No problem with that, since it's the artistry (not sordid details) of rockers that continues to appeal to me. Nor does it matter that Thompson didn't actually interview Smith for this book; like the John Lennon file, there's plenty of available info already. The author organizes Smith's ongoing commentary about her life via press interviews from his own perspective and interweaves the info beautifully.
So we've got Patti Smith's life as a poet and performance artist as the punk era was dawning in New York, mixed with her rock journalism phase, and then to her strong
run of albums beginning with 1975's still-astonishing Horses, her long break--finally picking up with two impressive returns, 1988's Dream of Life and 1996's Gone Again. Thompson hasn't ignored Smith's childhood or relationships with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, Allen Lanier of Blue Oyster Cult and her marriage to the MC5's Fred "Sonic" Smith (Fred died in 1994); he's simply shown how Patti's music and life are of one piece and how her art has been informed by her love life, motherhood, and the deaths of so many who were close to her. Sounds like Patti Smith has had more "soulmates" than the majority of us, because some of those mates, like guitarist Lenny Kaye or the late pianist Richard Sohl, are/were artistic brethren.
As far as omissions, Dancing Barefoot has no info on her Democracy Now! radio recording, "The Ballad of Abner Louima" (the man brutalized by NYC police in unmentionable ways), her on-air fisticuffs with Ted Nugent (see this blog, June 16, 2011), or a mention of Gilda Radner's "Candy Slice" parody on Saturday Night Live.
Patti and Fred lived in St. Clair Shores in the years she stopped recording (1980-87) but it's always referred to as "Detroit"; and there's the typical rock typos--not Greil but "Griel" Marcus, not Debby but "Debbie" Boone, etc. Okay, I care about that--sue me.
Taken as a whole, Dancing Barefoot is a terrific read because it manages to capture the essence of Patti Smith's soul, including this quote from a New York Times interview:
"I didn't disappear (in the 1980s) to be a housewife. I disappeared to be by the side of the man I loved...I think nothing greater could have happened to me at the time. I learned a lot of things in the process: humility, respect for others...I developed my skills and hopefully developed into the clean human being that I was as a child."
It's my thought that Patti Smith still has a lot of great music to share.