Patti Smith's Horses (15 page)

Although
Horses
opens with a fierce declaration of independence from the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is a record that remains in thrall to the crippling power of divine judgment. Nowhere, I would argue, is this more apparent than “Break It Up.” Cowritten with Tom Verlaine toward the end of 1974, the song was inspired by a dream. Emerging into a clearing, the dreamer happens on a group of natives worshipping a man laid out on a marble slab: Jim Morrison. In her note to “Break It Up” (1998), Smith records how the
man appears “alive with wings that merged with the marble. Like Prometheus.” Through chanting “break it up Jim break it up”—the phrase echoes the Doors’ “Break on Through” (1967)—she dissolves the stone and Morrison is set free. The allusion to Prometheus is, of course, highly significant. In Greek myth, the Titan Prometheus is presented as a resourceful and sophisticated defender of humanity. As punishment for defying Zeus by providing humanity with the gift of fire, Prometheus is chained to a rock on Mount Caucasus, where an eagle devours his liver for eternity. Eventually, the Titan is freed by Heracles (known as Hercules in Roman mythology). Aside from the obvious associations—Morrison as god-like hero, condemned and tortured by a conservative establishment intent on quashing the spirit of youthful rebellion—the dreamer’s self-association with Heracles is highly suggestive. Renowned for his superior strength, cunning, and sexual prowess, Heracles is in mythic terms the apogee of conventional masculine identity. Yet, while the dreamer appears to lay unconscious claim to this identity, it is worth recalling that Heracles/Hercules was figured in many Greek and Roman accounts as overtly bisexual. He thus emerges in the dream as a fitting addition to Smith’s panoply of sexually anarchic heroes. By taking on the role of the liberator, the dreamer enacts also her desire to draw inspiration from the dead; to elevate Morrison to the ranks of the immortals, but also, crucially, to steal some of his fire. As Smith envisaged in her essay, “Jukebox Cruci-Fix” (1975), “I refuse to believe … that Morrison had the last enlightened mind. [he] didn’t slip [his] skin and split forever for us to hibernate in posthumous jukeboxes.” Rather than mourning, the task was to become god-like oneself.

Musically, the song is introduced by a delicately ascending piano motif, over which Smith speaks/sings. A dramatic full band chordal progression leads into the chorus, with the “break it up” chant buoyed aloft by Verlaine’s beseeching lead guitar line. In the second verse, tension emerges from the contrast between the frozen landscape and the singer’s increasingly impassioned sense of incomprehension (“I don’t understand … I can’t comprehend”). With echoes not only of the Prometheus myth, but also of Jacob’s struggle with the angel in Genesis 32:21–32, the singer and the boy roll on the ground. The struggle culminates with the singer’s submission and her strangely authoritative imprecation, “take me please.” Abandoned by her antagonist/lover in the icy clearing, the singer’s heart begins to melt. The lyrical content is enhanced by the weird chest-beating effect that accompanies the line, as if the singer were attempting, literally, to crack the frozen cage of the heart. In conjunction with Verlaine’s startlingly mimetic guitar figure (“I can feel, I can feel”), by the end of the song she too is ready to break through, to transcend the flesh and become a deity. Through the alternation of quiet, reflective verses, and loud, soaring choruses, together with the harmonious interplay of voice and lead guitar, “Break It Up” offers what is, perhaps, the purest distillation of
Horse’
transcendental aspirations.

On record, “Land” is a complex and demanding song, made up of three sections: “Horses,” “Land of a Thousand Dances,” and “La Mer (de).” Clocking in at 9:25, it is also the longest track on
Horses
. A reading of “Land” will inevitably
reflect these conditions; the trick when endeavoring to embrace its multiple themes and nuances is to avoid going under, lost in the “sea of possibilities.” To stay afloat, it is helpful to keep sight of some of the more obvious markers, beginning with the figure of Johnny. At CBGBs in April, during one memorable performance of “Land,” Smith, in mock-poetic mode, described the song’s “argument” thus: “The dream, life, death, resurrection, and soap opera of Johnny in the hallway.” Following a comedic detour, centered on the singer’s purchase of a Sony TV, the song finally begins with the familiar “the boy stood in the hallway” line. Although nowhere near as honed as the
Horses
lyric, the story of Johnny, his violent nemesis, and the knife/sexual assault against the locker (“he drove it deep in Johnny”) are already in place, as is the invocation, leading to “Land of a Thousand Dances,” of the “rhythm of horses.”

Reflecting on the song, from the
post-Horses
perspective of December 1975, Smith claimed that “twenty versions got lost when I lost a notebook I had been writing in for three years.” She notes that the song

got real sadistic … and got mixed up with a dream I had when I was about 16 about a hallway plastered with six-foot posters of nuns and me running along burning holes in their groins with a cigarette. Then it was Arabia, Mexico, U.F.O.’s, razors, jackknives, horses and in some notes I wrote last Dec 16.—the 701st birthday of the great Persian mystic poet Jalaluddin Rumi—Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix. (Hiss and McClelland, 1975)

Many of these elements feature in the lyrics to “Land,” but it is the deaths of Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison that provide the song with its dominant note. Of interest here is the
opening paragraph of “Jukebox Cruci-fix.” Beneath a photograph of Hendrix’s gravestone Smith writes:

I was at this party but nothing was happening at all. a lot of chicks were leaning over a pale neon Wurlitzer jukebox. the way dead voice boxes rolled up it came on like a coffin, it was the kind of party to leave behind. 8 millimeter footage of Jimi Hendrix jacking his strat. Girls sobbing and measuring the spaces between his fingers. I went out in the hallway and stood there drinking a glass of tea. “riders on the storm” was rolling from a local transistor. the boy slipped on some soap and the radio fell in the bathtub. I gulped my tea too fast and some of it went up my nose it made me choke and stammer and my lungs started pumping like erratic water wings. (1975)

Thus the opening monologue: “The boy stood in the hallway drinking a glass of tea.” The shift in the song, from first-person pronoun to the substantive, and then again from female to male, is signalled in the prose piece by the writer’s decision to distinguish herself from “the chicks” mourning Hendrix. When, standing in the hallway, the writer chokes on her tea, s/he symbolically repeats the deaths of Hendrix and Morrison (asphyxiation through choking on his own vomit; drowning in a Parisian bathtub). These deaths are connected in turn to the watery demise of Brian Jones, an event which, as I have argued, functions as the primary sacrifice in Smith’s reimagining of pop culture as spilt religion.

Finally, these visions become conflated with the earlier dream of desecration: located once again in the liminal space of a hallway, the artist as young woman runs amok, destroying the icons of chastity and self-denial to allow for
the emergence of a liberated, sexualized form of identity. As she insists in “Jukebox Cruci-fix,” Hendrix and Morrison “didn’t slip their skins and split forever to let us hibernate in posthumous jukeboxes”; rather, they died to make way for “something new and totally ecstatic” (Smith, 1975). There is a sense here in which the death and transfiguration of the rock god is regarded as an essential, even desirable condition of cultural change. The writer’s attitude toward the deaths of her heroes is thus profoundly ambivalent: on the one hand, the hero is sacred; his death is to be lamented; on the other, the hero is sacred only because he has died. Given the sacrificial connotations of Brian Jones’s death, outlined earlier, Smith seems to believe that the death of the hero serves a higher purpose: to confirm the place of the sacred in a postreligious age and to serve as a locus for violent impulses that might otherwise be turned inward. In the context of the song, Johnny’s violent death results in a shamanistic transfiguration, signalled through the hypnotic chanting of “horses horses horses horses.” His sacrifice enables the ecstatic rebirth that is “Land of a Thousand Dances.”

The transitional section, “horses horses horses horses,” is in this respect especially significant. The meanings here are various:
horse
can be read as a euphemism for heroin (Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison were all users); Morrison’s “Horse Latitudes,” from the Doors album
Strange Days
(1967), includes the line “when the sea conspires an armor,” suggesting the couplet from “La Mer (de)”: “The waves were coming in / Like Arabian stallions gradually lapping into sea horses.” And in performance at CBGBs, the reference to Morrison is even more explicit: “Mr. Mojo rising! … Fillmore … 3000 or more screaming … ‘Horse Latitudes’ for Johnny in the desert.”
Eventually, in a 1976 interview for
Street Life
, Smith confessed that Johnny and Morrison were “intimately linked”:

Johnny got in trouble, I was in trouble on stage, Morrison had some trouble on stage.… He was very torn apart and frustrated, because he felt himself to be a blues guy and a poet, but he was promoted more as a sex star. That’s cool too, but he didn’t know how to shift from one to the other.… And when I was thinking of “Horse Latitudes” I remembered “Do you know how to pony?” it all made sense. (Gold, 1976)

Tom, like Smith, between the competing demands of rock and poetry, Morrison in performance took to presenting himself as a sacrificial deity, manipulating the Freudian association between sex and death. Like the drowning creatures in “Horse Latitudes,” the rock star struggles for breath, dragged down as he is elevated by the insatiable demands of his audience.

Asked if she ever feared falling into a similar trap, Smith stated, “That was Morrison’s tragedy, and Hendrix’s tragedy; they didn’t understand that you don’t have to separate yourself out. I refuse to go through that. They thought that to be one thing excluded the other. They didn’t understand that all these rhythms existed within them” (Gold, 1976). “Land,” then, may be read as an attempt to integrate these diverse strands, creating a seascape where Rimbaud and Morrison dance to the tune of a simple rock ’n’ roll song. Still, the descent into visionary depths is fraught with danger, and the links between narcosis and drowning, established by “Land,” are carried forward into the densely allusive sleeve notes for
Horses
, as, punning on the French for sea
(la mer)
and the
English for female horse (
mare
), as well as on the relations between “me,”
“merde”
(shit: an echo of
”Merde à Dieu”)
, and “murder,” Smith writes:

its me my shape burnt in the sky its me the memoire of me racing thru the eye of the mer thru the eye of the sea thru the arm of the needle merging and jacking new filaments new risks etched forever in a cold system of wax … horses groping for a breath …

charms. sweet angels—you have made me no longer afraid of death.

In Smith’s seascape, Morrison’s stallions rise from the watery depths to be resurrected as “sea horses,” potent symbols of sexual energy
(mare/la mer/l’amour)
, emblems of the newly risen gods.

As we shall see, with “Land” there is no land, no resting ground for the dialectical turns of life, death, and resurrection. Within the sea of possibilities, the singer-poet is constantly faced with the threat of annihilation. Such, as Rimbaud realized, is the price of vision:

To arrive at the unknown through the disordering of all the senses, that’s the point. The sufferings will be tremendous, but one must be strong, be born a poet: it is in no way my fault. It is wrong to say: I think. One should say: I am thought. Pardon the pun
[C’est faux de dire: Je pense: on devrait dire on me pense.—Pardon du jeu de mots]
. (Rimbaud, 1957)

A footnote to this passage from the famous “Lettre du voyant” (1871) explains the poet’s allusion: “When Voltaire came back from England, Louis XV is said to have asked him: ‘What did you learn over there?’ ‘To think, Sire’ (
penser
, to think), to which the King replied ‘Horses?’
(panser
, to groom
horses)” (Rimbaud, 1957).
Horses
, then, is about thinking; or rather, it is about allowing oneself to be thought, in the sense of a general, abstract principle, and of being thought, in the sense of an object of cognition. But above all, perhaps, it is about giving way to the violent impulses of the shadow self so that one may become a
voyant
. To do so, as Smith suggests, one must intensify the ego to the point where “me” drowns in the sea
(la mer)
of possibility.

Throughout 1974–75, “Land” had evolved from a more or less straightforward play on “Land of 1000 Dances” to a sprawling tone-poem, touching on the themes of sex, sacrifice, and identity that had preoccupied Smith since the late 60s. At CBGBs the previous spring, the lyrics had centered on the death and transfiguration of Jim Morrison. When, finally, the song came to be recorded at Electric Lady, the singer found herself thinking increasingly of the death of Jimi Hendrix. That the resulting impressionistic version of “Land” is not merely “about” Hendrix or Morrison is thanks, in no small part, to Smith’s creative handling of the studio mixing desk. As Tony Glover, present during the recording, observed:

Patti snuck into the booth that night, a haunted warp time of day. On the first take Patti did the singing part fine but when it came to do the poetry, Patti went blank and just drew out occasional words, or urged the boys on, saying “let it come down, come down,” or screaming “build it! build it! build it!” After the take they decided that the instrumental track was just what they wanted, so Patti would just overdub the vocal. She went back into the studio, and as the boys and I sprawled on the floor pillows and Cale hunched over the board, a superstrange flow came into the air.

“On that second take something weird happened,” Patti said later. “The Mexican boys and spaceships were gone—instead there was a black horse, and all those electrical wires and a sea—a “sea of possibilities”—I didn’t know what direction the song was taking, there was all this strange imagery I didn’t understand.” When the take ended it was as if the whole room was holding its breath—silence was thick and charged. Patti came into the booth drained, but agitated: “Whataya think?” she asked. Everyone thought it was great, but she wanted to do one more. “it ain’t quite—” she drifted out to the studio, took a deep breath and they rolled the tape one more time.