Patti Smith and the ecstasy of the unexpected
A few years ago, Patti Smith did one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen at a rock show. It was Oct. 20, 2008, at the Fillmore in San Francisco, on the tour for her covers record, Twelve. She was in-between songs, and doing that thing that most musicians do at least once at every gig when they’re in-between songs: talking about how much they like the city, how great it is to be back, etc. As I’d seen hundreds of musicians do before at hundreds of shows, she started talking about the sightseeing she’d done that day. But then, in an instant, she turned the decades-old rock ’n’ roll cliché into something mind-blowing, as she described returning from her walk through Union Square or Fisherman’s Wharf or wherever it was, back into her hotel, and how as she climbed to her room, the stairs started sticking to her shoes, attaching to her feet, stretching up with each step she took.
She didn’t change her nonchalant tone at all, but now people in the audience were looking at each other in disbelief, like one huge collective “What?” In the 30 feet or so of physical space she had left to describe, from the stairway to her hotel room, the story turned increasingly hallucinatory, until the bottom dropped out entirely, the band came in, and without missing a beat she launched into her cover of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.”
When I got the chance to meet Smith a couple of weeks ago at the Rio in Santa Cruz, before her book reading, I finally got to tell her how much that small, unexpected moment had stuck with me. And to my surprise, she not only remembered it, she also got a chuckle out of the fact that it had made such an impression on me.
“I’m glad you liked that,” she said, smiling. “That San Francisco show was the first time I did that. I didn’t tell the band I was going to do it.”
Wait, I said, the band didn’t even know? How could they possibly have realized they were supposed to come in with that song? She’d dropped a couple of key phrases from the lyrics as hints, she said, but mostly it was because “they’re used to me doing stuff like that.”
DO YOU KNOW HOW TO TWIST?
The rest of us are used to it too, because Smith has been doing the unexpected for her entire career, starting with her very first single in 1974. The A-side, “Hey Joe,” remains one of the most bizarre and powerful cover songs in the history of rock ’n’ roll. Somehow, it weaves the song of lust, jealousy and murderous intent that Jimi Hendrix had famously recorded eight years earlier into a spoken-word poem about the revolutionary and possibly sexual misadventures of Stockholm syndrome poster girl Patty Hearst. Her voice jumps instantly out of nowhere, against stark silence: “Honey, the way you play guitar makes me feel so, makes me feel so … masochistic.” She’s been on record for a total of seven seconds and she’s already praying to the rock gods, though Hendrix goes unnamed. Then it’s straight into a Hearst fantasy that is still startling now—I can’t even imagine what it was like to hear it 40 years ago. “I was wondering were you gettin’ it every night from a black revolutionary man and his women, or were you really dead?” she asks an imaginary Hearst, before slipping in a second rock tribute in the form of a Velvet Underground lyric: “Now that you’re on the run, what goes on in your mind?”
The single’s flip side, “Piss Factory,” was the first original song she recorded, and just as loaded with the unexpected and the taboo. Another example of poetry mixed with rock music as only she has ever really been able to mix them, it tells a story of the ultimate hostile work environment, drawing from her own time on an assembly line. But it also reaches back into rock history again, imagining a boss telling her “get off your mustang, Sally … shake it up, baby. Twist and shout.” In the next few lines, she also manages to namecheck James Brown, the doo-wop group the Jesters, and the Jamaican ska band the Paragons—whose song “The Tide is High” Smith’s CBGBs contemporary Blondie would take to the top of the charts six years later.
These callbacks to the touchstones of rock music via poetry solidified her blending of the art forms. She’d do it again a year later to even greater effect on her debut album, Horses, which Smith and her band will perform in its entirety at their show on Saturday at the Rio. On the nine-minute-plus “Land,” she swirls “Land of a Thousand Dances” (written by Chris Kenner, but made iconic by Wilson Pickett’s recording) into her story of how the boy looked at Johnny, or maybe it was only Johnny alone in the hallway the whole time. Cutting his own throat? Longing for someone’s touch?
At the Rio, I asked Smith about what’s really happening in “Land,” and all she could tell me was it’s about how hard it is to grow up, and that she was reading a lot of William Burroughs’ cut-up stuff at the time she wrote it. Fair enough; it’s unlikely that any close reading could account for the power of that song.
Smith’s cover songs are some of the best ever done, often because of the way she tangles a rock classic in her own poetry, and completely transforms it in the process. “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine,” a line from her poem “Oath” that she used to open her cover of Van Morrison’s “Gloria,” is only the most famous example. With the same poetic subterfuge, she’s turned Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” into a battle hymn for the exploited children of the third world, the Rolling Stones’ “Time is on My Side” into an angry protest against the very existence of time, and the Velvet Underground’s mindless “We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together” into a song about heroin in Harlem.
DOWN FOR YOU IS UP
When I found out I’d be meeting Smith before her Rio reading, I assumed it’d just be for a couple of minutes. But when we went up to the green room, she was sitting and signing books—and as cool and down to earth as anyone could hope. Not wanting to intrude or be otherwise obnoxious, I suggested, “Tell me how many questions I can ask before it will get annoying.” She simply gestured to a spot on the couch next to her and said, “Sit down. Ask them all.”
She wasn’t kidding. For half an hour or so, I got the chance to ask every nerdy question I could think of, mostly about her cover songs and what inspired her to re-invent them the way she did. Maybe she enjoyed the insane specificity of the questions, or maybe signing books is just really boring, but we got so into it that when I lagged on questions she said, “Come on, you’ve got to have more.”
I did. But of all her answers to the overly self-indulgent questions I got to ask, one in particular has stuck with me, to the point that I’ve thought about it every day since. One of my favorites of her covers is “Pale Blue Eyes,” a song that originally featured some of Lou Reed’s most passive-aggressive lyrics, opening with “Sometimes I feel so happy/Sometimes I feel so sad/Sometimes I feel just about everything/But mostly you just make me mad.” Smith changed the latter line (to “lately I’m just feeling bad”) and some other lyrics that soured the sweet heart of the song. In terms of rock history, it’s significant because when Michael Stipe covered “Pale Blue Eyes” with R.E.M., turning a lot of 1980s kids on to it for the first time, he used her version instead of Reed’s original words. But on a personal level, I always liked that she snatched a gorgeous love song from the jaws of cynicism. So I asked her what inspired that.
“Fred had pale blue eyes,” she said, referring to her late husband Fred “Sonic” Smith of the MC5, whom she married in 1980, and who died in 1994. “I sang it like that for him.”
As Smith’s music and poetry continue to endure and inspire (as the Horses 40th anniversary tribute show that Courtney Barnett and others performed in Melbourne in October proved once again), that answer reminded me that they do so not just because of the way they surprise, but also because their surprises are grounded in real emotion and a delivery that comes straight from her soul. Not unlike the end of “Land,” at the core of Patti Smith’s art there is just a woman dancing around to a simple rock ’n’ roll song.
ROCK’S POET LAUREATE Patti Smith performs on Saturday, Jan. 2 at the Rio Theatre in Santa Cruz.
