Patti Smith's Horses (2 page)

In this book I have tried to convey something of this emotional freedom: I associate
Horses
with intense feelings
of pleasure and excitement, even, at times, with states of rapture; it would be disingenuous of me to deny this. But
Horses
also lends itself to intense and rigorous thought. It is, after all, a record born out of a strange collision of high and low art: for the purposes of shorthand, the poetics of French symbolism and the raucous rhythms of early rock ’n’ roll. For Smith, there is no significant distinction between Hendrix and Rimbaud, Blake and Little Richard, T. S. Eliot and Jim Morrison. The sense of audacity, of challenging the listener’s expectations of what a rock ’n’ roll record should do, is sustained in
Horses’
conceptual range: from the struggle between liberty and authority (“Gloria (in Excelsis Deo)”) to the unsettling effects of desire (“Redondo Beach,” “Kimberly”), and then again from the evocation of dreams and altered states of mind (“Birdland,” “Free Money,” “Land”) to the unexpected beauty of melancholy and loss (“Break It Up,” “Elegie”). Underlying all of this is a concern with the relations between the spoken and written word, the poem and the song; in a final dialectical twist,
Horses
is about what happens when we listen as well as read.

In writing this book I have received advice and assistance from numerous friends, relatives, and colleagues. Space does not permit me to thank them all, but Adrian Berry, Tom Bristow, Tim Burke, Michael Davies, MC Drak, Mark Rawlinson, Peter Ross, and Ian Shaw have all had a part to play. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Andrew Wilson for providing me with vital information, and a wealth of CDs and other materials. Andrew kindly read an early version of this book and I have benefited immensely from his keen critical and editorial scrutiny. I am grateful to Robert Adlington of
the Department of Music at the Unviersity of Nottingham for lending me an expert ear and I am thankful to David Barker at Continuum for advice and encouragement from the outset. Finally, it is my pleasure to record my gratitude to my wife Sarah Knight; a close reader, she has provided love and instruction at every stage of the way.

* * *

The lines from “babelogue,” “oath,” “death by water,” “neo boy,” and “witt,” from Early Work: 1970–1979 by Patti Smith. Copyright © 1994 by Patti Smith. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Every reasonable effort has been made to contact copyright holders to the works cited herein. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to correct this in any future editions.

This reading is dedicated to crime

Wednesday February 10, 1971: a full moon over New York City. St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery is at the hub of the thriving downtown poetry scene, providing a forum for hundreds of poets, writers, and performers. Over the years it plays host to Allen Ginsberg, John Cage, Sam Shepard, Yoko Ono, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and John Giorno. Tonight, the star attraction is Gerard Malanga, legendary whip dancer with the Velvet Underground, a Warhol protégé, and an accomplished filmmaker, poet, and photographer. Patti Smith, an up-and-coming talent from south New Jersey, provides support. Smith has read her poems in public before, but St. Mark’s is the real deal. It’s the place you come when you want to get noticed. And tonight, Smith has something special planned: a performance of four songs, accompanied by her friend Lenny Kaye on electric guitar. Like Malanga and Lou Reed, who also happens to be
in the audience, Smith has long grown tired of the high/low culture debate, and the idea of performing poetry to musical accompaniment is nothing new: it began with the Beats in the 1950s and was carried over, via Ginsberg and Dylan, to the counterculture in the mid-1960s. But two things tonight are different. To begin with, Smith intends to sing as well as to read, and the backing is not free-jazz sax, or languid bongos, but an overdriven, crudely thrashed guitar. True enough, the Velvets had attempted something similar with “The Gift” on their
White Light/White Heat
album (1967), and Jim Morrison, together with the Doors, was well known for his shamanistic excursions into the realms of lyric excess, but Smith’s take on this is new. Whereas Reed, Morrison, and Dylan approached poetry through rock ’n’ roll, she comes to rock ’n’ roll via poetry. Although Smith knows and loves the songs of Dylan, the Doors, and the Stones, as well as the lesser-known garage groups of the times, she hears rock ’n’ roll as a continuation of the artistic avant-garde. Thus, for her, Jagger and Richards blend with Rimbaud and Verlaine, Hendrix with Artaud, and Little Richard with Blake and Baudelaire. This evening’s show, which the duo have spent a couple of months preparing, is characterized by a related density of allusion, a promiscuous intertwining of high art and popular song that would, in lesser hands, seem affected and pretentious. All four songs, which Smith will intersperse with more conventional readings, are related to the aesthetics of crime, and the references to outlaw artists come thick and fast, from the thief and novelist Jean Genet to the vagabond poet François Villon. Patti Smith gets away with it because as a performer she is charismatic, smart, and utterly beguiling.

Prior to the performance, Smith, together with her close
friend photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, has been working hard to drum up support. Her efforts have paid off as, looking across the aisles, she sees, in addition to the standard St. Mark’s crowd, a host of familiar faces from the realms of art, fashion, and popular music. There is Bobby Neuwirth, a Dylan associate and Smith’s first contact with the rock scene, accompanied by the blues guitarists Johnny and Edgar Winter and their influential manager, Steve Paul. Allen Ginsberg has arrived, along with his fellow Beat survivor John Giorno. Also from the literary world and sitting in the front row is the owner of the Gotham Book Mart, Andreas Brown. In his preppy tweeds and thick-rimmed glasses, Brown cuts an incongruous figure, but he is a staunch supporter of Smith’s work and has strong links with the uptown writing world. The poet Jim Carroll has appeared with some glamour models, and the rock journalist Lisa Robinson, who will eulogize Patti Smith in a few years time, has also come. Another key figure from the music world is Danny Fields, former employee of Elektra records and sometime manager of the MC5 and the Stooges. Gerard Malanga’s Warhol supporters, fashion photographer Frederico Scavullo, a scattering of Smith’s friends from the Chelsea Hotel—including her current lover, the playwright Sam Shepard—and some of Mapplethorpe’s wealthy patrons help to make up the audience.

Thanks to a tape recording by the Warhol superstar Brigid Polk, recently released on CD, it is possible to reconstruct and assess Smith’s debut performance. At eight o’clock, following a brief introduction by the poet Anne Waldman, Patti Smith takes to the stage. According to Victor Bockris, Smith’s first publisher and subsequent biographer, the poet’s appearance causes the audience to gasp with astonishment (Bockris, 1998).
At odds with the then conventionally immaculate image of female glamour, Smith is tall, dishevelled, and skinny, her look a mishmash of thrift store threads and garage punk chic. A sexually ambivalent figure, she seems nervous and frail, somewhat bewildered, and, at this point, beset by fits of giggles. But once her fumbling introduction is over, Smith snaps quickly into character. Tonight is the deceased German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s birthday, and to commemorate the occasion, the set begins with the Brecht and Weill standard “Mack the Knife,” from the recently revived
The Threepenny Opera,
which was first performed in 1933. Smith has come to Brecht via Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan, through the former’s performance of the “Alabama Song” on the Doors’ first album (1967), and the latter’s inclusion of a record by Lotte Lenya, the chanteuse and star of
The Threepenny Opera,
on the cover of Dylan’s
Bringing It All Back Home
(1965). In recent years Smith has grown to love Lotte Lenya and her mastery of the
Sprechstimme,
or “speech-song” tradition. It is a style suited to the untrained voice and, most recently, has been adopted by Smith’s fellow performance poets, Allen Ginsberg and Leonard Cohen. The
Sprechstimme
will stand her in good stead when she makes the transition from poet to cabaret artist to rock ’n’ roll singer, enabling her to alternate a range of personae: men and women, predators and victims, enchanters and ingénues. Later, as we shall see, it is a technique that will enable the singer to interrogate conventional ideas of gender and sexuality, but this evening’s performance of “Mack the Knife” is also, for Smith, a political gesture, for it is Brecht’s demolition of the low/high culture divide, together with his faith in the revolutionary power of the word, that informs her decision to blur the boundaries between speech, song, and poetry.

At the close of the song, Smith announces: “this reading is dedicated to
crime
[my emphasis; the final syllable is delivered in an extended drawl] … to the great pit of Babel … everybody talks about the great tower that they rose up to the face of God but nobody talks about the pit that they dug at the same time so that men could stick their tongues in the mouth of hell.” The litany of criminal saints embraces “the petty thief the whores of Mexico … Anne Powell the only woman Genet could love … Johnny Ace … Jackson Pollock … James Dean … Mayakovski … Gene Krupa … Mary Magdalene … Christ himself … and Sam Shepard.” Delivered in a characteristic New Jersey burr, the reading of the poems that follows is confident and assured, focussing on themes of sex, betrayal, and sacrilege. Using a range of rhythmic techniques, Smith displays an impressive command of language, juxtaposing self-consciously artistic formulations with street talk, slang phrases, and judicious expletives. But while the poems go down well with the audience, it is the songs that prompt the greatest applause. “A Fire of Unknown Origin,” the text of which will appear in Smith’s first volume of poetry,
Seventh Heaven,
in just over a year’s time, centers, like “Mack the Knife,” on an androgynous figure of death, “sweeping up the hallway like a lady’s dress … death comes riding from the highway in his Sunday best.” The song will eventually appear as the B-side to Smith’s 1979 singles “So You Want to Be a Rock ’n’ Roll Star” and “Frederick.”

The riding theme is sustained in the following number, “Picture Hanging Blues,” about the outlaw Jesse James. Here again, Smith celebrates James as a rabble-rousing artist figure, working with death as a mode of mental and social liberation. The song cycle closes with “Ballad of a Bad Boy.” Dedicated
to Sam Shepard, the verses tell the tale of a stock car racing hoodlum, bound up in a fatal relationship with a death-dealing “mom.” Relishing the song’s wickedness— “Oh I was bad, didn’t do what I should, mama catch with a lickin’, and tell me to be good”—Smith imbues the lines with lascivious intensity as Kaye thrashes an increasingly frenetic Link Wray—style rhythm. The sheer sexiness of transgression, of good and evil, queer and straight, male and female, is topped only by Smith’s flouting of Christian salvation in her introduction (“Christ the great escape artist, greater than Houdini and the finest faggot in history having twelve men to lick his feet”) and in her poem “Oath,” which opens thus: “Christ died for somebody’s sins but not mine / melting in a pot of thieves / wild card up my sleeve / thick heart of stone / my sins my own.” In four years’ time, these words will initiate the album
Horses.
Tonight, in St. Mark’s church, they resound as a declaration of artistic intent.

MacHeath, Jesse James, Jean Genet, and the murdered young punk: a selection of
hommes fatals.
It’s been quite an evening and the crowd respond well to this new entrant on the scene: Patti Smith, with her Keith Richards bangs, her Johnny Carson wisecracks, and her shotgun delivery, an outlaw poet with a rock ’n’ roll heart.

Horses
, released by Arista records in November 1975, is the greatest rock album of all time: end of story. For a literary critic, well practiced in the art of scholarly detachment, this is a strangely liberating yet dangerous claim. I would not dare, for instance, in a formal setting, to say the same of the productions of my favorite nineteenth-century poets.
In my field it just wouldn’t be done. Rock ’n’ roll seems different, more visceral, more in tune with the promptings of the heart than the deliberations of the head. But I’m not sure now that I should allow myself this license with Patti Smith. Why, after all, should a record not be treated with the same care and attention, and intellectual rigour, that would be applied to an epic poem or a collection of sonnets? And by now, of course, rock writing has reached a high level of academic respectability, signalled by the appearance in 1988 of Simon Frith’s
Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop
and in 1990 by Richard Middleton’s
Studying Popular Music.
Subsequent research by Walter Everett, Tricia Rose, Martha Bayles, Adam Krims, Susan McClary, Allan Moore, and Dai Griffiths, to name but a few, has gone on to consolidate this position. But although the analytical study of popular music, which spans the disciplines of musicology, sociology, and literary and cultural studies, is no longer the lightweight subject that it once seemed, a literary critic must nevertheless endeavor to justify his interest to those in the know.

The problem with taking rock music seriously, of course, is that rock music does not appear to
want
to be taken seriously. Patti Smith herself has spoken of her bafflement at being presented with a copy of a PhD thesis relating her work to Rimbaud: “It’s just great that people keep on pursuing things. I mean, I’d rather see someone write a worthless, 900-page dissertation on CBGBs than see them take their own life. Then again … I might want to shoot him after he wrote it” (Bracewell, 1996). Duly noted. But still I return to my opening query: why should rock music resist analytical study? The oft-cited Elvis Costello line (the attribution is disputed), “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” underscores
the sense in which the sensual, corporeal aspects of rock ’n’ roll seem diametrically opposed to the cerebral, abstracted realm of critical scrutiny. And there is truth to this, to be sure. But what interests me about Costello’s claim is the way it constructs music as an entirely unmediated experience, impacting on the listener directly, without any recourse to pre-existing cultural codes, with “codes” defined here as the underlying rules or conventions of a signifying system, be this a literary, fashion, or indeed musical or architectural system. People who hate this sort of approach, which may be identified in general terms as structuralist or, more latterly, poststructuralist, would rather maintain that music is not determined by pre-existing codes, it just
is.
To them, the analytical study of music is experienced as an assault on the primary experience of music: its ability to instill states of anger, freedom, and euphoria in the listener. By rendering the emotional charge of music an object of formal analysis, so the argument runs, we murder to dissect. And again, there is some truth to this, as anyone who has read through some of the more arid productions of musicology will no doubt attest. Furthermore, it wasn’t an academic treatise on the modal scale in contemporary jazz that turned Patti Smith on to music, but the hair-raising cry of Little Richard’s “Wopbob-aloobop-alopbamboom!” And for what it’s worth, I get the same feeling whenever I hear Smith chanting “Horses, horses, horses!” on the track “Land.”