Patti Smith's Horses Read online

  Rumors of a hot new band, fronted by an ethereal mid-westerner named Tom Verlaine (after Rimbaud’s lover, Paul Verlaine) and his friend, a charismatic poet called Richard Hell (after Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell), brought Smith and Kaye to a club in the Bowery called CBGBs on April 14, 1974. Driven by the twin guitars of Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, with Hell contributing bass, the band was called Television and they were playing visceral, intelligent rock music. As this was only their fourth show, the band’s performance was a little ragged, but Smith and Kaye were beguiled, not least by their daring approach to songwriting, with titles at this time including “Love Comes in Spurts,” “Hard on Love,” and “Fuck Rock and Roll.” Here, at last, was the “dirtier,” less “homogenized” style that Smith had been longing for. Drawing inspiration from the late 60s garage scene, a taste facilitated in part by Kaye’s own hugely influential Nuggets compilation, released in 1972, Television were allusive, energetic, and beautiful; indeed, they were everything that the Dolls represented, minus the self-parody, the glitter, and the chaos. In terms of their image, like Smith they favored a dressed-down, thrift store aesthetic, with Hell sporting ripped t-shirts and cropped, badly dyed hair in direct opposition to the extravagant glam look favored by the Mercers crowd. Crucial to Television’s musical aesthetic was the decision to reject the predominant “heavy” sound of early 70s rock in favor of drier, more trebly, jazz-based tones; Gibsons and Marshalls were thus exchanged for Fenders; the songs became correspondingly more nuanced and dramatic while avoiding the fatuous pomposity of so-called progressive rock. Although the creative tension between Hell and Verlaine would soon implode, with Hell departing to join the ex-New York Doll Johnny Thunders’s Heartbreakers before forming his own band, the Voidoids, in 1976, for the best part of 1974–75 Television were living proof that rock ’n’ roll could be raw and exciting as well as complex and artful. Under their direction, a new scene was starting to develop.

  Over the coming months, Smith became especially enamoured of the angular, swanlike Verlaine, and their friendship quickly developed into a physical and emotional partnership. One important song from this period, the blues ballad “We Three,” written in collaboration with Verlaine, addresses the fraught nature of their affair, which Smith pursued while still living with Allen Lanier. Performed throughout the year, but left unrecorded until 1978, “We Three” stretches the singer’s range, forcing her to sing from her belly and chest, rather than her throat. The result is achingly soulful. With its intimate subject matter, poised between starkly articulated despair and keening hope, it was, in many ways, Smith’s first true love song. But “We Three,” as the singer has since pointed out, is also about CBGBs, as the opening lines reveal: “Every Sunday I will go down to the bar and leave him the guitar. … It was just another Saturday and everything was in the key of A.” The ambiguity of the song’s pronouns, highlighting the confused relations within the erotic triangle, has the additional effect of underscoring the social fluidity of the CBGBs scene, with musicians and audiences alike forging unexpected and daring new alliances.

  Hey Joe (Version)/Piss Factory

  For the Patti Smith trio, working under the guidance of Jane Friedman, the spring and summer of 1974 were spent busily rehearsing. By early June, they were ready to make their first record. Using money donated by Robert Mapplethorpe, Smith, Kaye, and Sohl taped two tracks at Electric Lady Studios, “Hey Joe (Version)” and “Piss Factory.” Released as a seven-inch single a couple of months later on their own Mer label (Mer #601), “Hey Joe (Version)/Piss Factory” was available by mail order and through a handful of record and bookstores, such as Village Oldies, where Kaye had worked, and the Gotham Book Mart, where Smith had been an employee. Since described by Victor Bockris as “perhaps the most important record she ever made” (1998), the thousand or so signed copies of the original pressing, which very quickly sold out, are now expensive collector’s items. Recorded in mono, in the relative confines of studio B, the record’s flip side, “Piss Factory,” is perhaps the best known track. According to Smith, the song was recorded and mixed in just under an hour: “I had my poem, Richard and Lenny did this thing, and I read over it. That was it. We did it twice and picked the best one” (Fricke, 2004).

  As noted in chapter 2, the song documents Smith’s harrowing experience as an assembly-line worker in Pitman, New Jersey. Propelled by Sohl’s 5/4 rhythmic bedrock, augmented by Kaye’s jazz and blues flourishes, “Piss Factory” is unstintingly bleak in its portrayal of factory politics, how workforces succumb to petty jealousies and aggressive behavior as a result of the alienating effects of capitalist production. Lacking melody, the song is largely declaimed by Smith, using irregular stress patterns over variable phrase lengths. In the absence of discernable verses, and with no chorus, the relation between Sohl’s keyboard frills and Smith’s vocal emphases is wholly contingent. As such, “Piss Factory” is perhaps best described as a musically enhanced poem, rather than as a fully formed song. There are, nevertheless, some formal features that invite attention. Firstly, Smith uses repetition throughout the piece, both as a mode of rhythmic and semantic emphasis. Thus, “too lame to understand too goddam grateful to get this job,” the repetitive structure, enhanced by the omission of the connective “and,” has the effect of delaying and thus drawing attention to the conclusive punch of “to know they’re getting screwed up the ass.” A few lines later, “had to earn my dough had to earn my dough,” conveys the sense in which the young woman’s dedication to the work ethic is conditioned by the unpunctuated, i.e. unreflective, flow of the assembly line. This impulse is mirrored however, by her overbearingly maternal coworker’s put down: “you ain’t goin’ nowhere you ain’t goin nowhere”; in this instance, the repetition of the negative is used as a curb on the young woman’s self-assertion. As a result of this mirroring, Smith shows how the identity of both sides, the Protestant “moral school girl hard-working asshole” and the “hot shit … real Catholic” floor boss, is conditioned by the ideology of capital.

  As the piece progresses, references to popular song, from Mack Rice’s “Mustang Sally” (1965) to the Isley Brother’s “Twist and Shout” (1962), are used to highlight the connections between industrial and commercial production. On the assembly line, songs from the radio take on a darker, ironic tone; messages of freedom become oppressive ripostes, while, in the contrast between the “sweet … convent” outside the factory and Dot Hook’s dogmatic cross, the liberating promise of religion is curtailed by materialist conditioning. Through all this, the singer insists she has “something to hide,” a secret inner world, free from the “maternal sweat” of conventional femininity and unsullied by the stark realities of factory life. Welling up from the midst of a nostalgic sexual fantasy, the key word at this point is “desire”; with the uttering of this magic spell the repetitive deadlock of the song is relieved. No longer constrained by the binary opposition of Protestant individualism and Catholic collectivism, the singer is released into a postideological space of repetitive potential: “I’m gonna go I’m gonna get out of here I’m gonna get on that train and go to New York City and I’m gonna be somebody.” Through sheer verbal insistence, the singer removes herself from piecework drudgery and religious dogma into a fantasy realm of pure becoming: “watch me now.” This is, of course, everywoman’s dream, and in many ways “Piss Factory” may be read as a sophisticated variant of the rags to riches story; only, in this case, the female heroine is rescued, not by Prince Charming, but solely by herself.

  On the A side of the record, the trio recorded a version of Billy Roberts’s “Hey Joe” (c. 1961), originally a hit for LA band the Leaves (1965), and subsequently recorded in 1966 by the Surfaris, the Byrds, and Love; the song has since become a garage band standard. A slowed down version, by the folk singer Tim Rose, again recorded in 1966, provided the inspiration for Jimi Hendrix’s definitive recording the following year. In the setting of Electric Lady, the studio complex that Hendrix built on 52 West Eigh
th Street in 1970, the trio’s rendering of the song is mournful and elegiac but with a hard, unstinting edge. Coming in at a stately 5:05 minutes, “Hey Joe (Version),” credited to “Smith-Roberts,” is more like an avant-garde dramatization than a conventional cover version. Assisted by Tom Verlaine on lead guitar, and with an overdubbed bass drum supplied by Kaye, the performance draws inspiration from the Russian Formalist technique of defamiliarization, by which an exhausted artistic form is rendered afresh as a result of slowing down, decontextualizing, or “roughening” up. In simple terms, the decision to slow down “Hey Joe” forces the listener to concentrate on meanings that might not be apparent in the standard version. Rendered at a funereal pace, the focus of the original song on violence and murder thus becomes overlaid with memories of the untimely death of its most famous interpreter.

  The defamiliarization of “Hey Joe” does not stop here, however, as, foregoing a conventional count in, the song is prefaced by a lengthy spoken-word meditation, sometimes known as “Sixty Days,” on the Patty Hearst case. Kidnapped on February 4, 1974, by members of the self-styled Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), Patty Hearst was a member of the wealthy Hearst dynasty. Following a failed ransom attempt, she was photographed on April 15 wielding an assault rifle while robbing the Sunset District of the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco. A statement was issued under the pseudonym Tania, claiming that she was now committed to the goals of the SLA. The government issued a warrant for her arrest, and in September 1975 she was apprehended in an apartment along with other SLA members. By the time Smith came to record “Hey Joe,” her namesake had become a cult hero; a chic-looking young revolutionary with a hip line in combat fatigues and deadly weaponry. The sociocultural revolution that Smith and her friends were looking to instigate had found its cover girl, and in her opening rap the singer lays great store in the underlying sexuality of Hearst’s image:

  Honey, the way you play guitar makes me feel so, makes me feel so masochistic. The way you go down low deep into the neck and I would do anything, and I would do anything and Patty Hearst, you standing there in front of the Symbionese Liberation Army flag with your legs spread, I was wondering were you getting it every night from a black revolutionary man and his women or were you really dead and now that you’re on the run what goes on in your mind, your sisters they sit by the window, you know your mama doesn’t sit and cry and your daddy, well you know what your daddy said, Patty, you know what your daddy said, Patty, he said, he said, he said, “Well, sixty days ago she was such a lovely child, now here she is with a gun in her hand.”

  The phrase “gun in her hand” lends itself naturally to “Hey Joe’s” “gun in your hand” refrain, adding a new and unexpected layer of meaning, which the songwriter could not have predicted. Riding on the back of the Hearst rap, “Hey Joe” thus becomes politicized. Its primary target is the relationship between gender and power. Like Hendrix’s female devotee, succumbing masochistically to the seductive force of the guitar, the Hearst figure inspires awe through possession of that ultimate masculine symbol, the machine gun (coincidentally, the title of a classic Hendrix number from the Band of Gypsys era). Bringing this equation full circle, Smith’s fantasies of phallic mastery, of cutting it in a cultural realm dominated by men, would eventually be realized through the purchase of a Fender Duo Sonic, reputedly owned by the guitar legend himself. As the song continues, Verlaine underscores Smith’s deconstruction of the guitar/gun/phallus equation with sinuous, atonal lead guitar lines, the effect of which is simultaneously visceral and cerebral, as if Verlaine were reflecting on the sociocultural significance of the lead guitar solo in the very instant of its “spontaneous” production. In my view, the band’s instinctive grasp of the thematic and sonic darkness inherent in the Roberts song is secure enough to prevent the performance from going too far in the direction of a formal, academic study. The result is intellectually sophisticated, to be sure, but it also remains faithful to the instinctive bravura of the original. Something of this spirit is captured in Smith’s vocal performance. As the tune settles into skewed familiarity, the minor-key piano chords announced sequentially over Kaye’s metronymic down strum, the mournfully enunciated “Hey Joe” provides the first recorded evidence of one of Smith’s most recognizable vocal traits: a sustained major note (“Heeeey Jo-”) followed by a rapid slide to the lower end of the octave, to end on a sustained minor (“Jo-oooo”). In the next line, “Where you going with that gun in your hand?,” the emphasis on grief is displaced by a tone of sour suggestiveness, an effect created through the use of an extended mid-vowel sound, ending again on a minor (“your haaand?”).

  It is at this point that the vocal performance builds on the political significance announced in the introduction. As the verse progresses, the singer’s habitation of the male protagonist’s misogynistic reply (“I’m gonna go shoot my ol’ lady”) feels darkly subversive and indeed paves the way for a final act of detournement, a fantasy piece in which s/he imagines him/herself “standing there under that flag with your carbine / Between my legs.” Having blurred the boundary between Patti and Patty, female victim and male victimizer, hetero- and homosexual identity, the singer asserts that she is “free”: “I am nobody’s million dollar baby, I am nobody’s Patsy anymore / I’m nobody’s million dollar baby, I’m nobody’s Patsy anymore / And I feel so free.”

  As an artefact, the Mer recording of “Piss Factory/Hey Joe” is a thing of wonder. Across its two sides, Patti Smith and her collaborators compact more predatory energy, more wit and intelligence, and more evidence for the worth of personal and collective freedom, than virtually any other record release of the first half of the decade.

  Land 1: Max’s Kansas City

  In the wake of the single’s release, Smith, Kaye, and Sohl shared a ten-night residency with Television at Max’s Kansas City, beginning on Wednesday, August 28, and running through to Monday, September 9. A video or film of one of these nights, by the American photographer Bob Gruen, documents the astonishing progress of the band. Opening with a rollicking cover of Lou Reed’s “We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together,” replete with an additional self-penned verse pursuing an ambiguous drug/race theme (“I went to Harlem, looking for something black … don’t you know the blackest thing in Harlem is white?”), the trio return to their cabaret roots for a version of Bessie Smith’s “I’m Wild About That Thing,” with salacious backing vocals by Lenny Kaye. The next number, “Harbor Song,” the first original of the set, anticipates the spaced out, impressionistic style of “Birdland,” its lyrics centering on the dreams and desires of a dejected female protagonist. “Harbor Song” is followed by a cover of Smokey Robinson’s “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game,” its wounded pride offering a delicate counterpoint to the darker and more strident yearnings of the previous number. “Piss Factory” comes next, the lyrics on the single version segueing seamlessly into an improvised incantation that embraces Jean Genet’s prison novel, The Miracle of the Rose (1965), and demonstrates, as always, the overwhelming urge to “get out of here.” For the first poem of the evening, Smith reads “Marianne Faithfull,” from Seventh Heaven. The verse serves as an introduction to a lacerating rendition of the Stones’s “Paint It Black,” with Smith at the opening intoning the lyrics in the style of a German chanteuse: Nico, Lotte Lenya, or Marlene Dietrich. Drawing again on her theatrical roots, Smith had taken to accompanying the song with a mock striptease, slowly removing her white shirt and black tie to reveal an all-black outfit underneath (see Amy Gross’s review, quoted earlier). In a show notable for its thoughtful balancing of light and shade, the band shift from burlesque to deep soul balladry for a moving performance of “We Three.” At the song’s close, the sense of poignancy is kicked swiftly into touch by a spirited run through of “Picture Hanging Blues,” the jaunty, blues-based tribute to Jesse James, which Smith and Kaye debuted at their 1971 St. Mark’s show.

  The set’s penultimate song is an early version of “Land.” Starting out
as a straightforward version of the Chris Kenner/Cannibal and the Headhunters/Wilson Pickett number, “Land of 1000 Dances,” Smith’s rendition of the song, even at this stage, contains improvised elements that survive into the recording sessions for Horses. As the song mutates, the transition from R&B standard to surrealistic vision is signalled, as it is on the record, by the chorus from Chris Kenner and Alain Toussaint’s “I Like It Like That” (1961). Also in place are the lines running from “Can’t you show me nothing but surrender,” through “go Rimbaud … go Rimbaud,” to “Twistelette twistelette twistelette.” The closing section, known as “La Mer(de)” on Horses, is again familiar, with the band sustaining the “Land” chords as Smith intones “Let it calm down let it calm down.” As yet, however, the “sea of possibilities” and the lines detailing the death and transfiguration of Johnny remain vague and undetermined.

  In her December 1975 interview with Tony Hiss and David McClelland, Smith explained the song’s genesis: “I started the first ‘Land’—this was Upstairs at Max’s Kansas City—with a recitation of a New York poem from Witt [the title poem]. The poem’s about a carnival of fools in a city where you can’t see the stars, but I gave it a New York ballad rendition—you know, let’s keep on laughing, let’s keep on dancing” (Hiss and McClelland 1976). In a carnivalesque space, dominated by the reflected glare of neon and sodium, it becomes impossible to orient oneself in relation to reality; as for the impulse toward the divine, signalled by the light of distant stars: forget it. The “land where we am” is a land for “lost souls.” Here, instead of “angels,” we encounter only “the seduced and the discarded … the tricked ones.” Under the influence of choloroform, the speaker describes a dream vision of “courtship with the angels,” an experience that leaves him/her “satisfied … completely wiped out,” yet wondering if “there is yet a more natural light, one that rips and zings.” The inquiry yields a final vision of sexual intensity, surpassing faith that “can move mountains,” coming at last “like the flood” (Smith 1994). In the course of their interview, Hiss and McClelland describe Smith’s songs as “counterspells, attempts to release herself and the audience from all the dark forces of late 20th century delusions.” Described thus, “Witt” bears the imprint of Smith’s sustained fascination with Rimbaud, and the endeavor to supplant the illusory ecstasies of religion with the materialist excesses of the body. In performance, at Max’s Kansas City, the movement from the land of illusion through the corporeal heights of sex and narcosis to the febrile rhythms of “Land of a Thousand Dances” is but a step away. But such abandon can be sustained only for a short while, and, as the band locks into the key of F, there is, quite simply, nowhere left to go, and nothing left to do, but to “let it calm down let it calm down.” What the song needed, and what the singer was searching for, was a focal point to unify its diverse strands. On this early recording, there are some hints of what is to come: scattered references to riders on horseback, to “pretty boys and sisters” and, crucially, to the mythical presence of Johnny (“Johnny is coming … he’s coming [x 2].… Come on in Johnny [x 3] … johnny, Johnny, Johnny … do you know how to pony?”), but, as yet, the heart of “Land” is undetermined.