Mickey Z
Cool Observer
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Both revolutionary and poetic powers
Patti Smith sez: “When I entered rock ‘n roll, I entered into it in a political sort of way, not as a career.”
We’re not talking about the Patti Smith who stumped for John Kerry in 2004. This is more about the punk poetess whose first line of the first song on her first album was:
Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine...
I’m talking about the Patti Smith described in 1975 by Charles Shaar Murray in NME as “an odd little waif figure in a grubby black suit and black satin shirt, so skinny that her clothes hang baggily all over her, with chopped-off black hair and a face like Keith Richards’ kid sister would have if she’d gotten as wasted by age seventeen as Keith is now.” This is about the rock revolutionary that Murray accused of having “an aura that’d probably show up under ultraviolet light. She can generate more intensity with a single movement of one hand than most rock performers can produce in an entire set.”
“Rock ‘n roll was revolutionary for me,” Smith says. “Songs were weapons. People were afraid of rock music, they called it the Devil’s music - and they were right! It was the music of the revolution. Rock’s spiritual, political, and emotional content was stirring and important and it gave us strength.”
“To me, a rock ‘n roll star wasn’t all about lifestyle and record sales,” says Smith. “It was people who had something to say, who would excite and incite, who possessed both revolutionary and poetic powers.”
To read Murray’s take on a 1975 gig at CBGB’s, you’d have to believe Smith had the whole “excite and incite” thing down. “Patti Smith embodied and equaled everybody that I’ve ever dug on a rock and roll stage,” Murray wrote. “Patti Smith has always had the ability to create joy from despair and hope from fear,” adds author Ron Jacobs. “One imagines this is what brought her to rock and roll.”
“I wanted to be like Paul Revere,” Smith told William S. Burroughs in 1979. “That was my whole thing I wanted to be like Paul Revere. I didn’t want to be a giant big hero; I didn’t want to die for the cause. I didn’t want to be a martyr. All that I wanted was for the people to fuckin’ wake up.”
If it’s difficult for you to reconcile Patti Smith’s revolutionary roots with her recent, more mainstream political efforts, well, so it is for Smith herself. “That rock ‘n roll has evolved into something else is everybody’s fault,” she says. “We all have to take responsibility. You can’t say ‘I had to do that, because the marketing people said to’. It’s the artists’ fault. It’s MTV’s fault. We’re all guilty of forgetting what a great and powerful weapon rock ‘n roll is.”
Weapon of Mass Deconstruction:
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