FEATURE:
Female Icons
IN THIS PHOTO: Patti Smith in 1975/PHOTO CREDIT: Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation
Part Fifteen: Patti Smith
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LAST week…
IN THIS PHOTO: Patti Smith in 2017/PHOTO CREDIT: Jesse Dittmar
I included PJ Harvey in my Female Icons feature. I have tried to cover as many genres as possible in this feature and, in the coming weeks, I will include some Pop and Jazz. Today, I am sticking with an artist who is a bit rawer and gutsier than a lot of the artists I have covered – that is not a slight but just a difference in terms of the music. When we think of great women in music who have shone and inspired, you have to mention Patti Smith. She is still recording music today and, in 2012, she released Banga. The album gained a lot of critical praise and, in terms of themes and subjects, Smith was drawing from her dreams and observations. Songs talked about history, death; nature, current affairs and so much more – Smith still able to create these profound and moving songs so long after her debut.
PHOTO CREDIT: Sebastien Bozon/Getty Images
I shall collect together some of Smith’s best songs in a playlist at the bottom of this feature but, to start, it is best to mention her debut album: Horses was released in November of 1975. Patti Smith and her band, by that point, had built a reputation as favourites in the New York underground club scene. One can only imagine the scene back then and the sort of sounds that were flying around. Punk was happening then and, whilst it had not peaked and exploded, artists like Patti Smith were starting to experiment and push boundaries.
Smith and her band were spotted by Clive Davis of Arista Records and the band started work on Horses in 1975 and, in all, it was such a quick process between singing and releasing a debut. Some might say that a rushed and quick album recording signals a lack of ideas or experimentation – maybe there is depth missing or a lack of care. I like artists who take time in the studio but, when you listen to Patti Smith’s debut, she captures something urgent and thrilling but also manages to make songs build and grow. Classic tracks like Redondo Beach are relatively short (3:26) whereas Birdland is over nine minutes. If some of her contemporaries like Ramones were releasing album full of sharp and short shocks, Smith was building poetry and different elements into the Punk template. John Cale was enlisted to produce Horses but the relationship was not always smooth. Smith wanted to release an album that spoke to the outsiders; people who were a bit like her – rather than it being commercial and a ‘hit’. The working processes of Smith and Cale were different and it is small wonder there were confrontations. Smith has played down Cale’s role but, actually, maybe that tension led to some great moments. I think Smith has suggested the tension and mania in the studio led to songs like Birdland and Land: these long and emotional songs where it sounds like she is trying to get so much out.
Maybe Cale’s approach to the studio – more professional and studious – was foreign to Smith and her experiences previously. She had come from the club scene and it was like two different world clashing. Despite some negative memories, Horses remains one of the greatest debut albums ever. So many critics rank Horses in their favourite albums ever and it has inspired so many artists. After Horses arrived, Smith was hailed as one of the most important members of the New York Punk-Rock scene and one of the catalysts when it came to the Punk-Rock movement. Unlike so many Punk records of the 1970s, Horses had poetry, art and intelligence mixing alongside spit, fire and raw emotions. Everyone from R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe to Johnny Marr have cited the record as influential. Strong female artists such as Viv Albertine of The Slits claimed the album changed her life; PJ Harvey is another artist who was blown away by Horses. The reviews for Horses are universally positive and, in this AllMusic review, a lot of good points are raised:
“It isn't hard to make the case for Patti Smith as a punk rock progenitor based on her debut album, which anticipated the new wave by a year or so: the simple, crudely played rock & roll, featuring Lenny Kaye's rudimentary guitar work, the anarchic spirit of Smith's vocals, and the emotional and imaginative nature of her lyrics -- all prefigure the coming movement as it evolved on both sides of the Atlantic.
Smith is a rock critic's dream, a poet as steeped in '60s garage rock as she is in French Symbolism; "Land" carries on from the Doors' "The End," marking her as a successor to Jim Morrison, while the borrowed choruses of "Gloria" and "Land of a Thousand Dances" are more in tune with the era of sampling than they were in the '70s. Producer John Cale respected Smith's primitivism in a way that later producers did not, and the loose, improvisatory song structures worked with her free verse to create something like a new spoken word/musical art form: Horses was a hybrid, the sound of a post-Beat poet, as she put it, "dancing around to the simple rock & roll song”.
I shall not cover all of Smith’s albums in detail but, after Horses, Radio Ethiopia was released. Smith was back on terrific form by her third album but, in some ways, Radio Ethiopia was a way to move away from Horses and release something more commercial. With producer Jack Douglas, Smith recorded an album that can be seen as interesting rather than essential. The ten-minute title track drew a lot of criticism due to its lack of cohesion and, well…appeal. Maybe some of the harsh reviews were unfair but there was a feeling there was more self-indulgence than anything on Radio Ethiopia. Things would get back on track by 1978’s Easter.
PHOTO CREDIT: Lynn Goldsmith
Much more accessible than its predecessor, Easter had a more diverse and open feel. Rather than sticking with one genre/sound, Smith spliced Rock & Roll together with Folk and Spoken Word. Some of her best tracks to date appear on that record – including Because the Night (co-written by Bruce Springsteen), We Three and High on Rebellion. Easter’s title provokes religious imagery and, elsewhere, there are religious references – Privilege (Set Me Free) has some lyrics adapted from Psalm 23. Whilst it is a different beast to Horses, Easter is a classic in the Smith cannon and one that, again, drew some huge reviews. Pitchfork’s assessment of the album is particularly insightful and passionate:
“So after working with John Cale on Horses and Jack Douglas (Cheap Trick, John Lennon) on Radio Ethiopia, she chose to work with a new producer named Jimmy Iovine, because she liked what he’d done as an engineer working with Bruce Springsteen. It was a deliberate business decision, no matter that she would later insist that the album was “more communicative. I don’t like the words accessible and commercial.” Lenny Kaye would back her up: “There was no conscious drive to sell records, that was our last thought.”
Even the cover concept was Smith’s twist on sex appeal; while it was probably the first major-label album cover to show a woman with unshaved armpits (which Arista tried to airbrush out), it was created with the object of selling records. After that inimitable Robert Mapplethorpe shot on the cover of Horses and the black-on-silver abstract by Judy Linn that graced Radio Ethiopia, for Easter, Smith went with Lynn Goldsmith, who had just founded the first photo agency that focused on celebrity portraiture. Smith would even tell Rolling Stone that she had masturbated to her own album cover: “I thought if I could do it as an experiment, then 15-year-old boys could do it, and that would make me very happy.”
Smith then flips the switch to “25th Floor.” This is when the woman in “Because the Night” takes out a match and lights the whole damn place on fire. “Love in my heart/The night to exploit/Twenty-five stories over Detroit,” she sings, tales of unabashed emotion in the ancient Book Cadillac Hotel in the Motor City, where she and Fred “Sonic” Smith had taken rooms. “25th Floor” then transmutates its closing ecstasy straight into “High on Rebellion,” the title of which is accurate and illustrative. It is about another important relationship, this time a treatise about Smith and her electric guitar: “...I never tire of the solitary E and I trust my guitar…” The band manifests its own chaos effortlessly behind Smith, before the exemplification of that solitary E fades out slowly”.
By Dream Life in 1988, The Patti Smith Group disbanded but Smith was still in inspired form. Moving into the 1990s and we saw Smith’s music changing slightly. Maybe it is not as captivating as Horses and Easter but she was still producing these wonderful and evocative albums. There is a tinge of sadness on Gone Again, considering what was happening around the time. Released in 1996, a few of Smith’s friends and peers died around the time. Her husband Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, her brother Todd and Kurt Cobain had departed. Gone Again also features the final studio performance of Jeff Buckley – Buckley died in 1997.
PHOTO CREDIT: Annie Leibovitz
Gone Again, despite some of the bad luck and tragedy that surrounded it, was a revitalisation from Smith. It is one of her best albums and, as this review shows, there is a lot to love and respect:
“After years of silence, Patti Smith returned to music with a series of concerts in late 1995. It had been years since she had performed live -- for most of the '80s and '90s, she concentrated on domestic life. Following the death of her husband, Fred "Sonic" Smith, in early 1995, Smith began playing music in public again and those concerts eventually led to the triumphant comeback Gone Again. Her husband wasn't the only loved one Smith lost between 1988's Dream of Life and 1996's Gone Again -- her brother and her close friend Robert Mapplethorpe both died. Appropriately, grief and loss hang over Gone Again, but the overall effect is not one of indulgent melancholy. Instead, it's a sober but strengthing listen -- this is healing optimistic music. Like most of Smith's best work, the songs on Gone Again aren't proper songs, they're song poems, with cascading music and dense, inspired lyrics. Smith sounds more mature than her earlier records -- there are only a handful of out-and-out rockers, and most of the album is subtle and folky -- which gives the album extra weight. Gone Again is more than a comeback, it's a revitalization -- Patti Smith simply hasn't sound so engaged and provocative since Easter”.
In terms of Patti Smith’s more ‘recent’ albums, I really love 2004’s Trampin’. I will end with a bit about Smith’s legacy and importance – returning to Horses – but, in terms of longevity and relevance, there are not many like her.
Consider the fact she has been making albums for nearly forty-five years and, let’s hope, there is no end in sight! I opened by talking about her 2012 album, Banga. It is a remarkable album and one of her finest since the 1970s. Recorded throughout 2011 at New York’s Electric Lady Studios, the sessions were produced by Smith, Tony Shanahan; Jay Dee Daugherty and Lenny Kaye. It was almost like Smith was returning to her Horses roots – she used a lot of the same personal and a lot of Banga’s best moments can be compared to Horses’ pedigree. One wonders when the next Smith album will arrive but, as the reviews for Banga show, the legendary artist still has plenty of genius and firepower in her heart. This review from The Guardian gets the heart of Banga:
“Patti Smith has returned to the poetic-punk format of 1975's Horses, which the Polar prize committee recently described as "Rimbaud with amps". Four of Horses' personnel – Smith, guitarist Lenny Kaye, drummer Jay Dee Daugherty and Television' Tom Verlaine – are present here. It's a mixture of pop songs and poetic explorations, aided by the instantly resumed chemistry between Kaye's shimmering hooks and Smith's sensual vocals. While she has never sung better, the pop songs hit home first: the dreamy Amerigo, the reflective Maria and sublime April Fool, a headrushing tale of outlaw lovers who "race through alleyways in our tattered coats".
The more esoteric monologues demand – and reward – perseverance, especially the 10-minute Constantine's Dream, a passionate defence of her other great love, art, complete with fantasy sequences set in the Garden of Eden. The collision of sound and language is exhilarating; if it is also occasionally impenetrable, that's down to her death-or-glory manifesto to "let me die on the back of adventure, with a brush".
Patti Smith is still performing and creating music and, I understand, there might be something from her fairly soon – although that cannot be confirmed at this time. Smith transformed Punk and inspired countless artists. She continues to influence and the magnitude and importance of Horses cannot be denied. I will end by sourcing from a couple of interviews when Smith talks about Horses. In this BBC piece, Greg Kot recalls interviewing Smith and why some critics got Horses all wrong:
“I felt that our cultural voice, which was so magnificent through the late '60s and early ‘70s, was faltering,” Smith told me, “and there was the rise of stadium rock and glam rock and all of these different things and I felt like somebody had to save it. I didn’t think that it would be me, butI thought I could play a role. I had a strong sense of myself, and I came to say, ‘Here I am’. I’m speaking to those like me, the disenfranchised, the mavericks. ‘Don’t lose heart, don’t give up’.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation
In the end, the Smith heard on Horses aimed to transcend language, genre and her limitations as a sickly working-class kid who moved to New York in search of a job. She couldn’t be confined by a single genre, even one as full of possibility as ‘punk’. Though her bandmates weren’t jazz musicians, they flowed with and around Smith’s voice and words with improvisatory zeal and empathy, never more so than on Birdland. Smith and producer John Cale battled every step of the way about the direction of the album, and decades later the singer would credit Cale with bringing out one of her most intense performances on the nine-minute track”.
Here, in this feature from 2017, Smith talked about revisiting Horses. On 9th March, 2017, Smith played her first gig in Milwaukee for thirty-eight years; she played Horses in its entirety and she performed with two musicians who appear on the album: guitarist Lenny Kaye and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty.
“What goes through your mind as you revisit “Horses” at this stage in your career?
For me it is revisiting not just an album and the lyrics within the album, but a period of my life that was pivotal to my evolution as a performer. I wrote (the opening line, for opening track “Gloria: In Excelsis Deo”) “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine” as a poem in 1970. It was a very long, organic process to get to where “Horses” was, and it really sort of encapsulates my process from writing poetry and performing poetry to evolving within a rock and roll band.
IN THIS PHOTO: Patti Smith in 2017/PHOTO CREDIT: Jesse Dittmar
What about “Horses” are you most proud of?
That people are still responding. That makes me very happy, that it communicates something, whether it speaks to the disenfranchised, or people respond to a political or poetic element of it.
And I have to say when we perform it, it has a very fresh energy because new people come, a lot of our audiences have been very young people, and it’s such a fantastic thing to be able to connect with new generations with this material. And the nice thing is a couple of the songs have improvisational sections, so every night there’s always a different improvisation which reflects the people, the city we’re in, the political climate and the energy of the night.
What are your perceptions of where are we at now politically, and what role can music play?
We need citizen activism more than ever. Of course having artists and musicians who write inspiring songs that incite and inspire people are important. But I think even more important is when I see a million people on the streets, thousands of people in front of the Trump building, thousands and thousands at the airport, thousands of people that went in the cold to protest the pipeline. The people are really rising across America, and I think that is the most important thing. And I’m not saying artists aren’t helpful and aren’t inspiring, but its really the people united that make change”.
Whilst one cannot distill the legacy and brilliance of Patti Smith to a single album, it is clear Horses paved the way. From its songs to its cover, Horses set the bar and transformed the landscape of music – inspiring, as this article explored, so many pioneering artists:
“The album’s cover is iconic in its own right, featuring an image of Smith shot by acclaimed photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Dressed and posed in what would be labelled androgynous following the release of the album, Smith wears a white button-up shirt with a black jacket draped over her shoulder. The image was widely considered to be a statement against the sexualisation of women in the music industry, though Smith insists the photograph simply captures her as she is.
Horses, and Smith as a result, went on to inform the work of everyone from The Smiths to Siouxsie and the Banshees and, importantly, carved a space for strong-willed, unconventional female acts for generations to come. The sheer honesty and delivery of the tracks which form Horses and Smith’s refusal to maintain the status quo have shaped her legacy as a punk, a poet and a pioneer”.
Smith’s genius still burns bright and I do not think there will be another artist like her. You can hear her sound in so many modern artists and this will continue for decades to come. I just had to include Patti Smith in my Female Icons feature because she has given so much to music and she continues to fascinate, inspire and move us. There is nobody like the incredible, electric and utterly beguiling…
PATTI Smith.