Patti Smith's Horses (12 page)

“Break It Up” is followed by “Gloria.” Like the other
Horses
numbers, the song closely resembles the recorded version; Smith’s vocals on this performance are notable for their uncanny depth and maturity. Midway through the performance, however, the singer departs from the song’s familiar lyrics to deliver an extemporized account of the band’s evolution from duo through trio to four-piece, ending with a plea for a drummer to complete the line-up (“I know you’re out there”). Whether Jay Dee Daugherty was in the audience at WBAI is unknown, but he was familiar with Smith and her band, and, in addition to running the PA, had taken to sitting in for occasional performances at CBGBs. Although already a member of the Mumps, Daugherty actively courted Smith and her entourage, and with Jane Friedman’s support he was eventually recruited as a full-time member at the beginning of the summer. With Daugherty on board, the Patti Smith band became a fully fledged rock ’n’ roll group.

Given their positive experience the previous summer, it seemed natural for the band to return to Electric Lady. Situated on Greenwich Village’s then seedy Eighth Street, the historical studio, with its wallpapered basement, psychedelic murals, mood lighting, and curvaceous, womblike interiors, provided an appropriate setting for a band embarking on the difficult task of reinventing itself. Initially,
the task seemed clear enough: transpose the live sound to vinyl. But the band were savvy enough to realize that only the most experienced producer would be able to recreate the spontaneity of a live performance within a studio setting. After some deliberation, Smith decided to approach John Cale. Later, in conversation with Dave Marsh (1976), Smith claimed, “My picking John was about as arbitrary as picking Rimbaud. I saw the cover of
Illuminations
with Rimbaud’s face, y’know, he looked so cool, just like Bob I looked at the cover of
Fear
[Cale’s 1974 record] and I said, ‘Now there’s a set of cheekbones.’” Cheekbones aside, Cale seemed an appropriate choice for a band weaned on the
art brut
aesthetic of the Velvet Underground. Jay Dee Daugherty, moreover, had spent time with Cale in the late 60s during his tenure as Stooges producer, and had warmed to his affability and his no-nonsense approach to the recording process. That both assumptions were wrong became rapidly apparent. Since leaving the Velvet Underground, Cale, inspired by the example of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, had developed a much more symphonic approach to music-making. On records like
Paris 1919
(1972), he had opted for a lush, orchestral sound, and for the Patti Smith album he was keen, initially at least, to push the band in a similar direction. From the outset, however, his attempts to recreate the multitracked opulence of recordings like
Pet Sounds
met with fierce resistance. In the studio he found Smith to be domineering and single-minded; the singer, for her part, objected to Cale for precisely the same reasons.

On one point alone did Cale’s desire for sonic perfection meet with band approval; noting that the band’s equipment was irredeemably road-worn—the warped necks of Kaye’s
and Kral’s guitars were of particular concern—he insisted that a sizeable portion of their advance be spent on new instruments. Once the band plugged in, however, the arguments continued, with the battles of wills stemming particularly from the relationship between Smith and Cale. Alternating between bouts of manic energy and moments of near-violence, Cale and Smith had become creative sparring partners, as she informed
Crawdaddy
. “How am I getting on with John Cale? It’s like a Season in Hell. He’s a fighter and I’m a fighter so we’re fightin’. Sometimes fightin’ produces a champ” (Shapiro, 1975). To
Rolling Stone’s
Dave Marsh she added, “All I was really looking for was a technical person. Instead, I got a total maniac artist. I went to pick out an expensive watercolor painting and instead I got a mirror” (1976). A few months later, Smith sought to distance herself further from Cale’s influence, claiming that “he had nothing to do with anything. I mixed the record myself.… The album was spewed from my womb. It’s a naked record. We ignored all Cale’s suggestions” (Jones, 1976). The words are telling: one way to read the record is as a documentation of Smith’s struggle to occupy, possess, and displace the order of the phallus. As we shall see, her claim to have “spewed” the record from her “womb,” without Cale’s assistance, signifies to some extent the artist’s frustration at not being able to do away, entirely, with the phallic regime.

But amidst this frustration we encounter glimpses of what it might be like to upset this regime, as Smith went on to explain to Tony Glover: “in some of my songs I take on different personas.… Cool thing was that John [Cale] was into the chameleon thing, the changeling aspect—and I wasn’t made to feel guilty or nervous about any of the subject
matter” (1976). Isolated in the subterranean confines of the studio, with sessions running from five in the morning to eleven at night, resuming the next day at noon and running through to six
AM
, the band and their producer thus became “caught in the common obsession of getting it down.” As Glover reflected, “it don’t take many times of working all night and leaving, wasted in the dawn, only to find the streets full of sunshine and people going to offices before all that’s real is the mania of the sound you’re making” (1976). Out of this mania a shared vision began slowly to emerge, and the key to this vision was performance. By playing the songs over and over again, the band began to tighten up; once this end was achieved, Cale, in a moment of Zen-like creative provocation, encouraged the musicians to disassemble the songs, extending and improvising just as they had done in their Times Square rehearsals and on stage at CBGBs. The strategy, as Smith explained to
Rolling Stone
, drove the band to its limits, but, she added, “there’s a lotta inspiration going on between the murderer and the victim. And [Cale] had me so nuts I wound up doing this nine-minute cut [‘Birdland’] that transcended anything I ever did before” (Marsh, 1976).

Smith’s emphasis on a shared feeling of transcendence provides a clue to the underlying meaning of
Horses
. As I shall go on to argue,
Horses
is concerned with the testing of limits: the boundaries between the sacred and the profane; between male and female; queer and straight; the poetic and the demotic; self and other; the living and the dead. Just as the recording process forced its participants to their limits, so the songs collected on the album push the listener to question, though not necessarily to overcome, received ideas and attitudes. To listen to
Horses
is thus to hold oneself in suspense;
it is to reconsider all that one knows to be rational and real. I understand that these are weighty claims to make of a “simple” rock ’n’ roll record, but, as I hope to show,
Horses
, for all its pared down minimalism, is far from simple. In the reading that follows I shall consider the album as a material artifact, the finished form in which it is encountered by the listener, and as the result of a set of historically determined processes. Thus, where necessary, I will make reference to alternative performances, technological details, and marketing decisions. If the record is to be read as an artifact, however, we must begin not with the songs but with the image that greeted consumers of the record on the day of its release in November 1975.

She could have chosen any number of fashionable photographers for the album cover, but she chose her close friend and former collaborator Robert Mapplethorpe. The brief seemed simple enough: to convey a sense of glamour while avoiding cliché. Glamour, however, proved to be a contestable term. While Mapplethorpe at this stage was basing his understanding of the word on conventional images from the world of high fashion, Smith looked back to the underworld dandyism of her late-nineteenth-century literary heroes Rimbaud and Baudelaire. The photograph, in other words, would be a document of the androgynous look—white shirt, black jacket, black tie—that she favored both in her everyday life and on the stage. But Smith was also eager to convey something of the glacial minimalism of the French New Wave. She had in mind Jean-Luc Godard’s work with Anna
Karina in
Vivre sa vie
(1962), where the actress is portrayed as cool and enigmatic, intellectual yet sensual.

The resulting image was a triumph of artistry over technical deficiencies. Lacking the resources for supplementary lighting, Mapplethorpe was constantly on the lookout for interesting natural light effects, for subtle shadings and striking contrasts. A friend’s recently purchased apartment provided a solution. Located in Greenwich Village, near Washington Square, Sam Wagstaff’s place was empty, bare, and white. The photographer noticed how at a certain point in the afternoon the sun created a triangle on one of the walls and knew that he wanted to use it in some way for the forthcoming session. On the day of the shoot, Smith arrived at the apartment tired and dishevelled; she refused to comb her hair. The light was beginning to fade as Mapplethorpe anxiously maneuvered his subject into place, taking twelve shots in a rapid space of time. At just the right moment, Mapplethorpe caught the fading triangle, glimmering like an angel’s wing on her lefthand side. She had draped a jacket over her shoulder, on the lapel of which was mounted a small silver pin of a horse. An unknotted black tie completed the ensemble, but it was the poised, inscrutable look on the singer’s face, coupled with the hint of vulnerability in the hands, that created the most striking effect.

The resulting print is a masterpiece, an artful teasing of the conventional codes of gender and sexuality that leaves the viewer uncertain of the object of his or her regard. Simplistic forms of categorization fail to capture the underlying ambivalence of the image: are we gazing at a feminized man or a masculine woman? Through her performance of masculinity, reducing male iconography to a set of replicable metonymy—the
shirt, the jacket, the tie, the hint of insouciance—Smith suggests slyly yet powerfully that gendered identity is inessential, that the phallus, for example, is no more privileged than any other signifier. Certainly, the notion that a woman could take possession of the phallus was enough to perturb the boss of the record company. Clive Davis wanted to ditch the image outright; but Smith retained artistic control, even to the point of defying Davis’s request to the art department to airbrush the suggestion of a moustache on her upper lip.

The cover, then, was the first victory in Smith’s war on conventionality. When
Horses
appeared in the stores in time for Christmas, its monochromatic starkness contrasted with the florid, soft-focus imagery used in the marketing of most other American female singer-songwriters. The effect was compounded by the reverse of the sleeve, where Smith’s band appear unsmiling and remote, a hint of danger conveyed by the flick-knife with which the drummer Jay Dee Daugherty casually toys.

That Patti Smith was operating in a different realm entirely to that occupied by her sisters in the genre was made obvious when one removed the vinyl from its plain paper sleeve. Placing the record on the turntable, putting the needle into the groove, none of the ritualistic operations of the act of listening to a record could prepare the listener for the visceral and intellectual disturbance of “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo).” A live highlight from the CBGBs sets, the song’s opening lines, adapted from the poem “Oath,” have lost none of their power to shock. I remember hearing them for the
first time as a fourteen-year-old, having only recently been confirmed as a member of the Church of England. Then, as now, I felt a sense of risk-taking, a blasphemous and all-too-human leap into the unknown. On the record, as the words uncoil, the sense of solitary defiance is underpinned by a slow acidic chord progression, culminating with the down-stroked rhythmic assertion of “my sins my own they belong to me. Me.” But what law is being defied here? And why is this linked to the assertion of human sexual desire?

To answer these questions we must look closely at the song’s origins. “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo)” is based, of course, on Van Morrison’s “Gloria” (1964), a three-chord speak song that relies on rhythmic dynamics to convey the excitement of sexual attraction. Delivered from the perspective of a cocksure male protagonist, the significance of the original version turns on the implicit equation of sexual and religious ecstasy, “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo)” (“Glory to God in the Highest”) being the title of the Greater Doxology used in the Catholic Mass. By making the religious context explicit, Smith raises challenging questions about the relations between desire and authority, such as whether initially rejecting the male savior figure has anything to do with the subversion of gendered identity that follows. Although manifestly sung by a female voice, the persona of Smith’s “Gloria” is not necessarily female. This ambiguity has led some listeners to assume that the song is a lesbian fantasy. But this assumption ignores the sense in which the song deliberately subverts categorizations: is the female singer adopting a male persona? If not, is she singing of her desire for another woman? The point here is that “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo)” seeks to deliver itself, and its listeners, from such closed questions; it is, quite simply, a song
about desire, or rather, to be more precise, about how desire can lead to the adoption of unexpected, and often unsettling, identities and attitudes.

In an important discussion of “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo),” the musicologist Mike Daley notes how Smith violates the “structural cohesion” of Van Morrison’s text; “her new text manipulates the signifiers of Morrison’s language for her own desires, to enact a fantasy of omniscient control” (1998). For example, early on in the song, the protagonist is shown looking “out the window” at a “sweet young thing / Humpin’ on the parking meter leaning on the parking meter.” The scene recalls the voyeuristic tone of the original: “[She] comes walkin’ down my street / watch her come to my house,” but in a way that flouts the conventions of heterosexual desire. Again, who is singing here, and to whom? Smith’s querying of gender and sexuality in “Gloria” is not restricted to textual intervention, however. Musically, the song revolves around F# held over into E. The unorthodox tonal harmony, created by the relation between the natural and the flattened second, has a souring effect, resulting in the sonic equivalent of irony. This strategy is extended, in turn, to Smith’s manipulation of pitch and timbre. As Daley argues, Smith’s vocal technique, “flouts the conventions of rock singing, exposing the cracks in Morrison’s macho stance with [an] exaggeratedly leering, ‘male’ vocal performance. She appropriates both masculinity and femininity for playful deconstruction.” Aspects of Smith’s vocal style in the first seventeen bars of the song, such as her low register, her adherence to the tonic note (Eb), and her preference for closed vowels, “reinforce,” according to Daley, “connotations of rebellion and male self-control encoded in the lyrics” (1998). Her models here are, chiefly,
Jagger and Dylan, but one may also detect something of the female
Sprechtstimme
tradition, in which the performance of the masculine voice is calculated and arch.