Patti Smith has been touring throughout the year to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Horses, her celebrated debut album released in November 1975. Last week she performed in New York and rocked the Beacon Theater. She had so much fun that she played “Gloria” three times, which is crazy, but it got wilder each time. At the finale, she teased the audience: “Jesus died for someone’s sins…thank you, Jesus!”
Smith knew the audience had come to see her dance, and she delivered for two nights. At 79, the singer is still a dynamic dancer and came to showcase the frantic rock ‘n’ roll rhythms in her bones.
A band like a family
Their band is a purely family affair: Kaye has accompanied them on guitar since their poetry readings in the early 1970s. Jay Dee Daugherty was her drummer on “Horses.” Tony Shanahan has been there on piano, bass, guitar and as a singer since their creative rebirth in 1996. The guitarist even happens to be her son Jackson. Her daughter Jessie eventually joined to play piano for the encore.
Smith also just published one of her most powerful books: Bread of Angels. She’s written several memoirs, but this is her most powerful since “Just Kids,” in which she openly explores topics she’s never spoken about so openly before – 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 performed a moving version of “Because the Night,” which she dedicated to her husband, and recalled how she took Bruce Springsteen’s demo and wrote her own words “for the great love of my life, Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith.”
The timeless power of “Horses”
Horses is a perfect album that never loses its relevance in a way few of its heroes have ever managed. It was impossible to stop the night’s fanatical fans from shouting during highlights such as “Make her mine! Make her mine!” or “I like it like that! I like it like that!” to sing along.
Smith made the dubious decision to add “So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star,” one of the dullest songs she or the Byrds ever recorded, but at least she played some fantastically awkward guitar feedback. She also tore apart the current president in “Birdland” and “Land” as well as in the double finale “Ghost Dance” and “People Have the Power.” During “Land” she proved that no one can do the twist, the pony, the watusi or the mashed potato like she can.
A touching nod to television
At one point she left the stage for a break, leaving the boys in the band to play a 15-minute medley of Television classics. As Kaye said, they wanted to celebrate not only the 50th anniversary of Horses, but also the Patti Smith Group’s legendary six-week CBGB residency in the spring of 1975 with “our sister band.” They 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 CBGB television gigs in 1975, she’s got that “assassinatin’ rhythm.” She performed a wild version of “Dancing Barefoot,” her mystical tirade about sex and death. It’s a profound ode to Sonic Smith.
A few weeks ago at her book launch in New York she told a great story about “Dancing Barefoot” – the record company wanted her to change the line “come on like some heroine” because they assumed it was a reference to drugs. “I said, ‘Do you know what a heroine is? A heroine?'” she recalled. “Just a glimpse of how hard it was to be a girl in the 70s.”
“Horses” has lost none of its power over the years because her poetic voice has always been rooted in the beats of doo-wop and R&B. When she first started performing with Kaye, she played slow-dance classics from the ’50s like “Down the Aisle of Love” and turned them into the Scherezade love song from “One Thousand and One Nights” and the Motown oldie “The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game.”
But rock and roll rhythms always came first for them. With her gravelly South Jersey voice, she seemed more like the Shangri-La’s than a beat poet. She filtered her Rimbaud through Ronnie Spector, the way “Land” made him leader of the pack, complete with leather jacket, switchblade and a date with danger.
The underestimated greatness of “Kimberly”
But the highlight of the show was Horses’ most underrated classic: “Kimberly,” a love song about the birth of her little sister set to the doo-wop shuffle of Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs’ “Stay.” Perhaps the best song ever written about a little sister.
“Stay” was a hugely popular oldie in the 1970s, one of the most popular songs of the 1950s in that decade. Jackson Browne scored a major 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 to record a stunning live version for the soundtrack of the 1979 film No Nukes. But nobody rocks like Patti and the boys. At the Smith tribute concert at Carnegie Hall this spring, Susanna Hoffs played a fantastic “Kimberly,” which was perfect since the Bangles turned it into their ’80s hit “If She Knew What She Wants.”
Smith took full advantage of the self-centered swagger of “Gloria” with that great moment where she gloats about “20,000 girls calling me their names” and climbs onto Shanahan’s piano so he can join her in her boast: “Marie! Ruth! But To Tell You The Truth.”
She never lost her strong belief that pop music fandom is the ultimate religious experience. To be Patti Smith is to believe – no, to know – that not even Rimbaud saw his own “Illuminations” as clearly as you do as a Rimbaud fan. And being a Patti fan means chasing those epiphanies in your own life, in every song you hear on the radio and claiming as your own.
Seeing her raise hell with this band she’s led for 50 years, playing the songs that have truly turned the world into a stadium full of Maries and Ruths chanting her name, was like the fulfillment of one of her teenage punk rock dreams.
It evoked the raw “Gloria” she played on WBAI, New York’s community radio station, from the legendary Bootleg Free Music Store in 1975. She transforms “Gloria” into the fantasy of a rock star looking back to her beginnings.
It’s an astonishing act of hubris. Patti hasn’t even released “Horses” yet – virtually her entire radio audience is hearing “Gloria” for the first time. She is completely unknown outside the Bowery. But the entire story of “Horses” — the entire epic story of Patti Smith and everything she has built over the last amazing 50 years — is already there in this moment. She is already looking back on the conquest of the world that she never for a moment doubted was hers. And look at them now.
Her remarkable new book, Bread of Angels, is filled with sadness. She introduced it a few weeks before the Beacon shows in New York on November 4th – coincidentally, this was both Robert Mapplethorpe’s birthday and the anniversary of her husband’s death. In a beautifully melodramatic gesture – 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.
Vulnerability and strength
But she steps out of her comfort zone when she writes about her grief, which is exactly why “Bread” is so moving. She talks about Gone Again, her album about intense grief, which she never liked talking about or performing – as she admits in the book, it left her feeling too exposed. Like Beyoncé – in many ways her secret twin sister – she prefers to play the superhero rather than the victim, so her self-portrait of her idealized marriage was called “Dream of Life,” as was Bey’s “Life Is But a Dream,” but both dreams sounded superficial compared to the harsh words in “Gone Again” or “Lemonade.”
There’s a story in the book that sticks with you: Her 12-year-old son Jackson meets Bruce Springsteen and they talk about motorcycles. Jackson mentions that his late father planned to take him on a motorcycle for the first time for his thirteenth birthday. So Bruce shows up at Patti’s house and takes her son on his first ride to make good on the promise that Fred Smith couldn’t keep.
My God. It would have been easy to portray this as a cute “Isn’t Bruce great” story, but for Smith it’s a defeat. It’s just another painful reminder of the worst time of her life. She didn’t want to tell this story. (She hides it in the middle of a paragraph.) Can you blame her? The youthful arrogance of a line like “My sins, my own, they are mine” – that is one of the first things you lose as a widow. That’s what makes the book so moving. But perhaps that’s why she refused to give the audience the expected “Gloria” climax “But Not Mine.”
Celebrate despite sadness
At her “Horses” show, Smith acknowledged the sadness in her music with poignant tributes to her husband, her parents, her brother, her late friends, as well as late rock star heroes like Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and (for that matter) Jesus.
But make no mistake – she ensured that this concert was all about happy sounds. She came out to climb this cosmic parking meter and make the audience dance—though not barefoot—as only she can. The entire evening felt like a historic celebration of how far she and her music have come since she conquered the world and made it her own. Just like Patti Smith, who had it all planned out when she released “Horses” 50 years ago. GLORIA Forever.