Patti Smith's Horses Read online

  Horses

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  Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier

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  Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson

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  20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel

  Horses

  Philip Shaw

  2008

  The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc

  80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038

  The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd

  The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

  www.continuumbooks.com

  33third.blogspot.com

  Copyright © 2008 by Philip Shaw

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers or their agents.

  Cover art reprinted courtesy SonyBMG Music Entertainment

  Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer waste recycled paper

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shaw, Philip.

  Horses / Philip Shaw.

  p. cm. -- (33 1/3)

  Includes bibliographical references (p.).

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-6156-7

  1. Smith, Patti. Horses. 2. Smith, Patti.--Criticism and interpretation. 3. Rock music--1971–1980--

  History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series.

  ML420.S672S53 2008

  782.42166092--dc22

  2007039204

  Contents

  Preface and Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1: Introduction

  Chapter 2: South New Jersey, 1946-1967

  Chapter 3: New York, 1967–1972

  Chapter 4: Rock ’n’ Rimbaud, 1973–1975

  Chapter 5: Horses, 1975

  Chapter 6: Conclusion

  Works Cited

  For Sarah

  Preface and Acknowledgments

  I was an edgy, nervous teenager in the summer of 1979. Something was afoot. My brother had turned me on to John Peel and I remember late nights with the radio, the volume turned down low so as not to disturb my sleeping parents, straining to catch the latest sounds from Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, and Liverpool. In my hometown nothing seemed to happen. This was the year of the great indie explosion, of Rough Trade, Step Forward, Fast, and Factory, of Joy Division, PiL, Gang of Four, and “the mighty” Fall, none of whom came from or to Nottingham. And even if they did, how would I, a mere fourteen-year-old, and a young-looking one at that, get to see them?

  So for me, stuck in my lonely room, 1979 became a year of intense research. Every week I scanned the music papers, the accumulated ink on my fingers was an objective correlative of the information my head was absorbing. There were two figures that fascinated me: one male and one female. The first, Ian Curtis of Joy Division, seemed to be made of words. In early articles by Mick Middles, Paul Morley, and Paul Rambali, Curtis was portrayed as a wistful, enigmatic loner. Obviously, I recognized my kin. In an effort to make sense of this enigma, the journalists piled on the literary allusions: to Kafka, Ballard, and Dostoyevsky, as a consequence of which I began to get an education. The secondhand overcoat, the carrier bags laden with paperbacks, the earnest expression—these were all to follow.

  By contrast, the other figure, Patti Smith, was present only in image. By 1979 I was, of course, too late for Horses. Over three years had passed since the album’s release, but I remember seeing the sleeve in the racks in Selectadisc: that portrait in monochrome, the insouciant expression, cool and challenging; and for more than a year I lingered before it, weighing up the notes and change in my pocket before plumping, after all, for the latest new release: a long-forgotten album by Pink Industry or the Passage. Perhaps it was an early Jane Sucks article on Patti Smith bootlegs, or perhaps it was the cover version of “Free Money” by Penetration, but at some poi
nt I must have made the decision to stump up the readies and commit to taking this record home with me. In any case, what happened next is very clear. I was at my friend Sam’s house and I recall a moment of sacerdotal anticipation as the needle was placed in the groove and the record began to turn. I remember stealing a second glance at the front cover, then flipping it over to focus on the photo of the young man toying with a switch blade. These images, combined with the stream-of-consciousness prose, gave me a sense of danger, intrigue, and excitement. Yet none of this could have prepared me for the shock I experienced on first hearing the opening lines of “Gloria (in Excelsis Deo)”: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” I was a member of a Church of England school, recently confirmed and with a serious guilt complex to boot. The words seeped like acid into my brain and I was gripped by an impulse to take the record off the stereo and smash it to pieces. But stronger than this impulse was the desire to keep on listening. Here was another kind of education, straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were, and for what remained of that year my world consisted, or so it seemed, of this album and no other.

  In those early days I experienced Horses viscerally. Before I understood what was going on, I was touched by the majestic rasp of Smith’s voice, buffeted by the raw urgency of Jay Dee Daugherty’s drumming, moved by Richard Sohl’s expressive piano playing, and transported by the thrashing, keening guitars of Kaye, Kral, Lanier, and Verlaine. But by degrees, my acquaintance with the album and my growing knowledge of Smith and her works led to other forms of appreciation. Specifically, I was led to new forms of writing: to poems by Rimbaud, Eliot, and Blake, but also to the experimental prose rhythms of Lawrence, Joyce, and Woolf. There was, in all of this, vitality—a religious impulse, even, that I didn’t seem to get from my previous reading. True enough, I was still absorbed in the gothic gloom of Kafka et. al, but from Patti Smith I learned that the loss of control, a key word for Ian Curtis, need not lead to a suicidal walk “upon the edge of no escape” (“She’s Lost Control Again”). As “Land” taught me, the loss of control could lead, equally, to the sea of possibilities. There were other emotions, no less authentic than anger and despair.

  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.

  Chapter 1

  Introduction

  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 th
e 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.