It was as if she had suddenly remembered who (and where) she was. And from then on, the performance was peerless. “Pissing in a River,” one of the few new songs that had slipped into the set during the American tour, glistened with laconic longing, and the compulsive, hypnotic dub of “Ain’t It Strange” swirled into a breathless rap through the lurching and only occasionally melodic jam that would one day become “Radio Ethiopia,” which bled, in turn, into “Land” and “Gloria.”
Live recordings from earlier in the year, as the band ground its way in triumph across the United States, are exhilarating, but they start to sound alike after a time, as the repetition of touring dulled the performers’ instincts. No time at all separated the European shows from the American ones, but somehow the band had switched off the autopilot.
Then it was back to London, where the audience that awaited at the Chalk Farm Roundhouse was disparate and, thanks to Whistle Test, divided. Journalist Barry Miles (who “knew me when I was just a nobody,” purred Patti) described the gathering as the “regular Sunday night Roundhouse crowd, stoned and shaking sack loads of dandruff over their Levi’s, part Patti Smith cult fans, including a large number of women delighted to have someone female do for rock what David Bowie did for the males,” plus “a few fungoids and weirdoes who have come to check her out.”
Onstage, Patti’s excitement was palpable. She dressed for the album cover, but she was giggling and laughing, applauding the audience that was applauding her before she’d even sung a note, bouncing up and down on the stage like a schoolgirl unwrapping her very own pony.
Somebody shouted for “Gloria,” and Patti shouted it back at the audience. Someone laughed when she picked up her guitar; she laughed along and dedicated her next song to Keith Relf, the former lead vocalist with the Yardbirds who had died two days earlier, electrocuted by his own guitar. As “Radio Ethiopia” took form around her, Patti howled out feedback over her instrument’s yowling, and then it was into the closing salvo. “Gloria” ended the set, “My Generation” opened the encore, and the entire room gave voice to its savage denouement.
Another rap ended the night, a few lines from her poem “Neo Boy”: everything, she declared, comes down so pasturized / everything comes down16 degrees / they say your amplifier is too loud … Tic/toc tic/toc tic/toc / FUCK THE CLOCK! Then it was bang into a triumphant “Time Is on My Side,” and Patti knew, in that instant, that it was. Years later she would describe it as one of her favorite moments performing rock ‘n’ roll—the audience sang along, some weeping openly, and she reveled in the honest outpouring of emotion.
The band was back at the Roundhouse the following evening, but they also had time to explore London. Patti and Kaye caught the Rolling Stones at Earl’s Court. Then somebody suggested they pile on down to the 100 Club on Oxford Street, to catch Malcolm McLaren’s latest managerial enterprise, the Sex Pistols. Before she was halfway down the stairs, the band’s front man, Johnny Rotten, recognized Patti and swung from whichever Pistols number he was caterwauling into a sneering chorus of Horseshit! Horseshit! Horseshit!
Patti loved it, but in an interview with Mary Harron of Punk magazine, Rotten professed himself less impressed. “I don’t like Patti Smith. Just a bunch of bullshit going on about ‘Oh, yeah, when I was in high school.’ Two out of ten for effort.” But that didn’t stop him from hanging out around the hotel while the band was staying there; “the last night they had to carry her up the stairs. I liked her for that. She was such a physical wreck.”
It was all a very long way from CBGB.
10
BABELFIELD
BACK IN NEW York City, the band began preparing to record their second album. Live work was left to one side now; there was a show to play in Milwaukee, and an afternoon in Central Park to get through, but from then until a scheduled appearance in August at the Orange Festival in Nimes, France (which, in any case, would be canceled weeks later), they would all be able to sleep in their own beds and hang out with their own friends.
On July 26, 1976, Patti dropped by the Ocean Club, the new venue of former Max’s Svengali Mickey Ruskin, where John Cale was playing his own season of shows. There, a fortuitously rolling cassette captured her stepping onstage as early as the second number, “Buffalo Ballet,” to add distinctive, and distinctively haunting, backing vocals to that most plaintive of ballads, and then bouncing back just a couple of songs later to keen behind “I’m Waiting for the Man” and attempt to snatch the occasional verse. Hey, white boy, what you doin’ uptown? she shrieks, then extemporizes a line of her own, and suddenly the duet is a conversation, Patti driving between the Lou Reed composition and her own “Rock n Roll Nigger,” while Lou Reed and Talking Head David Byrne, suddenly onstage as well, strummed and rumbled behind them.
Even at the time, there was no doubt—either among the band or elsewhere—that Patti Smith’s second album was the acid test, all the more so since Horses was received as something akin to a musical secondcoming. Patti didn’t just have to meet expectations; she had to exceed them.
So while outside observers were puzzling over whom she might select as a producer, floating names such as Lou Reed, David Bowie, and even Brian Eno (whose attempts to handle Television had ended in such ignominious failure), Patti was poring through the top forty in search of a producer who would take the band and its sound in the opposite direction entirely. She’d worked with a fellow artist and the world had heard the results. Now she wanted a technician. That’s what she’d been seeking the first time around as well, but this time she was going to get one.
Even her bandmates raised their eyebrows when she first suggested Jack Douglas, but they also knew why she did it. Douglas was no ingenue. He was assistant engineer on John Lennon’s Imagine and engineer on the first New York Dolls album. He worked with Alice Cooper during that band’s tenure under the aegis of producer Bob Ezrin, and when Ezrin turned down the opportunity to produce the second Aerosmith album, it was he who recommended Douglas to them. Since that time, Douglas and Aerosmith had carved three monster records out of their relationship, and if observers thought there was a hell of a gulf between Patti Smith and Aerosmith, then that only heightened Patti’s excitement.
“I wanted to do a record that wasn’t just a cerebral experience [but] more of a physical record,” she later explained at a press conference in London covered by Allan Jones of Melody Maker. And from the moment the needle touched down on the opening “Ask the Angels,” it was clear that she had accomplished it.
Recorded at New York City’s Record Plant studios, the album would be dominated by the numbers that had been surfacing in Patti’s live set over the past year. While “Radio Ethiopia” would be the title track and the centerpiece of the record, it was the songs at the fringes that allowed the album’s heart to beat so loud. The miasmic dub of “Ain’t It Strange” was in there; so was “Distant Fingers,” which hadn’t made it onto Horses. (This time around the hypnotic rag “Chiklets” would be left on the cutting room floor, a fate it certainly never deserved—it would remain unused until the album’s mid-1990s rerelease.) The group tackled theugly “Pumping (My Heart)” and then contrasted it with the impossibly beautiful “Pissing in a River,” a passionate expression of devotion and love, set to an Ivan Kral melody that seemed almost heartbroken to be married to such a radio-unfriendly title.
Like the still-gestating “25th Floor” and “Godspeed,” “Pissing in a River” was written for Fred Smith, the man whom Patti had so recently met and whom she already knew she was destined to spend her future loving. Every move I made I move to you, she sang. And I came like a magnet for you, now. Whereas the other two songs would look back at the night the pair first met (“Godspeed” even references the coat Fred was wearing that evening), “Pissing in a River” is the declaration of togetherness, forever-ness, that would develop from that initial encounter, squeezed through the prism of uncertainty, fear, and insecurity that so often accompanies the first months of a relationship.<
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Although Fred Smith was married at the time, he and his wife, Sigrid, were in the slow process of breaking up, and he was moving into a relationship with Kathy Asheton, whose brother Scott played with Smith in Sonic’s Rendezvous Band. If a part of Patti’s unconscious mind looked back at her time with Sam Shepard and wondered whether she was stepping back into that same sad circus, nobody would have been surprised. Which is perhaps why, in “Pissing in a River,” she crafted lyrics that are a prayer to insecurity in its most painful guise.
She then turned the song over to Kral to beautify. Indeed, Kral was fast becoming Patti’s most reliable writing partner. Across Horses, Lenny Kaye had been the only band member who received a straight cowriting credit, though Kral certainly added a dignified air to Patti and Allen Lanier’s “Kimberly.” Now he was stepping wholeheartedly into the spotlight. “Ask the Angels” and “Ain’t It Strange” were both Smith/Kral compositions, and “Pumping (My Heart)” was a collaboration between them and Jay Dee Daugherty. The first record to be credited to the Patti Smith Group was clearly a group effort.
Even the dead had something to contribute—or so Patti later claimed. “I don’t care what anybody says,” she told ZigZag magazine’s John Tobler in April 1978, “I don’t care if they think I’m full of shit.” Listen to “Poppies,” she said, the song that merged with the most horrifying aspect of anew prose piece, “Babel,” about a rape taking place under the influence of gas: She lay there and the gas traveled fast / Through the dorsal spine and down and around the anal cavity. “There’s several voices, voice-overs like on Horses. There’s one voice that came out of my mouth that scared me. I’m like a little one-hundred-pound girl, you know … but the voice in it sounds just like Hendrix, and I felt just like I was being taken over. It scared me. [And] I don’t scare easy, believe me.”
Yet even this spectral encounter would be overshadowed by the freeform chaos of the title track, “Radio Ethiopia.”
Ethiopia was Rimbaud’s last real home; it is also the home of Rastafarianism, the religion whose symbols and luminaries lie at the soul of Jamaican reggae music. Marijuana is the Rastafarian sacrament. Haile Selassie, who was the country’s emperor between 1930 and his death in 1975, was Rastafari’s God Incarnate, a messiah who would lead the African people back to the golden age that slavery had stolen from them. And his father, Ras Makonnen, had been one of Rimbaud’s closest friends. Although Patti denied that she had embraced the religion itself, she did go through a period when “I was studying all aspects of Rastafarianism, including smoking a lot of pot while reading the Bible!”
Until now, she had eschewed drugs. “I regarded them as sacred and secret, something for jazz musicians or Hopi shamans,” she told Simon Reynolds of the Observer in 2005. “I hated the suburbanization of drugs in the ‘60s.” Now she felt free to explore, in the guise of the scholarship that would flavor, if not fixate, “Radio Ethiopia.”
The song was further fueled by her friend Janet Hamill’s recent return from that land. Tiring of New York City, Hamill had headed off to travel around the United States and Mexico and then caught a freighter across the Atlantic and journeyed through southern Europe and North Africa and down to Ethiopia. She’d returned in 1975 for the publication of her first collection of poems, and when she and Patti talked, their conversation frequently turned to Ethiopia—or Abyssinia, as it was known in Rimbaud’s day.
Rimbaud spent two years in Harar dealing in coffee and weapons; it was his illness alone that forced him back to France, and he was desperate to return to Abyssinia as he lay dying in the French port townof Marseille. His final letter to his sister, written the day before he died, begs her to find him some stretcher bearers, to carry him to a freighter that he knew was about to leave for Harar. “I am unable to do what I must do,” he wrote. “The first dog on the street can tell you that.”
Patti’s song, she told Stephen Foehr in the Shambhala Sun, “was exploring Rimbaud’s state of mind at that moment when he experienced perhaps the last bit of excitement in his life—the hope of returning to Abyssinia—while realizing that he wasn’t going anywhere except where God was going to take him.”
Patti felt she shared that destiny.
As the band prepared to record the track, it was still without lyrics, a ten-minute flood of power, emotion, and raw spectral energy that, at sometimes twice that length, had been climaxing Patti’s shows since her California sojourn the previous November. Live, it was a powerhouse; it often segued out of a reading of Jim Morrison’s “American Prayer,” while bass and guitar rumbled behind her, then wandered through snatches of old verse and impromptu stream of consciousness. In the studio, it became (and remains) one of Patti Smith’s most astonishing performances, and one of the group’s most pivotal: an apparently freeform but in reality deeply structured sequence of riff and melody that only slowly reveals its true nature to the listener.
Arguably, nothing that either Patti or her musicians would ever accomplish afterward could hope to surpass it, for what would be the point? “Radio Ethiopia” is a frozen moment in time, but it is a striking moment of both crisis and accomplishment. “Perhaps it was the repetition of performing, for 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,” she admitted in a note published in Patti Smith Complete. “How then to communicate? To reinvent words. Disassociate them. Redefine them.”
She flew blind. “Fuck the slang scrawled across our practice room walls,” the note continued. Words were not the be-all and end-all of poetry. Sound, too, could be words, and while Patti’s note would credit Fred Smith as being the person who, “with few words, showed me the way to draw from my instrument another language,” that realization wasonly a part of the alchemical equation that Patti first teased and then tortured from “Radio Ethiopia.”
Few people in New York City at the time have forgotten the night that the song was recorded. It was August 9, 1976, and a storm was unfolding over the city, a hurricane that had some people contemplating evacuation, and others rushing to protect their homes and businesses from the elements. At Record Plant, Jack Douglas was plugging the gaps beneath the studio doors with towels and rags and strewing newspapers across the floor in readiness for the expected deluge. Patti alone may have been aware of the full moon “setting up for the night of the Lion. The emblem of Ethiopia. The Kingdom of Sheba,” her note put it.
“Radio Ethiopia” would be recorded in a single take, one take that would last for as long as it needed to. It left nothing to chance, and everything.
“Nobody looked at each other, but we were ready,” Patti wrote. The five musicians in a circle, Patti clutching the 1957 Fender Duo-Sonic that she’d just purchased from Manny’s Guitars, and which might once have belonged to Jimi Hendrix. “Legend or not, it was mine.” She paid $110 for it, but she had no intention of learning to play it. “I was interested in expressing ideas … within the realm of sound.” And “Radio Ethiopia” flowed from there, the sound of a clothed naked woman, celebrating the storm but not feeling its impact, “just me on my knees laughing hysterically, thankful for the privilege of playing in a rock and roll band.”
She revisited the moment in a new verse, “High on Rebellion”: what i feel when i’m playing guitar is completely cold and crazy, like i don’t owe nobody nothing and it’s a test just to see how far I can relax in to the cold wave of a note.
Later, she declared that she would not be working with Jack Douglas again but admitted that he allowed the band to work at its own pace, jamming for as long as it took for them to find the rhythm they required, and that he threw aside his own instincts and not only recorded but also mixed “Radio Ethiopia” live in the studio. In fact, when Patti and the band mused on the possibility of overdubbing the track with the soundsof radios fading in and out, it was Douglas who told them to let it stand as it was, naked and unadorned.
“This is not an avant-ga
rde project of mine,” Patti had prophetically ad-libbed while performing the embryonic “Radio Ethiopia” in Paris earlier in the year. “I still want to be your valentine.” And for anybody who values intention as an art form, and sees successful execution in the defiance of all expectations, she succeeded.
With the sessions at an end, the Patti Smith Group played a couple of New York state shows at Hamilton College in Clinton and Hofstra University in Hempstead, both shows effectively previewing everything that Radio Ethiopia had to offer. The band was gearing up for its next challenge: a swift return to the now-slavering Europe for two weeks worth of gigs.
The tour fell on the very eve of release for Radio Ethiopia, an album that was already getting a rough ride from critics. Much as Patti predicted, and certainly as she expected, reviewers who had waxed platitudinous over Horses simply failed to comprehend the new disc; they demanded to know what had happened to the poetry, slammed the heavy tracks as mutant metal, condemned the ballads for being too pretty.
“Patti Smith certainly has one hell of a lot to answer for,” growled Marianne Partridge’s review in Melody Maker. “Not only does she unashamedly use her band as a backcloth for her pretentious ‘poetic’ ramblings, but she simultaneously comes on as the savior of raw-power rock and roll as it struggles to survive the onslaught of esoteric rock. In other words, she’s into the myth-making business. And in this, her second album, the myth is exposed … as cheap thrills.”
That, perhaps, was only to be expected; Melody Maker had scarcely been supportive either of Patti or of the fast-collecting storm clouds of punk. But Rolling Stone’s Dave Marsh was also dismissive: “While Smith can be an inventive, sometimes inspired writer and performer, her band is basically just another loud punk-rock gang of primitives, riff-based and redundant. The rhythm is disjointed, the guitar chording trite and elementary…. Smith obviously would like to be just another rock singer, with a band that could reach a broad, tough teenage audience. Ceding control to a band that lacks her best qualities and encourages herworst … is hardly the way to go about it.” Marsh also drew an utterly mystifying parallel between the “vulgar” “Pissing in a River” and the “transcendent quality” of “Piss Factory”—two songs that surely have nothing more in common than the very different meaning of a single term in their titles.
Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story Page 16