Patti Smith's Horses (14 page)

In light of this, “Birdland” may be read as an attempt to negotiate with a similarly commanding, otherworldly, and aloof presence. As Smith goes on to suggest, however, the Name-of-the-Father is not necessarily tied to Grant. Recollecting her tempestuous relationship in the recording studio, she credits John Cale for creating the conditions that led to “Birdland”: “John kept pushing me to improvise and extend—‘Birdland’ used to be four minutes onstage, but it flowered in the studio and ended up about nine minutes long” (Glover, 1976). Working with and against Wilhelm Reich, Grant Smith, and John Cale, aided by the “collective intelligence” of the musicians (see Smith, 1998), the singer fleshed out the outline of the song that she had performed a few months earlier at WBAI. The resulting narrative, looped around Sohl’s C and B♭ chord progression, a repeat of the natural, flattened second technique used in “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo),” takes as its theme the Reichian notion of the
transformation of energy. Specifically, it focuses on the wish to transcend the limitations of the human, to convert death into the portal to a higher plane of existence. What is interesting, however, in Smith’s treatment of this theme, is her depiction of the father. Following Sohl’s chromatic piano scale at 0:50, the voice mimics the boy’s “drift” into unconsciousness through an extended central vowel slide. The resulting entry into the “belly” of the spaceship seems curiously regressive, as if the child were returning to the maternal body. But any sense of this representing a return to the imaginary bliss of the presymbolic is swiftly dispelled as the boy catches sight of the father “at the control board.” The belly of the ship turns out, then, to be a version of the orgone accumulator, the man-made womb from which the Reichian subject emerges happy, healthy, and restored. Significantly, Smith accentuates the craziness of this vision with repeated references to cartoons and animation. Yet, as an attempt on the part of the father to control the unruliness of the womb, the orgone accumulator is not merely comic, it is also dangerously misogynistic. Thus, toward the end of the song, the singer evokes “the shape of a tortured woman,” her sons “all dreaming they’re going to bear the prophet.” The sense in which Reich co-opts female generative power for his own dubious purposes is underscored here by the multiple meanings of the verb “to bear.”

In light of the veiled critique of the orgone box, it is perhaps also worth noting Cale’s place at the center of the dark, curvaceous interior of Electric Lady. To produce or bear a record remains a fundamentally male preserve. In many respects, “Birdland” comments on this paradox, drawing energy from the masculine imperative to improvise and extend: the title alludes to Charlie Parker and the New York
jazz club of that name at 1678 Broadway, and the song is dedicated, in addition to Reich, to the respected blues pianist and Jehovah’s Witness Huey Smith. At the same time, the song questions the right of the male to dictate in this way. Eventually, as we shall see, Smith wrested control from Cale in order to realize her own vision, but for now, in “Birdland,” the critique of patriarchy proceeds through irony and, in the end, via the sourly sweet “sha da do wop” section, with a knowing glance toward 50s doo-wop.

Opening with a beautiful piano arabesque in Am, the first opening minor chord on the record, “Free Money,” is also its most conventional rock song. As Smith explained in a recent interview (Houston, 2006), the lyric was inspired by memories of family poverty. Ever the “dreamer,” it was Beverley’s ability to transform the mundane, by, for example, converting a pot of potatoes into “a mountain of French fries,” which enabled Smith, and her siblings, to overlook their material circumstances. Like its predecessors, “Free Money” can thus be approached as a form of dream, and indeed the word “dream” is repeated seventeen times over the course of the song’s duration. But “Free Money” is also, arguably, the song on
Horses
that is most closely rooted in social reality. To witness the relations between capitalism and poverty in New York in 1975, one need only to have stepped outside the studio, where evidence of the city’s ongoing fiscal crisis was evident: piles of garbage, shut-down schools, a decrease in police patrols, and an attendant rise in violent crime. “At the time,” as Joshua Brustein notes, “the federal government
accused the city of handling its money like a heroin addict, focusing only on its next fix—relying on deceptive accounting, borrowing excessively, and refusing to plan” (2005). The sense of a city in the throes of a vertiginous drug habit, lurching from crisis to crisis is conveyed both lyrically and musically by “Free Money.”

Inspired by a tune that came to Smith during an early morning walk in the East Village, the song begins with a sobbed enunciation of the links between the lyrical and the mundane: “Find a ticket win a lottery / Scoop the pearls up from the sea.” Following this testimony to the alchemical power of capital, the pearls, in turn, are “cashed in” to buy “the things you need.” To emphasize the abrupt transition from beauty to commodity, Smith introduces a pause after “thing,” which forces a compression of the word “need,” as if the voice were ashamed of the ability of capital to convert precious pearls into mere units of exchange. With an allusion to Matthew 13:45–46 (“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is a merchant seeking goodly pearls: and having found one pearl of great price, he went and sold all that he had, and bought it”), the song thus advances the Marxian thesis that under capitalism “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned”
(The Communist Manifesto
, 1848; Marx, 1977). In a further gesture toward Marx, the lyrics underscore the topical relations between money and criminality (“I know [the bills are] stolen”), with Smith tapping deep into her New Jersey working-class roots to pronounce the end rhymes “bad” and “had.”

Musically, the song relies on Daugherty’s impressive command of rhythm and texture to convey the sense of a narcotic ascent into the delirious heights of capitalist consumption.
Propelled by rolling snare and tom-tom patterns, the evocation of the capitalist stratosphere embraces not merely the world (the deserts of Arabia and the “cool fields of snow”), but, indeed, the universe. Such is the extent of money’s influence on the sphere of human activity that creation itself, traditionally conceived as the realm of the divine, seems subject to its dizzying control. Smith’s vocals at this point make expressive use of vibrato, with a notable upward octave slide on the final word of the choral version of the opening line (“every night before I go to sleep”). Structurally, it should be noted at this point that “Free Money” is constructed in the form of a spiral, with early lines repeated in a higher register to suggest an increasing sense of urgency. In the case of “sleep,” the octave shift indicates a wish to cross some form of boundary. But due to the accelerating pace of the song, it becomes very difficult to discern where the force of this desire lies: does the singer wish to realize her dream or does she wish to awake from it? Significantly, toward the close of the song, the backing vocals mimic the repetition of “money” in “Money, Money,” from
Cabaret
. In both cases, the effect is hallucinatory, to the extent that it becomes difficult to distinguish between the virtual realm of capital and the real world of love, labor, and material well-being. Thus the song ends with a shouted insistence on the relations between freedom, money, and dreams, but also with an anxiety that, as a result of capital, it may no longer be possible to conceive of freedom or of dreams outside of a system of exchange.

Like “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo),” “Redondo Beach,” and “Birdland,” then, “Free Money” seeks to break through the signifying bar, the limit that allows us to sustain our misrecognition of the Real. But like those other attempts, “Free
Money” can only go so far before desire, confronted by the hideous impossibility of the Real, succumbs to symbolic control. Like the drug addict’s dream of sustained euphoria, free money is revealed here as an oxymoron. We must all, at some point, pay a price for our dreams.

“Kimberly,” the opening track on the second side of
Horses
, is the second song to be named after a woman’s name, and the second song, after “Redondo Beach,” to bear on a family connection. Like “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo),” “Kimberly” also addresses the relations between art, individuation, and the divine. But unlike “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo),” it interweaves these connections with vivid personal recollections. The song may therefore be understood as an attempt to address abstract concerns from the perspective of individual experience.

As Bockris recounts, “Kimberly” grew out of an event that occurred one stormy afternoon, shortly after the birth of Smith’s sister Kimberly in August 1959:

I was outside and there was this huge storm brewing. I was standing outside and I was sick … sick of being a Jehovah’s Witness, because they said there was no place for art in Jesus’ world. I said, “Well, what’s going to happen with the museums, the Modiglianis, the Blue Period?” They said it would fall into the molten sea of hell. I certainly didn’t want to go to heaven if there was no art in heaven. (Bockris, 1998)

The storm thus marks the point at which Smith, according to her own account, rejects religion in favor of art. In her
“notes” for 1975, Smith recreates this scene in rather more vivid terms:

In the field, about a hundred feet from the black barn, was the great bush-tree. It was alive and vibrating, all the words of God. I spent long hours praying to it. When I was twelve my sister was born. One afternoon the sky went pitch. A storm was coming. I was holding Kimberly in my arms. The air was like milk. I was fed up with prayers. I was fed up with everything. I stared at the bush for a long time. I wanted something. I cradled the baby’s skull. It was a light-bulb. I concentrated as hard as I could. Lightning struck. Her face lit up. Everything in flames. The world was turning all the destructive whims of nature. Rivers drying, rivers of salt remaining, berserk waterfowl kamikazing into raging falls. The bam was crumbling. The bush was burning. And Kimberly was shining in my arms like a phosphorescent living doll. (1998)

Despite Smith’s rejection of the church, the language of the Old Testament has clearly left its creative imprint. The obvious reference point here is to Exodus 3:2: “the angel of the
LORD
appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up.” In this account, however, the sudden burst of lightning, channelled by the adolescent girl in an act of Promethean intensity, leads not to the promise of liberation (in Exodus the Lord pledges to lead the Israelites out of Egypt) but to the awakening of the young girl’s artistic consciousness, symbolized by the shining of the “living doll.” Kimberly thus appears as an artwork, illumined by the power of her sister’s imagination.

On record, “Kimberly” is disarmingly light, a welcome relief even from the “heaviness” of “Birdland” and “Free Money.” Yet this playful quality belies a more serious intent as, riding over the top of a churchy-sounding Hammond organ, sustained by a vaguely reggae beat, the lyrics shift from fragmentary personal recollection (“The wall is high the black barn”), with intimations of authority and control, to a sense of pending apocalypse (“And I know soon the sky will split”). At 0:50, the song introduces the record’s first true modulation, moving in an unusual progression from B to E♭m to A♭ to E♭, ending with G7 and C. The causal dismissal of the storm (“I don’t mind”) echoes “Gloria’s” avowed imperviousness to the divine. In this case, however, the dismissal of divine retribution culminates in the internalization of heavenly power, realized in the human as the power to create art. In a feminist revision of the Immaculate Conception, the song goes on to envisage the moment when the adolescent Smith felt the storm settling in her “belly.” Sequenced with memories of the birth of her sister, the protagonist spits out the resulting “gas,” which she then proceeds to ignite in a knowing parody of the creation myth. In formal terms, the connection between the human and the divine is reinforced through internal rhymes and repetition. At the moment, for example, when the protagonist births herself, as it were, she repeats the lines associated earlier with the apocalyptic power of God: “And I know that soon the sky will split / And the planets will shift.”

“Kimberly,” like “Redondo Beach,” raises some interesting questions about familial jealousy. Sampling a line from T. S. Eliot’s
Waste Land
(1922), the singer envisions the baby’s skull cracked by lightning as the bats “with their baby vein faces” fly from the barn. Yet, as creativity is wrested
from destruction, the following verse goes on to downplay this desire, and a wish is expressed for the safety of the baby sister. Just as in the Freudian account of sibling rivalry, Smith mixes feelings of love and hate in this song. On a wider scale, this links “Kimberly” as a sister song to “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo),” where the contest between the individual and the divine is mapped onto the conflict between feminine
jouissance
and the Name-of-the-Father. While in some respects “Kimberly” may be read as a more or less successful attempt to occupy, possess, and displace the power of the phallus, the recourse at the end of the song to a conventional ideal of motherhood might suggest otherwise. And yet, such is the force of the vision residing at the core of the song, that no amount of speculative mothering (“Looking deep in your eyes baby”) will remedy the split between the aberrant female “I” and her idealized maternal self-image. As we have seen with “Birdland,” the ironic
coda
is one of many strategies that Smith deploys to query the sense of a definitive reading, and so “Kimberly” leaves us, in the end, with a strangely pleasing sense of uncertainty and unease.

Horses
closes with three songs, “Break It Up,” “Land,” and “Elegie,” which draw inspiration from the untimely deaths of Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix. Death, of course, is a pervasive theme of this record, and in all, six of the eight songs collected on
Horses
address this issue in some form or another. “Redondo Beach” and “Kimberly,” as we have seen, touch on the imagined loss of siblings, while “Birdland” focuses on the death of a father. Collectively, the album may
therefore be conceived as a form of
memento mori
, an artistic meditation on the limits of mortality. In classical Latin literature,
memento mori
(literally, “remember you will die”) was often linked with the theme of
carpe diem
, or “seize the day.” In Horace’s Ode 37, for example, the line
“Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus”
(“Now we should drink, now we should beat the ground with unrestrained step”), makes the connection between pleasure and mortality explicit: enjoy yourself now, for your days are numbered (Horace, 1998; author’s translation). With the influence of Christian thought, the
memento mori
takes on an altogether more moral tone. When faced with the prospect of his or her death, the Christian is encouraged to meditate on the contrast between the transient delights of mortality and the eternal joy of the afterlife. To young people in the 1950s and 60s, the tension between classical and Christian notions of mortality came to a head in the hedonistic imperatives of rock ’n’ roll. Many early rock ’n’ roll careers, such as those of Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, were, as a result of strict religious backgrounds, divided between liberation and damnation, their young lives split between the desire to please themselves and the injunction to please God.