Patti Smith: People Have The Power

"Listen, I believe everything we dream
Can come to pass through our union
We can turn the world around
We can turn the earth's revolution
We have the power
People have the power"

I don't really know why I said in my last-but-one post that the Patti Smith gig on Monday night ended with Rock 'n' Roll Nigger, because it didn't. The explanation is that I was drunk, though given that I was driving I should add swiftly that not a drop of alcohol had passed my lips. I was intoxicated by the performance that I had watched, which exceeded my expectations by some considerable degree. Smith has a shaman-like power in her performance that draws you in to a near-religious experience, leaving you in a state of ecstacy.

In fact, the final song was People Have The Power, from which I've quoted above. The words look rather flat on the page, yet this 1988 single and album track is probably somewhere fairly high in my Top 10 Songs Of Significant Personal Resonance list. (When I first read Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, I was convinced that he'd been stalking me; it was only later that I came to understand that I was a more stereotypical example of the male species than I had previously realised.) In order for me to convey to you exactly what the song means to me, I'm going to give you a musical history lesson.

I first encountered Patti Smith's music in 1985, at the age of seventeen. At this point in her career she had released four albums in the 1970s and then apparently given up music. Her debut album, Horses, was released in 1975 and appropriately it was the first one that I tried. Produced by John Cale, with an iconic Robert Mapplethorpe picture on its cover (Mapplethorpe was a close friend of hers), it is rightly regarded as a timeless, classic album. It begins with an enhanced cover version of Van Morrison's Gloria (with the unparalleled opening line "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine..."), working its way through the gentle reggae of Redondo Beach and Kimberly and the lyrical soundscapes of Birdland and Land, before coming to a close with the haunting, fragile Elegie.

In Horses, Smith created a compelling mixture of poetry and rock 'n' roll that aspired to emulate - and in certain cases surpassed - the successes of her idols such as Bob Dylan, The Doors and the Rolling Stones. No mere copyist, what she added to the rock 'n' roll canon was her fiercely androgynous stance (including the infamous hint of a moustache, which she refused to have airbrushed from the album cover picture) and a sense of myth and awe that located musicians such as Dylan and Morrison alongside literary giants such as Rimbaud, Kerouac and Burroughs. If you have any interest in guitar-based music and you've never heard this album, you owe it to yourself to buy a copy.

Her follow-up album, Radio Ethiopia, was released in 1976 to disappointed reviews. It was partly a victim of the success of its predecessor (anything would have been a let-down after Horses) and partly criticised for its more commercial-sounding production. Listening to the album for the first time almost a decade after its initial release, I didn't share any of these concerns and in fact for a long, long time this was my favourite Patti Smith Group album. It's a fantastically varied collection of songs and I'd be hard-pushed to nominate a highlight. Poppies (dedicated to Edie Sedgwick, Jim Morrison and the Queen of Sheba) is a hallucinatory head-trip and Pissing In A River contains one of my favourite rock-lyric couplets ever ("Should I pursue a path so twisted? Should I crawl, defeated and gifted?"). The closing track, Radio Ethiopia/Abyssinia, is a ten-minute improvised guitar freak-out and stream-of-consciousness vocal; it's one of those fantastic pieces of music that takes you somewhere else entirely.

The third album, Easter, was released in 1978 and was probably her most commercially successful album. She was at the height of the initial period of her career and once more every single song on the album is alive. The controversial Rock 'n' Roll Nigger (probably the most anti-racist song ever written, but some people just couldn't see past that word) and her biggest chart hit, the Springsteen-penned Because The Night, are typical of its rock-orientated hard-hitters, but it also contains the more sedate Easter and the moving cover version of Privilege (Set Me Free).

In 1979, Wave was released. The tired, pale-faced image of Smith on the cover matched much of the content within. The most uplifting song on the album is Frederick, dedicated to Fred 'Sonic' Smith, former member of the MC5 (Kick Out The Jams), her piano teacher, her lover and her future husband. Dancing Barefoot is a beguiling, sensual paean to Jeanne Hebuterne (mistress of the artist Modigliani) in particular and womanhood in general. However, the cover version of The Byrds' So You Want To Be A Rock 'n' Roll Star reveals a previously unthinkable ambivalence to the music business and other tracks like Revenge, Citizen Ship and Seven Ways Of Going are difficult, even somewhat tortuous listening.

After Wave, Smith released no further music and thus six years later I thought I was exploring the back catalogue of a retired artist. However, in my final year of university in 1988, Smith returned to the music world with the album Dream Of Life. The taster single was People Have The Power and I instantly disliked it. Musically it appeared formulaic, bombastic, repetitive and unimaginative. As for its lyrics, the only explanation I could find was that she had gone soft in her old age. In place of her former defiant individuality, she seemed to be espousing a vague, muddled notion that "everyone can make a difference". In the arrogance of youth, still shrugging off the certainties of my teenage years, I was disappointed. The great Patti Smith had come to this and I was having none of it. She sounded like that other annoying sermoniser, Bono (for whom I now have a great admiration, but who at the time I thought embodied everything that was wrong with contemporary music).

My attitude mellowed slightly when I read an interview with her on the release of the album. In it, she talked about creating a home and a family with her husband, about her travelling and writing and about their philosophy that they had a duty to be responsible world citizens and to prepare both their children for the world and the world for their children. I had never read any interviews with her previously and I was remarkably touched by her intense honesty. It penetrated all the selfish, baggage-ridden, twenty-one year-old nonsense in my head and made me look at Patti Smith, myself and indeed the whole world in a different light. No longer an insignificant student nonentity with a silly haircut and a dearth of ambition, I was a world citizen with a mission.

I still wasn't keen on the song - in retrospect, most of my issues are with its production rather than its music or lyrics - but I had accepted the sentiment. I played the album Dream Of Life a lot, but found it equally unsatisfying. I still don't like it that much and I rarely play it, though I'm warming to it more as the years go by. As far as I remember, the reviews were mixed - it was great that she was back, but did it have to be with this? I'm not sure how she regarded it herself, but within a year or two she had retreated from view again and from a purely music-oriented perspective it seemed that she had thrown in the towel.

In fact, she had returned to being a mother, a wife and a writer. However, over the next five years several of her family members and long-term friends passed away. Firstly, Robert Mapplethorpe, in 1989, then a year later her long-term PSG musical collaborator Richard Sohl. In the early-to-mid 1990s rumours indicated that she was working on another album, but with the sudden death of both her husband and her brother within a month of each other in 1994 it seemed unlikely for a while that this would ever be released.

However, Smith is nothing if not a survivor and just over a year later the completed album Gone Again - including backing vocals from Jeff Buckley and a song dedicated to Kurt Cobain - was being ecstatically received as her finest work since Easter. For me, the album's highlights are its title track (with Fred 'Sonic' Smith's vocals rising miraculously in the background towards the end of the song), the beautiful song of hope Beyond The Southern Cross and the impossibly poignant Farewell Reel. The album is muted and reflective with a recurring theme of loss; it has much in common with her poetry collection The Coral Sea, published in the same year and dedicated to Mapplethorpe.

Around this time, I saw a TV interview with Smith where she talked about the initial writing of the album with her husband, the impact of his death and her determination to complete the work. Others might self-indulgently have allowed themselves to be overcome by grief at losing such a close, long-term partner, but she was articulate and lucid as she described the time they had spent together. Instead of mourning her loss, she considered it an honour to have journeyed through part of her life with him and - as far as I recall, though this part might be my poetic license - viewed her children as the embodiment of their union and as a representation of the fact that his spirit lived on.

This interview had a profound impact upon me. I was so utterly entranced by her calmness, serenity and strength of purpose that I knew without question that even if she never released another album throughout the rest of her (or my) life, I would not stop following her activities until one of us was no more. If I had to trace the roots of my "glass half-full" philosophy back to any individual time or event, it's probably no exaggeration to say that it stems from watching this interview. Prior to this, I was the usual mid-twenties bag of nerves, neuroses and insecurities. Subsequently I might not exactly have been Mr Sorted, but I had seen what was possible. To respond to the loss of your loved one with celebration rather than sorrow seemed to be such an admirable way of approaching the world that I wanted nothing more than to emulate it.

Since Gone Again, Patti Smith has released two more studio albums: 1997's Peace And Noise (my favourite of her recent material, containing the vibrant improvised track Memento Mori) and 2000's Gung-Ho (which I can listen to, but which still hasn't really grabbed me). Last year a retrospective compilation album called Land 1975-2002 was released. Such a compilation usually indicates a mainstream critical acceptance of an artist and certainly it looks like Patti Smith's time has come (again). People Have The Power is a good indication of exactly why.

Throughout the 1970s she sang about outsiders and longed for escape, either literally in an alien spacecraft in Distant Fingers or metaphorically in Rock 'n' Roll Nigger's anthemic chorus ("Outside of society is where I wanna be!", interestingly partially rephrased to "Inside of society..." during Monday's gig). People Have The Power marked a turnaround in her approach and now I see that what I previously regarded as a soft option is, in fact, a much more radical, harder message.

It's harder both because it's a more difficult choice - to take collective responsibility for your actions within a societal structure, rather than simply burying your head in the sand - and also because it's a more hard-edged sentiment that rejects destructive nihilism or anarchy in favour of collective positivity. In performance on Monday, it was sung against a backdrop of WTO protester footage, but in her preamble she identified a more recent context for the song when she thanked London and the UK in general for the massive turn-out at the anti-war rallies earlier this year.

Like a good wine, this song has matured with age and I have matured along with it. Where I was previously alternately bewildered by and dismissive of its sentiment, now I appreciate and support the central idea that it advocates. No longer content to live a disenfranchised life in an incomprehensible world, I want to feel that I have both the possibility and the capability to shape the environment in which I exist. I want to believe that I am empowered with the ability to exercise my responsibilities. Patti Smith - both in this specific song and in her wider body of work - inspires me to maintain this belief even in difficult times, which is why she retains my eternal interest and respect.

Posted by Hg on Friday 15 August 2003 at 07:15.
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