Patti Smith's Horses Read online

  The resulting print is a masterpiece, an artful teasing of the conventional codes of gender and sexuality that leaves the viewer uncertain of the object of his or her regard. Simplistic forms of categorization fail to capture the underlying ambivalence of the image: are we gazing at a feminized man or a masculine woman? Through her performance of masculinity, reducing male iconography to a set of replicable metonymy—the shirt, the jacket, the tie, the hint of insouciance—Smith suggests slyly yet powerfully that gendered identity is inessential, that the phallus, for example, is no more privileged than any other signifier. Certainly, the notion that a woman could take possession of the phallus was enough to perturb the boss of the record company. Clive Davis wanted to ditch the image outright; but Smith retained artistic control, even to the point of defying Davis’s request to the art department to airbrush the suggestion of a moustache on her upper lip.

  The cover, then, was the first victory in Smith’s war on conventionality. When Horses appeared in the stores in time for Christmas, its monochromatic starkness contrasted with the florid, soft-focus imagery used in the marketing of most other American female singer-songwriters. The effect was compounded by the reverse of the sleeve, where Smith’s band appear unsmiling and remote, a hint of danger conveyed by the flick-knife with which the drummer Jay Dee Daugherty casually toys.

  Gloria (In Excelsis Deo)

  That Patti Smith was operating in a different realm entirely to that occupied by her sisters in the genre was made obvious when one removed the vinyl from its plain paper sleeve. Placing the record on the turntable, putting the needle into the groove, none of the ritualistic operations of the act of listening to a record could prepare the listener for the visceral and intellectual disturbance of “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo).” A live highlight from the CBGBs sets, the song’s opening lines, adapted from the poem “Oath,” have lost none of their power to shock. I remember hearing them for the first time as a fourteen-year-old, having only recently been confirmed as a member of the Church of England. Then, as now, I felt a sense of risk-taking, a blasphemous and all-too-human leap into the unknown. On the record, as the words uncoil, the sense of solitary defiance is underpinned by a slow acidic chord progression, culminating with the down-stroked rhythmic assertion of “my sins my own they belong to me. Me.” But what law is being defied here? And why is this linked to the assertion of human sexual desire?

  To answer these questions we must look closely at the song’s origins. “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo)” is based, of course, on Van Morrison’s “Gloria” (1964), a three-chord speak song that relies on rhythmic dynamics to convey the excitement of sexual attraction. Delivered from the perspective of a cocksure male protagonist, the significance of the original version turns on the implicit equation of sexual and religious ecstasy, “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo)” (“Glory to God in the Highest”) being the title of the Greater Doxology used in the Catholic Mass. By making the religious context explicit, Smith raises challenging questions about the relations between desire and authority, such as whether initially rejecting the male savior figure has anything to do with the subversion of gendered identity that follows. Although manifestly sung by a female voice, the persona of Smith’s “Gloria” is not necessarily female. This ambiguity has led some listeners to assume that the song is a lesbian fantasy. But this assumption ignores the sense in which the song deliberately subverts categorizations: is the female singer adopting a male persona? If not, is she singing of her desire for another woman? The point here is that “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo)” seeks to deliver itself, and its listeners, from such closed questions; it is, quite simply, a song about desire, or rather, to be more precise, about how desire can lead to the adoption of unexpected, and often unsettling, identities and attitudes.

  In an important discussion of “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo),” the musicologist Mike Daley notes how Smith violates the “structural cohesion” of Van Morrison’s text; “her new text manipulates the signifiers of Morrison’s language for her own desires, to enact a fantasy of omniscient control” (1998). For example, early on in the song, the protagonist is shown looking “out the window” at a “sweet young thing / Humpin’ on the parking meter leaning on the parking meter.” The scene recalls the voyeuristic tone of the original: “[She] comes walkin’ down my street / watch her come to my house,” but in a way that flouts the conventions of heterosexual desire. Again, who is singing here, and to whom? Smith’s querying of gender and sexuality in “Gloria” is not restricted to textual intervention, however. Musically, the song revolves around F# held over into E. The unorthodox tonal harmony, created by the relation between the natural and the flattened second, has a souring effect, resulting in the sonic equivalent of irony. This strategy is extended, in turn, to Smith’s manipulation of pitch and timbre. As Daley argues, Smith’s vocal technique, “flouts the conventions of rock singing, exposing the cracks in Morrison’s macho stance with [an] exaggeratedly leering, ‘male’ vocal performance. She appropriates both masculinity and femininity for playful deconstruction.” Aspects of Smith’s vocal style in the first seventeen bars of the song, such as her low register, her adherence to the tonic note (Eb), and her preference for closed vowels, “reinforce,” according to Daley, “connotations of rebellion and male self-control encoded in the lyrics” (1998). Her models here are, chiefly, Jagger and Dylan, but one may also detect something of the female Sprechtstimme tradition, in which the performance of the masculine voice is calculated and arch.

  After a change to shuffle rhythm, Smith alternates her mimicry of macho bravado with a breathier, more sibilant style, confusing, once again, the boundaries between gender roles. As the song progresses, the use of shrieks, sobs, sliding pitches, wide glissandos, and other vocal effects complicates the significance of the text further. In the space of a single line, for example, “I I walk in a room you know I look so proud,” the voice moves from an impassioned sobbing effect, (“I I walk”), to breathiness (“in a room”), to hard and nasal (“you know I look”), to clipped and cocksure (“so proud”). Further along, the sense of solitary defiance is emphasized by the casually slurred “I go to this here par-ty,” and the closed, croaked effect of “bored.” In the lines that follow, and as the tempo accelerates, Smith deploys her most characteristic vocal device, an “upward octave portamento” (Daley, 1998). Used at the ends of certain phrases (for example, “oh she looks so fine”), the device seems to transform otherwise straightforward sexual assertions into “coy rhetorical questions.” The effect, as Daley notes, is certainly playful, but it also “functions as a critique and a grab for power.” Thus, in the song’s midsection, the voice mimics the brute physicality of phallic penetration via the staccato stress on “unh! unh! make her mine.” Following on from this, “Gloria” begins to resemble something like a conventional cover version, with Smith drawing more closely on Morrison’s original text. But as the tempo increases, moving from 100 beats per minute to 150 beats per minute, the sense of febrile abandon contrasts with Morrison’s more controlled approach. In Smith’s version, the breathy, semicoherent delivery of the lyrics emphasizes the vertiginous effects of sexual desire; the sense in which language, à la Rimbaud, cracks in response to the demands of the body.

  When, finally, the sexual encounter climaxes in the closing section (“and the name is and the name is GLORIIIIIIIIA”), the release of tension is ecstatic, orgasmic even. There is, indeed, an element of jouissance, a dangerous excessive pleasure, in the octave leap that accompanies the enunciation of the climactic “A.” But in a song that launches multiple excursions into the realm of orgasm, this is only one of many peaks. And lest we be tempted into assuming that the eruptive, noisy, paralinguistic dimensions of Smith’s performance signifies a realm of feminine pleasure beyond the law of the phallus, we should note that “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo)” places much emphasis on the lability of male and female subject positions. The phallus, in other words, by virtue of its status as a signifier, is subject to co-optation by th
e feminine. Thus, in the lines that follow, Smith changes the focus to the scene of a rock show at the New Jersey Roosevelt Stadium, where the singer hears the sound of “twenty thousand girls call[ing] their name out to me.” Here, however, the indeterminacy of the singer’s gendered identity and sexual orientation is relieved by the sight of “the big tower clock” with its bells chiming “ding dong ding dong ding dong.” We have returned, in other words, to the scene of phallic authority with which the song began. The Holy Father may be challenged, the song suggests, but ultimately the fact that Gloria’s name is constituted only in the interplay between Smith, the female singer, and her male band members (“G-L-O-R-I-A [Gloria]”) implies that she must remain an object of exchange: a glory to God the highest, but not to herself.

  In a sense, then, Gloria signifies the impossibility of woman herself (see Lacan, 1999, and Žižek, 1999). Since she appears only as an object of exchange and not as a person in her own right, Gloria functions as a symptom of Smith’s alienation as a woman in a male-dominated cultural environment. At best, in moments of ecstasy, she appears to mark a potential space beyond the control of the patriarchal god; as the Lacanian Real (see Lacan, 1979), she thus emerges as unreachable, excessive, and sublime. Yet, as Richard Middleton has argued (2006), the notion of the feminine as a sublime object of desire (Žižek, 1989, and Shaw, 2006) lends itself equally to the shoring up of patriarchy. By designating femininity as a zone of excess, the phallic order effectively shields itself from its own capacity for self-contestation. In the end, however, “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo)” leaves the question of the success or failure of its challenge as a matter for the listener to decide. As Middleton goes on to suggest, the mere fact that the song uncovers the perverse nature of the Name-of-the-Father points to an alternative and perhaps more positive outcome.

  Redondo Beach

  The next song is “Redondo Beach”; named after the city in the South Bay region of the greater Los Angeles area, its beach area is a focus for the local lesbian and gay community. Set to a reggae-inflected beat, crisply accented by Sohl and Daugherty, and based around a twelve-bar blues progression in C, the song appears to sustain the exploration of alternative sexuality begun in “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo).” It was composed in the latter half of 1974, but with lyrics dating from 1971 (a version of these lyrics appeared in 1972 in Kodak as “Radondo Beach” [sic]). For Horses, Smith chose to omit the syncopated lines that she used to introduce the song live: “Redondo beach! Is a beach! Where! Women! Love! Uthhhaargh! Women! [kissing noises].” The effect of this elision on the meaning of the recorded version depends a great deal on the competence of the listener; while listeners familiar with the sexual topography of southern California will, of course, supply their own contextual meanings, other less knowledgable listeners must rely on the evidence presented by the song itself: the fact that it is sung by a woman and that it is addressed to the memory of a beloved “pretty little girl.”

  But who, precisely, might this girl be, and why should the song center on her death by suicide? Or, for that matter, why should an ostensibly straight woman come to write a song with a lesbian connotation? To answer the first question, it is helpful to consider Smith’s own reflections on the song. Some time after the recording of “Redondo Beach,” the singer claimed, in a note for Complete Lyrics (1998), that the song was inspired by a quarrel with her sister Linda. Smith has testified on many occasions to the unusually close bond she shared with her younger brother and sisters. With Linda, she travelled to Paris in the late 60s; Todd was a member of her road crew for many years; and Kimberly, her youngest sister, has appeared on recent albums playing mandolin and occasionally in concert playing guitar. The text that emerged from this argument might seem, at first sight, to belie the notion of a sympathetic and loving relationship between Patti and Linda, but it is important to remember that “Redondo Beach” is fashioned from the outset as a sort of dream-text: “late afternoon dreaming hotel” is the song’s suggestive opening line. The dream of the death of a beloved sibling, as Freud suggests (The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900; Freud, 1976), is not uncommon and its implications need not be disturbing. Put simply, where there is love, there is also hate; and the emotional ambivalence felt by one sibling toward another may sometimes find expression in dreams of murder, accidental death, or suicide. Freud thus cautions against using the dream “as evidence that [the dreamer] wishes for that person’s death at the present time.” Though this does not discount “the inference that this death has been wished for at some time or other during the dreamer’s childhood” (Freud, 1976), the fact that the adult protagonist of “Redondo Beach” is grieving qualifies the sense in which the dream expresses a wish for such a death in the present.

  Rather than approach the song as disguised sibling death-wish, it is perhaps more interesting to ponder the reasons why the lyric is set in Redondo Beach, rather than Coney Island, where the song was conceived. What, to put it crudely, is signified by the shift from death to sex and to lesbian sex, at that? One obvious answer is that Smith, after Bowie and Reed, wished simply to contribute to the then fashionable “gender bender” genre. But given that the song follows on from the deeply ambivalent “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo),” it might make more sense to consider “Redondo Beach” as yet another attempt to engage with the conceptual hegemony of the phallus. When considered, however, as a form of mental topography, “Redondo Beach,” unlike “Gloria,” seems at first sight to have nothing to do with the Name-of-the-Father. Here, for example, there are no looming towers, no symbols of masculine penetration to disturb the playful, oceanic setting. But this, as the central narrative makes clear, is not a song of celebration. Faced with the prospect of the girl’s “sweet suicide,” the women “stand with shock on their faces” while the singer, for the greater part of the song, gives expression to trauma through repetition: “I was looking for you are you gone gone.” Like Gloria, the unnamed girl is only ever encountered as missing or lacking, and as such she suggests, once again, the Lacanian idea of woman as excessive or “impossible,” a sublime object of desire that must be excluded if the symbolic order is to take effect (see Lacan, 1999 and Žižek, 1999).

  When, at the close of the song, the singer expresses acceptance (“Never to return into my arms you are gone gone.… Good-bye”), the tone is disarmingly light, resigned—comic even. In performance, throughout 1975, Smith accentuated this latter aspect of the song by mimicking the act of drying tears. As several critics have noted, while the gesture fits well with the song’s playful reggae rhythm and the knowing harmonic gesture toward doo-wop, it contrasts with the song’s morbid lyrical content. To explain this apparent disparity, it is worth pausing to reflect on the significance of play and its unexpected relation with loss. If, as I have suggested, the greater part of “Redondo Beach” is preoccupied with the repetitive expression of loss (“gone gone”), then the final acceptance of loss (“Good-bye”) suggests a point of closure. As Freud postulates in his discussion of the fort-da game in his 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1984), the ability to overcome grief may originate in early childhood when the young infant is forced to come to terms with the absence of the mother. Observing the behavior of his grandson, Freud noticed the boy playing with a reel of cotton, uttering the word fort, or gone, when the reel rolled away, and a joyful da, or there, when it was returned. By mastering loss in symbolic form, the boy was able to resign his instinctive desire for the mother’s return. As Lacan goes on to argue, conceived thus, the fort-da game might be read as an early (pre-Oedipal) entry point into “the structure of signifying lack which is constitutive of the symbolic order itself” (see Lacan, 1979, and Middleton, 2006). For Smith, in “Redondo Beach,” the presymbolic girl, herself a little piece of the excluded maternal body, must be casually dismissed if the subject is to be allowed access to the patriarchal realm of language and culture. The song may therefore be considered as a form of play, a little game within which the female subject learns to resign her lov
e for mothers, for women, for girls, and ultimately for herself. Equally, however, as is the case with “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo),” “Redondo Beach” is open enough to allow scope for the development of qualifying perspectives, enabling the listener to countenance the idea of same-sex desire running alongside and perhaps intertwined with the operation of heterosexuality.

  Birdland

  In an interview with Crawdaddy, Smith explained the inspiration behind “Birdland,” the ten-minute speech-song that forms the centerpiece of side one of Horses:

  I got the idea for “Birdland” when I read this book by Peter Reich called Book of Dreams … there’s a passage in it about when he was little and his father [the maverick psychiatrist, Wilhelm] died. He kept going out into the fields hoping his father would pick him up in a spaceship, or a UFO. He saw all these UFOs coming at him [later revealed to be a flock of blackbirds] and inside one was his father, glowing and shining. Then the air force planes came in and chased the UFOs away and he was left there crying: No! Daddy! Come back! It really moved me. (Shapiro, 1975)

  Trained under Freud, Wilhelm Reich became a practicing psychoanalyst in the 1920s. As an exile from Nazi Germany, he moved to the United States, where his controversial theories on the function of the orgasm, his unorthodox scientific claims, and his left-wing politics summoned the unwelcome attentions of the Federal Bureau of Investigations and the Food and Drug Administration. It was Reich’s research into sexual energy and his development of the “orgone accumulator,” a wardrobe-sized box that purported to concentrate life-enhancing orgone energy, that led to his eventual arrest and imprisonment in 1957. In the aftermath of the trial, the FDA burned Reich’s books and pamphlets and destroyed his collection of accumulators. He died of heart failure in prison a few months later.