Patti Smith's Horses Page 13

  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.

  Elegie

  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.

  Chapter 6

  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 adde
d 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:

  With her wealth of promise and the most incandescent flights and stillnesses of this album she joins the ranks of people like Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, or the Dylan of “Sad Eyed Lady” and Royal Albert Hall. It’s that deeply felt, and that moving: a new Romanticism built upon the universal language of rock ’n’ roll, an affirmation of life so total that, even in the graphic recognition of death, it sweeps your breath away. (1976)

  Thus, while the record company provided the requisite capital to disseminate Smith’s product in the marketplace, publications like Creem supplied much needed cultural capital, encouraging consumers to locate the artist in the same prestigious spheres as Dylan, Mingus, and Davis. John Rockwell’s review for Rolling Stone reciprocated Bangs’s admiration for Smith’s high art credentials, in this case pointing out comparisons with the literary and musical avant gardes: from Allen Ginsberg to La Monte Young, and from Terry Riley to Merdith Monk (1976). And in a similar vein, Tony Glover, in Circus, described the record as the aural equivalent of a William Burroughs book (1976a).

  In Britain meanwhile, Charles Shaar Murray of the New Musical Express hailed the album as “better than the first Roxy album, better than the first Beatles and Stones albums, better than the Doors and Who and Hendrix and Velvet Underground albums.” Horses, he goes on to argue, is a “definitive essay on the American night as a state of mind … it’s strange, askew and flat-out weird. It’s neurotic and unhealthy and dank, a message in a bottle sent from some place that you and I have only been to in the worst moments of self doubting defeated psychosis” (Shaar Murray, 1975). Between them, Bangs, Shaar Murray, Rockwell, and indeed Smith herself, created the template for an entirely new genre, a form of music that was intelligent and self-conscious, yet visceral and exciting, and that would receive a range of names over the coming months and years: art rock, punk rock, new wave; and thereafter: alternative, grunge, college rock, and indie. With the accent falling on feeling, rather than technique, and on passion, rather than polish, the art brut aesthetic of Smith’s Horses is sustained in the work of numerous contemporary musicians, from Nick Cave to P. J. Harvey, and from Kim Gordon to Kristin Hersh.

  Praise for this new genre was not unanimous, however. In Britain, for instance, a number of critics, including Angus McKinnon (1976) and Steve Lake (1976) of the Melody Maker, argued that Smith’s rise to fame was entirely the result a cleverly orchestrated media company. Lake, in particular, came to advance the idea that Arista had engineered a “‘fame-association’ situation,” drawing attention to Smith by promoting her alongside established artists such as Bob Dylan, with whom she had been recently photographed at the Other End Club. As fans of English progressive rock, Lake and McKinnin were quick to dismiss the studied minimalism of Horses as amateurish, decrepit, musically incompetent, and just plain “bad. Period” (Lake, 1976). Lake’s antipathy to Smith’s music culminated in a confrontational meeting with the band during their British tour the following May. Yet despite Lake’s best efforts, Horses received a warm reception from the New Musical Express and from Sounds. But it was Smith’s remarkable appearance on BBC-2’s The Old Grey Whistle Test followed by two memorable sets at London’s Roundhouse theater on May 16 and 17, that confirmed her reputation among British fans. On The Old Grey Whistle Test, the band performed a coruscating version of “Land.” Citing Oscar Wilde alongside the recently disgraced former Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe in her introduction to the song, Smith remained true to the radical political agenda that she had demonstrated in her St. Mark’s performance and on record on “Hey Joe” (Whitely, 2006).

  In America meanwhile, toward the end of December ‘75, Smith and her band played a series of gigs at the Bottom Line club in New York. As Lisa Robinson noted, the gigs had been sold out for weeks and the “ambience at Mercer and Fourth Streets was not totally unlike that when Springsteen played there some months ago.… The energy level was intense … it was amazing … not since the Velvets has this city known such a performance” (1975). In all, the band played seven shows over a three-night period, marking a return to the relaxed, residency feel of their CBGBs days. At the Bottom Line, the evenings began, typically, with Smith appearing alone on stage to chat with the audience and read from her poems. As Robinson observed, Smith was starting to become a visually expressive performer, punching the air with her fists, swaying with the music, and bending down on all fours. She had become a rock ’n’ roll star.

  In addition to the Horses songs, the band played several numbers that would appear on their follow up album (Radio Ethiopia was released a mere ten months later), alongside versions of “Pale Blue Eyes” (reportedly observed by a “stunned” Lou Reed), “Time Is on My Side,” “Louie Louie,” and “My Generation.” No mere covers, the performances tapped directly into the primal, urchin-like spirit of rock’s renaissance, effortlessly bypassing the self-indulgence, the frippery, and the waste of rock’s more recent baroque period. No longer enmeshed in cultural or corporate logic, Patti Smith enters the realm of the simple present. It is a moment of pure indulgence, a temporary yet, for me, vital suspension of the drive to critical accountability—all the time I am mindful that what I am listening to and what I am describing is documentary evidence, that I am listening to events that happened a long time ago, and that I am trying to reconstruct them, fruitlessly no doubt, in “the present time of playback” (Auslander, 2007). In closing, however, I should like to imagine what it might be like to reawaken the spirit of the past.

  At the end of the show on December 27, 1975, the singer announces, “Rock ’n’ roll … goes through creepy times. We made it up, so we can make it better again.” As the band launches into “My Generation,” Smith picks at her guitar, a Fender Duo Sonic reputedly owned by Jimi Hendrix, adding dissonant, scratchy noise to the rumbling, bass heavy, chaos—the latter supplied by John Cale. Egged on by the baying crowd she loses herself in the moment, issuing a deluge of fucks, shits, and goddams, as the song lurches toward an explosive end. “I’m so young, so goddam young,” she screams. “I’m so young, so goddam young.” Shouting hoarsely at the limits of expression it seems as though the artist has reached another realm. Perhaps it is possible to exceed the law, to be something other than male/female, hetero-/homosexual, poet/rock singer, artist/product. Meanwhile, the crowd shouts for more, chanting her name over and over.

  When she returns, it is to end where she began, with a poem:

  to have no need of the apparatus

  of the operating room

  to be safe from all bodily harm

  to know love without exception

  to be a saint in any form (Smith, 1994)

  Works Cited

  Works b
y Patti Smith

  Recordings

  Singles/EPs

  “Hey Joe” (Version) / “Piss Factor” (1974). Mer Records, #601 (US).

  “Gloria” / “My Generation” (1976) (“My Generation” recorded live in Cleveland on 1/26/76). Arista Records AS 0171 (US) Arista Records/Pathe Marconi/EMI 2C.010–97.523 (France) Arista Records ARISTA 135 (UK) (twelve-inch 45 RPM single) Note: Early issues of the British single were released with “My Generation” censored.

  Albums

  Horses (1975). Produced by John Cale. AL 4066 (US). ARTY 122 (UK). 201 112 (Germany). 18RS-7 (Japan).

  Horses (2005). 30th Anniversary Legacy Edition CD. B000BKDOB6

  Land 1975–2002. Arista CD. B00005YVQN

  Bootleg recordings of readings and concerts are listed at http://www.oceanstar.com/patti/ (see Web Sources below)

  Books

  (1998) Patti Smith Complete: Lyrics, Reflections, and Notes for the Future. New York: Doubleday.

  (1994) Early Work 1970–1979. London: Plexus.