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Patti Smith
Horses / Horses
Arista / Columbia / Legacy
82876711982
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Disc One: HORSES - 1975
Recorded and Mixed 1975 at Electric Lady Studios, NYC
1. Gloria (5:53)
In Excelsis Deo (P. Smith)
Gloria (Version) (V. Morrison)
2. Redondo Beach (3:24)
(P. Smith-A. Sohl-L. Kaye)
3. Birdland (9:14)
(P. Smith-A. Sohl-L. Kaye-I. Kral)
4. Free Money (3:50)
(P. Smith-L. Kaye)
5. Kimberly (4:25)
(P. Smith-A. Lanier-I. Kral)
6. Break It Up (4:00)
(P. Smith-T. Verlaine)
7. Land: (9:25)
Horses (P. Smith)
Land Of A Thousand Dances (C. Kenner)
La Mer (De) (P. Smith)
8. Elegie (2:41)
(P. Smith-A. Lanier)
9. My Generation (3:21)
(P. Townsend)
______________________________________________________
Patti Smith - Vocals
Lenny Kaye - Guitar
Richard Sohl - Piano
Ivan Kral - Guitar, Bass
Jay Dee Daugherty - Drums
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Guitars on "Break It Up" - Tom Verlaine (Television)
Guitars on "Elegie" - Allen Lanier (Blue Oyster Cult)
Bass on "My Generation" - John Cale
"Birdland" was inspired by Peter Reich and Huey Smith
Horses Arista LP AL 4066
Produced by John Cale
Engineered by Bernie Kirsh
Assistant Engineer: Frank D'Augusta
Design: Bob Heimall
Special appreciation to Jeff Jones and Rosemary Carroll
Special appreciation to Clive Davis and Jane Friedman
Additional thanks to: Mark Feldman, Gail Marowitz, Steven Sebring, Glenn Max and friends at Royal Festival Hall
Cover photograph: Robert Mapplethorpe
2005 Photographs: Melodie McDaniel
Art Direction and Design: Gail Marowitz
Additional Photographs: Robert Mapplethorpe, David Gahr, Claude Gassian, Lenny Kaye, the Arista Archives, Patti Smith Personal Archives
www.pattismith.net
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DISC 2: HORSES - 2005
Recorded June 25, 2005, Royal Festival Hall, London, England
1. Gloria (7:00)
In Excelsis Deo (P. Smith)
Gloria (Version) (V. Morrison)
2. Redondo Beach (4:29)
(P. Smith-A. Sohl-L. Kaye)
3. Birdland (9:52)
(P. Smith-R. Sohl-L. Kaye-I. Kral)
4. Free Money (5:29)
(P. Smith-L. Kaye)
5. Kimberly (5:29)
(P. Smith-A. Lanier-I. Kral)
6. Break It Up (5:23)
(P. Smith-T. Verlaine)
7. Land: (17:35)
Horses (P. Smith)
Land Of A Thousand Dances (C. Kenner)
La Mer (De) (P. Smith)
8. Elegie (4:59)
(P. Smith-A. Lanier)
9. My Generation (6:59)
(P. Townsend)
______________________________________________________
Patti Smith - Vocals
Lenny Kaye - Guitar, Vocals
Jay Dee Daugherty - Drums
Tony Shanahan - Piano, Bass
Tom Verlaine - Guitar
Flea - Trumpet, Bass
______________________________________________________
Recorded by Emery Dobyns
Mixed by Emery Dobyns and Tony Shanahan
All songs on CD 2 are previously unreleased live versions
Re-mastered in 2005 by Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound, Inc.
Produced for reissue by Bruce Dickinson
Product Managers: Mark Feldman and Lisa Buckler
______________________________________________________
All Songs Published by Linda Music Corp. (ASCAP); except "Gloria" also Published by Bernice Music (BMI), admin. by Unichappell Music, Inc.; "Break It Up" Published by Verlaine Music/Druse Music (ASCAP); "Land" also Published by EMI Longitude Music (BMI). "My Generation" Published by Rada Dara Music (BMI). All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.
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compacted awareness .. gems flattening .. long streams of resin tools .. kool system of destine wax sculpt..drums tongue and waves slapping .. the feel of horses long before horses enter the scene .. molten tar stud dead w/bones and glass and the teeth of women ... veins filled w/existance .. beyond race gender baptism mathmatics politricks ... assassinating rythum .. c-rude transending .. soul-ar energy in the shape of a laughing pack of scarabs dressed in coats of milk armour..grace greased w/merc and henna ... hair wires .. neither the desire nor the ability to stop i plop on the bed pink electric immediate some human light bulb these bands around my neck should reveal what state i'm in .. only history (gentle rocking mona lisa) seals .. only histoire is responsible for the ultimate cannonizing .. as for me i am truly totally ready to go ...
sonic klein man its me my shape burnt in the sky its me the memoire of me racing thru the eye of the mer thru the eye of the sea thru the arm of the needle merging and jacking new filaments new risks etched forever in a cold system of wax .. horses groping for a sign for a breath ...
charms. sweet angels - you have made me no longer afraid of death.
The pursuit of style has always been a spirited part of the work process. Images that inform the work or the movement of the work. Baudelaire's cravat. June Christie's careless ponytail. A raincoat a la Camus. Bob Dylan's snap tab collar. Black capris like Ava Gardner. Discarded finery from rich heaps. Italian sunglasses. Green silk stockings. Ballet slippers. Boxer shoes. A sense of style. A certain body language. A simple, intricate gesture. More often than not, bred from innocence, awkwardness or pure survival.
I overslept the day we shot the cover of Horses. I dressed hastily in the clothes I wore, like a uniform, on the stage and in the street. Robert worked swiftly, wordlessly. He had a nervous, confident manner. He had no assistant. There was a triangle of shadow he wanted. The light was changing. The triangle fading. He asked me to remove my jacket because he liked the white of my shirt. I tossed the jacket over my shoulder Sinatra-style, hopefully capturing some of his casual defiance. That was the shot Robert chose.
When I look at it now, I believe we captured some of the anthemic artlessness of our age. Of our generation. A breed apart who sought within a new landscape to excite, to astonish, and to resonate with all the possibilities of our youth.
______________________________________________________
Gloria
Hark ye, the little lower layer. All visible objects, as Ahab told us, are but pasteboard masks. But in each event, each living act, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If you follow me so far, I'm saying this record is about one's relationship with God, one's relationship with oneself, one's relationship with sex, and, not least, one's relationship with one's heritage: those monumental achievements that came before - like Them (or Van Morrison)’s "Gloria" - and pierced the veil of this reality the first time, Patti Smith is the herald for a new moment in rock and roll, third generation. She quotes Chuck Berry by quoting the Rolling Stones; lights candles to Hendrix and Jim Morrison; writes crazed brilliant anarchic poetry using "Land of 1000 Dances" as a lyrical and spiritual reference point.
She is not being cute. She is telling her truth. She is reaching for the thing behind the mask.
To do this, she puts on the mask. "Piss Factory," Patti's self-published 1974 single, was a great record; "Gloria," the single off her 1975 debut album Horses, is even better, a shout of pure joy and a shot of pure adrenaline - an unforgettable, irrevocable declaration of existence. Notice me, universe! Her song, which is not Van Morrison's "Gloria" but which contains and overlaps (or lapses into) it, begins with an invocation, an assertion, a blasphemous boast, and ends neatly with the same phrase repeated as final climax and benediction: (slow and deliberate) "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine." This is a Catholic girl's proclamation of independence, in the breach because the very need to make it shows, one is not as free as one might wish. A gambit, then. She steps forth proudly with impeccable attitude: "People say beware, but I don't care [sneer]/The words are just rules and regulations to me."
And then the story of a lesbian love affair. In the front part of the story, the singer is asserting her coolness ("I go to this here party and I just get bored") which is broken only by sexual desire ("I look out the window, see a sweet young thing ... oh, she looks so good"), sexual fantasy that suddenly becomes real as the love object approaches ("here she comes!") and makes herself available for taking. The actual consummation takes place offstage on the single, a minute has been cut from the album version for reasons of propriety or, more probably, time; musically the track is stronger for the telescoping, but a key scene is lost (or made implicit) - "I look up at this big tower clock and say, 'Oh my god, it's midnight!' And my baby, she's walking through the door ... she whispers to me..."
The song explodes into its centerpiece, Patti challenging Van Morrison and all the gods of her childhood, or rather challenging herself to strut up to them as an equal. With sublime support from her band (which has been with her each step of the way, making uncompromising, flawless rock and roll to match every mood and movement of her operetta), she sings "And her name is, and her name is ... " and then bursts into the call-and-response, spell-it-out chorus of "Gloria," reaching for the sexiest and most powerful music she's heard in her whole life, measuring herself against the masters. And (breathless moment) she succeeds, and enters the ranks of the Immortals. The rest of the song reveals that this cocky seductress has fallen in love, other girls visit but "I didn't hear them, I didn't see/I let my eyes ride to the big tower clock/And I heard those bells talking in my heart, going 'DING DONG DING DONG DING DONG DING DONG DING DONG DING DONG DING DONG DING DONG'/Remember the time, when you came in my room ... "
The quotes from the earlier song are brilliant: "so good," "and her name is," and the extraordinary buildup as lover approaches street, house, door, room. Most amazing of all though is what the daughter poet/storyteller/rock and roller does with the opening image of that song ("She comes around here just about midnight"): add the bells, and discovers that sex and God and love are inseparable after all, strut though we may.
"If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me." "And her name is, and her name' is, and her name is, and her name is ... "
Written by Paul Williams
Rock and Roll:
The 100 Best Singles
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All wisdom can be found between the eyes of a horse – The Qur’an
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Sing Goddess.
Of things now past but not forgotten. It's 1975 OK. Avery Fisher Hall, home of the NY Philharmonic, sanctified space under Bernstein & Boulez, about to be re-energized as the 1st Big-Box Venue for Patti, in honor of the release of Horses. A full house is in the house. Two Goddesses have converged. The ancient antagonists, Aphrodite and Athena back at it for one more fall that's all. Taking a back seat for once, though seated in the front row, the world's de facto reigning sex goddess, Marilyn Chambers, the Queen of Porn herself, is perched for good view of the stage. As above so below, Aphrodite for a Day, know your competition. Above her, was the Girl with the Tie, Patti Smith, commanding the stage with full panoply of Athena's playbook. From onset of Patti Smith's project way back with Jesse James, live in 1971 w/ Lenny Kaye (one time only and ever only so) at St Mark's in the Bowery, the Athenoid parallelisms have been too dense for mere coincidence:
Wisdom, Fury, Poetry, Guardian of Heroes, the Merciless Heart, Tamer of Horses. Athena was the archetypal Tamer of Horses. Incarnation or possession, perhaps, but, mere coincidence, never. As above so below, the dance of the archetypes begins. Needles and Pins. Two Goddesses on the track; but one of them will sing. "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine!'
That there's no such thing as coincidence. That Patti Smith often hung w/ the alien that ran the Saucer News Book Store over at 45th Street on the West Side of Manhattan. That he was not human. That Patti would wind up 30 years later, totally by coincidence, with the sign that hung outside that store, when she discovered it on a wall of the house she was about to buy. That Birdland was written with crop circles in mind and UFO's on the brain when no one even knew what crop circles were. That Wilhelm Reich, who's at the controls, in, and whose son is inhabitant, of, Birdland, wrote The Mass Psychology of Fascism. That what Patti Smith stands for, now and forever, issues a challenge to the very existence of essentially pessimistic Mass Cult Fascist Art and by extension to the more insidious propagation of industrial music objects which utilize entrainment by repetition and commodity fetish compulsion as compliance mechanisms to first captivate, with exclusionary repetition like airplay, then to capture, their captive audiences. That the Cult Patti simultaneously embodies and serves is of the truth that music is born of invention, adventure, of paradoxical limitless individuation: Love Minus Zero/No Limit. That the truth is music is neither wallpaper, nor means of entrainment; neither vehicle of domination, nor of its mass psychology; neither an industry, nor industrial. That when music is treated as if it is of that kind, then what we get is more of what we've got now and no more Horses. That for exposing The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich got run out by the 3rd Reich. That as a function of insights developed earlier around his Mass Psychology, in the late 1940's thru mid 1950's, Wilhelm Reich went on to dream up a comprehensive theory of the great world systems, even accounting for UFO's, the age of which was first dawning. That this theory anticipates and encompasses the X-Filing Corpus Mulder/Sculley. That this theory got him run off the Planet (i.e. he died in prison) by his next government, the same US government that brought leading lights of the 3rd Reich home to build Space Ships in Area 51 ,White Sands and Huntsville, Alabama. That Moon of Alabama written by Kurt Weill (also run out by 3rd Reich), not Steven Foster, was covered by the Doors and eventually recovered by Patti's Crew on Brecht/Weill night at her London Meltdown in 2005. That Horses now closes with a 3rd cover ( ... beyond Van Morrison and Cannibal and the Headhunters ... ) and that cover is the Who's My Generation. That on the night of her Meltdown, the night when Patti's band played all of Horses from cover to cover, for the first time, live, in the order it was recorded, Patti revealed the corrosive irony that dare not speak its name: That Our Generation had given the world George Bush.
There is a geography of Horses. Its territory is divided into two parts: Birdland and The Land of a Thousand Dances. They are the same but different. Twins again, since we've seen this before. Twin states of mind, of matter ... ? As above so below. Upper and Lower Egypt, The Twin Towers, Places Charmed and Ordinary, the State of Maine and New Orleans ... Twins again, but not identical. Perhaps "twinned" would be better. Each twin influences the other, but, their differential "gravities" disruptively interact to produce unpredictable dynamical outcomes. With chaotic perturbations in the orbits of their spheres of influence and dialectical chaos at their structural core. The center will not hold. Actually there is no center. This territory has no capitol city. When systems collapse like this, for better or worse, liberation attends. Not just of, and, from things. But of, and, from process itself. Including the process of language. Within the concept logic boundaries of Horses transit is possible without transition. Transformation is possible without process. To get anywhere it's not necessary to go through somewhere. Transformation Direct, that's the ticket. With Horses, truly the transformational generator's on interstellar overdrive and all wormholes fully activated. There are no loops but Mobius and Patti Smith is their prophet. And the radical, clearly counterintuitive leaps of lyrical faith that characterize the "texts" of Birdland, Land, Kimberly, Free Money, Redondo Beach ... all pass for intuitively logical in the final analysis. Free Money/Free Language. If poetry like music is born of invention, adventure, of paradoxical limitless individuation, then the first principle of Patti's excellent adventure w/ Horses was to bet the ranch on a poetic language that directly transforms itself by means of clearly counterintuitive unstaged leaps of word faith, that, wind up being perceived at the other end of the combinatorial wormhole as inevitable intuitive logic. As if creation of Horses somehow entailed the simultaneous running of an infinite number of data loops, and, where they stopped and started nobody knows, nor, cares, since, all their data are already mapped for previously unknown intuitive validity anyway. As if by coincidence. Or paradox of limitless individuation. Or by virtue of Patti Smith, Our Lady of Perpetual Intuition's Greater Magdalenic Cloud of Grace. Consider, for example, the dialectical orbit of Patti Smith and Chris Carter, the X Files/Millennium Creation God. That Chris Carter would cut Lara Means' awesomely creepy revelation overload sequence from "Time is Now," the 1998 Millennium season finale, to the full 9 minutes and 26 seconds entirety of Land, closes the Mobius Loop that Patti opened 25 years earlier with Birdland, her comprehensive premonitory dream of Domaine Mulder/Sculley, dreamt up before anyone had ever dreamt of an X File.
Pulling out of Birdland. On the Glossolalia Moonlight Express. Riding the Trend Line. Somewhere near the end of the Line. Where Do Wop Shaman reveals mastery of autoexstatic trick of Singing In Tongues by singing own name to produce sax parts Charlie Parker would have played, if only not precluded by circumstances unforeseen (i.e. his death), this being Birdland after all. A function of access to the Exstatic Instruction Set, induced by consumption of Maine Blueberries under unique plasmatic moonlight environment. (Plasma being the 4th State of Matter.) The photoreactive bacterial noble rot (more noble than that of Sauternes even) on the surface of these blue berries being activated thru exposure to a one time per year manifestation of extremely limited edition light from the Harvest Moon. It was the last discovery by Wilhelm Reich, made on his farm in Maine, just before the US Government put him on ice, that blue was the color of the fundamental energy of the Universe. By 1957 he would be dead enough to discover nothing more. Speaking in Tongues was only 1st level of this Adventure. Singing in Tongues is actual bomb. Then there's the Tonguing in Tongues. The viscous, plasmatic eroticism of Birdland. Swimming the Thick Ocean. Singing in Tongues while you swim. Be bop Do wop Re bop Zo bop. Mostly of the Voodoo Lexicon. The Glossolalia Express embarking now for Haiti, ultimately bound for Guinee, the Old Country, all by way of New Orleans. The Mobius Loop is closing. In 1962 Chris Kenner is back in New Orleans. He's pretty much blown whatever he's made from his monster hit, I Like it Like That, way back in 1961. Please sir, may I have another is what he says to himself. Which is how Land of a Thousand Dances gets to be written. Nobody really knows who's recorded the song, or, how many times since Chris Kenner launched the trend back in 1962. Certainly its enough to be a trend, including Fats Domino, Rufus Thomas, Cannibal and the Headhunters, Little Willie and Thee Midnighters, Wilson Pickett, Tina Turner, Patti Smith, Tom Jones, Junior Walker. .. Notwithstanding the manifest greatness of the whole cover crew, the only versions that matter are Patti's and the Cannibal. Alone of all their kind they discovered the dark chaos ritual inhabiting the antic shell of the song. This was always there, but, an interpreter of genius was needed to bring down the night. The first such interpretive breakthrough was made by Cannibal and the Headhunters in 1965. In an Alternative Universe this band was actually a gang in East LA. But they wanted to become a band. They were looking for simple songs, since, that was all they could play and they landed on Land of a Thousand Dances. That was their first mistake. Their 2nd mistake would make them immortal and is outlined by Cannibal (nee Frankie Garcia) below: "Now the original of that song, if you've ever heard it, is lyrics from beginning to end. Dances all the way through. Lots of lyrics. And on stage, I blacked out and couldn't remember the words. So I started ad-libbing, 'Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na.' After the show, the other musicians went 'What were you doing?' and I said 'I don't know.' And they said 'Well do it again, it sounded real good. Could you do it again?' Finally we got to where I could remember it, but didn't care about the words anymore. I just wanted to get to that 'Na na na na na." What Cannibal had done was to recover the sanctified incantorial stuff still latent from Chris Kenner's original inspiration for Land, an old Spiritual (Are there any new ones?) called" Children Go Where I Send Thee." Once the latent sanctified incantorial got dressed down to preverbal reptile brain sex moans coupled to a very modern prepunk amphetamine anti-Disney fright park shred track. Well, the dark side of entrainment was in the house and on your phone. In 1975 Patti Smith's left handed re/sanctification of the Cannibal Worldview gets 'released upon an unsuspecting world. Recalling Cannibal's complaint about "Lots of Lyrics" from a piece in Hit Parader or a show at the Camden Armory, she reacts the way anyone other than Emily Dickinson would, with lots more. Somewhere a young Chris Carter takes note and we're back to where we started. Sing Goddess.
- Sandy Pearlman
©2005
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© 2005 Sony BMG Music Entertainment / (P) 1975 (1-8), 1976 (9) Arista Records LLC; 2005 Sony BMG Music Entertainment / Manufactured and Distributed in the U.S.A. by Sony BMG Music Entertainment / 550 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10022-3211 / Arista and the Arista logo are registered trademarks of Arista Records LLC / “Columbia,” Logo, “Legacy” and logo Reg. U.S. Pat & Tm. Off. Marcas Registrada. / Warning: All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized duplication is a violation of applicable laws. / Printed in the U.S.A.
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Patti Smith
Horses / Horses
Arista / Columbia / Legacy
82876711982
______________________________________________________
Disc One: HORSES - 1975
Recorded and Mixed 1975 at Electric Lady Studios, NYC
1. Gloria (5:53)
In Excelsis Deo (P. Smith)
Gloria (Version) (V. Morrison)
2. Redondo Beach (3:24)
(P. Smith-A. Sohl-L. Kaye)
3. Birdland (9:14)
(P. Smith-A. Sohl-L. Kaye-I. Kral)
4. Free Money (3:50)
(P. Smith-L. Kaye)
5. Kimberly (4:25)
(P. Smith-A. Lanier-I. Kral)
6. Break It Up (4:00)
(P. Smith-T. Verlaine)
7. Land: (9:25)
Horses (P. Smith)
Land Of A Thousand Dances (C. Kenner)
La Mer (De) (P. Smith)
8. Elegie (2:41)
(P. Smith-A. Lanier)
9. My Generation (3:21)
(P. Townsend)
______________________________________________________
Patti Smith - Vocals
Lenny Kaye - Guitar
Richard Sohl - Piano
Ivan Kral - Guitar, Bass
Jay Dee Daugherty - Drums
______________________________________________________
Guitars on "Break It Up" - Tom Verlaine (Television)
Guitars on "Elegie" - Allen Lanier (Blue Oyster Cult)
Bass on "My Generation" - John Cale
"Birdland" was inspired by Peter Reich and Huey Smith
Horses Arista LP AL 4066
Produced by John Cale
Engineered by Bernie Kirsh
Assistant Engineer: Frank D'Augusta
Design: Bob Heimall
Special appreciation to Jeff Jones and Rosemary Carroll
Special appreciation to Clive Davis and Jane Friedman
Additional thanks to: Mark Feldman, Gail Marowitz, Steven Sebring, Glenn Max and friends at Royal Festival Hall
Cover photograph: Robert Mapplethorpe
2005 Photographs: Melodie McDaniel
Art Direction and Design: Gail Marowitz
Additional Photographs: Robert Mapplethorpe, David Gahr, Claude Gassian, Lenny Kaye, the Arista Archives, Patti Smith Personal Archives
www.pattismith.net
______________________________________________________
DISC 2: HORSES - 2005
Recorded June 25, 2005, Royal Festival Hall, London, England
1. Gloria (7:00)
In Excelsis Deo (P. Smith)
Gloria (Version) (V. Morrison)
2. Redondo Beach (4:29)
(P. Smith-A. Sohl-L. Kaye)
3. Birdland (9:52)
(P. Smith-R. Sohl-L. Kaye-I. Kral)
4. Free Money (5:29)
(P. Smith-L. Kaye)
5. Kimberly (5:29)
(P. Smith-A. Lanier-I. Kral)
6. Break It Up (5:23)
(P. Smith-T. Verlaine)
7. Land: (17:35)
Horses (P. Smith)
Land Of A Thousand Dances (C. Kenner)
La Mer (De) (P. Smith)
8. Elegie (4:59)
(P. Smith-A. Lanier)
9. My Generation (6:59)
(P. Townsend)
______________________________________________________
Patti Smith - Vocals
Lenny Kaye - Guitar, Vocals
Jay Dee Daugherty - Drums
Tony Shanahan - Piano, Bass
Tom Verlaine - Guitar
Flea - Trumpet, Bass
______________________________________________________
Recorded by Emery Dobyns
Mixed by Emery Dobyns and Tony Shanahan
All songs on CD 2 are previously unreleased live versions
Re-mastered in 2005 by Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound, Inc.
Produced for reissue by Bruce Dickinson
Product Managers: Mark Feldman and Lisa Buckler
______________________________________________________
All Songs Published by Linda Music Corp. (ASCAP); except "Gloria" also Published by Bernice Music (BMI), admin. by Unichappell Music, Inc.; "Break It Up" Published by Verlaine Music/Druse Music (ASCAP); "Land" also Published by EMI Longitude Music (BMI). "My Generation" Published by Rada Dara Music (BMI). All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.
______________________________________________________
compacted awareness .. gems flattening .. long streams of resin tools .. kool system of destine wax sculpt..drums tongue and waves slapping .. the feel of horses long before horses enter the scene .. molten tar stud dead w/bones and glass and the teeth of women ... veins filled w/existance .. beyond race gender baptism mathmatics politricks ... assassinating rythum .. c-rude transending .. soul-ar energy in the shape of a laughing pack of scarabs dressed in coats of milk armour..grace greased w/merc and henna ... hair wires .. neither the desire nor the ability to stop i plop on the bed pink electric immediate some human light bulb these bands around my neck should reveal what state i'm in .. only history (gentle rocking mona lisa) seals .. only histoire is responsible for the ultimate cannonizing .. as for me i am truly totally ready to go ...
sonic klein man its me my shape burnt in the sky its me the memoire of me racing thru the eye of the mer thru the eye of the sea thru the arm of the needle merging and jacking new filaments new risks etched forever in a cold system of wax .. horses groping for a sign for a breath ...
charms. sweet angels - you have made me no longer afraid of death.
The pursuit of style has always been a spirited part of the work process. Images that inform the work or the movement of the work. Baudelaire's cravat. June Christie's careless ponytail. A raincoat a la Camus. Bob Dylan's snap tab collar. Black capris like Ava Gardner. Discarded finery from rich heaps. Italian sunglasses. Green silk stockings. Ballet slippers. Boxer shoes. A sense of style. A certain body language. A simple, intricate gesture. More often than not, bred from innocence, awkwardness or pure survival.
I overslept the day we shot the cover of Horses. I dressed hastily in the clothes I wore, like a uniform, on the stage and in the street. Robert worked swiftly, wordlessly. He had a nervous, confident manner. He had no assistant. There was a triangle of shadow he wanted. The light was changing. The triangle fading. He asked me to remove my jacket because he liked the white of my shirt. I tossed the jacket over my shoulder Sinatra-style, hopefully capturing some of his casual defiance. That was the shot Robert chose.
When I look at it now, I believe we captured some of the anthemic artlessness of our age. Of our generation. A breed apart who sought within a new landscape to excite, to astonish, and to resonate with all the possibilities of our youth.
______________________________________________________
Gloria
Hark ye, the little lower layer. All visible objects, as Ahab told us, are but pasteboard masks. But in each event, each living act, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If you follow me so far, I'm saying this record is about one's relationship with God, one's relationship with oneself, one's relationship with sex, and, not least, one's relationship with one's heritage: those monumental achievements that came before - like Them (or Van Morrison)’s "Gloria" - and pierced the veil of this reality the first time, Patti Smith is the herald for a new moment in rock and roll, third generation. She quotes Chuck Berry by quoting the Rolling Stones; lights candles to Hendrix and Jim Morrison; writes crazed brilliant anarchic poetry using "Land of 1000 Dances" as a lyrical and spiritual reference point.
She is not being cute. She is telling her truth. She is reaching for the thing behind the mask.
To do this, she puts on the mask. "Piss Factory," Patti's self-published 1974 single, was a great record; "Gloria," the single off her 1975 debut album Horses, is even better, a shout of pure joy and a shot of pure adrenaline - an unforgettable, irrevocable declaration of existence. Notice me, universe! Her song, which is not Van Morrison's "Gloria" but which contains and overlaps (or lapses into) it, begins with an invocation, an assertion, a blasphemous boast, and ends neatly with the same phrase repeated as final climax and benediction: (slow and deliberate) "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine." This is a Catholic girl's proclamation of independence, in the breach because the very need to make it shows, one is not as free as one might wish. A gambit, then. She steps forth proudly with impeccable attitude: "People say beware, but I don't care [sneer]/The words are just rules and regulations to me."
And then the story of a lesbian love affair. In the front part of the story, the singer is asserting her coolness ("I go to this here party and I just get bored") which is broken only by sexual desire ("I look out the window, see a sweet young thing ... oh, she looks so good"), sexual fantasy that suddenly becomes real as the love object approaches ("here she comes!") and makes herself available for taking. The actual consummation takes place offstage on the single, a minute has been cut from the album version for reasons of propriety or, more probably, time; musically the track is stronger for the telescoping, but a key scene is lost (or made implicit) - "I look up at this big tower clock and say, 'Oh my god, it's midnight!' And my baby, she's walking through the door ... she whispers to me..."
The song explodes into its centerpiece, Patti challenging Van Morrison and all the gods of her childhood, or rather challenging herself to strut up to them as an equal. With sublime support from her band (which has been with her each step of the way, making uncompromising, flawless rock and roll to match every mood and movement of her operetta), she sings "And her name is, and her name is ... " and then bursts into the call-and-response, spell-it-out chorus of "Gloria," reaching for the sexiest and most powerful music she's heard in her whole life, measuring herself against the masters. And (breathless moment) she succeeds, and enters the ranks of the Immortals. The rest of the song reveals that this cocky seductress has fallen in love, other girls visit but "I didn't hear them, I didn't see/I let my eyes ride to the big tower clock/And I heard those bells talking in my heart, going 'DING DONG DING DONG DING DONG DING DONG DING DONG DING DONG DING DONG DING DONG'/Remember the time, when you came in my room ... "
The quotes from the earlier song are brilliant: "so good," "and her name is," and the extraordinary buildup as lover approaches street, house, door, room. Most amazing of all though is what the daughter poet/storyteller/rock and roller does with the opening image of that song ("She comes around here just about midnight"): add the bells, and discovers that sex and God and love are inseparable after all, strut though we may.
"If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me." "And her name is, and her name' is, and her name is, and her name is ... "
Written by Paul Williams
Rock and Roll:
The 100 Best Singles
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All wisdom can be found between the eyes of a horse – The Qur’an
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Sing Goddess.
Of things now past but not forgotten. It's 1975 OK. Avery Fisher Hall, home of the NY Philharmonic, sanctified space under Bernstein & Boulez, about to be re-energized as the 1st Big-Box Venue for Patti, in honor of the release of Horses. A full house is in the house. Two Goddesses have converged. The ancient antagonists, Aphrodite and Athena back at it for one more fall that's all. Taking a back seat for once, though seated in the front row, the world's de facto reigning sex goddess, Marilyn Chambers, the Queen of Porn herself, is perched for good view of the stage. As above so below, Aphrodite for a Day, know your competition. Above her, was the Girl with the Tie, Patti Smith, commanding the stage with full panoply of Athena's playbook. From onset of Patti Smith's project way back with Jesse James, live in 1971 w/ Lenny Kaye (one time only and ever only so) at St Mark's in the Bowery, the Athenoid parallelisms have been too dense for mere coincidence:
Wisdom, Fury, Poetry, Guardian of Heroes, the Merciless Heart, Tamer of Horses. Athena was the archetypal Tamer of Horses. Incarnation or possession, perhaps, but, mere coincidence, never. As above so below, the dance of the archetypes begins. Needles and Pins. Two Goddesses on the track; but one of them will sing. "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine!'
That there's no such thing as coincidence. That Patti Smith often hung w/ the alien that ran the Saucer News Book Store over at 45th Street on the West Side of Manhattan. That he was not human. That Patti would wind up 30 years later, totally by coincidence, with the sign that hung outside that store, when she discovered it on a wall of the house she was about to buy. That Birdland was written with crop circles in mind and UFO's on the brain when no one even knew what crop circles were. That Wilhelm Reich, who's at the controls, in, and whose son is inhabitant, of, Birdland, wrote The Mass Psychology of Fascism. That what Patti Smith stands for, now and forever, issues a challenge to the very existence of essentially pessimistic Mass Cult Fascist Art and by extension to the more insidious propagation of industrial music objects which utilize entrainment by repetition and commodity fetish compulsion as compliance mechanisms to first captivate, with exclusionary repetition like airplay, then to capture, their captive audiences. That the Cult Patti simultaneously embodies and serves is of the truth that music is born of invention, adventure, of paradoxical limitless individuation: Love Minus Zero/No Limit. That the truth is music is neither wallpaper, nor means of entrainment; neither vehicle of domination, nor of its mass psychology; neither an industry, nor industrial. That when music is treated as if it is of that kind, then what we get is more of what we've got now and no more Horses. That for exposing The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich got run out by the 3rd Reich. That as a function of insights developed earlier around his Mass Psychology, in the late 1940's thru mid 1950's, Wilhelm Reich went on to dream up a comprehensive theory of the great world systems, even accounting for UFO's, the age of which was first dawning. That this theory anticipates and encompasses the X-Filing Corpus Mulder/Sculley. That this theory got him run off the Planet (i.e. he died in prison) by his next government, the same US government that brought leading lights of the 3rd Reich home to build Space Ships in Area 51 ,White Sands and Huntsville, Alabama. That Moon of Alabama written by Kurt Weill (also run out by 3rd Reich), not Steven Foster, was covered by the Doors and eventually recovered by Patti's Crew on Brecht/Weill night at her London Meltdown in 2005. That Horses now closes with a 3rd cover ( ... beyond Van Morrison and Cannibal and the Headhunters ... ) and that cover is the Who's My Generation. That on the night of her Meltdown, the night when Patti's band played all of Horses from cover to cover, for the first time, live, in the order it was recorded, Patti revealed the corrosive irony that dare not speak its name: That Our Generation had given the world George Bush.
There is a geography of Horses. Its territory is divided into two parts: Birdland and The Land of a Thousand Dances. They are the same but different. Twins again, since we've seen this before. Twin states of mind, of matter ... ? As above so below. Upper and Lower Egypt, The Twin Towers, Places Charmed and Ordinary, the State of Maine and New Orleans ... Twins again, but not identical. Perhaps "twinned" would be better. Each twin influences the other, but, their differential "gravities" disruptively interact to produce unpredictable dynamical outcomes. With chaotic perturbations in the orbits of their spheres of influence and dialectical chaos at their structural core. The center will not hold. Actually there is no center. This territory has no capitol city. When systems collapse like this, for better or worse, liberation attends. Not just of, and, from things. But of, and, from process itself. Including the process of language. Within the concept logic boundaries of Horses transit is possible without transition. Transformation is possible without process. To get anywhere it's not necessary to go through somewhere. Transformation Direct, that's the ticket. With Horses, truly the transformational generator's on interstellar overdrive and all wormholes fully activated. There are no loops but Mobius and Patti Smith is their prophet. And the radical, clearly counterintuitive leaps of lyrical faith that characterize the "texts" of Birdland, Land, Kimberly, Free Money, Redondo Beach ... all pass for intuitively logical in the final analysis. Free Money/Free Language. If poetry like music is born of invention, adventure, of paradoxical limitless individuation, then the first principle of Patti's excellent adventure w/ Horses was to bet the ranch on a poetic language that directly transforms itself by means of clearly counterintuitive unstaged leaps of word faith, that, wind up being perceived at the other end of the combinatorial wormhole as inevitable intuitive logic. As if creation of Horses somehow entailed the simultaneous running of an infinite number of data loops, and, where they stopped and started nobody knows, nor, cares, since, all their data are already mapped for previously unknown intuitive validity anyway. As if by coincidence. Or paradox of limitless individuation. Or by virtue of Patti Smith, Our Lady of Perpetual Intuition's Greater Magdalenic Cloud of Grace. Consider, for example, the dialectical orbit of Patti Smith and Chris Carter, the X Files/Millennium Creation God. That Chris Carter would cut Lara Means' awesomely creepy revelation overload sequence from "Time is Now," the 1998 Millennium season finale, to the full 9 minutes and 26 seconds entirety of Land, closes the Mobius Loop that Patti opened 25 years earlier with Birdland, her comprehensive premonitory dream of Domaine Mulder/Sculley, dreamt up before anyone had ever dreamt of an X File.
Pulling out of Birdland. On the Glossolalia Moonlight Express. Riding the Trend Line. Somewhere near the end of the Line. Where Do Wop Shaman reveals mastery of autoexstatic trick of Singing In Tongues by singing own name to produce sax parts Charlie Parker would have played, if only not precluded by circumstances unforeseen (i.e. his death), this being Birdland after all. A function of access to the Exstatic Instruction Set, induced by consumption of Maine Blueberries under unique plasmatic moonlight environment. (Plasma being the 4th State of Matter.) The photoreactive bacterial noble rot (more noble than that of Sauternes even) on the surface of these blue berries being activated thru exposure to a one time per year manifestation of extremely limited edition light from the Harvest Moon. It was the last discovery by Wilhelm Reich, made on his farm in Maine, just before the US Government put him on ice, that blue was the color of the fundamental energy of the Universe. By 1957 he would be dead enough to discover nothing more. Speaking in Tongues was only 1st level of this Adventure. Singing in Tongues is actual bomb. Then there's the Tonguing in Tongues. The viscous, plasmatic eroticism of Birdland. Swimming the Thick Ocean. Singing in Tongues while you swim. Be bop Do wop Re bop Zo bop. Mostly of the Voodoo Lexicon. The Glossolalia Express embarking now for Haiti, ultimately bound for Guinee, the Old Country, all by way of New Orleans. The Mobius Loop is closing. In 1962 Chris Kenner is back in New Orleans. He's pretty much blown whatever he's made from his monster hit, I Like it Like That, way back in 1961. Please sir, may I have another is what he says to himself. Which is how Land of a Thousand Dances gets to be written. Nobody really knows who's recorded the song, or, how many times since Chris Kenner launched the trend back in 1962. Certainly its enough to be a trend, including Fats Domino, Rufus Thomas, Cannibal and the Headhunters, Little Willie and Thee Midnighters, Wilson Pickett, Tina Turner, Patti Smith, Tom Jones, Junior Walker. .. Notwithstanding the manifest greatness of the whole cover crew, the only versions that matter are Patti's and the Cannibal. Alone of all their kind they discovered the dark chaos ritual inhabiting the antic shell of the song. This was always there, but, an interpreter of genius was needed to bring down the night. The first such interpretive breakthrough was made by Cannibal and the Headhunters in 1965. In an Alternative Universe this band was actually a gang in East LA. But they wanted to become a band. They were looking for simple songs, since, that was all they could play and they landed on Land of a Thousand Dances. That was their first mistake. Their 2nd mistake would make them immortal and is outlined by Cannibal (nee Frankie Garcia) below: "Now the original of that song, if you've ever heard it, is lyrics from beginning to end. Dances all the way through. Lots of lyrics. And on stage, I blacked out and couldn't remember the words. So I started ad-libbing, 'Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na.' After the show, the other musicians went 'What were you doing?' and I said 'I don't know.' And they said 'Well do it again, it sounded real good. Could you do it again?' Finally we got to where I could remember it, but didn't care about the words anymore. I just wanted to get to that 'Na na na na na." What Cannibal had done was to recover the sanctified incantorial stuff still latent from Chris Kenner's original inspiration for Land, an old Spiritual (Are there any new ones?) called" Children Go Where I Send Thee." Once the latent sanctified incantorial got dressed down to preverbal reptile brain sex moans coupled to a very modern prepunk amphetamine anti-Disney fright park shred track. Well, the dark side of entrainment was in the house and on your phone. In 1975 Patti Smith's left handed re/sanctification of the Cannibal Worldview gets 'released upon an unsuspecting world. Recalling Cannibal's complaint about "Lots of Lyrics" from a piece in Hit Parader or a show at the Camden Armory, she reacts the way anyone other than Emily Dickinson would, with lots more. Somewhere a young Chris Carter takes note and we're back to where we started. Sing Goddess.
- Sandy Pearlman
©2005
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© 2005 Sony BMG Music Entertainment / (P) 1975 (1-8), 1976 (9) Arista Records LLC; 2005 Sony BMG Music Entertainment / Manufactured and Distributed in the U.S.A. by Sony BMG Music Entertainment / 550 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10022-3211 / Arista and the Arista logo are registered trademarks of Arista Records LLC / “Columbia,” Logo, “Legacy” and logo Reg. U.S. Pat & Tm. Off. Marcas Registrada. / Warning: All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized duplication is a violation of applicable laws. / Printed in the U.S.A.
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