Patti Smith

Patti Smith was one of the most authentic voices of the new wave movement and inspired much of the phenomenon that created it.

Patti Smith arrived in New York at twenty-one, a provincial intellectual like many others, searching for a vocation in the underground scene. Smith was already a single mother and wrote poetry. For eight years, she made ends meet with various cultural activities, sometimes working as a bookseller, sometimes as a critic for a music magazine, sometimes as a playwright. Smith had the determination and the fortune to come into contact with the influential intelligentsia, from Andy Warhol to Bob Dylan, from Sam Shepard to Johnny Thunders.
During her relationship with Allen Lanier, Smith wrote some songs for the Blue Oyster Cult. But the crucial turning point came when she began writing music for her own free-form performances, a New York tradition in which she became one of the most powerful voices and one of the few able to complement her words with compelling music (thanks also to guitarist and rock musicologist Lennie Kaye). When the new wave exploded, Patti Smith found herself in the ideal position (and circuits) to ride it. In short, Patti Smith became the queen of the new wave.
It was not only her hysterical singing style and free-form lyrics that made her known. Patti Smith was a complete personality, one of those for whom the line between life and art is very thin. Pervaded by the spirit of the cursed of rock, from Lou Reed to Bob Dylan, from Janis Joplin to Jim Morrison, and endowed with a dry and piercing voice—sick and fierce, desperate and angry, compelling and feverish, which found its natural tone in rapturous spoken word or in taut, no-frills rock and roll—Smith was a visionary caught between the Bible and Rimbaud, between catechism and bohemia.

A thirty-year-old skinny witch determined to save rock, blathering about the presumed death of the genre, posing as a prophetess of a Christian revival, and strutting as an ordinary girl who simply had more courage than others, she established a cliche' even before a musical style. Like all myths of rock music, she had just enough exhibitionism to magnetize the audience, as well as spectacular performing skills. Her ideology, however, was quite nebulous: loyal to her country, a street girl redeemed by the Vatican Council, she proclaimed the greatest performers of all time to be Jagger, Christ, and Hitler (i.e., the most skilled at captivating the masses), and preached rock as a form of communication of the soul. Despite being talked about for her professed ideas, she retained the charm of a generational priestess—seductive yet powerless, uniting yet deceiving.

Her musical patterns were always the same: long deliria with suspense, or a kind of concise and hysterical gospel, the equivalent of a biblical psalm set to rock'n'roll. Often, Lenny Kaye’s distorted and compelling guitar had more substance than her crescendoing vocal outbursts.

Her first single, Piss Factory, released on July 31, 1974, effectively marks the birth of the new wave, and is a canonical example of her free declamations over free-form guitar jams.

The first album, Horses (1975 - Arista, 2005), marked for rock music a return to the style of the heroic times, to Bob Dylan and the Doors, to epic confessions of frustration and alienation. In reality, the album simply explained how to "read" her poems: the voice pushed forward in an emotional crescendo, while the rock band built a more or less veiled boogie. The dramatic introspection of Birdland, a “slow” piece stretched into psychedelic hypnosis and cocktail-lounge riffs that explodes into an epic, rapturous gospel-like sarabande; the neurotic nightmare of Land, variations on Pickett’s famous theme and the first demonstration of how the slight, liturgical Patti could struggle to the extreme with the notes thanks to a wide range of nuances, an entirely instinctive rhetoric, and expressive tension at the edge of nervous exhaustion, thereby creating hallucinatory atmospheres that then detonate in her titanic progressions; and the solemn “Doorsian” torment of Break It Up, where her acting skills sublimely generate suspense, emotion, and despair—these were the artist’s first masterpieces. The free-form, yet very rock-oriented, accompaniments, capable of stretching like elastic and suddenly exploding with the power and violence of hard rock, by Kaye and Richard Sohl (piano), were as revolutionary as her hysterical singing/reciting style.
More conventional songs, such as the reggae Redondo Beach, the hypnotic and swirling Kimberley, and the funereal Elegie closing the album, went almost unnoticed despite their original structures and performances.
With this work, Smith replicated the trick Dylan performed for the protest generation: constructing with her own style of art and life the imaginary world of her fans so that they could fulfill their own imagination through her artistic and personal vision. By placing her visionary genius at the service of her generation’s frustrations, Smith gave voice to an era. It is a tortured and insecure voice, breathless and suffering, no longer able either to soar in the epic flights of Slick or to sink into Joplin’s hoarse lament. It is wilder and more spontaneous than both, technically weak, and amateurish. She does not emulate the radiant utopianism of the former nor the depressed realism of the latter: her deliria are confused, deliberately vague, deliberately abstract.

With Radio Ethiopia (Arista, 1976), the poetess chose to follow the path of the “maudit” master (Ethiopia was Rimbaud’s second homeland). To convey lived experience, Smith shaped a more extreme language, from the brief epileptic bursts of Ask The Angels and Pumping My Heart, a dynamite boogie (where her heavy apprenticeship with the Blue Oyster Cult proves useful), sung with a cutting voice and extraordinary psychomotor energy, to the desperate, agonizing dissonances of Radio Ethiopia, spits of rotten sound reaching peaks of obsession and experimentalism in a hallucinatory sabbath led by Kay’s Hendrixian guitar in the best psychedelic tradition of the New York underground. Free-form litanies like the dark and apocalyptic Ain’t It Strange and the calmer Distant Fingers, and almost religious elegies like Pissing In A River add nothing to the breviary of Horses.

Easter (Arista, 1978) is the album of Patti Smith’s definitive artistic and commercial maturity. The sound is now a cocktail of classic influences (Dylan, Reed, Morrison, Stones, Who) and the lyrics are more mystical and visionary than ever. The concision translates into grittier riffs and more focused melodies, ultimately benefiting the singing as well, no longer a delirious muezzin but fierce and dark-toned. The explosive drive of vocalist and guitarist paints powerful and precise rock’n’roll (Rock And Roll Nigger, the most terrifying progression, a cannibalistic and epileptic gospel-boogie by a possessed performer; Set Me Free, another concentrate of epidermal cadences and riffs), granting ample space to ritualistic tones (Space Monkey and Ghost Dance, two agitated performances on macabre and exotic cadences), liturgical (High On Rebellion), and emphatic (Till Victory, Springsteen’s Because The Night) elements that had made her famous. Moving toward the song form does not diminish the emotionality of her dramaturgy: Smith shouts without mercy, croaks and belches, launches guttural screams and wild high notes, in a kind of methodical negation of the “bel canto.”

Wave (Arista, 1979) is a modest collection of songs in that style (Dancing Barefoot, Fredrick).

If Horses was the album of free-form poetry, if Radio Ethiopia was that of stream-of-consciousness, Easter is that of rock, and Wave is that of elegy.

At this point, Smith gave up music and retired to domestic life in Detroit, as the wife of Fred Smith (MC5).

Guitarist Lenny Kaye took the opportunity to record his first solo album, I've Got A Right (Giorno, 1984), oscillating between power-pop (I've Got A Right) and country-rock (Luke The Drifter).

Continuing the pseudo-Dylanian trajectory that had first seen her as a biblical prophetess of the underground, a “cursed bard” in Beat slang, and a myth of a generation, and later only as an ambiguous renegade, Patti Smith made a surprising return in 1988 with Dream of Life (Arista). The sound is less brutal and more elegant, but between the lines of the anthem People Have the Power, the boogie Up There Down There, and the elegy Paths That Cross, it is easy to recognize the same lyrical tiger of her earlier albums. Age, however, has made her somewhat tiresome, and it is precisely the most ambitious sermons, like Where Duty Calls, that fail.

Dedicated to the memory of her brother and her husband (Fred “Sonic” Smith), Gone Again (Arista, 1996) had a long gestation and was recorded with the help of guitarists and friends Lenny Kaye and Tom Verlaine.
As on her previous comeback (this is the second time she “returns” to the scene, for those who missed the first), Smith fills the album with the ghosts of her past. Each track evokes one of those classic ghosts, demanding attention. But Gone Again and Summer Cannibals are a far cry from the Because The Night and Ask The Angels of old, and Fireflies (almost ten minutes), despite its suggestive accompaniment, lacks the emotional charge of the long improvisations of her early albums.
The lyrics, as always (and as her books have shown), are ultimately secondary. America has two hundred thousand poets like her. It’s the feeling that counts, not the text. So rather than songs of death, hers are songs of compassion, meditations on the grave before the coffin is lowered. Thus she murmurs the requiem of About A Boy (her tribute to Kurt Cobain), somewhat verbose and monotonous; she intones an Ave Maria as My Madrigal; she dances Ravens as if at an Irish funeral.
This survivor from the ’60s (already out of step in her time, having debuted at thirty) and now approaching fifty has lost much of her histrionic and playful charm. She remains only a seasoned bohemian and intellectual, deluded by the artistic longevity of Bob Dylan: except that Dylan is Dylan, and she is not.

Peace And Noise (Arista, 1997) is the second album of Patti Smith’s second era. After the period of mourning, Smith throws herself headlong into the sociopolitical landscape of contemporary America. Pulling Lenny Kaye (guitar) and J.D. Daugherty (drums) out of retirement and enlisting the brilliant young Oliver Ray (guitar), her new boyfriend, and Tony Shanahan (bass), Smith does not change a single iota, convinced, like all prophets, that she is right (musically and otherwise). Ambitions and determination manifest in the religious fervor of Waiting Underground, the declamatory beat of Spell (lyrics drawn from Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” a long-standing model for her), and the emphatic Death Singing (the only truly original song on the album). Yet it feels like listening to your grandmother repeat for the thousandth time the story that once held you breathless as a child. Unfortunately, we have grown up. Memento Mori is the obligatory long improvisation, now a tradition as fixed as Thanksgiving turkey. The music is more enjoyable in Whirl Away, a cross between Pretenders and Badalamenti, weaving flamenco and reggae steps, and in Dead City, a boogie worthy of Easter.

Smith belonged to another era (the Beat poets, the ’50s beatniks) when she first appeared on the stages of the new wave. Now she seems to belong to another age. Ancient and antiquated, she has the charm of fossils. Like most fossils, she is not only useless but also tedious.

Her animalistic singing, born more from itinerant preachers than the Stooges, her blasphemous lyrics (“Jesus died for somebody's sins / but not mine,” the most famous from Horses), and her epileptic contortions (one critic compared a performance to labor and childbirth) renewed above all the ritualism of rock, which had remained stuck in the Velvet Underground bacchanals (with Kaye’s guitar emulating Cale’s viola). They certainly helped cement her image as a “rock” woman—not merely a singer or mascot, but a strong, autonomous, and intelligent persona.

For those who have recognized the decline that started after Radio Ethiopia and have not clinged on the myth, Gung Ho (Arista, 2000) is simply another stage of the aging of Patti Smith, but a slightly surprising one. Where previous records simply exploited her myth and badly reshashed her persona, Gung Ho is a tight rock'n'roll album. Glitter In Their Eyes is a spunky, vitriolic rave-up, while the march-like One Voice (dedicated to Mother Theresa) and Boy Cried Wolf revive her messianic vein. With the lengthy sermon of Gung Ho (dedicated to Ho Chi Min) Smith seems to close the loop that she started a quarter of a century before in Birdland (same wavering voice, but far less gripping accompaniment and hardly any of her proverbial progressions). Smith wisely buries the somber tones and the bluesy and folksy accents of Gone Again (the last echoes dying in Gone Pie and Libbie's Song) and returns to her witchy origins. There is plenty of weakness (the eight-minute Strange Messengers never packs the punch it keeps promising, and Persuasion, with son Jackson Smith on guitar, sounds like a Police cover band), but, for better and for worse, this is Smith's most polished album. Land (1975-2002) (Arista, 2002) is a double-cd anthology that, unfortunately, includes lots of rare/unreleased/live tracks.

Trampin' (Columbia, 2004) is formulaic to the point that it could be a Patti Smith cover band interpreting some of her classics. The shorter songs lack venom and wit (the would-be stomping anthem Jubilee is the best), and the two long tracks, the nine-minute revolutionary sermon Gandhi and the twelve-minute anti-war rant Radio Baghdad, stick to the charisma but can't seem to muster enough instrumental energy to sustain Smith's verbal skills. It is also debatable if one wants to hear Smith's political opinions (as opposed to the surrealistic stream of consciousness of Horses).

Twelve (Columbia, 2007) was a collection of covers.

The double disc The Coral Sea (2008) documents a live reading of poetry with Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine providing a musical background.

If your name is not Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen or Nick Cave, you better think twice about focusing an entire album on your lyrics. This advice works for Patty Smith too, whose lyrics have never been the reason to listen to her music. Her vocal delivery certainly was. Her backup band certainly was. Banga (Col, 2012), the first album of original material in eight years, falls precisely in that trap. The blistering boogie Fuji-San (which is just a variation on much better ones of the late 1970s) and the pow-wow dance of Banga are passable, but the pensive meditation of Amerigo, the tedious ten-minute spoken-word improvisation Constantine's Dream and sleep-inducing ballads like This is the Girl are simply acts of sabotage against her glorious past.