May 31: Besides Rimbaud, Patti Smith was William Blake devotee, something she shares with next month’s artists, Jim Morrison and the Doors. In Just Kids, she writes, ” Our most prized books were on William Blake. I had a very pretty facsimile of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and I often read it to Robert before we went to sleep. I also had a vellum edition of Blake’s collected writings, and he had the Trianon Press edition of Blake’s Milton. We both admired the likeness of Blake’s brother Robert, who died young, pictured with a star at his foot. We adopted Blake’s palette as our own, shades of rose, cadmium, and moss, colors that seemed to generate light” (p. 49). It should be pointed out that Smith was a visual artist at this time (late sixties/early seventies). Songwriting would come later.
My Blakean Year (Trampin’ 2004)
May 30: Patti Smith is typical of so many American performers who walk the tightrope between the flesh and the spirit–on their knees one day for a lover; the next, for God. Her hedonistic side finds an outlet in the Rolling Stones. In an earlier post, she did “Gimme Shelter.” Here she does “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” a song which signalled the Stones’ escape from pyschedelia and flower power to raw rock. In Just Kids, she describes sharing a tiny room with Robert Mapplethorpe: ”I often sat on the floor next to my favorite object, a large bowl of hammered silver resembling a glowing hubcap with a single gardenia swimming in its center. I would listen to Beggars Banquet over and over while its fragrance permeated the all but empty room” (p. 102).
Elsewhere in the book, she describes Mapplethorpe’s Faustian bargain at the crossroads. He seems to have taken the signature song of the album, “Sympathy for the Devil,” a tad too seriously. “Robert, wishing to shed his Catholic yoke, delved into another side of the spirit, reigned over by the Angel of Light. The image of Lucifer, the fallen angel, came to eclipse the saints he used in his collages and varnished onto boxes. . . . I would return home to find Robert in brown monk’s cloth, a Jesuit robe he had found in a thrift store, poring over pamphlets on alchemy and magic. . . . He was not evil, though as darker elements infused his work, he became more silent
“He grew interested in creating visual spells, which might serve to call up Satan, like one would call up a genie. He imagined if he could make a pact that accessed Satan’s purest self, the self of the light, he would recognize a kindred soul, and that Satan would grant him fame and fortune. He did not have to ask for greatnes, for the ability to be an artist, because he believed he already had that. ’You’re looking for shortcuts,’ I said. ’Why should I take the long road?’” (pp. 62-63). As they say, be careful what you wish for . . . J.B.
Patti Smith: Jumpin’ Jack Flash (Live Unplugged: 200_?)
May 29: Fires can kill, but not if you’re properly prepared; cars can kill too, but here too proper preparation can mean the difference between life and death. And then there’s the bomb. Very dangerous. But less so if you’re properly prepared. So goes the wisdom of Duck and Cover, the Civil Defense film used widely in schools during the fifties and early sixties. Anyone who grew up during that era will remember the drill and the shadow of dread hanging over their adolescent heads. Damn Ruskies threatening to blow Disney America to smithereens! Patti Smith remembers the time well; witness her preface to 1959.
Patti Smith (Duck and Cover Preface)Patti Smith: (1959 Unplugged 200_ ?)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2kdpAGDu8s (Duck and Cover)
May 28: Here’s another song suitable for the passing of Robert Mapplethorpe, Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door.” Smith and Dylan toured together in 1995, and Dylan helped her emerge from her cocoon of sorrow following the death of her husband Fred Smith in 1994.
Knocking on Heaven’s Door (w/ Dylan: Philly: 12/17/95)
May 27: Given her famous line, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine,” Patti Smith would not seem to be the type to petition the lord with prayer. Yet, Just Kids is thick with examples of her doing just that. The most poignant section occurs when her former lover and art-mate Robert Mapplethorpe was knocking on heaven’s door, a victim of AIDS. The year is 1987, and after parting with him once to drive back to Detroit with her husband Fred Smith of the MC5, who himself would be dead in 1994, Patti writes, “I felt haunted by the idea that if I stayed with him he would live. Yet I also struggled with a mounting sense of resignation. I was ashamed of that, for Robert had fought as if could be cured by his will alone. He had tried everything from science to voodoo, everything but prayer. That, at least, I could give him in abundance. I prayed ceaselessly for him, a desperate human prayer. Not for his life, no one could take that cup from him, but for the strength to endure the unendurable” (p. 275).
In mid-February, she went again to visit him at his loft, which had become his sick bay. She stood by his bed and took his hand, staying like that for a long time without saying anything. ”Suddenly he looked up and said, ‘Patti, did art get us?’ I looked away, not really wanting to think about it. ”I don’t know Robert, I don’t know” (p. 275).
“He looked at me, his look of love and reproach. My love for him could not save him. His love for life could not save him. it was the first time that I truly knew he was going to die . . . He looked at me with such deep apology that it was unbearable and I burst into tears. He admonished me for that, but he put his arms around me. I tried to brighten, but it was too late. I had nothing more to give him but love. I helped him to the couch. Mercifully, he did not cought, and he fell asleep with his head on my shoulder.
The light poured through the windows upon his photraphs and the poem of us sitting together a last time. Robert dying: creating silence. Myself, destined to live, listening closely to a silence that would take a lifetime to express” (p. 276).
May 26: (See the May 25 post for part one). As Patti Smith stood at Morrison’s grave in 1973, she saw in the distance “an old woman dressed in a heavy coat, holding a long pointed stick and dreagging a large leather bag behind her. She was cleaning the gravesites. When she saw me, she began to shout to me in French. I begged her forgiveness for not speaking the language, yet I knew what she must be thinking. All the pitiful treasures and the surrounding graffiti were to her nothing but desecration. . . . Suddenly she turned and gruffly cried in English: ‘American! Why do you not honor your poets!’ I was very tired. I was twenty-six years old. All around me the messages written in chalk were dissolving like tears in the rain. Streams formed beneath the charms, cigarettes, guit picks. Petals of flowers left on the plot of earth above Jim Morrison floated like bits of Ophelia’s bouquet” (232). She asked again why young people don’t honor their poets. ”I do not know” (232). In “Break It Up,” Tom Verlaine and I wrote of a dream in which Jim Morrison, bound like Prometheus, suddenly broke free” (249). Break It Up (Live: 2005)
May 25: In the May 7 post, Patti Smith describes how when watching Jim Morrison in concert she felt that she could do what he was doing, adding ”I felt both kinship and contempt for him. I could feel his self-consciousness as well as his supreme comfidence. He exuded a mixture of beauty and self-loathing, and mystic pain, like a West Coast Saint Sebastian. When anyone asked how the Doors were, I just said they were great. I was somewhat ashamed of how I had responded to their concert” (59). A few years later, in October of 1973, she visited his grave at Pere Lachaise cemetary in Paris, having first stopped to pick up a bouquet of hyacinths ["Hyacinth House"]. ”At the time there was no marker, and it was not easy to find, but I followed messages scrawled by well-wishers on neighboring headstones. It was completely silent, save the rustling of autumn leaves and the rain, which was becoming more pronounced. On the unmarked grave were gifts from pilgrims before me: plastic flowers, cigarette buttes, half-empty whiskey bottles, broken rosaries, and strange charms. The graffiti surrounding him were words in French from his own songs. ’This is the end, beautiful friend.’
I felt an uncommon lightheartedness, not sad at all. I felt that he might silently step from the mist and tap me on the shoulder. It seemed right for him to be buried in Paris. The rain began in earnest. I wanted to leave because I was so wet, but I felt rooted. I had the uneasy feeling that if I did not flee I would turn into stone, a statue armed with hyacinths. (p. 231) Soul Kitchen (Twelve: 2007)
May 24: Bob Dylan, he whose birthday is today, is widely known with as spurring Patti Smith’s street cred by showing up and one of her performances at the Other End (aka the Bitter End) in the summer of 1975, a year when he was enjoying a musical resurgence with Blood on the Tracks in the can and Desire on the way. Something was happening again in New York. The photograph of Dylan with Smith was seen as an official stamp of approval that Patti was part of it. In Just Kids, she writes: “Our first job with a drummer was at the Other End, around the corner from where I lived on MacDougal Street. . . . Clive Davis’s presence lent an air of excitement on the opening night of our four-day stint. When we threaded our way through the crowd to take the stage, the atmosphere intensified, charged as if before a storm. (p. 248).
The night, as the saying goes, was a jewel in our crown. We played as one, and the pulse and pitch of the band spiraled us into another dimension. Yet with all the swirling around me, I could feel another presence as surely as the rabbit senses the hound. He was there. I suddenly understood the nature of the electric air. Bob Dylan had entered the club. This knowledge had a strange effect on me. Instead of humbled, I felt a power, perhaps his; but I also felt my own worth and the worth of my band. It seemed for me a night of initiation, where I had to become fully myself in the presence of the one I had modeled myself after.” (p. 248). For more on that night, check out the link below: [from "Patti Smith," by Barry Miles, in Wanted Man: In Search of Bob Dylan
http://www.oceanstar.com/patti/intervus/770318bd.htm The Wicked Messenger (Hamburg: 8/1/96)
May 23: In a previous post, we talked about how Patti Smith saw herself as a keeper of the rock flame. Horses was intended to honor the past while also moving it forward and rescuing it from being turned into vapid commercial fodder. In Just Kids, she makes all of this quite explicit. Describing the five-week process of recording and mixing her first record at Electric Ladyland as if to fulfill Hendrix's dream of creating a new musical language, she writes, "These things were on my mind from the firt moment I entered the vocal booth. The gratitude I had of rock and roll as it pulled me through a difficult adolescence. The joy I experienced when I danced. The moral power I gleaned in taking responsibilities for one's actions. (p. 249)
"These things were encoded in Horses, as well as a salute to those who paved the way before us. In Birdland, we embarked with young Peter Reich as he waited for his father, Wilhelm Reich, to descend from the sky and deliver him. Wilhelm Reich, a contemporary of Freud, was a German psychologist and psychoanalyst who championed the idea of orgasms as essential to good mental health. Peter, his son from a second marriage wrote A Book of Dreams about his relationship with his father and his confusion as a thirteen-year old boy when his father died in prison. (p. 249)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich
Birdland (Bottom Line: 12/27/75)
May 22: Here's a recording that will bring back snap, crackle, and pop memories for all those who remember the era of the record player: Patti Smith's first single, 'Hey Joe,' which has yet to be reissued, forcing me to take desperate measures and record the single. From Just Kids, here's Patti's discussion on how the inspiration for the song and the recording of it came about.
"On April 15 [1974] , Patty Hearst was caught on a security camera wielding a gun, joining her captors in robbing a San Francisco bank. Subsequently a tape was released, in which she declared allegiance to the SLA and issued this statement: ‘Tell everybody that I feel free and strong and I send my greetings and love to all the sisters and brothers out there.’ Something in these words, magnified by our shared first name, drew me to respond to her complicated plight. Lenny, Richard, and I merged my meditation on her situation with Jimi Hendrix’s version of ‘Hey Joe.’ The connection between Patti Hearst and ‘Hey Joe’ lay within the lyrics, a fugitive crying out ‘I feel so free.’ We decided to do a single, to see how the effect we were having live could be translated to a record” (p.241). Time was booked in Jimi Hendrix’s studio, Electric Ladyland. And “wishing to add a guitar line that could represent the desperate desire to be free, we chose Tom Verlaine to join us . . . . We recorded in studio B with a small eight-track setup in the back of Electric Lady. Before we started, I whispered ‘Hi Jimi’ into the microphone [no word if he answered. Could have thought it was Jimi Morrison]. After a false start or two, Richard, Lenny, and I, playing together, got our take, and Tom overdubbed two tracks of a solo guitar. Lenny mixed these two into one spiraling lead, and then added a bass drum. It was our first use of percussion.
. . .
Lenny and I designed the record. We called our label Mer. We pressed 1,500 copies at a small plant on Ridge Avenue in Philadelphia and distributed them to book and record stores, where they sold for two dollars apiece. . . . Of all the places, our greatest source of pride was to hear it on Max’s jukebox. We were surprised to discover that our B-side, ‘Piss Factory,’ was more popular than ‘Hey Joe,” inspiring us to focus more on our own work” (p.242.). Hey Joe (1974)
May 21: Here’s part two of the Welles Park concert described below. For Springsteen fans, there’s “Because the Night”; for Holly fans, how about “Not Fade Away”? And then there’s a tribute to Jesus followed by “Gloria,” which closes the show. Enjoy! J.B.
Patti Smith (Welles Park, Chi.: 7/15/00)
May 20: A special treat. Below is a link to the first half of an outdoor concert Patti Smith gave on a brutally hot day on July 15 of 2000. The second half will be posted on Friday. The concert took place in Welles Park, on the north side of Chicago, as part of a Folk and Roots festival. Richard Thompson had performed earlier when it was even hotter, around 100 degrees, and he joined her for “Ghost Dance.” There was an overflow crowd, and in later years the festival scaled back to less prominent performers who would stress Chicago’s finest and Streets and Sanitation. Born in Chicago, Patti had visited her old hood before the show. She gave an animated performance, well worth the $5 or $6 it cost to get in. Yes, that’s the right amount. I got up close and managed to get a decent recording. There might be other bootlegs out there, though. For you Dylan fans, she does “Wicked Messenger” as the second song; for Byrds fans, she does “So You Want To Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” a few songs later. Enjoy! J.B.
Welles Park (7/15/2000): Part 1 Patti Smith (Welles Park, Chi.: 7/15/2000)
May 19: Something in the way she moved . . . . If ever there were an example of a charmed rise to stardom, Patti Smith would have to be under serious consideration. She seems to have struck the random interest or fancy of anybody who was anybody in New York’s artistic circles circa 1970. A case in point: Bobby Neuwirth, whom she describes in Just Kids as “the peacemaker-provocateru. Bob Dylan’s alter ego” (p. 141). She describes how she was sitting in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel one day waiting for Robert Mapplethorpe to show up while she fiddled with her cycle of poems for Brian Jones. As she was hammering away, she was interrupted by an oddly familar voice.
“Whatcha doin’, darlin?’”
I looked up into the face of a stranger sporting the perfect pair of dark sunglasses.
“Writing.”
“Are you a poet?”
“Maybe.”
“I shifted in my seat, acting disinterested, pretending like I didn’t recognize him, but I knew exactly who I was facing. He was the guy from Don’t Look Back. He was a painter, singer-songwriter, and risk taker. He was a trusted confidant to many of the great minds and musicians of his generation, which was just a beat before mine. To hide how impressed I was, I got up, nodded, and headed toward the door without saying goodbye. He called out to me.
“Hey, where did you learn to walk like that?”
I turned. ”From Don’t Look Back.”
“He just laughed and asked me to join him in the El Quitoe for a short of tequila . . . . He was easy to talk to and we covered everything from Hank Williams to abstract expressionism. He seemed to take a liking to me. He took the notebook out of my hands and checked it out. I guess he saw the potential, for he said, ‘Did you ever think about writing songs? I wasn’t sure how to answer. ’Next time I see you I want a song out of you,’ he said as we exited the bar. That was all he had to say. When he left, I pledged to write him a song.” Something in the way she moved . . . . Here Patti combines her love of Dylan with her love of Hendrix. All Along The Watchtower (8/11/79)
May 18: Patti Smith’s take on Nirvana’s grunge classic, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” is perhaps the most distinctive cover she did Twelve. She emphasizes the lyrics (you can actually make them all out) and melody more than the original. Then she adds a Horses style verbal tirade against the ills and evils of modern industrial society, suggesting by the interpolation that the despair could very stem from the bleak prospects of modern society. Her take on Prince’s, “When the Doves Cry” isn’t quite as fresh but still enjoyable. J.B.
Smells Like Teen Spirit (Twelve) When the Doves Cry (Hamburg: 8/1/96)
May 17: Among other rock luminaries Patti Smith just happened to cross paths with besides admire at a distance was Jimi Hendrix. In Just Kids, she describes how she received a coveted invitation on August 28 of 1970 to the opening of Hendrix’s studio, presumably Electric Ladyland. The invitation was courtesy of Wartoke’s Jane Friedman, who’d done the publicity for the Woodstock festival and who’d shown some interest in Patti’s work. Patti writes:
“I was excited to go. I put on my straw hat and walked downtown, but when I got there, I couldn’t bring myself to go it. By chance, Jimi Hendrix came up the stairs and found me sitting there like some hick wallflower and grinned. He had to catch a plane to the Isle of Wight Festival. When I told him I was too chicken to go in, he laughed softly and said that contrary to what people might think, he was shy, and parties made him nervous. He spend a little time with me on the stairs and told me his vision of what he wanted to do with his studio. He dreamed of amassing musicians from all over the world in Woodstock and they would sit in a field in a circle and play and play. It didn’t matter what key or tempo or what melody, they would keep on playing through the discordance until they found a common language. Eventually, they would record this abstract universal language of music in his studio. ’The language of peace. You dig?’ I did.
I don’t remember if I actually went into the studio, but Jimi never accomplished his dream. In September I went with my sister and Annie to Paris . . . . As we walked down the boulevard Montparnasse, I saw a headline that filled me with sorrow: Jimi Hendrix est mort. 27 ans. I knew what those words meant . . . . I felt that we had all lost a friend. I pictured his back, the embroidered vest, and his long legs as he went up the stairs and out into the world for the last time” (170). ”Elegie” commemorates Hendrix’s death, but this particular version commemorates many other musicians and notables as well as the end of CBGB’s, The Patti Smith Group’s birthplace. ”Are You Experienced?” on Twelve (2007) is her testament to Hendrix and his sentiment of a better place beckoned by trumpets and violins in the distance. Note the monolog where Hendrix’s guitar solo would have gone. If you can’t beat the solo, paper over it with words, ala Horses.
Are You Experienced? (Twelve) Elegie (11/18/2006)
May 16: The Patti Smith Group honed their skills at New York’s celebrated CBGB’s, especially after returning from a brief tour of small venues out in California, such as the Whiskey a Go Go. In Just Kids, Smith says CBGB’s was the “ideal place to sound a clarion call.” She saw it as a mission “to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll.” ”From the dead of winter throught the renewalof spring, we grapppled and prevailed until we found our stride. As we played, the songs took on a life of their own, often reflecting the energy of the people, the atmosphere, our growing confidence, and events that occurred in our immediate terrain” (p.241). Of the many things she remembers from the time: “Performing a version of ‘Land’ that Lenny [her guitarist] called ‘a blazing zone,’ with Johnny blazing a trail of his own, racing toward me from the acid night where the wild boys reigned, from the locker room to the sea of possibilities, as if channeling from the third and fourth minds of Robert and William sitting before us” (p.241). By May Day of 1975, Clive Davis was offering a three-record contract with Arista records. And they the group didn’t even have a permanent drummer yet. In keeping with her declared mission, “Land” is another fusion of Beat spontaneity with classic rock, “The Land of a 1000 Dances.” Here are an early version and the last one from CBGB:
Land (St. Mark’s Church, N.Y. early ’70s) Land (CBGB 10/15/2006)
May 15: Janis Joplin seems to have been quite a source of inspiration for songwriters. Leonard Cohen wrote “Chelsea Hotel #2″ for her; Kris Kristofferson, “Me and Bobby McGee,” and Patti Smith, “I Was Working Real Hard.” Two of the songs became famous; the other, well, at least Janis loved it and thought it her signature song. Patti relates the story in Just Kids:
“When Janis Joplin returned in August for her rain date in Central Park, she seemed extremely happy. She was looking forward to recording, and came into town resplendent in majenta, pink, and purple feather boas. She wore them everywhere. The concert was a great success, and afterwards we all went to the Remington, an artists’ bar near lower Broadway. The tables were crowded with her entourage: Michael Pollard, Sally Grossman, who was the girl in the red dress on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home, Brice Marden, Emmett Grogan of the Diggers, and the actress Tuesday Weld. The jukebox was playing Charlie Pride. Janis spent most of the party with a good-looking guy she was attracted to, but just before closing time he ducked out with one of the prettier hangers-on. Janis was devasted. ”This always happens to me, man. Just another night alone,” she sobbed on Bobby’s shoulder.
“Bobby asked me to get her to the Chelsea to keep an eye on her. I took Janis back to her room, and sat with her while she bemoaned her fate. Before I left, I told her that I’d make a little song for her, and sang it to her.
I was working real hard/To show the world what I could do
Oh, I guess I never dreamed/I’d have to
World spins some photographs/ How I love to laugh when the crowd laughs
While slips through/ A theater that is full
But oh baby/When the crowd goes home
And I turn in and I realize I’m alone
I can’t believe/I had to sacrifice you.
“She said, “That’s me, man, That’s my song.” As I was leaving, she looked in the mirror, adjusting her boas. ”How do I look, man?” ”Like a pearl,” I answered, “A pearl of a girl” (p. 166)
Curiously, Leonard Cohen seems to be one of the few transients at the Chelsea Hotel Smith didn’t know, or at least she says nothing about him. She even knew Harry Smith, he of the hugely influential celebrated Anthology of American Folk Music.
I Was Working Real Hard (Bottom Line: 12/27/75) Chelsea Hotel #2 (Beacon Theater, N.Y.: 2009)
May 14: “Pale Blue Eyes,” by Lou Reed, is one of Patti Smith’s better covers. She was introduced to the Velvet Underground by Donald Lyons, whom she describes as an Irish Catholic boy from the boroughs (Just Kids 159).
“Donald asked us if we were going to see the Velvet Underground opening upstairs. It marked their reunion in New York City and the debut of live rock and roll at Max’s. Donald was shocked to finde I had never seen them, and insisted we go upstairs with him to catch their next set.
“I immediately related to the music, which had a throbbing surfer beat. I had never listened closely to Lou Reed’s lyrics, and recognized, especially through the ears of Donald, what strong poetry they contained. The upstairs room at Max’s was small, perhaps holding fewer than a hundred people, and as the Velvets moved deeper into their set, we began to move as well . . . . They were the best band in New York City.” For comparative purposes, I’ve posted two versions 25 years apart. J.B.
Pale Blue Eyes – Louie Louie (Bottom LIne: N.Y.: 12/27/75) Pale Blue Eyes (Paris: 7/10/2001)
May 13: In Just Kids, Smith describes in one section how she listened to the Rolling Stones’ Beggar’s Banquet (1968) over and over again when it first came out. In another section, she describes how Robert Mapplethorpe identified with its signature song, “Sympathy for the Devil,” this perhaps owing to his homosexuality and the demonization of it by established christianity. Yet on her album of cover tunes, Twelve, Patti takes a tune from Let it Bleed (1969), the seminal “Gimme Shelter.” She gives it a good shot, but I think she’d have been well advised to pick a less imposing song. At any rate, here’s a live version from the last show at CBGBs, her legendary launching pad. Gimmie Shelter (CBGB: 10/15/2006)
May 12: “The Bells of Marie” is another example of poetry set beautifully to music. It’s not clear if it’s a Patti Smith song or not. Another title for it is, “O Mort, Où Est Ta Victoire,” French for “O grave, where is thy victory,” which is the tail end of the famous biblical quote borrowed by Shakespeare and others: “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” 1 Corinthians:15:55
“The Bells of Marie” joins dozens of songs with bells, such as Seeger’s “The Bells of Rhmney,” Dylan’s “Ring the Bells” and “Chimes of Freedom” to name just a few. And, or course, because of their evocative sounds and multiple purposes from signalling weddings and funerals to mass and the passage of time, bells occur in the titles of many films and literary works, too, such as Chimes at Midnight, A Bell for Adano, “The Bell,” and For Whom the Bell Tolls, the Hemingway novel. What the title is based on comes from the great conflicted poet John Donne, whose attempts to reconcile sexuality and Christianity are very evident in his poems and holy sonnets.
“No man is an Island, entire of it self; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”
- – - – John Donne “Devotions XVII”
O Mort, Où Est Ta Victoire (Paris, 7/10/2001)
May 11: Patti Smith’s albums after Easter feature occasional gems mixed in with lots of coal. ”Summer Cannibals” is one of the songs that sparkle. Down in Georgia she’s confronted with a coven of witches right out of Macbeth, who beguile her not with prophesies of kingdoms and greatness but with implorations to “eat, eat, eat.” And it’s not organic food they’re talking about. The lesbian motif of this songs and others like “Gloria” and “Redondo Beach,” along with her androgenous looks in the early days, have prompted speculation that Patti is a latent lesbian, much as Mapplethorpe was a latent gay before he went to San Francisco and discovered his true sexual identity. But it’s a fool’s journey to go down the road of assuming that the artist and the subject of the art are one and the same.
In Just Kids, Patti had this to say about the speculation. ”When Telegraph Books, a revolutionary small press spearheaded by Andrew Wylie, offered to publish a small book of poems, I concentrated on work that skirted the edge of sex, broads, and blasphemy. The girls interested me: Marianne Faithfull, Anita Pallenberg, Amelia Earhart, Mary Magdalene. I would go to parties with Robert [Mapplethorpe] just to check out the dames. They were good material and knew how to dress. Ponytails and silk shirtwaist dresses. Some of them found their way into my work. People took my interest the wrong way. They figured I was a latent homosexual, or maybe just acting like one, but I was merely a Mickey Spillane type, ecercising my hard, ironic edge” (199-200).
Summer Cannibals (Hamburg, 8/1/96)
May 10: “Fire of Unknown Origin” is another of those songs that get added to a CD after the original release, in this case, the album Wave (1996). It’s a fairly unremarkable song except for one fact–it’s Patti’s first. From Just Kids, here’s the story: ”Toward the middle of July, I made my last payment on my first guitar. Held in layaway in a pawnshop on Eighth Avenue, it was a little Martin Acoustic, a parlor model. It had a tiny bluebird decal on its top, and strap made of mulicolored braid. I bought a Bob Dylan songbook and learned a few simple chords. At first it didn’t sound too bad, but the more I played, the worse it sounded. I didn’t realize you had to tune it. . . . I had written “Fire of Unknown Origin” as a poem, but after I met Bobby [Neuwirth, Dylan's pal--more on this in another post), I struggled to find some chords to accompany it on guitar, and sang it for Robert and Sandy. She was especially elated. The dress sweeping down the hallway was hers" (p. 164).
A fire of unknown origin took my baby away.
Fire of unknown origin took my baby away.
Swept her up and off my wavelength.
Swallowed her up like the ocean in a fire thick and gray.
Death comes sweeping thru the hallway like a ladies' dress.
Death comes riding down the hallway in it's sunday best.
Death comes driving; death comes creeping; death comes I can't do nothing.
Death goes, there must be something that remains.
Death, it made me sick and crazy 'cause that fire took my baby away
May 9: In Just Kids, Patti Smith talks of reading Rimbaud's celebrated prose poem "A Season in Hell." Besides trying to emulate that style in her early days, she clearly draws on a particular section for her song, "Rock and Roll Nigger." The first paragraph just establishes the context, but the second develops the theme of the nigger as being an outsider from blind and hypocritical society, the pharisees of their day, same as Jesus, the ultimate outsider. Just like Rimbaud, Smith riffs on the term but without the ironic slant Rimbaud takes with his emphasis on fake niggers. This is a classic case of a "lift and twist," where an artist lifts from another but gives it a fresh twist. The more euphemistic way to describe it is to say one work influenced the other. But Rimbaud never rocked like Patti. J.B.
"But orgies and the companionship of women were impossible for me. Not even a friend. I saw myself before an angry mob, facing a firing squad, weeping out sorrows they could not understand, and pardoning! - like Joan of Arc! - "Priests, professors and doctors, you are mistaken in delivering me into the hands of the law. I have never been one of you; I have never been a Christian; I belong to the race that sang on the scaffold; I do not understand your laws; I have no moral sense; I am a brute; you are making a mistake..."
Yes, my eyes are closed to your light. I am an animal, a nigger. But I can be saved. You are fake niggers; maniacs, savages, misers, all of you. Businessman, you're a nigger; judge, you're a nigger; general, you're a nigger; emperor, old scratch-head, you're a nigger: you've drunk a liquor no one taxes, from Satan's still. - This nation is inspired by fever and cancer. Invalids and old men are so respectable that they ask to be boiled. - The best thing is to quit this continent where madness prowls, out to supply hostages for these wretches. I will enter the true kingdom of the sons of Cham."
Do I understand nature? Do I understand myself? No more words. I shroud dead men in my stomach.... Shouts, drums, dance, dance, dance! I can't even imagine the hour when the white men land, and I will fall into nothingness.
Thirst and hunger, shouts, dance, dance, dance!"
Rock N Roll Nigger (Park West, Chicago 1978)
A Season in Hell http://www.mag4.net/Rimbaud/poesies/Season.html
May 8: "Paths that Cross" (Dream of Life 1996) was written to console Robert Mapplethorpe. In late 1986, he and his lover and patron Sam Wagstaff both had AIDS. Patti Smith learned the news of this during the time when she was bearing her second child in Michigan. On New Year's Day, she called Wagstaff and found him optimistic about beating the odds. Two weeks later, she received a distraught call from Mapplethorpe. "Sam, his steady love and patron, had died. They had weathered painful shifts in their relationship, and also the critical tongues and envy of others, but they could not stem the tide of the terrible fortune that befell them. Robert was devastated by the loss of Sam, the bulwark of his life.
"Sam's death also cast a shadow on Robert's hopes for his own recovery. To comfort him I wrote the lyrics and Fred the music to 'Paths that Cross,' a sort of Sufi song in memory of Sam. Though Robert was grateful for the song, I knew one day I might seek out these same words for myself. Paths that cross will cross again (Just Kids, 269). For comparative purposes, I've posted a version of the classic "We'll Meet Again," a song made all the more enduring by being sung over a nuclear holocaust at the end of the satiric Kubric classic, Dr. Strangelove. J.B.
Paths that Cross We'll Meet Again (Johnny Cash)
May 7: "The Crystal Ship" is one of the songs that have made Jim Morrison and the Doors endure to this day since their self-titled debut album in 1967. Like Patti Smith, Morrison had a fascination with decadent and rebellious French poets like Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and they also shared an interest in fertility mythology and mysticism. In Just Kids, Smith describes her experience at a Doors concert in New York. "I had a strange reaction watching Jim Morrison. Everyone around me seemed transfixed, but I observed his every move in a state of cold hyperawareness. I remember this feeling much more clearly than the concert. I felt, watching Jim Morrison, that I could do that. I can't say why I thought this. I had nothing in my experience to make me think that would ever be possible, yet I harbored the conceit. I felt both kinship and contempt for him. I could feel his self-consciousness as well as his supreme comfidence. He exuded a mixture of beauty and self-loathing, and mystic pain, like a West Coast Saint Sebastian. When anyone asked how the Doors were, I just said they were great. I was somewhat ashamed of how I had responded to their concert" (59).
The Crystal Ship (Hamburg: 8/1/96)
May 6: "Wild Leaves" is a song available only on the remastered CD of Dream of Life (1996). Since as a loyal Patti Smith enthusiast I bought the original CD, I was forced to buy the MP3 for an extra 99c from Amazon. Wasn't being the early bird supposed to be a good thing? Not if you're talking about the racket of CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Ray, apparently. The title of the album is a reference to Shelley's epic Platonic masterpiece, "Adonais," an elegy for Keats, the Romantic poet who died in Rome at twenty-five after penning a number of odes still influential to this day. The theme of the poem is that life is but a shadow of the real thing that exists beyond the senses in the realm of essences. We're in a dream of life, in other words, and dying means awakening to reality. If there is another side, it's a safe bet that BMG, Sony, and others will be waiting to sell us the ESSENTIAL Patti Smith on some immutable media. As a sidenote, Mick Jagger quoted from 'Adonais' when he eulogized Brian Jones in a Hyde Park concert of 1969.
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep-
He hath awakened from the dream of life-
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings.-We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.
The song was created in the summer of 1987 at a time when Robert Mapplethorpe was dying of AIDS, though he'd survive until March of 1989. Patti, who by 1987 had married Fred "Sonic" Smith, the guitarist for the MC5, writes of her former lover, confidant, and comrade at arts: "Robert was celebrating his forty-first birthday in his loft with champagne, caviar, and white orchids. That morning I sat at the desk in the Mayflower Hotel and wrote him the song 'Wild Leaves,' but I did not give it to him. Though I was trying to write him an immortal lyric, it seemed all too mortal (Just Kids p.274). The version here has extra power because of an arresting poem spoken over it by Nick Tosches. The fusion of autumnal music and brutal verse might not make for an immortal work, but it sure is haunting and deserving of a wider audience. J.B.
Wild Leaves (Paris: 7/10/2001)
May 5: "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine." If there's a more dramatic and provocative way in a Christian country to begin a song that begins a beginning album, I have yet to hear it, and the song goes on to describe a lesbian seduction. A riff on the Van Morrison's garage classic made famous by Chicago's Shadows of Knight, Patti Smith's "Gloria" defines the punk attitude--raw, raucus, and rebellious--but with a literary affinity to Smith's heroes, Rimbaud and his A Season in Hell, and perhaps Verlaine and Baudelaire, as well. Rimbaud was also evoked by Dylan and Morrison, among others, all of them putting their music in the context of anti-establishment art. Here's Patti with some background on the origin and evolution of the song:
"WBAI was an important transmitter of the last vestiges of revolution on the radio. On May 28, 1975, my band supported them by doing a benefit in a church on the Upper East Side. . . .
"Our set ended with a version of 'Gloria' that had taken shape over the past several monghts, merging my poem 'Oath' with the great Van Morrison classic. It had becug with Richard Hell's copper-toned Danelectro bass, which we bought from him for forty dollars. I had a mind to play it, and since it was small, I thought I could handle it. Lenny showed me how to play an E, and as I struck the note, I spoke the line, 'Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine.' I had written the line some years before as a declaration of existence, as a vow to take responsibility for my own actions. Christ was a man worthy to rebel against, for he was rebellion itself.
"Lenny started strumming the classic rock chords, E to D to A, and the marriage of the chords with this poem excited me. Three cords merged with the power of the word. 'Are those chords to a real song?' 'Only the most glorious,' he answered, going into 'Gloria,' and Richard followed" (246-247).
Ironically, in Just Kids, Smith seems to do as much praying as Jerry Falwell, and you have to wonder if she'll hold to the sentiment of the line if and when it's time to speak to that shining light approaching.
Gloria (van)Gloria [Doors live]Oath? (Paris: 7/10/2001) Gloria (Park West: 1978)
May 4: Shortly after the manager of the Factory, Fred Hughes, wondered if Patti, with her Joan Baez-like hair, was a folksinger, she took out her rock magazines and looked for every possible picture she could find of Keith Richards. ”I studied them for a while and took up the scissors, machete-ing my way out of the folk era . . . . It was a liberating experience. . . . Someone at Max’s [Kansas City] asked me if I was androgenous. I asked what that meant. ’You know, like Mick Jagger.’ I figured that must be cool. I thought the word meant beautiful and ugly at the same time. Whatever it meant, with just a haircut, I miraculously turned androgenous overnight. Opportunities suddenly arose” (Just Kids p. 140) 
And her androgeny led to a meeting with Beat poet and Walt Whitman devotee extraordinaire, Allen Ginsberg, though it’s not clear if this occurred before or after the haircut. Seems Smith had gone to an Automat for some food but was a dime short because the price had gone up to 65 cents. ”I was disappointed, to say the least, when I heard a voice say, ‘Can I help?”
I turned around, and it was Allen Ginsberg. . . . Allen added the extra dime and also stood me to a cup of coffee. I wordlessly followed him to his table, and then plowed into the sandwich.
Allen introduced himself. He was talking about Walt Whitman, and I mentioned I was raised near Camden, where Whitman was buried, when he leaned forward and looked at me intently. ’Are you a girl?” he asked. ’Yeah,’ I said. ’Is that a problem?’ He just laughed. ’I'm sorry, I took you for a very pretty boy.’ I got the picture immediately. ’Well, does that mean I return the sandwich?’ No enjoy it. It was my mistake.’ . . . .
Sometime later Allen became my good friend and teacher. We often reminsced about our first encounter, and he once asked how I would describe how we met. ’I would say you fed me when I was hungry,’ I told him. And he did” (Just Kids, p. 123). During this time, Patti Smith’s lover, colleague, and cohabitant was famed artist Robert Mapplethorpe, the other kid of Just Kids, and he was a deeply conflicted bisexual. Meanwhile, the gender bending and blurring continues with Smith’s Redondo Beach (Horses, 1975), which concerns the suicide of a lesbian lover. We’re most definitely not in Kansas anymore.
Redondo Beach (Bottom Line, N.Y. 12/27/75)
May 3: Many of Patti Smith’s songs are collaborations with her band members, but ”Because the Night,” which was recorded for her Easter album of 1978, was a collaboration with Bruce Springsteen, albeit a loose one. In Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story, Dave Marsh describes what happened: ”After Jimmie Iovine [a recording engineer who founded Interscope Records] took a demo for ‘Because the Night’ to the studio next door, where he was producing a record for Patti Smith, Springsteen let Smith finish the lyric.
Unlike her more loosely structured songs from Horses and Radio Ethiopia, ‘Because the Night’ stuck close to classic pop formula, featuring a verse, chorus, climactic bridge, and hooks galore, starting with “because the night,” all clocking in at just under 3 1/2 minutes. Not surprisingly, it earned her a top twenty hit in 1978. Springsteen has yet to release a studio version, though a demo lackluster demo has circulated for years, but the song was a staple of his Darkness tour in 1978 and remains a fan favorite. The E-Street Band with its crushing sound and three stellar guitar drive the song into an entirely different universe. Check out the Springsteen entry from April’s blog to hear what I mean. J.B.Because the Night (Park West: Chi. 1978)
May 2: ”Piss Factory” is Patti Smith’s equivalent to Springsteen’s “Born to Run” (or any number of his songs, actually) in depicting the world of blue-collar work as mind-numbing and spirit-sapping drudgery that must be escaped at all costs. If Marx needed first-hand examples of the alienation of labor, he need go no further. But Smith is quite unlike Bruce in being a child of the Beat Generation, a trait she shares with Tom Waits, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, and any number of artists. Indeed, much of the sixties music scene can be understood as a continuation of the Beat legacy. Smith’s indebtedness to the Beats, some of whom she knew,such as Burroughs and Corso, is amply demonstrated in “Piss Factory.” Just compare the characteristics of Beat poetry as described in Wikipedia with the song, and you’ll hear what I mean. You might note that cataloging images goes all the way back to Walt Whitman, he of “Leaves of Grass” notoriety. Some in academe still consider the Beat poets largely a derivative movement, a pop phenonemon. But the Beats didn’t have much regard for the ivory tower, either. The clash between pop poets and schooled poets continues . . . .
“The Beat Generation works highlighted the primacy of such Beat Generation essentials as spontaneity, open emotion, visceral engagement in often gritty worldly experiences; in a seeming paradox, the Beats often emphasized a spiritual yearning, using concepts and imagery from Buddhism, Judaism, Catholicism, and so on. Thus members of the Beat Generation sought a synthesis of the “beaten down” and the “beatific,” as Kerouac described it. One of the best-publicized aspects of Beat writing is the continual challenge to the limits of free expression; the Beat writers produced a body of written work controversial both for its advocacy of non-conformity and for its non-conforming style. The language and topics (drug use, sexuality, aberrant behavior) pushed the boundaries of acceptability in the conformist 1950’s.”
Piss Factory (St. Mark’s Church:12/25/71)
May 1: Many of the posts on Patti Smith will attempt to connect her songs with parts of her book, Just Kids (2010), a reflective chronicle of her relationship with celebrated artist Robert Mapplethorpe that, according to the jacket, “begins as a love story and ends as an elegy.” Hanging out in the Village and residing in the famed Chelsea Hotel from the late sixties into the seventies, Smith knew a surprising number of rock stars before she became one herself. Unlike Springsteen, last month’s poet laureate, Smith did not burn with a monomanical desire to be a rock star. Artist yes, but not necessarily a rock star. She more or less eased into it. Mapplethorpe helped her overcome artistic doubts.
Smith writes: “In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art? For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one’s work caged in art’s great zoos-the Modern, the Met, the Louvre? I craved honesty, yet found dishonesty in myself. Why commit to art? For self-realization, or for itself? It seemed indulgent to add to the glut unless one offered illumination. . . . Robert had little patience with these introspective bouts of mine. He never seemed to question his artistic drives, and by his example, I understood that what matters is the work: the string of words propelled by God becoming a poem, the weave of color and graphite scrawled upn the sheet that magnifies His motion. To achieve within the work a perfect balance of faith and execution. From this state of mind comes a light, life charged” (p.65).
While attending a Doors concert at the Fillmore and watching Morrison with a “cold hyperawareness,” she began harboring the conceit that she could do what he did. Some time afterward, a friend, Ed Hansen, brought her a record by the Byrds, telling her the song would be important to her as he “touched the needle to ‘So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star.’ Something in the song excited and unnerved me but I couldn’t divine his intention.” A decade passes, and she’s lost contact with him. But as she “approached the microphone with my electric guitar to sing the opening line to ‘So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star,’ I remembered his words. Small prophesies.” J.B.