roll and drag and claw like a bitch.

like a bitch.

like a bitch.

As a teenager she got pregnant back home in Pitman and gave the child up for adoption. She is now 29.

IN 1975, Clive Davis, former czar of Columbia now making a comeback with Arista Records, picks her out of the ruck of New York City cult figures and decides her rock and roll is worth the Big Play, assuming it's carefully cultivated like a wild plant in a hothouse. Her rock grew out of her poetry readings and it's angry poetic rock. About such prime time subjects as homosexual rape near deserted high school lockers to the tune of Land of a Thousand Dances. A whole herd of stud boys surrounds Johnny by the lockers and his head is getting slammed into the metal and pounds from the bleeding.

Suddenly Johnny gets the feeling he's being surrounded by horses horses horses

Comin in all directions, white', shinin', silver studs with their noses all in flames...

Do you know how to pony?

Is this the new singing cowgirl?

Patti Smith fell for Rimbaud because his picture looked like Dylan. Now Dylan writes liner notes on Desire about Rimbaud, and when Patti Smith sees it for the first time she laughs and giggles because not only had Dylan come to see her perform, but he must have been influenced by her appetites.

She is laughing at Strawberries record shop on Boylston Street on January 9 at noon. She has come to promote her new album Horses and sign autographs. Strawberries is hip. Somebody at the store has made an altar of Black Ken dolls, melted wax, plastic horses, alligators, kangaroos. Dirt. Ashes. All images in her poems. The altar stands in an alcove lined with an arch of over 200 of her albums. Photographers drain the juice on their electronic strobes as people shyly wait with pens. One kid, who stole Patti's "Braves" jersey the other night has come to return it.

PATTI COMES IN with long thin teardrop legs stuffed into jeans which are stuffed into boots. Wisecracking and cursing and strutting and smiling, she is not playing the sensitive artist. Davis had said he wouldn't give her the full promo treatment if she shrank from stuff like this. She is determined to have a good time. She says it's her birthday, and if true, she shares it with Richard Nixon.

After a half hour of taking pictures, one photographer can't resist buying Patti's record and getting her to sign it, even though he has no record player. "To Tim/Platinum nerves/" (plus a picture of an eye...) "p--tti smttth"

Standing out on the ice on that Thursday night in January, the people at the end of the line are getting anxious. They are not exactly worried whether or not Patti Smith is A Legend Before Her Own Time. More to the point, they wonder if they can be saved from frostbite. The guys at the door don't tell anyone what the limit will be. They are letting people in slowly, slowly, like a bloodletting. Two hundred and fifty people are allowed to challenge the fire laws before the last 50 are told to forget it. An hour and a half, where has Patti been all this time? The small house, of course, has been calculated to boost a rising artist who had to be seen selling out. Joe McGinnis knew about such tactics.

At 7 p.m. Patti Smith is lounging in bed at Howard Johnson Motor Hotel in Kenmore Square. She's wearing a "Rastafarian" t-shirt. Her pencil thin arms fly out of the round stove holes of the too big t-shirt as she talks to some Mr. Jones journalists wearing bow ties.