Icon: Patti Smith
A singular artist in an era where female musicians were most often kept under the thumb of their bandmates or managers, Patti Smith looked and sounded like no one else – a statement as true now as it was in 1975, when her first album, Horses, was released. Having worked as an actor, a playwright and, most frequently, a poet, Smith brought a range of experiences to her early recordings, and rather than leave off the parts that didn’t overlap, she pushed them to the fore. The miniature opus “Land” mingled references to the French poet Rimbaud and “Land of a Thousand Dances”; this was music that made you think while you moved, or vice-versa. Throughout the course of her career, Smith has proven to be one of the most enduring and consistently vital artists of her generation, as well as the spiritual godmother to innumerable like-minded souls; Michael Stipe famously said that listening to Horses as a teenager “tore my arms and legs off and put them back on in a new way.” She’s made great albums and less-than-good ones, but never one that sounds like anything but who she’s always been.
The Holy Trinity
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Many an artist busts out of the starting gate with a first album full of pent-up passions, but few have ever sprung forth so fully formed, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. "Gloria" gathers steam gradually, beginning with a stately two-chord piano vamp whose unresolved center lays the groundwork for Smith's scorched-earth salvo. When Smith sings "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine," she's repudiating not just Christianity but all that came before her; she will be her own salvation. By intermingling church hymn and classic rock staple and adding a pinch of Sapphic shock value, Smith rewrote the Gospel as a story of liberation: from her past, from society, from herself. "Free Money" moves through a fantasy of financial independence to a dream of more impossible freedoms: "I'll buy you a jet plane/ Take you through the stratosphere, check out the planets there." Jay Dee Daugherty's drums hurtle headlong behind her, the song picking up speed until all Smith can do is chant the song's title, the words sounding like the chug of a runaway locomotive. The songs on Horses follow a similar pattern: Start slow, build to a frenetic pace and, if there's time, do it again. Idolizing Rimbaud and Mick Jagger in equal measure, Smith joined free-associative spoken word and the guttural pre-language of rock 'n' roll primitivism, poetry and shoobee-doobee. Sometimes the fusion was literal: The three-part "Land" bridges the gap between a portrait of homosexual rape and its aftermath with a warped reflection of "Land of a Thousand Dances." (Smith's first single, "Hey Joe," pulled a similar movie with the classic-rock staple by interpolating lyrics about Patty Hearst.) But often the fusion is more subtle, Smith slipping between recitation and incantation so seamlessly that the border between them disappears.
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By the time of Patti Smith's second album — the first credited to her eponymous group rather than her alone — the tension between poetry and rock that animated Horses had been definitively resolved in the latter's favor. Trading the Velvet Underground's John Cale for veteran rock producer Jack Douglas (Aerosmith, the Who), the album has a dense, guitar-heavy sound and more traditional song structures, pushing Smith closer to mainstream success while jettisoning many of the characteristics that got her noticed in the first place.
more »The opening "Ask the Angels" successfully presents Smith as a nascent rock goddess, but the slicked-up, dumbed-down "Pumping (My Heart)" reveals the price of the tradeoff. Stretching out over 12 minutes of droning organ and haunted-house guitar, the climactic duo of "Radio Ethiopia" and "Abyssinia" reach back to the first album's form, but Smith's growled vocals render the lyrics almost unintelligible. "Pissing in a River" successfully reverses Horses' course, pushing rock towards poetry rather than the other way around; its primal stomp pulls you in, while lyrics like "My bowels are empty, excreting your soul" warn you to approach with caution.
Over time, Radio Ethiopia's veneer wears thin, allowing the natural beauty of a song like "Poppies" to bleed through to the surface. But it's best to have a firm grounding in Smith's strengths first, lest the album turn you away or, worse, leave you with the wrong idea.
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If only by dint of containing the Springsteen collab "Because the Night," her only Top 10 hit, Easter is Patti Smith's most commercial album, but it's hardly a sellout. The musical backing by her longtime trio of Lenny Kaye, Ivan Kral and Jay Dee Daugherty (with Bruce Brody in for Richard Sohl on keys) is almost anthemic at times, full of ringing power chords and massive snare hits, but Smith's lyrics are as dark and complex as those on Horses, maybe more so.
more »Not surprisingly given its title, the album is shot through with references to death and resurrection (perhaps most tangibly on "Ghost Dance"). "Privilege (Set Me Free)" closes with a snippet of Psalm 23.
Smith's embrace of Christian themes is ecstatic and tortured rather than dogmatic. She includes Jesus Christ along with Jimi Hendrix and Jackson Pollack in the roll call of social outcasts in "Rock n Roll Nigger," a song more radical for its mixture of spoken-word poetry and all-out rock than its questionable attempt to rework racial epithets.
Smith is so often discussed as a poet that her singing sometimes gets second billing, but she was never in better voice than here, shifting from a raspy snarl to a mournful wail. That "Because the Night" isn't bad, either.
Years in the Wilderness
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Although she kept it from her band during the sessions, Smith knew going in that Wave would be her last album for a while, if not forever. Inspiration was flagging; the band had hardly any complete songs when they turned up to record with producer Todd Rundgren. The offhanded quality enhances the title track, a disarmingly casual monologue addressed to Pope John Paul I, tagged with a sung-spoken coda that briefly evokes Gregorian chant. But too often, the songs are only half there, and Rundgren's thin, unsympathetic production gives them nowhere to hide. The pounding organ of "Citizen Ship" needlessly underlines an already clunky lyric, made worse by Smith's uninspired riff on Emma Lazarus in the closing bars.
more »Wave's crests come early. "Frederick" is a tender tribute to former MC5 guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith, who Smith would shortly marry, and "Dancing Barefoot" revisits the liberation of Horses from a more worldly perspective. Through the verse and into the chorus, the song gradually rises in pitch, moving slowly upwards rather than lunging for the top rung. Smith's ambivalence about the life of a public artist is neatly expressed by the "strange music" that makes her "come on like some heroin(e)." Is she moving towards a better self, or simply getting high on her own supply? Wave still sounds like an album made with one foot out the door, but Smith got in her last licks before fleeing the scene.
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Were it not for Patti Smith's name on the cover, fans might have flipped right past Dream of Life in the record bins, not realizing Smith had returned from her self-imposed nine-year hiatus. The woman on the cover bears scant resemblance to the gaunt, androgynous figure of years past, and with good reason; the profane Manhattan poet was now a suburban mother of two. Smith rebuffs suggestions that she "gave up" her career to raise children, but it certainly sounds as if her primary interest was elsewhere. The blunt sloganeering of "People Have the Power" would be easier to swallow from a writer who hadn't previously demonstrated a gift for more personal anthems, and the production, by Fred Smith and Jimmy Iovine, leans heavily on contemporary radio clichés. Artists have the right, even the duty, to change over time, but change in the direction of John Mellencamp ("Looking for You") is not a step forward.
more »A solid ballad anchored by Smith's melancholy vocal, "Paths That Cross" indicates what might have been. There's a mellifluous quality to her voice, unconstrained by persona or posturing, the sound of a woman who's been happily out of the limelight for nearly a decade. But the truism that personal contentment rarely produces great art holds true. The angry, sputtering fire has become a warm and even glow, enough to keep warm but not enough to share.
The Second Coming
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Only Smith's second album in 10 years, Gone Again was preceded by a succession of less welcome milestones: the deaths of Smith's husband Fred "Sonic" Smith, her brother Todd, longtime friend Robert Mapplethorpe and her former keyboard player, Richard Sohl. It's an album made of necessity, gathering old friends Lenny Kaye and Jay Dee Daugherty to take stock of what remains. Co-credited to her late husband, the title track opens the album with a burst of angry guitar, but for the most part, the mood is subdued, pushing towards acceptance, endurance, and, in the case of the Kurt Cobain-inspired "About a Boy," understanding. "Wing" is as lovely and heartbreaking a song as Smith has ever recorded, a transparent hymn of loss and hope.
more »Gone Again is inspired by loss, but it also celebrates the common experience of grief. Smith opens "Farewell Reel" with a spoken dedication to her husband, then follows it with a list of the song's chords: G, C, D, D minor. Anyone can play along, and sooner or later they will. Smith doesn't push towards universals as forcefully as on Wave, but they emerge all the same from amidst a thicket of personal, sometimes indecipherable, images. Her loss is our loss.
As much as it's a series of farewells, Gone Again is also the mark of Smith's full-fledged return, her most fully realized album since Easter and a high-water mark of her latter-day career.
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Coming hard on the heels of the bereavement that inspired Gone Again, Peace & Noise finds Smith still sifting through the ashes. She sounds more confident here; less shell-shocked, giving her a greater degree of control but inevitably (and no doubt thankfully) losing some of the raw hurt. As befits the title, Smith broadens her focus to include loss on a national and historical level. "1959" muses on possibilities vanished and squandered, juxtaposing the Chinese invasion of Tibet and the rise of American prosperity: "In the land of the Impala, baby, things were looking fine."
more »"Memento Mori" looks back to Smith's own past. The story of a Vietnam veteran killed in action stretches out over 10 minutes, its mixture of evocative blank verse and primitive rock 'n' roll (in this case a fitful evocation of the Bo Diddley beat) harking back to Horses' "Land". Some of the songs take on an impersonal cast as Smith strays into more far-reaching subjects, but Peace & Noise proved that Gone Again's return to form was no fluke and Smith was back for good this time.
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The title and the cover photo of a uniformed soldier are enough to spark fears that Smith's eighth album takes a turn for the impersonal — only fair after two albums consumed with personal grief. On the page, Gung Ho's lyrics are rife with topical clunkers like "Glitter in Their Eyes." ("Genius stalking in new shoes/ Have you got WTO blues?") Luckily, that line is yoked to the most irresistible riff since "Because the Night," which pushes the song forward so smoothly there's no time to object. Producer Gil Norton gives the album an energetic sheen while still allowing the lengthy "Strange Messengers" and the title track ample space to stretch out. Smith's singing voice has never been so supple and strong: On "New Party," she leaps between notes and shifts accents as if staging a radio drama. It's almost hard to imagine a woman so far into her career coming up with new tricks that work so well, but the evidence is impossible to refute.
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The title of Smith's ninth album evokes her vagabond lifestyle, but it also conjures the image of a foot coming down hard, which turns out to be the more apt metaphor for its leaden political broadsides. Smith's anger is galvanizing, but it's not enough to get past such lyrical humps as "Our sacred realms are being squeezed/ Curtailing civil liberties."
more »"My Blakean Year" departs from the breast-beating for a vaguely ominous tale of spiritual searching, enhanced by the anxious twitter of a string quartet. But too often the songs follow the pattern of "Radio Baghdad" and "Ethiopia," applying Smith's indisputable artistry to terrain that's already been mapped.
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The cover of Twelve, featuring a tambourine decorated for her by confidante Robert Mapplethorpe, serves notice that Smith's covers album is no lark or contract-filler, but a way of paying homage to those whose music has shaped her from childhood on. The inclusion of patron saints Jimi Hendrix, the Doors and the Rolling Stones is no surprise to anyone who's heard Smith discuss her influences, but Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon might come as a bit of a shock. (The expanded version includes a version of the Decemberists' "Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect.")
more »Smith approaches most songs as a disciple, which is to say that the arrangements are faithful without being slavish and the main distinguishing factor is the sound of her voice. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is recast as bluegrass, with playing by several Holy Modal Rounders, but such digressions are the exception rather than the rule. There's nothing so bold as her early appropriations of Them's "Gloria" and Hendrix's "Hey Joe," so while Twelve casts a fascinating light on the albums that precede it, it doesn't stand with the best of them.
The Memoir
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There is so much to admire about Patti Smith's enchanting memoir, Just Kids. It is, first and foremost, a depiction of Smith's unique relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe in their youth, starting with their love affair as bohemian bookstore workers in New York City in 1969 and running through their friendship roles as muses in the fields of music, photography and poetry. "We gathered our colored pencils and sheets of paper and drew like wild, feral children into the night, until, exhausted, we fell into bed," Smith writes of their early time together. The power of their connection is inspiring. The book, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, operates also as historical document, as Smith introduces us to a fascinating tract of cultural history: New York City in the 1970s. Here's the legendary Chelsea Hotel, where Smith and Mapplethorpe lived together for years, bursting with artists and musicians, and there's the wildly decadent Max's Kansas City, where Smith and Mapplethorpe made the scene, decked in their finest hipster fare. Smith also reveals her interactions with important artistic personalities, including William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Sam Shepherd and Janis Joplin, all of whom she encountered with wide-eyed innocence. Finally, Just Kids is simply a gorgeously written book. Smith's eye for object and place is mesmerizing; the language impeccable. She writes of her first trip to New York: "At 20 years old, I boarded the bus. I wore my dungarees, black turtleneck, and the old gray raincoat I had bought in Camden. My small suitcase, yellow-and-red plaid, held some drawing pencils, a notebook, Illuminations, a few pieces of clothing, and pictures of my sibling. I was superstitious. Today was a Monday; I was born on Monday. It was a good day to arrive in New York City. No one expected me. Everything awaited me." It's also a real treasure to have Smith narrate the audiobook a ridiculously addictive, highly listenable experience, as the older, wiser version of Patti Smith reflects on her younger self. Her youthful optimism still hangs so well, as she reflects on seeing Picasso as a teenager: "I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings to create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not." Jami Attenberg
