Into your starry eyes, baby. Patti Smith has been on tour all year, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Horses, her classic punk debut, released in November 1975. She brought the show to New York last week, and ripped it up at the Beacon Theater. She was having so much fun, she did “Gloria” three times, which is insane, but it got wilder each go-round. And all three times she held back on the punch line. For the finale, she taunted the crowd: “Jesus died for somebody’s siiiiins…thank you, Jesus!”
She knew the crowd came to see her strut, and she delivered for two nights. Still a dynamite dancer at 79, she came to flaunt the convulsive rock & roll rhythms in her bones — she’s the punk who always said she learned to walk by watching Bob Dylan in Don’t Look Back. She stretched out “Kimberly” into a long killer R&B groove so she and her guitar soulmate Lenny Kaye could do the frug. The whole night was an exhilarating rush of G-LO-R-I-A in excelsis dea.
Her band is a family affair all the way. Kaye has been by her side on guitar for her poetry readings in the early 1970s. Jay Dee Daugherty was her drummer on Horses; Tony Shanahan has been with her on piano, bass, guitar, and vocals since her 1996 creative rebirth; the guitarist happens to be her son Jackson. Her daughter Jessie came out to play piano for the encore.
She’s also just published one of her most powerful books, Bread of Angels. She’s written quite a few memoirs, but this one is her toughest since Just Kids, getting down and dirty about topic she’s never discussed in such candor — her marriage to MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Youth, her years of isolation in Detroit, and her grief as a young widow of 48 after his death in 1994. She did a touching version of “Because the Night” dedicated to her husband, recalling how she took Bruce Springsteen’s demo and wrote her own words “for the great love of my life, Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith.”
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Horses is a perfect album that never fades, the kind that few of her heroes even got close to. I don’t know about you, but for me it breaks down to: 1. “Gloria” 2. “Land” 3. “Kimberly” 4. “Birdland” 5. “Break It Up” 6. “Redondo Beach” 7. “Elegie” 8. the one Sammy Hagar covered. (So why hasn’t Patti tried “I Can’t Drive 55”?) There’s no way she could have stopped these rabid fans from chanting madly at peak lines like “Make her mine! Make her mine!” or “I like it like that! I like it like that!”
She made the dubious choice to add “So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star,” one of the lamest songs either she or the Byrds ever recorded, but at least she played some awesomely inept feedback guitar. She also ripped the current President a new one or three in “Birdland” and “Land” and the one-two finale of “Ghost Dance” and “People Have the Power.” During “Land,” she proved that no-no-no-nobody can do the Twist, the Pony, the Watusi, or the Mashed Potato like she can do.
At one point she departed the stage for a break, leaving the boys in the band alone to do a 15-minute medley of Television classics. As Kaye said, they wanted to celebrate not just the 50th anniversary of Horses, but the legendary six-week CBGB residency the Patti Smith Group in the spring of 1975 with “our sibling band.” They graciously dedicated “See No Evil,” “Friction,” and the inexhaustible “Marquee Moon” to the memory of the late Tom Verlaine.
But as Patti Smith proclaimed at one of those 1975 CBGB gigs with Television, she’s got that “assassinatin’ rhythm.” She did a ferocious version of “Dancing Barefoot,” her mystic rant on sex and death and levitation, a heartfelt ode to Sonic Smith. She told a great story about “Dancing. Barefoot” at her NYC book launch a couple of weeks ago — the record company wanted her to change the line “come on like some heroine” because they assumed it was a drug reference. “I said, ‘You know, ‘heroine’? Like a female hero?’” she recalled. “Just a little window of how tough it was to be a girl in the Seventies.”
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Horses has never lost any of its fire over the years because her poetic voice was always rooted in the beats of doo-wop and R&B. When she first began performing with Kaye, she’d do Fifties slow-dance classics like “Down the Aisle of Love,” turning it into the love song of Scherezade from the Thousand and One Nights, or the Motown oldie “The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game.” But rock & roll rhythm always came first with her. Ranting in her South Jersey dirtbag voice, she came on more like the Shangri-La’s than any Beat poet. She filtered her Rimbaud through Ronnie Spector, just as “Land” turned him into the Leader of the Pack, with a leather jacket, a switchblade, and a date with danger.
But the highlight of the show was the most underrated Horses classic: “Kimberly,” a love song on the birth of her baby sister, set to the doo-wop shuffle of Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs’ “Stay.” I would humbly submit “Kimberly” as the best song anyone’s ever written about having a little sister. You’re just a kid, but then a new baby suddenly enters your world, and everything is different now. You hold her close — “the babe in my arms in her swaddling clothes” — and it dawns on even your young mind that she is a permanent piece of weirdness and chaos and noise and mystery. Your world is suddenly so much more full of wonder and surprise. I love how there’s no angst or drama in this song — how emotionally one-dimensional it is, the crazed psychedelic ecstasy in her voice as Patti gazes into her sister’s starry eyes and sees the universe.
“Stay” was a wildly popular oldie in the Seventies, one of the decade’s favorite Fifties tunes. Jackson Browne scored a great Top Ten hit in 1978 by turning it into a rock star’s plea to his audience. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band teamed up with Browne, Tom Petty, and Rosemary Butler for a knockdown live version on the 1979 movie soundtrack No Nukes. But nobody rocks it like Patti and the boys. At the Smith tribute concert at Carnegie Hall this spring, Susanna Hoffs did a fantastic “Kimberly,” which is perfect since the Bangles turned it into their Eighties hit “If She Knew What She Wants.”
She milked the egomaniac bravado of “Gloria,” with that great moment where she salivates over “20,000 girls call their names out to me” and climbs up on Shanahan’s piano so he can join her in the boast, “Marie! Ruth! But to tell you the truth!” (It was a trip seeing her sing that line at Madison Square Garden, almost exactly 13 years ago in November 2012, for a packed arena of 20,000 fans there to see Neil Young and Crazy Horse.) She’s never lost her devout belief that pop-music fandom is the ultimate gnosis. To be Patti Smith is to believe—no, to know — that not even Rimbaud saw his own Illuminations as clearly as you can as a Rimbaud fan. And to be a Patti fan is to chase those illuminations in your own life, in any song you hear on the radio and claim as your own.
Seeing her raise hell with this band she’s led for 50 years, playing the songs that really did turn the world into a stadium of Maries and Ruths calling out her name, it was like one of her teenage punk rock dreams come true. It conjured up the raw “Gloria” she did in 1975 on WBAI, the New York community radio station, from the legendary bootleg Free Music Store. She turns “Gloria” into the fantasy of a rock star looking back on her early days. “She was standing in the stadium,” Smith raves. “And she looked back at the things that put her there today! She thought about when she wanted to talk about the power of the word! And she met a boy who would follow her!”
That would be Lenny Kaye, joined by her original pianist, the late Ivan Kral — “he could do the Watusi on the ivory keys!” She prays over the radio for a drummer somewhere to come find them. (“I know you’re out there!” Little did she know she’d get so lucky with Daugherty.) But the sweet young thing she plans to conquer? The muse she wants to seduce and take up to her room and take the big plunge? That sweet young thing is rock & roll herself. “Oh, it’ll feel so good! Oh it’ll feel so fine! When I feel the day, rock & roll, I made you miiiine! Made you miiiine!”
It’s an astounding act of hubris. Patti hasn’t even released Horses yet — virtually her entire radio audience is hearing “Gloria” for the first time. She’s a complete unknown outside the Bowery. But the whole history of Horses — the whole epic story of Patti Smith and everything she’s built over the past amazing 50 years— is already there in that moment. She’s already looking back at how she conquered the world that she never even pretended to doubt was hers for the claiming. And look at her now. Made you mine. Made you mine. Made you mine.
Her remarkable new Bread of Angels is a book full of grief. She did a NYC book launch a couple weeks before the Beacon shows, on November 4 — which happened to be Robert Mapplethorpe’s birthday as well as her husband’s passing day. In a nicely melodramatic touch — her specialty, right? — it was also the night New York got a new mayor who quoted Eugene Debs in the first line of his victory speech.
But she’s way out of her comfort zone writing about her grief, which is why Bread is so moving. She discusses Gone Again, her album of intense bereavement, one she’s never liked discussing or performing — as she admits in the book, it made her feel too exposed. Like Beyoncé — her secret twin in so many ways — she prefers to play the superhero, not the victim, so her self-portrait of her idealized marriage was called Dream of Life just as Bey’s was called Life Is But a Dream, yet both dreams sounded facile compared to the tough talk of Gone Again or Lemonade.
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There’s a story in the book I simply can’t get out of my skull — I think about this detail several dozen times a day. Her 12-year-old son Jackson meets Bruce Springsteen, and they talk motorcycles. Jackson mentions that his late dad planned to take him for his first bike ride for his thirteenth birthday. So Bruce shows up at Patti’s house and takes her son out for his first ride, taking up the promise Fred Smith didn’t get to keep. Jesus. The easy move would have been to frame this as a cute “isn’t Bruce amazing” story, but for Smith it’s a defeat. It’s just another painful memory from the worst era of her life. She didn’t want to tell this story. (She buries it halfway through a paragraph.) Can you blame her? The youthful arrogance of a line like “my sins, my own, they belong to me”—that’s one of the first things you lose as a widow. That’s what makes the book so moving. But maybe that’s why she kept refusing to give the crowd the final “but not mine” climax they expected.
At her Horses show, she honored the grief in her music, with her poignant tributes to her husband, her parents, her brother, her absent friends, as well as dead rock-star heroes like Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and (for that matter) Jesus. But make no mistake — she made sure this show was devoted to joyful noise. She came out to rock and roll and hump that cosmic parking meter and bring a crowd to our dancing — though not bare — feet, the way only she can. The entire night felt like a historic celebration of how far she and her music have traveled, ever since she conquered the world and made it hers. Just like Patti Smith had it all planned out already when she was dropped Horses 50 years ago. G-L-O-R-I-A, forever.
