Patti Smith's Horses (16 page)

“On that last take it was obvious that I was being told what I wanted to know about Hendrix’s death. The song is like 8 or 9 minutes long, so its obvious I’m gonna lose control sometime—but I felt like it was
The Exorcist
, or somebody else talking through my voice. I said ‘How did I die … I–I–I tried to walk thru’ light’ … and it ended up with ‘in the sheets, there was a man’—it really frightened me. After I was done I felt like all three tracks had the total information of his last seconds, so I decided to mix ’em all together.” (Glover, 1976)

In the literary sphere, Smith’s heroes, Rimbaud, Eliot, Burroughs, had each attempted to create multivocal, layered forms of expression. Via symbolism, collage, and “cut-up,” all three had sought to challenge the hegemony of conventional linear narrative, allowing for the eruption of unconscious connections and for the creation of random, aleatory meanings. Smith herself, especially in her more recent poetry collections,
Witt
and
Kodak
, had attempted something similar. But it was the transformation from written to spoken word, and then again from stage to recording studio, that enabled
Smith, finally, to advance this process. No longer tied to the spatial limitations of the printed page, the singer used the mixing desk as a tool to create a multileveled sound collage. Specifically, as Glover explains,

Patti spent hours listening, picking out key phrases or words like “spoon” or “mad pituitary gland” or “eyes of a horse,” three volume controls at her fingertips, one for each vocal track. As the engineer [Bernie Kirsh] mixed the instrumental parts, Patti cross-faded and wove the narrative together. The aura was of controlled insanity as holes in one track intersected perfectly with phrases of another—Patti ran on pure nerve, and after 7 hours emerged with a chilling and affecting piece of true art. (1976)

Mixing in this way, the singer was able not only to move between tracks, adding or deleting words and phrases as she saw fit, but also to manipulate aspects of timbre, intonation, volume, and stress, and even, where necessary, disrupting the linear flow of time. Those aspects of “the grain of the voice” (Barthes, 1977) that writing can only gesture toward could thus be realized, fully, using the resources of the recording studio.

To read “Land,” then, we must attend closely to the mixing process, paying attention to the effects of crossfading, layering, and reverb. Like “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo),” “Horses,” the first section of “Land,” begins with unaccompanied speech: “the boy was in the hallway drinking a glass of tea.” The statement is prosaic, unremarkable. But beneath the primary spoken-word track, a second voice may be discerned. As a guitar strums in the key of F, the words on the second vocal track, treated with reverb to create a distanced, ghostly
effect, phase in and out of sequence with the primary track. The result is hypnotic, disorienting. In what follows, the lyrical concern with merging and mirroring is complemented by the phasing effect, which enables the two voices to mimic each other, allowing for the repetition of key words and phrases. Through repetition in lines 4 and 5, for instance, Smith emphasizes the sense in which the second boy merges “perfectly with the mirror.” In practice, however, the asynchrony of the vocal tracks creates a countereffect, disrupting the conceptual harmony signified by the text.

The sense of disjunction resembles, in many ways, the asymmetrical structure of the self, identified by Lacan in his classic account of the mirror stage (1977). According to Lacan, a child is able to recognize itself in a mirror from the age of about six months. This joyful moment, which symbolizes the child’s entry into self-consciousness, comes at a price, however, for the child realizes at the same time that the image of wholeness and perfection represented in the mirror differs from his experience of inhabiting an uncoordinated, immature body. Henceforth, the assertion of an autonomous, integrated ego, what Lacan calls the Ideal–I, is undermined by feelings of alienation and anxiety. In extreme cases, as these feelings progress into adulthood, the inability to merge the Ideal-I and the primordial fragmented self results in outbursts of psychotic violence. Thus in “Horses,” the boy and Johnny may be regarded as two aspects of the same personality, with the boy taking on the role of the wrathful and, indeed, murderous alter ego. The object that he subsequently drives into Johnny is indeterminate: but whether as switchblade, spike, or phallus, the act itself collapses the boundary between
eras
(life) and
thanatos
(death). To emphasize “The boy disappeared,”
Smith cuts off the second vocal track. Abandoned by his fatal other, Johnny falls into hysteria, “crashing his head against the locker.” At this point, the primary vocal becomes more assertive, an effect enhanced by the addition of reverb (“suddenly”) and by the gathering intensity of the rhythm guitar, bass drum, and hi-hat cymbal. When Johnny finally surrenders his ego, bass, rhythm guitar, and drums mimic the accelerated pulse beat to oblivion by means of the accented vocal stresses of
“horses horses horses horses.”

The passage from “Horses” to “Land of a Thousand Dances” is effected by the dramatic entry of the full band, bass, guitars, and piano, riding over a soundly struck 4/4 standard rock beat. Smith’s interpretation of the Chris Kenner original makes great play of the dance/sex equation, with an additional emphasis on the physical and mental delights of losing and taking “control.” Following the imploration to “do the Watusi,” the music drops down to announce a recitative, poetic section: “Life is filled with holes Johnny’s lying there in his sperm coffin.” The singer goes on to mimic a streetwise, Chandleresque angel, goading Johnny to return to life. In his resurrected form, Johnny signals his possession of the alter ego’s phallus with a proud display of “pen knives jack knives and / Switchblades.” With the vocal accents and drum fills falling on “Johnny gets
up
takes off his leather
jacket … pen
knives and
jack
knives,” the hero undergoes a final metamorphosis, emerging as a Rimbaudesque
voyant
via the ingestion of “snow,” or cocaine. Now, fully identified as Johnny Rimbaud (“Go Rimbaud go Rimbaud go Rimbaud”), the knife-wielder is abandoned to the frenzied jerks of the Watusi, but no sooner is this rhythm established than the mood drops, once again, to the lulling, voluptuousness of the
line “There’s a little place called space.” This mood, in turn, is displaced swiftly by the slurred repetition of “I like it like that,” with Richard Sohl’s dissonant blues chords highlighting the climactic stress of “twistelettes twistelettes twistelettes.”

In the remaining section, “La Mer (de),” the relationship between identity and the possession of the phallus is explored further. With a nod toward the focus on criminality that defined her St. Mark’s performance, the title plays on the relation between
la mer (de)
and its English homophone, murder. The track begins with the instruction from the first take of the song, “Let it calm down let it calm down.” Thereafter, using the mixing desk to move between vocal tracks, the singer sets up a dialogue between the three vocal tracks, using the alternation between reverb and non-reverb, song and speech, to create dramatic tension. Flowing, in turn, through this “sea of possibilities,” are a range of sexual personae: at one point the lyrical “I” describes him/herself as “standing there with my legs spread like a sailor.” In the midst of his/her seduction of Johnny, a sex scene overlaid with intimations of violent death, the speaker takes possession of the hero’s penis. With the object “hardening in my hand,” he/she now merges with the
voyant
figure, an identification conveyed through the return of “go Rimbaud go Rimbaud go Rimbaud” chant from the previous section. In addition, we hear from track 1 Smith’s notation to the band “build it build it.” Here, thematic and performative engorgement is combined, propelling the song toward an expected climax. At the thematic level, however, this is countered by the intrusion of a voice announcing “I that’s how I that’s how I died.” As the mix sets up a tension between the energetic imperatives of the “Land of a Thousand Dances” and “La Mer (de),” the metacommentary of track 1
(“build it build it”), and the fragmented, spoken-word account of the hero’s death (tracks 2 and 3), the switchblade returns as a signifier of dissolution. This shift, combined with the reference to the Tower of Babel, another St. Mark’s echo later identified by Smith in her poem “grant” as a hubristic “symbol of penetration” (1994), serves to undercut the drive toward phallic fulfillment. “Build it” as you wish, but in the end the body of man will be scattered.

As tracks 1 and 2 recede, the song as a whole begins to diminish. A formless, scratchy guitar, droning bass note, and basic drum pattern underpin a horrifying spoken-word account of Johnny’s/Rimbaud’s/Morrison’s/Hendrix’s final moments. As the song disintegrates, the lyrics recall, briefly, the point at which
Horses
began, with “Gloria,” “Humping on the parking meter / Leaning on the parking meter,” ending, finally, with the image: “In the sheets there was a man / Everything around him unravelling like some long Fender whine / Dancing to the rhythm of a simple rock and roll song.”

“Land,” to conclude, is an exploration of the liberating possibilities of low-rent rock ’n’ roll and of high art poetry. Like Rimbaud, Smith attempts a transgression of the linguistic and social spheres, first in the sphere of writing, next in the sphere of performance, and, finally, in the virtual realm of the recording studio. By using the mixing desk to alter time, to multiply voices, and to manipulate sounds, Smith created a visionary artifact, true to the spirit of her symbolist precursor.

Recorded on the sixth anniversary of Jimi Hendrix’s death, on Saturday, September 18, “Elegie,” the last track on
Horses
,
is, from a musicological point of view, the first true tune on the album. Circling around Am and B♭, Smith draws on her love of opera, inflecting the lyrics with a rich, harmonic diversity not encountered elsewhere on the album. The song belongs, however, as much to Richard Sohl and to Allen Lanier as it does to Smith. While the former contributes a beautiful, classically inspired piano arrangement, the latter performs a sonorous, elegiac guitar solo, reputedly devised and recorded in a single take. As a farewell offering to the record, as well as to Hendrix, Morrison, Rimbaud
et al
., the tone of the song could not be more appropriate. Adopting a different voice for each line, Smith conveys a strong sense of the emotional complexity of loss, moving from blank desertion (“I just don’t know what to do tonight”), through detached observation (“Memory falls like cream in my bones”), to the sheer voluptuousness of grief (“Moving on my own”); “Elegie” is brought to a focus on the assertion of “will.” Smith’s caustic intonation of the word is the cue for Lanier’s remarkable solo, accompanied by a wordless, expressive melody, conveying all the feeling that language leaves unsaid. When the singer returns to conventional lyrical expression, the flat, acidic tone is resumed, undercutting the potential for sentiment encoded in the final couplet (“I think it’s sad, it’s much too bad / That our friends can’t be with us today”). Only here, again, the sense of toughness is displaced by the convulsive, extended sob on the song’s final syllable.

In the end, “Elegie” suggests the futility of our attempts to come to terms with loss. Here, so-called closure is as perilous and fragile as the experience, death, that it seeks to comprehend and contain. Like its precursors in the elegiac poetic tradition, such as Milton’s “Lycidas” (1638) and Shelley’s
“Adonais” (1821), Smith’s “Elegie” is thus openended and radically decentered; it speaks disturbingly of the richness of death, of how loss can be transformed into profit; of how a singer can feed on the legacy of the dead (Morrison, Hendrix, Rimbaud), and of how declarations of self-reliance and autonomy (“Moving on my own … I have the will”) are haunted and undermined by attendant feelings of guilt and sorrow.
Horses
could not have a finer conclusion.

On Friday, September 18, the day that “Elegie” was recorded, Arista hosted a three-day record company convention at City Center Music Hall. The convention, which Arista had opened to the public, began with a “product presentation” by Clive Davis and culminated with live performances by an eclectic range of artists, including Martha Reeves, Gil Scott-Heron, Loudon Wainwright III, Barry Manilow, and Patti Smith. Introduced by Davis himself (“Welcome uptown … from CBGBs … Patti Smith!”), Smith and her band performed five numbers from their forthcoming album: “Birdland,” “Redondo Beach,” “Break It Up,” “Land,” and, for an encore, “Free Money.” Lisa Robinson, who reviewed the event, described the singer’s performance as “stupendous, a truly exciting moment … everyone connected with Arista records was ecstatic” (Robinson, 1975).

Six weeks later, on November 8,
Horses
(Arista AL 4060) entered the Billboard charts, where it remained for seventeen weeks, peaking at #47. Although generating nothing like the
commercial “ecstasy” attendant upon Barry Manilow’s #5 placing for
Tryin’ to Get the Feeling, Horses
made respectable sales for a debut album, and Davis’s label certainly benefited from its enthusiastic critical reception in the music press. But while Smith added much needed cultural kudos to Arista’s image, she too, undoubtedly benefited from the record company’s power and prestige. Unlike the literary networks where Smith’s name was initially forged, Arista allowed access to important channels of communication, providing much-needed publicity in key publications such as the
New York Times, Time, People
, and
Newsweek
, not to mention radio and television.

Any lingering suspicions of Smith having sold out to the corporate world were rapidly allayed by the enthusiastic declarations of the alternative rock press. As subsequent instances would prove, from the Clash to Nirvana, it was possible to work for the man while retaining artistic credibility. At the core of the rock press’s reception of
Horses
was the very strategy that Smith had deployed way back in 1971: the location of the artist within a cultural context. At the St. Mark’s show, for instance, Smith dazzled her audience with a catalog of names, drawn from the realms of high and low art. But by placing herself alongside Brecht and Johnny Ace, Genet and Gene Krupa, she did more than challenge artistic boundaries: she also created a context for the “correct” reception of her work. When, in late 1975, journalists embarked on the task of explaining and evaluating the record, not surprisingly they too cited an eclectic range of artistic precedents. It was Lester Bangs’s review for
Creem
magazine that set the dominant tone: