Patti Smith

Born in Chicago in 1948, she was brought up in New Jersey. Her early years saw her contract a serious childhood illness that resulted in hallucinations that lasted into her teens. She got pregnant in 1967 but had the child and gave it up for adoption which led to some social stigma. The one condition she made was that it could not be baptized a catholic. Her mother was a strict Jehovah’s Witness and her father was a solid atheist and these twin poles would be key in what influenced her art. Getting a job in a factory and being bullied by her illiterate work colleagues would be the inspiration for Piss Factory and she determined to become an artist.

Music was also key for her and artists such as Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison (she had seen the Doors live), Bob Dylan and Brian Jones were key and heroic figures to her. The poet Arthur Rimbaud came into her life through again a chance encounter when she saw his picture on the cover of a book of his poems and she loved the work of William Burroughs. All her heroes were male.

James Grauerholz Because through all the I AM RIMBAUD, I AM BAUDELAIRE, I AM BURROUGHS, there was a very strong torch-singer type – a Billie Holiday. I mean, the art was there but in principle she would give it all up for a good man….All Patti’s heroes tended to be heroic men, but her women tended… [to be ] the kind of uncredited , passed over by history supporter women. Please Kill Me, Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil

Patti herself was no conscious feminist; she just did everything on her own terms though she came out with some classic lines like the below and the one above left. To be fair that headline accompanied the printing of some nude photographs in the New York Daily Planet in May 1976 from earlier in her life that she tried unsuccessfully to get an injunction over.

Scott Cohen Just a few years ago Patti said rock ‘n’ roll was a man’s job. She wanted to see a man’s muscles and a man’s veins up onstage; she didn’t want to see “some chick’s tits banging against a guitar.

“Well,” she says now, “I never saw a woman do it cool. See anyone move good lately? Whatever I said a couple of years ago . . . I mean, I change hourly. Underneath it all, my heart’s been in the same place. In those days, poetry was as far as I could go.” Oui, July 1976

She was strikingly beautiful and feminine but could appear androgynous at will. She also had an inbuilt aggression and rebellious streak.

Patti Smith Some of us are born rebellious.. I remember passing shopwindows with my mother asking her why people didn’t just kick them in… I struggled to suppress destructive impulses and worked instead on creative ones. Still, the small rule-hating self within me did not die. Just Kids, Patti Smith

Patti Smith I had no stage fright and liked to elicit a response from the audience. But I made a mental note that I wasn’t acting material…I just couldn’t surrender enough of myself to be an actor. Just Kids, Patti Smith

At some stage after someone remarked her hair looked like a folk singer, she pulled together some photos of Keith Richards and hacked her hair into a rough approximation and the Patti Smith look was born.

Left – it’s such a prepunk Joan Jett, Suzi Quatro, Gaye Advert hairstyle. Right – Chelsea Hotel 1971 – did Johnny Thunders copy that look?

She was also writing articles for Creem, Crawdaddy and other music magazines taking writers such as Sandy Pearlman (who would become the Blue Oyster Cult producer and a key part of the band before later producing The Clash’s Give ‘Em Enough Rope) as influences in her rock writing. She believed strongly that rock criticism was an art form and this would be a bone of contention later when her private life would be subject to what she saw as unjustified reporting.

With these influences, Patti began her slow journey to fronting a band.  She began writing poetry and the first one she turned into a song was Fire Of Unknown Origin which both she and Blue Oyster Cult would later record. She had several books of prose and poems including Seventh Heaven, The Amazing Tale Of Skunk Dog and Devotions For Arthur Rimbaud and was featured in Creem.

She had a long relationship with Alan Lanier of Blue Oyster Cult (from the fall of 1971) who encouraged her to start performing in public. Around 1973 she met Jane Friedman who was booking groups for the Mercer Arts Centre, which was becoming the center of underground activity featuring bands like the New York Dolls,  and her poetry readings were initially on her own.

Richard Hell…they would just go nuts for her. That amazed me. ‘This crowd turned out for this girl doing poetry?’… it was so hot and she was so sharp, but she was sweet and vulnerable at the same time. She was the real thing , there was no mistaking it.

Joey Ramone…Every time she’d read a poem, she scrunched up the paper in a ball and threw it on the floor – or… she’d pick up a chair – and throw it across the room… I thought that was great. Please Kill Me, Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil

For Patti rock had become too safe and too boring with its wilder heroes dead. Clinton Heylin in From the Velvets To The Voidoids recounts a review she did of Edgar Winter in the March 1973 issue of Creem.

Rock N Roll is a dream soup. What’s your brand? Mine has turned over. mine is almost at the bottom of the bowl…there are new recipes. New ear drums…rock n roll is being reinvented. Just like truth. Its not for me but its there…Personally I’d like to see it dirtier. Less homogenized. But then I’m of the oldschool.

Reading an article by fellow rock critic Lenny Kaye, she sought him out and began to be accompanied by him on guitar.

Prefacing and interspersing songs with bursts of her poetry fired out almost like raps, these improvisations morphed and transformed the songs that were often covers. An example was Gloria prefaced by Oath and Land with her Horses poem but weaved in with snatched of Bony Maronie. Hey Joe had a rap about Parry Hearst.

For Smith & Kaye it was still the sixties heroes like Hendrix, the Doors, and Velvet Underground but also that playful freeform experimentation and throwing out ideas to create something new from. It was more the feeling than the ability to be a competent singer or musician. For Patti it was also more and that rock & roll was the new religion that had the power to touch and change.

..all of the political statements I make are pretty romantic, and I realise that, but I do believe that rock ‘n’ roll is the most universal form of communication since Christianity.

The performances developed from poetry readings to chanting’s to Patti untutored idiosyncratic and unique style of singing with whoops and tone change as exaggeration and as distinctive as Rotten’s rolling”r’s” and dragged out vowels and accentuated end of words.

Patti Smith Well, Rimbaud elevated the role of the poet to one point and then Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison took the possibilities even further. See, Jimi Hendrix had the process and Jim Morrison had the words, but neither one had the whole formula. So, you know, I just tried to take it from there. Scott Cohen, Oui, July 1976

In 1974 she wrote a poem for Todd Rungren that appeared as part of the packaging of his album A Wizard, A True Star. She also appeared on Ray Manzarek’s 1974 solo album reciting a Jim Morrison song.

Visiting the just opened CBGB’s she and Lenny caught the nascent Television and in 1974 they recorded Piss Factory/Hey Joe on their own Mer label which brought in Verlaine on guitar and pianist Richard Sohl.

They secured a residency at CBGB’s with Television and Ivan Krall (poached from Blondie) joined. By March 1975, with an increasing buzz about the band,  they had signed to Arista. With Jay Dee Daugherty the last to join they were now a bona fide rock n roll band but unlike the ‘Blondie is a band‘ to avoid focusing on just singer Debbie Harry, this was very clearly Patti Smith being backed by her group.

Lenny Kaye – Patti Smith’s like the focal point, there would be no band without her…we feel very honoured to work with her. NME, 1^st April 1978

Over that four years since the first poetry readings there was now a diverse scene starting to be called ‘Punk’ and comprising The Ramones, Talking Head, Blondie, Television and The Heartbreakers (then a mixture of Richard Hell & The New York Dolls) and Patti Smith was at the forefront.

So into the studio at Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland they went and the Velvet Undergrounds John Cale (who had produced the Stooges debut) was chosen to produce as Patti explained to writer Dave Marsh in1976:

… I looked at the cover of Fear and I said, ‘Now there’s a set of cheekbones.’ …In my mind I picked him because his records sounded good. But I hired the wrong guy. All I was really looking for was a technical person. Instead, I got a total maniac artist. I went to pick out an expensive watercolor painting and instead I got a mirror. .. But inspiration doesn’t always have to be someone sending me half a dozen American Beauty roses. There’s a lotta inspiration going on between the murderer and the victim. And he had me so nuts I wound up doing this nine-minute cut [“Birdland”] that transcended anything I ever did before. Rolling Stone, January 1, 1976

The album’s cover which straight away became iconic was courtesy of Robert Mapplethorpe and the record reached the US top 50 at the tail end of 1975 without a single to break it which was interesting in itself. Views on it were polarised from rabid praise to rabid criticism.

On the back of this, the band went full on the record industry treadmill with relentless touring to support the record which as artists used to more irregular gigs was a military operation all within strict confines.

Gloria, backed with their expletive-ridden scorching version of My Generation with John Cale on bass, was released uncensored in Europe but censored in the States.

We got our breath back with a brief return to “Horses” in the shape of “Land”, but even that soon mutated into a reprise of “Ain’t It Strange”. And then a final assault on the walls of the city, with a joyous and raucous assault on “Gloria” and “My Generation”, Van Morrison and Pete Townshend repurposed and dragged from the nostalgia zone through the barbed wire and born again for the new decade. It was one of those transcendent times when music provides a kind of out of body experience, a collective loss of ego by the audience, a fleeting escape from mundanity and obligation… and then they were gone. House lights soon turning the magical stage powder back to plain old dust.

We staggered out into the clammy night, pausing at the top of the Roundhouse stairs long enough to gather ourselves before returning to the world of traffic lights and timetables. There was no need to talk or analyse, we both knew we’d witnessed something truly out of the ordinary. Deviation Street

Also at the gig was Anna Da Silva who would later form the Raincoats and other like Viv Albertine were there.

It was really inspirational, she (Patti) was doing something I wasn’t used to, being really feisty with this band, all guys, but she was in the front and just giving everything – both a physical presence and an ‘I’m not taking any shit from anybody’ kind of attitude. She came onstage with a flower, she put it in her mouth and she spat it, it was like the end of flower power spitting it out. I will never forget that until I die. Typical Girls

Patti Smith  … we’re looking for something magic every night. We don’t have fixed set or formula. We’re not like a male band either, in that the male process of ecstasy in performance is starting here.”- she starts jerking at the base of an imaginary giant phallus – “ and building and building until the big spurt at the end. We’re a feminine band, we’ll go so far and peak and then we’ll start again and peak, over and over. It’s like an ocean  NME, 16.9.1978

It’s like tuning in, the whole process of performing is like getting to that moment where you’ve tuned in, it’s like tuning a radio…in performance I feel a lot of archaic energy – maybe it’s like watching a movie. Sometimes I feel like a human movie y’know, like, people are watching a movie and sometimes what they forget is that they are also the movie that I’m watching, it’s a two way process… Zigzag

Her abandon on stage was also manifested offstage with the frankness she conducted interviews often a stream of consciousness whirlwind with direct frankness that pulled the interviewer in multiple directions and made her an easy target of criticism from the music papers because of some of her wilder statements. Didn’t stop them featuring her on the cover to sell their papers though

Patti Smith I don’t consider writing a quiet, closet act. I consider it a real physical act. When I’m home writing on a typewriter, I go crazy. I move like a monkey. I’ve wet myself, I’ve come in my pants writing…instead of shooting smack, I masturbate – fourteen times in a row…I start seeing all these strange spaceships landing in the Aztec mountains… I see weird things. I see temples, underground temples, with the doors opening, sliding door after sliding door, Pharoah revealed – this bound up Pharaoh with ropes of gold. That’s how I write a lot of my poetry. Clinton Heylin, From the Velvets to the Voidoids

I really hope people jerk off to my records. This is what I’m trying for. I’m trying to write porno rock ‘n’ roll in an illuminated way, so that not only will you wet your pants but your mind will crack like an egg. That’s my project.

Also at the gig was some of the new guard that would become British punk. There was aspiring guitarist and future Slit Viv Albertine, Clash member Joe Strummer and Palmolive, who seeing Ari Up misbehaving with her mother Norah, approached her to be in a band that would become The Slits.

Others from the new breed were less impressed. They too were unhappy at the state of music, but they would be ushering in a harder different type of artier sound. Drummer Jay Dee recalls after their triumphant gig they went to the 100 Club to see a band with a ‘wacky’ name play called the Sex Pistols.

Jay Dee Daughterty The band comes on and we’re like,’WHOA!’ Before they even play the first song, John Totten says, ‘Did anybody go to the Roundhouse the other night and see the hippie shaking the tambourines? Horses, Horses, HORSESHIT.’ I said to myself, Fuck, that was a quick fifteen minutes. Please Kill Me, Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil

Why Jack Douglas

… I went through a whole different torment with Jack. Jack believes one hundred percent in his technology, which is his art. It was just more confusing. It was like a very interesting chess game, but he did confuse me. There’s always going to be a battle, because a producer has his own ego, his own vision, his own way of hearing — especially Jack, who has a sound.

The album was recorded in 3 weeks and was her second in a year. It contained the classic Radio Ethiopia a song that would become their Sister Ray, Black To Comm or even Siouxsie’s Lords Prayer that was a flexible improvisational piece that could be extended and bent out of shape depending on the feeling and circumstances.

The album wasn’t well received by all fans or critics alike, some seeing it as self-indulgent, especially the track Radio Ethiopia, and didn’t sell well getting to around #150 in the charts. Its cover was by Judy Linn this time and sees Smith almost caught unawares crouching compressed in a corner.

Doing no interviews because of the criticism of the latest album, a UK music press conference in London sees a frazzled by touring and emotional Patti Smith deteriorate into her throwing plates of sandwiches at journalists. It’s later revealed that the Melody Maker journalist Allen Jones (twat) deliberately goaded and insulted her to provoke a reaction which he duly got. (It was Melody Maker that panned Horses)

Patti, meanwhile, is loudly defending her new LP. “What do you want from me?” she screeches. “Tell me who you write for and I’ll review the record. ‘Radio Ethiopia’, the cut itself, is a very sensitive, heartfelt and courageous voyage. It’s us improvising alone in a dark studio with a hurricane coming, with the moon shitting on us.”

This is colourful stuff… what else made her such a unique performer?
“Everything I have inside me, whether it’s cosmic or telepathic or my knowledge about Egyptology or having a baby or being raped or beaten up, everything wonderful or horrible that’s ever happened to me. The temple of my experience is my body, and that’s what I use onstage.” She then announces she’s declaring war, presumably on the music press, or that part of it that’s been recently so unkind to her, which makes us all sit up. “Call me the Field Marshall if it makes you feel better,” she shouts. “I’m the Field Marshall of rock’n’roll. And I’m fucking declaring war! My guitar is my machine gun.” And with this, she storms out, faithful retainers scampering in her turbulent slipstream. I’m back at the bar before she gets to the door. Uncut Magazine, July 2012

She didn’t always help herself in her interviews, sometimes coming across as arrogant.

Patti Smith  I try to speak a lot, I have certain ideas, I write books, I try to give in a lot of different areas. I try to think of the political and spiritual ramifications of what I do and because of that I think I deserve special privileges  Zigzag #88, October 1978

By this time in 1976 keyboardist Richard Sohl had left the band worn out by the touring but would return post the Easter album.

In January 1977 disaster struck when Patti fell from a high stage while performing the extended section of Ain’t It Strange where she spins like a dervish and challenged God to make a move. In this case, she spun off the darkened stage and over an unseen monitor falling some 12 feet.

Hand of god feel the finger/hand of god I start to whirl
hand of god I don’t linger, don’t get dizzy/do not fall now
turn whirl like a dervish/turn god make a move/turn lord
I don’t get nervous oh I just move in another dimension – Ain’t It Strange

She broke a bone in her neck and needed some twenty stitches forcing the band off the road for pretty much most of 1977 which was a key time in the developing punk rock/new wave movement. It also meant her backing band went on welfare to make ends meet and worked up new songs. That said they still appeared on covers of Punk magazines and multiple punk books of the time keeping their profile going.

The enforced layoff caused her to reflect on things and in all the biographies and histories is seen by the band as the moment where they had pushed the membrane as far it would go and it then began to come back.

In the layoff, Patti pulled together poetry and prose to get ready another book that would be published in 1978 as Babel. Hey Joe was re-released by Sire and the money for that was used as seed to continue Mer records of which one of the first releases was a re-release of the classic 1973 reggae album Man Ah Warrior by Tapper Zukie. (he had joined the band on stage at the Hammersmith Odeon in November 1976 for Ain’t It Strange) and would support the band along with Subway Sect at The Rainbow in early 1978.

But before that, she had 8 months of extensive physio and recuperation (an Olympic programme of excruciating rehabilitation – Zigzag #88, October 1978) in a neck brace and then warm up back to live gigs with 9 nights at CBGB’s. She barely mentioned it, but it was a potentially life-changing injury and she must have still been in a fair amount of pain resuming gigging. Its a testament to her will and spirit that she got through it.

In November 1977 they were back in the studio with a working album title of Rock & Roll Nigger. It would be released in early 1978 and featured the single Because The Night (music Springsteen, lyrics bar the phrase ‘Because the Night belongs to lovers’ – Patti). The album and single would be top twenty hits and for some it would be her most accessible album if not most controversial due to at least one of the song titles and lyrics as well as its cover featuring Patti in an almost pe-Raphaelite pose but with armpit hair which the record company wanted to airbrush out.

In an interview with Zigzag, a clearly angry Patti about the feature also revealed that Fred Smith had written some songs for her and that plans were in motion to do a solo album with Fred and Richard Sohl of mostly poetry and to work with Todd Rundgren. However, she made it clear that the band was her main concern and more hits.

Patti Smith ..they’re my life. The band is my alternative life – it’s like I have two lives, one with my man and one with my band…my main energy at this point in my life goes to the band, and that’s my prime concern musically. Zigzag #88, October 1978

In fact her next band album Wave would be produced by Todd, who knew she was going to quit even before the recording, and released in May 1979.

At this stage Television had split – the victim of a poorly received second album and little record company support. The Heartbreakers, Richard Hell & The Voidoids and Sex Pistols had imploded and the Ramones were despairing of ever getting success and were locked into an eternal touring society recycling old songs at ever-increasing speed. The scene had changed beyond recognition with harder, faster bands.

Patti Smith I really have no patience at all for so much crap in the punk rock scene. New wave is romantically political, but all this shit sticking safety pins in cheeks and all this fucking violence, I feel, is just a style and a fad. I came into rock as a purist with a motivation to communicate, something I see as man’s greatest gift. If the kids could remember their motivation, where they came from, then the positive aspects could be developed.

It was all coming to an end. Their last ever live gig was on September 10^th and ironically So You Wanna Be A Rock & Roll Star was released on September 18th. The b side featured appropriately a studio version of Fire Of Unknown Origin; the first song she had written all those years ago,.

And that was it. Patti Smith – the link between the sixties and seventies carrying the sacred fire of rock and roll into Punk rock just stopped and had her one life with her man, getting married and raising kids.

The end was seen already by Lenny Kaye and Patti as early as March/April 1978 but no one paid attention to the words as they had just released the highly successful Easter.

Patti Smith I know that very soon I’m going to be finished in rock ‘n’ roll but there have to be others to carry it on, and whether people like me and my records or not I have always tried to be honest and to work toward the unification fo people through rock ‘n’ roll. Chris Brazier, Melody Maker, March 18, 1978

Lenny Kaye And when the time comes that we’re just going through the motions, there won’t be any Patti Smith group any more and Patti Smith will be the first to cast it into the ocean and move onto something else. NME, 1^st April 1978

James Grauerholz (William Burroughs Manager) Patti actually managed a pretty canny thing. She managed to be a rock & roll death without having to die.

She did indeed!

This is just a selection of highlights as Arista released many singles by the Patti Smith Group over 1975-79. They are all pretty consistent and all very good. She also did several guest appearances including reciting a Jim Morrison poem on Ray Manzarek’s Wake Up Screaming (1974) and the guest vocals on Blue Oyster Cult’s fabulous Revenge Of Vera Gemini from the platinum-selling Agents Of Fortune album that peaked at #29 in 1976.

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Piss Factory / Hey Joe
(Mer Records 1974)

Patti Smith It was at the time a personal anthem of extricating myself from the tedium of being a factory girl, and escaping to New York City…Of all the places, our greatest source of pride was to hear it on Max’s jukebox. We were surprised to discover that our b side, Piss Factory, was more popular than “Hey Joe”… Just Kids, Patti Smith

The A side Hey Joe was kicked off by a now typical Patti rap/meditation on what was dominating the news at the time which was the heiress Patty Hearst’s kidnap by the Symbionese Liberation Army and her captured on camera with them robbing a bank. Recorded at Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland studio, it featured Tom Verlaine on solo guitar and Lenny Kaye on guitar and bass drum. Richard Sohl added the piano.

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Gloria / My Generation
(Arista 1975)

Patti and Lenny were fucked off with the state of rock because it had lost its dangerousness and become so placid and clean. While later UK punk went ground zero and basic 3 chord thrash, for them way back in 1975 it was a return to the garage sound of the sixties. But here it was more subversive as Patti assumed a male voice and kept genders intact as she sang Gloria a male fantasy paeon to an available groupie wanting sex. Released post-album success, the b side featured a live My Generation with John Cale on bass and full of swearing which meant it was issued with a censored version stateside but uncensored in Europe.

Belgium Brussels Cirque Royal “I witnessed this concert. Actually, it was on the 10th of October 76. The audience in front of the stage (like me) went so crazy that most of the seats went broken. Even the floor of the first rows did collapse. I was even captured on the video footage of this incredible moment in my life.” Daniel Van Stichel

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Hey Joe / Radio Ethiopia (Live Version)

I’ve added this French release on the strength of its b side featuring the tour de force that is Radio Ethiopia. The song itself was slated by critics as being self-indulgent but for me, the band uses it like the Velvet Underground and Sister Ray or even Siouxsie & The Banshees’ The Lord’s Prayer. It’s a throw it all in and see what comes out free form which may sound hippy, but often produces some pure punk maelstrom. This version fuses Ethiopia with Rock N Roll Nigger and is just Patti perfection. It’s sadly not available on YouTube or Spotify.

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Because The Night / God Speed

Now a staple of classic rock radio/AOR rock. Personally, I think it’s magnificent. We all know Bruce Springsteen can overdo the bluster, but Patti makes the song her own because apart from the phrase ‘Because The Night belongs to lovers’ she wrote the rest. The story is that she was conducting a long-distance relationship with Fred Smith and they used to phone each other once a week. She waited at the allotted time but he was around 2 hours late. In that time she wrote the lyrics which is why you have the couplet “Have I doubts when I’m alone. Love is a ring, the telephone.”

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Dancing Barefoot / 54321

While Frederick was the first single this was next and it is sublime in the way that you wish a song would continue forever. Warning – this song has been covered by U2, Simple Minds, The Mission and REM and always frikkin horrifically. Leave it alone! It’s Patti’s!

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So You Want To Be A Rock’n’Roll Star / 54321/ Fire Of Unknown Origin (Arista 1979)

You know I quite like this. It’s pretty much a like for like run through of the original but it’s delivered by Patti so that’s enough. I also like that the picture cover returns to the black and white of old and even the punky lettering design of the sleeve. And to further that it features her first poem turned song Fire Of Unknown Origin which neatly bookends her career.

Horses
(Arista 1975)

Horses is striking from the moment you pick up the record and look at the cover with an androgynous Patti staring directly at the cameras and looking so goddamn self-assured. The photo was taken by long-time friend Robert Mapplethorpe in Sam Wagstaff’s penthouse apartment where the light was good. In a clean white shirt bought especially, Robert asked her to take the jacket off.

Patti Smith I fling my jacket over my shoulder, Frank Sinatra style. I was full of references. He was full of light and shade. He took a few more shots. “I got it.” How do you know?.” ” I just Know.” He took twelve pictures that day. Within a few days he showed me the contact sheet. “This one has the magic,” he said. When I look at it now, I never see me. I see us. Just Kids, Patti Smith

The album is astonishing because although fairly simple, there’s so much going on it – from the sleeve to Patti assuming an almost masculine persona through the songs subverting the archetypical sleazy groupie song Gloria. Add in the rap-like poetry and its range of subject matter from the more esoteric to Free Money remembering her mum when she was growing up dreaming of winning the lottery.

Patti Smith The gratitude I had for rock and roll as it pulled me through a difficult adolescence. The joy I experienced when I danced. The moral power I gleaned in taking responsibility for ones own actions….These things were encoded in Horses as well as a salute to those who paved the way before us. In Birdland we embarked with young Peter Reich as he waited for his father, Wilhelm Reich, to descend from the sky and deliver him. In “Break Up”, Tom Verlaine and I wrote of a dream in which Jim Morrison, bound like Prometheus suddenly broke free. In “Land”, wild-boy imagery fused with stages of Hendrix’s death. In “Elegie,” remembering them all, past present and future, those we had lost, were losing and would ultimately lose. Just Kids, Patti Smith

Patti’s chosen producer was John Cale ex of The Velvet Underground and producer of The Stooges’ first album. It was a draining & cathartic experience for both.

Patti Smith With John it was like two artists colliding, artistic mania attention… I mean with John I actually slugged him once, you know? … It was hard for me to fight with John sometimes because he believes one hundred percent in his art.

The album was released without a lead single and made #50 in the American album charts which was astonishing for a new band. The critics were pretty unanimous in praise, though Melody Maker’s comments stick out and they would play a part in later events.

The New York Times’ John Rockwell called it an “…extraordinary disc…it will shake you and move you as little else can do.” Writing for Sounds, John Ingham called it the “Record of the year. Quite simply one of the most stunning, commanding, engrossing platters to come down the turnpike since John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band.” The NME described it as having amazing “depth and level of maturity” saying it was a better first album than those debut discs of the Beatles, Stones and Dylan.

Only the Melody Maker seemed to differ in opinion when their reviewer stated, “…precisely what’s wrong rock and roll right now is that there’s too many academics pretending to be cretins and too many cretins pretending to be academics…There’s no way the contrived and affected amateurism of ‘Horses’ constitutes good rock & roll. Horses is just bad. Period” Punk Diary: 1970-1979, George Gimarc

It’s rightly called seminal, one of the best debuts ever, and no matter what people try and tell you it’s punk as fuck in attitude and playing, just a little more intelligent.

Radio Ethiopia
(Arista Records November 1976)

Ah the difficult second album. Horses had four years to gestate and mutate while Radio Ethiopia had a mere 6 months and in between relentless touring and interviews. There was also the small matter of writer’s block to overcome as well.

This is the first album as the Patti Smith Group and it was never going to be Horses parte deux. The cover to my eyes sees a slightly frazzled Patti. The whirlwind of the music industry and gigs and tours and interviews was a shock to the system but they adapted. Selecting Aerosmith/Montrose producer Bruce Douglas was a deliberate move to make a smoother more accomplished commercial album (as opposed to Cale’s more artistic torment approach) but it doesn’t quite succeed to my ears. The question is by more commercial who was she looking to appeal to? There was no alternative music back then so it could only be the rock world and the boys club music journalism and record companies that soaped each other’s backs.

When the songs are good they are very good like Radio Ethiopia, Pumping, Poppies and Pissing In A River. For me, the tour de force is Radio Ethiopia. It’s a free-form excursion into noise and dissonance and a primeval howl of Patti’s voice distorted into god knows what and is fantastic. Considering she wanted this album to be more commercial, I love the fact that this is almost commercial suicide though I can’t understand the scale of negative critical reaction to it. She also looked to expand how she used her voice on the album which is something John Cale had made her aware of.

Patti Smith He made me real aware that I had a lot of personas inherent in my vocal chords. I just thought it was an artistic thing, but John convinced me, or tried to convince me that I had like a lot of masculine, feminine or animal rhythms in my vocal chords and on this record I started bein’ able to utilize it. 

The difference she thought Douglas brought out was vulnerability and femininity.

Patti Smith  But what Jack did bring out in this record I think is that it’s a sexier record. One, because I’m older and more aware of myself and my female qualities, and also … because he’s so … macho, you know what I mean?…it was more a female/male thing and it was rough because it brought out my more vulnerable qualities…My other record seems like I felt I was a boy, a young boy … I don’t mean like a guy, I just mean boyish. Well, Johnny was the hero, anyway. On this record, the hero is me.

Patti Smith – Radio Ethiopia – 1976 – Stockholm

However, as much as I love their music their attempt at reggae, notwithstanding any lyrical brilliance, on Aint It Strange just doesn’t work to my ears (works much better live). They sounded much more competent on live sets when they covered Lloyd Parks’ Mafia (1975). Again, even if the record was commercial, I’m not sure interviews like the one below would have helped sales given how militantly religious large parts of the United States were. This is incendiary stuff challenging god and wanting to fuck him.

Patti Smith There’s a lot of messages to God. When I used to write rock and roll articles, I was always sending out secret little cryptic messages to Mick, messages to Dylan, I thought fuck it, I’m gonna go to the top. There’s so many messages to God on this record. One says “turn around God,” and then one says, “C’mon God, make a move.” It’s like challenging him sexually. You know, challenging him in the flesh … Because I think if Jesus was around, if I was a groupie, I’d really like to get behind that guy, you know what I mean?

That’s why I think Mary Magdalene was so cool, she was like the first groupie. I mean she was really into Jesus and following him around and I wish she would’ve left a diary. It’s too bad she repented because she could have left a really great diary. I mean all this stuff about Jesus, how wonderful he was, and how he’s gonna save us. All I’d like to know is if he was a good lay. That interests me. Lisa Robinson, Hit Parader, Summer-Fall 1977

Patti Smith – Ain’t It Strange – 1976 – Stockholm

And like the above, sometimes the challenge with Patti Smith’s songs is there’s just so much going on in them as this explanation by Patti herself about Poppies illustrates.

“Poppies” is the predecessor of “Land.” “Land” had three vocals, this has five and it’s very, very feminine. And the heroine is heroin as well as being about Edie Sedgwick. People won’t get that, but it is. You know that Andy Warhol book? There’s a part in there about a girl named Taxi and how she hoarded her drugs in the closet and everything. Well, it’s about Edie Sedgwick and it really affected me.

And there’s a whole section in “Poppies”: “Baby get it / baby tag it /baby horde it in the closet / baby beg for it / baby spread for it,” and that’s about Edie Sedgwick. But there are five different things goin’ on in the song. When it starts out, “heard it on the radio, it’s no good / heard it on the radio, it’s news to me,” it never tells what I heard on the radio, but it was because I was listening to the radio and DNV was foolin’ around on the piano and it said they had burnt down all the opium fields in Guam. Or I don’t know, I can’t remember, but these Asiatic countries where they grow opium and they burned down the marijuana fields in Mexico and they just kept going on about all the drugs they burned this year and it just horrified me.

So I thought about Edie Sedgwick, and how she hoarded … it was like Erik Satie used to be afraid there would be no more white handkerchiefs so he hoarded white handkerchiefs … and when he died they found 3,000 white handkerchiefs… Lisa Robinson, Hit Parader, Summer-Fall 1977

Sometimes you just want to go wooooahhhhhh! Hold on! But Poppies is astonishing where the end of the song has Patti singing & intoning in both left and right speaker and stereo center in different tones of voice.

In the end, the album wasn’t a commercial success. There was a critical and fan backlash and the record reached around #150 considerably lower than Horses which peaked at #50.

Anyways, below are a couple more reviews one from the time and one more recent from Amazon to give you a couple more views as you listen.

miliosr – 4.0 out of 5 stars Unjustly Maligned – Reviewed in the United States on October 1, 2016

As Patti Smith and her group prepared to record their follow-up to her extraordinary debut, Horses, in the Summer of 1976, Smith found that, “the flow of language that seemed infinite, that poured through my hand onto sheets of paper onto the wall and into the air, seemed to dry up as we created Radio Ethiopia. How then to communicate?” (taken from Complete: Lyrics, Reflections & Notes for the Future, 1998)

A partial solution came in the answer of Smith’s voice itself. On Horses, she utilized her very distinctive South Jersey drawl across a very broad range of sounds, from virtual whispers to incomprehensible screams. Faced (by her own admission) with a kind of writer’s/vocalist’s block in the run-up to the recording of Radio Ethiopia, she responded by exploring the limits of her voice and its capacity to make sound. Freed from the tight leash of conventional sung melody, Smith utilized her voice much like a free jazz vocalist would. She was matched in this effort by her band, who themselves adopted a much more aggressive sound for the group’s sophomore outing with many tracks having a proto-Stooges or 1968-era Velvet Underground feel to them.

The key tracks on Radio Ethiopia are “Ain’t It Strange” (Track 2) and “Radio Ethiopia/Abyssinia” (Tracks 7 and 8). The former is a “heavy” downtown semi-reggae cut that, as another reviewer pointed out, is Smith’s reenactment of the Tower of Babel story; pounding on the doors of Heaven with the full fury of rock ‘n’ roll. (Interestingly, she took her infamous fall off the stage in Tampa, FL in 1977 while performing this song.) Smith’s exploration of her voice’s potential to create sound is never less than fascinating on this track and the band surges forward and retreats backward when she does.

The title track and its coda, “Abyssinia,” are another story entirely. When Radio Ethiopia was released in Fall 1976, critics savaged these tracks unmercifully. The tracks themselves are a kind of foray into Albert Ayler-style free jazz improvisation. But unlike Ayler, who would start with a simple theme, proceed into free playing and then return to the simple theme, the Patti Smith Group never really returns from its journey into free exploration. “Radio Ethiopia”/”Abyssinia” doesn’t evolve into a freer and more enlightened. Instead, it devolves into a 12-minute discursion to nowhere. While Smith’s vocal experiments are even more pronounced on this track than on “Ain’t It Strange,” the sheer impenetrability of all this makes these tracks tough going for the listener.

Upon its release, critics savaged Radio Ethiopia for any number of imagined failings. While there were valid criticisms to be made of the title track, most critics of that era missed just how bold Smith was being by taking her voice to its absolute limit and pushing in a new creative direction (rather than making Horses 2.) Time has been kinder to Radio Ethiopia (or at least the first six tracks on it) since 1976 and several of the tracks on it have remained in Smith’s live repertory to this very day.

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Circus Magazine, December 14, 1976

On Radio Ethiopia, Patti Smith stakes out her own lost continent, and puts transmitters in Atlantis. While producer Jack Douglas (Aerosmith, Montrose) permissively allows for surreal sounds and accidents of Fate and randomness, the slave-boy band of Horses shucks its bonds and plays with genuine musical competence. Yet there is still no one making records like Patti Smith’s.

“Radio Ethiopia” is a 10-minute mood piece: bloated moons, oceans, feedback cymbals, dissonance and percussion. It could be ammunition for a tribal war, a white girl poet’s dream of a confrontation in Botswana, for example. And are those psychedelic effects we hear? Or just cries and whispers, vomit, shredding of skin? If you liked the Doors, you’ll love Radio Ethiopia.

Easter
(Arista 1978)

Ok so an unusual way to start this mini-review by comparing this album and cover to The Slits Cut but stay with it. While the Slits went topless and in loincloths to portray their pride in their womanhood, literally baring all with an iconic sleeve, this one has similar power and symbolism but is understated.

Popular opinion says this is her most commercial-sounding one and that’s in part due to the massive world hit she had with the song she wrote with Bruce Springsteen Because The Night. I’d argue that this is Patti’s most punk album. At the time of writing, she was in a long-distance relationship with Fred Smith so apart most of the time, no doubt still in pain from her accident and just getting back to live work so plenty of frustration to work out.

What Patti actually chose was a natural shot that Lynn had taken of her taking out her hairpin and looking almost pre-Raphaelite. Due to her accident, she struggled with movement so this simple task was a return to normality. She’s also dressed very simply in a cream muslin dress that was bought for her by her friend Robert Mapplethorpe. But then you notice the most prominent thing displayed is her unshaven armpit which for women was not the done thing. Arista originally airbrushed it out but had to restore it at Patti’s request and some shops thought the cover offensive, even refusing to display it on their racks which damaged its sales. Check out the headlines that occurred when actress Julia Roberts went with unshaven armpits when she attended the Notting Hill film premiere in 1999.

The original title was going to be Rock N Roll Nigger which is again one of the songs that is on the album which I would think even back in 1978 would have been kamikaze but which would have been pretty much akin to calling your album Never Mind The Bollocks.

Personally, I think this is her best most complete album and like her others, it’s like the fucking Tardis. Ostensibly on the outside, it was a rock album – on the inside it was a punk album packed full of a complex set of references, influences and symbolism.

The opener, Privilege (Set Me Free), is a cover of a song called Free Me featured in the 1967 film of the same name. Its plot is about a popular pop star called Sorter played by Manfred Mann’s lead singer Paul Jones. Sorter, in reality though is a puppet whose popularity is carefully managed by the government who use him to keep the country’s youth under control. Only an act of complete rebellion can set him free. It also features the iconic Sixties supermodel Jean Shrimpton as the girl who tries to help him defy the system. It had been in their set since 1976. Interestingly Arista canvassed opinion on this as the second single and despite it being negative, because of the subject matter and mild expletives, to their credit still released it.

You can see why the band chose it. With its church-like organ and defiant lyrics with some additional extra spice courtesy of some typical Patti sex and blasphemy and Psalm 23.

It’s not the only old song. We Three dates back to 1974 and was arranged by Tom Verlaine. Space Monkey was another old one from 1976. Most people would have been lured in by the power ballad Because The Night. Taken from a Bruce Springsteen demo, that producer Jimmy Iovine played Patti, she kept the ‘Because the night belongs to lovers’ and wrote the rest of the lyrics giving them a top 10 single and boosting the album.

Babel and Rock & Roll Nigger are the stand-out tracks and they segue into each other. Babel is like the distilled essence of Patti – an amphetamine rush of breathless machine gun orgasmic punk rapoetry complete with expletives, tumbles of words and vivid descriptions that finish with ‘I have not sold my soul to god!’

3. Offensive: Now Rare. a victim of prejudice similar to that suffered by Black people; a person who is economically, politically, or socially disenfranchised

For some reason Spotify omits the track which ruins the album so I’ve used YouTube.

25th Floor is another beauty and is about Patti and Fred Smith staying in a hotel in Detroit. It’s a rocker with an immense riff and you have to love the way Patti spits out ‘We don’t give a shit!’ in the opening lines.

Patti Smith Group | 25th Floor | Live on the Old Grey Whistle Test | 3 April 1978

The album closes off with Easter, that ostensibly is a beautiful haunting mood piece that features a number of Patti’s common themes of Rimbaud, god and rock & roll.

The title track is about Rimbaud convincing his brother and sisters one Easter Sunday (while enroute to receive their first holy communion) that the way to reach God was not through the church, but through the sky. Glorious organ and bells ring out and ‘all is glowing‘ as they begin to rise. According to the liner notes, this takes place “about a hundred years before Little Richard baptized America with rock n’ roll.” Madeline Bocaro

I would have loved to have seen the reaction of yer average rock fan buying the album on the strength of Because The Night and being confronted with the cover and the music covering religion and blasphemy, native American Indians and lines like ‘….In heart, I am Muslim, in heart, I’m an American artist and I have no guilt’ swearing poetry of a strong woman-led band. It sure wasn’t no Stevie Nicks Fleetwood Mac – this was Punk rock delivered straight to the heart of America.

The last sentence of the liner notes was enigmatic and a quote from Second Epistle to Timothy 4:7 — “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course …”

In short the below sums it up perfectly

Appearing raw and unpolished on the album cover, growling her desires and bellowing her neuroses in her music, and standing by her artistic convictions, Patti Smith demanded that women be seen on their terms, exactly as they wanted to be.

Forty years on, Easter remains a catalyst for feminism, a stronghold for lyric poetry, and an icon of blood-pumping, heart-racing, hair-raising rock and roll. 77Music Club

Wave
(Arista 1979)

The cover is once again by and loaded with meaning. The two doves traditionally symbolised true love and by the time of this album’s release, Patti had moved from New York to Detroit with Fred Smith. Indeed the opening song (and first single release) was about him and called unsurprisingly Frederick. It also sounds a little like Because The Night.

Wave offered nothing new but saw them again make the top 20 of the US charts and was their best selling album. It’s assured with some great tracks like Dancing Barefoot, Frederick and Wave and a great album to finish with but it wasn’t exactly pushing at the boundaries they themselves had redefined. In fact it’s an album more at peace with itself – no railing at god or existence or profanity.

Why Wave? Not sure the below answers it but..

Patti Smith It’s a real nice word. What I was tryin to do was soften the aggression of a salute and what was the friendliest extension of a salute? A wave. Andy Schwartz, New York Rocker, #19, June/July 1979

While Easter been democratic this was a purely Patti album and Jay Dee thought ‘Flux’ was a more appropriate title.

Jay Dee Daugherty We’re sort of feeling our way. The last album, I think a better title might have been ‘Flux’ rather than ‘Wave.’ But Patti’s in a really good frame of mind as far as working goes. . . This, one was really strongly influenced by Patti, where the last album was probably the most democratic one we’ve made—it was like five people with pretty much an equal voice. But Patti had definite ideas about this album and that’s the way we chose to follow through on it. Andy Schwartz, New York Rocker, #19, June/July 1979

In actual fact it was a wave goodbye though none of the band was aware of it at the time. As revealed by Bebe Buell in Please Kill Me, producer Todd Rungren already knew it would be her last album. Maybe Lenny Kaye knew as well given the quote below, but Ivan and Jay Dee hadn’t a scooby.

Lenny Kaye If you listen to Wave, she was saying goodbye during the entire record – no odd mystery there. We could see it coming because we’d done everything…what more rock n roll thing can you do than not make money out of it… She didn’t wanna become her own oldies act.

.. A lot of Patti’s problems stem from youth and looks being conspicuous in their absence. ..her declarations of intent have tended towards the mawkish…she really tries to be some jerks idea of a totally feminine woman, right down to the virgin white party dress…The only sleeve she was ever cute on was ‘Horses’ when she ..looked like the winner of the international “Dyke you’d like to take home contest”. Her attempts at femininity look like parodies, like drag without the padding. Julie Burchill, NME 5/579

Let’s just ignore jilted Julie though and finish on the beautiful spoken word piece Wave that finishes the album