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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
In early 1975, Smith began playing regularly at CBGB, a biker bar nestled amid Bowery flophouses. As Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's scabrously entertaining oral history of American punk, "Please Kill Me," makes plain, the punk revolution CBGB hosted had individual precedents in the Velvet Underground, the MC5 and the Stooges, all of whom had taken distinctly anticommercial stances and -- surprise -- unequivocally failed to win a mass audience. Their successors in the protopunk parade, the New York Dolls, had ascended to downtown notoriety in the early-'70s, but the American market wasn't ready yet for garage rock in lipstick and platform shoes.
But by 1975, subcultural gravity converged on CBGB, attracted by a small group of rockers -- notably Television, the Ramones and Smith -- who had little in common besides a commitment to ignore limitations. Punk was not a single style, but a boundary-crashing attitude. You could be a punk journalist, a punk painter, a punk poet. Soon enough, of course, punk would be codified into a canon of stylistic tics, few of which Smith indulged in, but it's always worth remembering that the central motivation was to escape limits, not to invent a new musical cage. As she said once, talking about "Piss Factory," "What is punk rock, anyway? Is it like, I'm writing something just to make a bunch of people with weird hair happy? I wrote it because I was concerned about the common man, and I was trying to remind them they had a choice."
While she earned her rent as a writer and performer, Patti Smith was always, before anything, a fan. Her early sets included at least as many covers as originals, including Smokey Robinson's "The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game," Lou Reed's "Pale Blue Eyes" and "We're Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together," the Who's "My Generation" and everybody's "Louie Louie." Though she borrowed some vocal mannerisms, it was the attitudes and looks of her readily acknowledged heroes that seduced her as much as their songs -- Dylan's cockiness and mystery; the sinister sensuality of the Stones and Jim Morrison; everything about Jimi Hendrix.
Smith's models were all male, by default rather than deliberation. The only solo female rock star to precede her (as opposed to singer in a male band or packaged pop chanteuse) had been Janis Joplin, who provided a small example for a writer who, at first, couldn't carry a tune without bruising it. Smith wore loose T-shirts, jeans and a leather jacket without trying to make a statement of androgyny. She knew what looked cool, even if no other girl looked that way.
Following in the footsteps of Dylan and Reed, Smith was not the first to explode preconceptions of what pop lyrics could be. What she added into the poet-songwriter equation was ecstasy -- not just visceral thrill, the standard goal of rock, but spiritual epiphany, a striving for communion with the beyond, which in the abstract sounds like the worst kind of pretension, but with Smith it was heartfelt. "Horses," the first album to emerge from the CBGB class of '75, is full of gestures toward transcendence -- visionary riffs involving everything from love and money through burning bats and death by drowning; and the music itself, a swirling, driving assemblage anchored not by garage guitar but by Sohl's delicate piano.
"Land" contains in nine and a half minutes everything splendid and perverse about Smith: She whispers, croons, intones and sighs about a boy named Johnny, who is apparently raped in a locker room; Johnny has a vision of horses; then we're in the land of a thousand dances, which may or may not have anything to do with Johnny; Johnny may or may not cut his throat by the sea. But when Smith belts the party cry "Go Rimbaud!" and gleefully sings, "And the name of that place is I like it like that, I like it like that," she circumvents reason, tapping into that ecstasy by trumpeting the failure of language to express it, as in Sufi poetry.
She works the same trick throughout the album, in the rollicking "Redondo Beach," "Kimberly" and "Gloria," which achieves its thrill not in its opening kiss-off to Jesus or because it's a song of lust for a girl, but in the way she holds off for more than half the song before finally releasing us into the chorus, breaking the title down into letters, which was the gimmicky hook of Them's original version, but then playing with the letters -- "I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I" -- until they become pure sound.
The follow-up, 1976's "Radio Ethiopia," is a crunchier, messier work. Smith played guitar on it, though she didn't actually know how: Welcome to punk rock. On the other hand, her voice is much surer; she not only hits her notes, but swoops effortlessly from lilting lullaby to Shangri-la bravado to Buddy Holly hiccup, sometimes in a single line. To the public and to most critics, it was a comedown from the Top 50 "Horses"; she was castigated for slipping into plain hard rock on the one hand and impenetrable abstraction on the other. But this is the one Patti Smith album on which the band sounds like her worthy foil, with enough production bite behind it to challenge Smith's elastic voice. Again, she bleeds meaning out of words through repetition -- "wild, wild, wild, wild" over and over in "Ask the Angels," and "total abandon, total abandon" again and again in "Pumping (My Heart)." "Poppies" is about drugs, but the clearest indication that she's not for them is her idiot-junkie imitation, "It was rilly greaat, maaan." The epigraph on the back, "Beauty will be convulsive or not at all," effectively describes the music's occasionally awkward but always warranted stabs and dives. Cumulatively, even more than "Horses," "Radio Ethiopia" is a harrowing, ravishing encyclopedia of exaltations, though I'll admit to unreliable partisanship.
