Never—never!—have I encountered an album so brilliant, bad, enthralling, infuriating, and just plain pretentious in so many ways as Patti Smith’s Passover 1978 offering to her many genuflecting worshippers, Easter. Smith can be a ferocious vocalist, and an inspired and inspiring artist to boot, but I’ll be damned if I’ll buy into her shaman’s shuck or her often bathetic poetry for that matter.
I simply don’t trust her; while her hero and role model Arthur Rimbaud spent his season in hell (which he went into in harrowing detail in his Une Saison en Enfer), Patti the elitist (who humbly went on record as saying “I never think anybody should do art unless they’re a great artist”—geesh, I wonder if she puts herself in that class?) spent her season in Hell being feted by the celebrities of the New York City punk scene, and I have never for one moment believed she harrowed anything more soul-scorching than the parties she had to attend with Debbie Harry, whom she loathed for having the audacity to be a woman and an artist and hence a threat to Patti’s role as the undisputed Queen of NYC punk.
As poor Harry said, “Basically Patti told me that there wasn’t room for two women in the CBGB’s scene and that I should leave the business ‘cause I didn’t stand a chance against her.” Evidently Patti the prima donna had no interest whatsoever in feminist unity. (And indeed, many feminists would go on to attack Smith for her altogether dismissive statements on feminism, which she was adamant in declaring played no role whatsoever in her success.)
And she’s not a very good poet either. “Babelogue” may be an enthralling listen, but pay careful attention to the words and what you’re left with is the stark realization that Smith is no more a poet than poor dead Jimbo Morrison. Both toss off the occasional great line, but “the scroll of ancient lettuce” is bunk, while “I would measure the success of a night/By the way by the way/By the amount of piss and seed/I would exude over the columns that nestled the P.A.” is problematic at many levels. Both “exude” and “nestled” are poor word choices, and call me overly fastidious but I can’t help but feel sorry for the poor peon (not that Patti would care about her; she’s no genius) left to clean up this mess. And what in God’s name are we to make of the line, “Like a log of Helen/Is my pleasure”?
“Rock N Roll Nigger” is both a great song—one of the most fiery Smith ever recorded, what with its incendiary guitar work and in-your-face chorus—and a deplorable example of the casual racism that was all too common amongst the so-called enlightened art rockers of the time. Not everybody was as oblivious as Smith—Lester Bangs, who came to regret his loose use of the n-word, wrote a very thoughtful article on the subject—and to Smith’s discredit she refused to back down on her use of the term, even telling one interviewer, “Ya think black people are better than white people or sumpthin’? I was raised with black people. It’s like, I can walk down the street and say to a kid, “Hey, nigger.”… When I say statements like that they’re not supposed to be analyzed, ‘cause they’re more like off-the-cuff humorous statements.” Hilarious, Patti, simply hilarious. I wonder if the kid found you funny. And here I thought you had absolutely no sense of humor. Although maybe you do; who else would put her own granny on her short list of rock’n’roll people worthy of being verbally degraded?
If “Rock N Roll Nigger” isn’t the most ferocious rocker on Easter then “25th Floor” is; the opening guitar riff is just flat out mean, the keyboards are great, and wow. But once again I find myself put off by the lyrics. The opening lines, “We explore the men’s room/We don’t give a shit” are funny, although Patti probably didn’t intend them to be so, while the following lines, “Ladies’ lost electricity/Take vows inside of it,” are hoity-toity horseshit. And when she goes into her “transformation of waste” spiel she loses me altogether, because maybe the conjunction of shit and alchemy may make sense in her world but smells like so much pretentious excreta in mine. I can only think the alchemists of old would have rolled their eyes. I also enjoy the segue tune “High on Rebellion,” mainly because I can’t really make out what Smith’s saying and I’m set free to listen to the way her frenetic word spiel rides the chaotic wave produced by the great Lenny Kaye and the rest of the band.
As for “Space Monkey,” I’m no fan. I mean, I feel as terrible about all those monkeys the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. sent on one-way tickets to space as the next guy, but “Space Monkey” ain’t no testament to their involuntary gallantry—it’s pure malarkey, is what it is. Take away the cool organ and some very fine vocalizing (in places, that is) by Smith and what you’re left with is a lot of verbal gibberish and some silly-beyond-words monkey noises by one of the guys in the band. As for the lines, “There he is, up in a tree/Oh, I hear him calling down to me/That banana-shaped object ain’t no banana/It’s a bright yellow U.F.O./And he’s coming to get me” they’re howlingly bad, pure and simple. And the dumb title grates.
Easter also marked Smith’s first foray into quasi-generic hard rock on the Springsteen-flavored “Till Victory” and “Because the Night,” the latter of which sounds like the Boss because, well, duh. Both songs are more than decent but neither taps into that wellspring of animalistic ecstasy that made the early Smith such a one-of-a-kind artist. “Because the Night” may have been Smith’s biggest hit, but it marked a disturbing retreat into rock’s AOR mainstream, and was certainly a betrayal of the totally idiosyncratic and incendiary songs on her first two LPs.
On the more positive side, “We Three” is a moving torch ballad of a song and builds beautifully; Bruce Brody plays some simply grand piano, and Smith’s vocals are both breathless and breathtaking. The title track is also excellent–a moody evocation of the childhood of Arthur Rimbaud, it’s both haunting and lovely, and even Smith’s word spiel towards the end doesn’t prove an embarrassment. Meanwhile, “Privilege (Set Me Free)” adds an interesting frisson to Patti’s obsessive contemplations on God—on one hand Jesus didn’t die for her sins and she will not sell herself to God, while on the other she is looking to God to set her free. I can appreciate the contradiction—her dual status as rebel and seeker is one of the things that make her such an intriguing artist, and an essential voice. Anybody who has ever wrestled with faith will understand where she’s coming from—in this regard alone, her artistic path is a timeless one.
To conclude, I consider Smith a uniquely flawed genius; one who suffers from the sins of hubris and hopeless self-mythologizing, and whose gifts—at least in the poetry department—are at infinite odds with her own appraisal of said gifts. One NME reviewer wrote of her 1978 book of poetry, Babel: “Most of us were writing better than this in the lower Sixth, with or with expensive drugs, friends or book deals… This is self-conceit, and it should have been burnt out or burnt years ago.” As for her adamantine narcissism and self-regard (I masturbate to my own photograph!), the critic Julie Burchill wrote perceptively, “She has babbled and jived herself into a corner where two mirrors meet and [she] seems to stand there examining herself… wishing that she could be Stevie Nicks.”
Brutal? For sure. But that said, the early Patti Smith Group did produce music that changed people’s lives, and there’s no gainsaying that very few artists possess that gift. So what if she’s never discovered a pedestal high enough to place herself upon? And so what if much of her poetry is bathetic drivel? On her best songs Smith is electrifying, transcendent, and almost the genius she so obviously thinks she is. Easter isn’t her best album, although it beats hell out of anything she released afterwards. But it has its moments, and they are some thrilling moments indeed. I even listen to them occasionally. But I generally find myself scoffing just as much as I do cheering. And hey, I wonder what Jimi Hendrix would have thought about being called, well, you know? Or her dear old grandma for that matter?
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B-
