patti smith: review of _gone_again

chicago tribune review of gone again

[from "Back for More after Bitter Heartbreak, Patti Smith Takes Comfort in the Healing Power of Rock 'N' Roll," by Greg Kot, Chicago Tribune, June 17, 1996]

The last thing Fred "Sonic" Smith taught his wife before he died was how to play guitar. Patti Smith didn't know it at the time, but that new knowledge would be her salvation. On Tuesday, her first album in eight years, Gone Again (Arista), will arrive in stores, and the bittersweet fruit of those lessons can be heard in its midnight-hour meditations and elegies.

"Fred taught me seven or eight chords, and I stayed up nights writing a song for each one of them," says Smith, more than a trace of a New Jersey accent still in her voice, even though she has lived the last 16 years outside Detroit in a big house by a canal that she shared with Fred and their two children, Jackson, 14, and Jesse, 9. "Those guitar chords got me through a lot of difficult nights."

Fred Smith, former guitarist for the legendary proto-punk band the MC5, had been in deteriorating health, but when he died of heart failure at age 45 on Nov. 4, 1994, it was still a shock to his family and friends. Besides them, he left behind some important unfinished business: a new Patti Smith album that he was arranging and co-writing with his wife.

At first, the task of finishing the album seemed insurmountable. Patti Smith had released only one album in the preceding 15 years, coaxed out of semi-retirement by her husband to record an album in 1988. After his death, Patti Smith's brother Todd came to live with her. "He worked hard to get my spirits up, and he pushed me to record," she says. "He put all his effort into keeping me focused on the work, and then he died (of a heart attack) a month later. It was completely unexpected and I was feeling pretty desolate.

"I would go in to record songs, and I would have to stop and run off because I needed to cry or throw up. I had to shelve songs because I couldn't handle them—they were just too heartbreaking. But I felt I owed something to Fred and Todd and my family. I felt a sense of duty to finish the album."

Personal tragedy aside, Smith's return to the recording studio was big news in a rock community still reverberating from her daring debut album of 21 years ago. Smith, born 49 years ago in Chicago, grew up on the East Coast. By the late '60s, she had migrated from New Jersey to Manhattan to mingle with New York's bohemian arts community. She was a devotee of Rimbaud and Genet who also adored Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison.

She moved in with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, published three books of poetry and co-wrote a play, Cowboy Mouth, with Sam Shepard. She also began performing with music journalist Lenny Kaye at St. Mark's Church on the Lower East Side, her shamanistic sing-speak style weaving through the twists and turns of Kaye's guitar and Richard Sohl's piano.

"We began as this weird performance-poetry thing," Kaye recalls. "I suppose we were always aiming to be a rock 'n' roll band, but getting there was really interesting because we had to learn who we were."

Ushering in a new era

Mapplethorpe financed three hours of studio time so the fledgling band could record some music in 1974. The resulting single, a radical remake of the classic blues "Hey Joe" that referenced the then-recent Patty Hearst kidnapping on the A side, and a striking Smith original called "Piss Factory" on the flip, became one of the first shots fired in the punk uprising. The unlikely Ground Zero for the movement was the Bowery shot-and-a-beer dive CBGB, where Smith, Kaye, Sohl, new recruits Ivan Kral and sound man-turned-drummer Jay Dee Daugherty played an eight-week stint in the spring of 1975. Soon after, Smith was signed to Arista Records.

Her debut album Horses arrived later that year. Its cover was a striking black-and-white Mapplethorpe photograph of the singer, radiating both sensual androgyny and don't-mess-with-me dignity. The music was visionary—Rimbaud 'n' roll, the first crucial album in a revolutionary new era of rock that would include such bands as Television, Talking Heads, Blondie and the Ramones.

But after putting out her fourth album, Wave, in 1979, Smith essentially retired from the record business. She had met Fred "Sonic" Smith in 1976, and knew instantly "he was going to be my future," she says. "I didn't know who the MC5 were. Lenny was a big fan, and I learned about them through him. I related to Fred as a fellow human being. And I knew if I wanted Fred, I had to take Detroit."

They were married in 1980 and moved to a suburb to raise a family, a culture shock to which Smith never quite adapted.

"I'm not a suburban type of person," she says with a laugh. "To me a good neighborhood is where you can get a good cup of coffee and there's a good bookstore within walking distance. But we created as much culture in our house as we could. We fit in by not drawing attention to ourselves."

Fred Smith studied aviation and became a pilot; Patti Smith continued her writing (two more books of poetry were published) and reconciled herself to the possibility that she might never record music again.

"She is a rare artist in that she never released an album unless she had something to say," says Kaye. "We were getting more and more successful with the Patti Smith Group in the '70s, but we called it a day because we felt our work was done, there was nothing more we could do in that context. I had no expectation of ever working with Patti again after that, even though we remained very close friends, because that's the kind of artist she is. She saw honor in retreating and coming back to fight another day, in a completely different context if need be."

Fred Smith produced and helped write his wife's only album of the '80s, Dream of Life, a record that presented a less volatile Smith with its lullabies for her children and odes to the ecology. It fell flat with the public, Kaye says, because Smith's audience was expecting the boundary-pushing poet-priestess of the '70s instead of the tranquil Earth Mother of the late '80s. "She was caught in a time when people were more interested in escaping who they are," Kaye says. "Patti was never interested in that. She uses her art as a tool for self-knowledge, no matter what the current fashion is."

Dylan-Cobain period

Fred Smith encouraged his wife to record again a few years ago, with the idea of making a fiercer, more rock 'n' roll record than Dream of Life. Together they wrote a handful of songs, including what would become the title track of Gone Again. But the weight of the deaths of her husband and brother, following the deaths a few years earlier of her close friends Mapplethorpe and Sohl, became almost too much for Smith to bear. She was no longer in the mood to rock. Instead, as the sleepless nights piled up, she took solace in two records—Bob Dylan's solo acoustic World Gone Wrong and Nirvana's MTV Unplugged in New York, both stark, intensely private records that touched on themes of sorrow, salvation and transcendence that fit her own state of mind.

"I spent half the nights listening to Dylan and Kurt Cobain, and the rest writing songs on my guitar," Smith says. "It got me through."

She also called upon Kaye to help her shape the album and shepherd it to its conclusion, bringing full circle the collaboration that had started her on the road as a rock singer 25 years before. "I couldn't have done it without Lenny's patience," she says.

For months she avoided finishing a track that the band had recorded for a song called "My Madrigal" because she couldn't bear to sing it: "We waltzed beneath motionless skies/All heaven's glory turned in your eyes/You pledged me your heart/Till death do us part."

Finally, on the anniversary of her husband's death, Kaye and Smith agreed it was time to give it one more shot. "Instead of crying or feeling sorry for myself, I wanted to do something in tribute," Smith says. "I got through it, though I'm a little off pitch. But Lenny kept reassuring me, 'It's OK, it's got a lot of heart.' "

Heart is never something Smith has lacked, and Gone Again pumps with an urgency that overwhelms any hint of nostalgia. Smith's verse has become more tightly woven, more direct, and Gone Again is a cathartic album, even if it doesn't shout or rant. If forged in a crucible of death and loss, its theme is one of transcending tragedy.

"I wanted people to know that life is still worth living," Smith says. "My generation has been through a lot of death, there has been too much death lately, from Vietnam and the Korean War to Robert Kennedy getting killed right before our eyes on television, to Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix, to all the friends we've lost to AIDS. It's quite a battleground."

"But we can't lose heart. I don't mind people crying with me, as long as they laugh too."

Smith is asked if she herself had to be reconvinced of that message after losing her husband and brother so suddenly. She does not hesitate: "If I ever felt myself losing heart, all I would have to do is look at my children."

" 'Dead to the world, alive I awoke'—that's the album right there," Kaye says, quoting a lyric from the song "Dead to the World." "It would have been easy for someone who has been away from making records so long to look at MTV and wonder what she has to offer. But Patti's ideal and mine was always that the work be honest, and that nothing else—money, fame, recognition—really mattered."

Indeed, none of Smith's albums ever went so much as gold (500,000 sales), yet her impact has been undeniable. Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and Bono of U2 flatly state that their desire to play rock 'n' roll was fired by their romance with Smith's debut album, Horses.

And at a time when female performers were all too rare in rock, Smith blazed the trail for everyone from Kim Deal to Courtney Love. As the rockers who grew up with her records came of age in the '90s, Smith's time again appears to be at hand.

"With the Patti Smith Group in the '70s, we felt the mission of our music was to create an open ground for the future, a space where young bands could work in," Smith says. "And now it's really wonderful that groups like R.E.M. and Hole and Sonic Youth, and many groups that I've never even heard of, have taken that message to heart and welcomed us back. I'm glad those people are speaking up for me, because I could use a helping hand now."

SMITH, UNABRIDGED

The release of Patti Smith 's "Gone Again" on Tuesday coincides with the reissue on CD of her five previous albums. An overview follows, with comments from Smith and her collaborator Lenny Kaye:

Horses (1975) ****

The band surges and ebbs with Smith's alternately hypnotic and jarring verse, beginning with the immortal rock 'n' roll line "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine.Smith I drove poor John Cale (the producer) crazy I improvised so much. Kaye "You can feel our desire more than our ability."

Radio Ethiopia (1976) ** 1/2

Kaye "The black sheep. We felt Horses was a bit understated, but this one overbalanced the equation. We wanted to go up against Aerosmith and beat them at their own game." Not quite.

Easter (1978) *** 1/2

Contains Smith's sole Top 20 hit, her reworked version of Bruce Springsteen's "Because the Night." Kaye "Our most succinct statement as a band. ...This was music of conciliation after the violence of Radio Ethiopia."

Wave (1979) ***

A soft-focus farewell to the rock wars, an embrace of new love ("Frederick"), and the classic "Dancing Barefoot."

Dream of Life (1988) ** 1/2

A collaboration between Smith and her husband, ex-MC5 guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith, this is a postcard from an old friend rather than a raging revisit of the '70s. "Fred wrote and arranged it for me, it was his gift to me, and he was greatly disappointed that it wasn't that well received."

Gone Again (1996) *** 1/2

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