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Patti Smith unleashes in me a great quantity of emotions and memories. And it's not just music or just poetry, nor their fabulous hand-to-hand combat. There's much more.
The way she told stories, for instance. And the way she still tells them today.
Indeed, it's hard to read anything of hers (today the memoirs, yesterday the interviews) without being captivated by that remarkable storytelling art.
Let's say I pick at random and find, you know, her being the only girl in a gang of boys since everyone, absolutely everyone, thought she was a boy...
Or the plays invented for her siblings like in "Little Women" by Mary Jo Alcott...
Or Callas listened to with a fever of forty degrees...
And, of course, the barn fire with her little sister shining in her arms like a small phosphorescent doll...
I could go on forever, but perhaps I should stop here.
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Or maybe not, maybe I won't finish and I'll make you do a simple addition.
Please, add the hallucinatory state caused by a severe childhood illness and the wet panties from that time she saw the Stones on TV...yes yes, add them up...
And you will have the most perfect description of her music.
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And then that aspect of a Ramone sister turned somehow into a vamp. That air between ugly duckling and little match girl, with the last match that never goes out.
Not to forget the girl with the gun (which, however, was a rifle). "Patty, do you know what your father said? Oh, he said...he said she was so cute a while ago, and now here she is with a gun in hand."
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And the sparkling and magical names she whispered into our ears: Coltrane, Rimbaud, Pollock, Brancusi, Pasolini, Blake.
And Modigliani of whom, apparently, she was the cosmic lover. Because if you can't do anything but dream, you might as well dream big.
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See, as a young guy, I was a bit like that. And, as you have understood, neither did Patti kid around. You do the math, but I think I've explained myself.
Like: I couldn't identify with Bowie. Who, yes, had written the anthem of the misfits but was...was gorgeous. And that's not a minor detail.
You remember "Rock'n'roll suicide," right? That stuff like "You're too messed up" "Your head's torn with so many knives" "But now I'm here, the alien"? Oh, I know it's one of the greatest songs of all time.
But I needed a loser, a real loser...
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"I was nothing but a skinny loser."
Look at her then, the skinny loser in the splendid black and white of the "Horses" cover, with the Baudelaire-style tie and Sinatra-like pose.
Look at her...
That even before the idea of raising the flag of rock'n'roll high again, even before the fiery words... even before the arrogance, the energy, the fervor...
Even before all this, and anything that might come to mind, there was that photo. And with that photo, I started to become splendid too...
Forget Bowie...
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And anyway, are you familiar with when you're depressed and desperately need to cling to something? Well, when it happens to me, my lifeline is Patti.
And then I take the biography, read the first twenty/thirty pages (which I know by heart), and I swear, I feel better.
Or I listen to her, usually choosing "Horses" even settling for just the fabulous initial one-two-three:
One: "Gloria," hyper-cover of the hyper-classic garage/beat.
Two "Redondo Beach," the best white reggae ever.
Three: "Birdland," a weird kind of crazy lounge that starts with a magical and nocturnal tale, then, increasingly mad, becomes the most perfect suit for drift and delirium.
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God, how I loved her at sixteen!!! And how I defended her, especially in the pre and post-concert period of '79...
That in '79 there were strange premises...
The sweetest horde of romantic misfits sending kisses and throwing flowers, The journalists' assault, which, after all, was the first really important concert after years of blackout.
And, especially, all those fanatics asking for an audience to sign this or that appeal. But what did she possibly know about our quarrelsome fights? If anything, she knew Michelangelo or the Madonnas of Siena, or maybe Pasolini, though not as a Marxist thinker.
So to all those unlikely requests, she limited herself to responding, mocking herself: "I'm just an American artist."
Heaven forbid!!!
What happened to the rebel who in "Radio Ethiopia" hailed anarchy and in "Rock'n'roll nigger" proclaimed that her place was outside society?
In short, it was a lot, a lot of effort to take off the ideological glasses.
And the sixteen-year-old luludia shouting, "But she’s a poet, damn it!!!"
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"She's a poet, damn it!!!"
"And how the hell do you know if you don't even understand English?"
Yeah, how did I know?
Because of a graceless voice (frog, nightingale, lioness, child, monster) capable of reaching everywhere. Of a wild sound totally worthy of those wet panties from back then. Of ballads with almost gospel fervor.
But above all there was something torrential (sobbing, hysterical, visionary). Something that seemed to gush forth madly free, sustained (or rather pumped) by a kind of cheekiness, very, very rock'n'roll.
Oh, it couldn't be anything other than poetry. And, in the end, there was no need for translation either.
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Patti Smith is born great.
"Hey Joe"/"Piss factory," the first forty-five, is already a little masterpiece, the work of an artist perfectly in control of her style and with a very, very clear goal: to re-energize the rock of the sixties and build a bridge towards the new.
Goal magnificently exemplified by the highly courageous choice to take a classic (and what a classic!!!) and twist it to a double (if not triple) level.
Not only indeed does the song sound very different from the famous Hendrix version, but, with a real stroke of genius, even the lyrics are modified/extended with Smith's verses creating a wonderful hybrid.
But it doesn't end here, because in the ancient blues imagery of "Hey Joe" a reference to the news of those days is inserted. Thus the man fleeing to Mexico is juxtaposed with, and in a sense overshadowed by, the most famous girl of '74, namely Patty Hearst.
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Hearst, scion of one of the most important families in America, was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a ragtag, indeed extremely ragtag, group of terrorists until then absolutely unknown.
After the family paid, albeit only a small part, of the requested sum, the girl, instead of returning home, joined the group becoming a terrorist herself.
The photo where she posed, armed with an M1 carbine next to the group's symbol (an eight-headed stylized eagle), went around the world and became, thanks to its iconic power, a grand symbol of determination and revolt.
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The song begins with Patti's wonderful spoken word that immediately pays homage to Hendrix ("the way you play the guitar makes me feel...makes me feel...makes me feel...so...so...")
Then, in a few strokes, the figure of Hearst, the voice a hurried whisper, almost running, with, here and there, just a hint of guitar's percussive strumming.
"Patty, do you know what your father said? Oh, he said...he said she was so cute a while ago, and now here she is with a gun in hand."
And here's the first link, "a gun in her hand"...
That when "Hey Joe" really kicks off "The gun in her hand" becomes "that gun in your hand"...
"Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand"
With Richard Sohl's piano notes introducing, then accompanying, with melancholic solemnity, that voice that seems to pray. It's Smith's first ballad, but the best ones will all be like this, something of the night, something of gospel.
The piano dominates for a while, then the guitars and gradually, a sort of chaos, with Patti escalating, escalating...
Escalating....
"And I'll go to Mexico where a man can be free," Another link, that now it's Patty Hearst speaking: "The FBI is looking for me, but they'll never find me...I'm sorry but I'm no longer the little rich and pretty girl...and I feel so free....so free..."
It ends almost in apnea...
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Then there's "Piss factory," a fabulous account of her factory life written in an exciting street lyricism.
Recorded in a hurry and musically less focused compared to "Hey Joe," yet it's a hell of a poem, wonderfully dirty, wonderfully intense.
A shitty job in a shitty place. "But I'll take that train and become a big star"
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"Hey Joe"/"Piss factory" is thus a grand diptych on the theme of escape. Joe probably won't make it to Mexico. Hearst will certainly be captured by the FBI...But the skinny loser took that train and really became a star..
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