Patti Smith's Horses Page 12

  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.

  Land

  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 d
rowning, 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.

  “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.”