REALITY
BITES
Patti Smith mines her extraordinary life for beautiful music
You
gotta hand it to Patti Smith — she's really has led quite a life. In her early
twenties, she made her way from college in New Jersey to Manhattan's Lower East
Side, struck up a romance with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe that's lovingly
chronicled in her 2010 memoir Just Kids
(a National Book Award winner), and had her first exposure to NYC's burgeoning
underground music scene while living at the Chelsea Hotel and frequenting Max's
Kansas City and CBGB's, each a landmark in the unofficial registry of hip creative
locales. By the time she hooked up with guitarist Lenny Kaye to form the Patti
Smith Group in 1974, she'd already published her first three poetry
collections. Seventh Heaven, Early Morning Dream, and Witt.
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| Patti, Banga, (Columbia) |
The original PSG, anchored by Kaye,
guitarist Ivan Krahl, drummer Jay Dee Doherty, and keyboardist Richard Sohl,
put the electrifyingly unconventional Smith in the spotlight as a dark-maned,
androgynously thin-as-a-rail proto-punk priestess. A daringly smart, sexy,
spiritually grounded force of nature, Smith wasn't afraid to mix free-form,
spoken-word poetry slams into the band's gritty brand of garage-rock on four
albums that culminated in 1978 and 1979 with Easter and Wave, discs
that featured, respectively, a track she co-wrote with Bruce Springsteen (the
radio hit "Because the Night"), and another that U2 would famously go
on to cover ("Dancing Barefoot").
Smith sketches what might be a portrait
of herself from those days in one of the more arresting tracks on her new Banga, her eleventh studio album and
first in eight years. A wistful, ruminative piano ballad with a stern backbeat,
mellifluous string quartet embellishments, and a searing slide-guitar solo by
her son Jackson, the song is dedicated to the memory of French actress Maria
Schneider (perhaps best known on these shores for her role opposite Marlon
Brando in 1972's Last Tango In Paris),
who passed away last year. "I new you/When we were young," Smith
bellows on the rousing chorus, recalling a chance 1976 meeting she recounts in
the disc's liner notes. "I knew you/Now your gone." And then, turning
the mirror back on herself, she catches a glimpse of "Wild, wild hair/Sad,
sad eyes/White shirt/Black tie. . ."
Banga
is a deeply reflective album by an artist who, at 65, has a lot to reflect on.
It's also the most compellingly cohesive album she's released since taking a
prolonged sabbatical from music to raise a family with Fred "Sonic"
Smith, the late, great MC5 guitarist, in his native Detroit. It's not entirely
uncommon for creative types to take a year or two off – these days, I believe
it's usually called "celebrity rehab." But Smith more or less dropped
out entirely for close to 14 years, returning to New York only after the death
in ’94 of her husband and her brother Todd. At the behest of Bob Dylan, she
returned to the stage the following year. And, by ’96, she'd struck up a
friendship with Michael Stipe, collaborating with his band R.E.M. on their
"New Adventures in Hi-Fi," and was back to recording with members of
the PSG.
While it wouldn't be at all fair to
characterize the five albums leading up to "Banga" as artistic
failures, with the benefit of hindsight one gets the sense that Smith has spent
much of the past decade and a half adrift, trying to reconcile the explosive,
groundbreaking nature of her early work with her more obscure, avant
inclinations, perhaps even trying a bit to hard not to merely repeat herself
without entirely eschewing her bad-grrrl rocker leanings. Reading the liner
notes to "Banga," it becomes clear that Smith was quite literally
adrift during the formative stages of the new album. Indeed, she and Kaye, who
rejoins Daugherty, longtime collaborators Tony Shanahan (keyboards and bass)
guitarist Tom Verlaine (of Television) on Banga,
were invited on a ten-day cruise by director Jean Luc Goddard as he shot scenes
for a new film in the Mediterranean in March of 2009, when they began the
writing process.
Some of the other inspirations for Banga, as Smith tells it, were a trip to
Moscow, where she visited a monument to the writer Nikolai Gogol, a few days
spent with Johnny Depp (who's credited with playing guitar and drums on the
disc's title track) on location in Puerto Rico shooting The Rum Diaries, and a tour stop in Arezzo, Italy, where she
encountered the painting by Piero della Francesca that's referenced in the epic, ten minute-long reverie
"Constantine's Dream." But, you don't need to know the biographical
details or the background stories, for that matter, to appreciate the gentle
ease with which Smith conjures the breeze aboard the ship that, in 1482,
brought Amerigo Vespucci to a new world that would, in time, be named for him,
on the album's first track (the flowingly melodic "Amerigo"). Or the
subtle guitar hook that wends its way around Smith's unadorned voice on
"April Fool," a romantic ode to breaking rules that gets a big boost
from a beautiful solo by Verlaine. Or, the way Smith subtly channels the spirit
of Amy Winehouse in "This Is the Girl," a swaying stab at r&b
that's shot through with the kind of striking imagery ("This is the song
of the smothering vine/Twisted as laurel to crown her head/Laid as a wreath
upon her bed") that surfaces time and time again on Banga.
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| Patti Smith found her inspiration for Banga around the world |
On the other hand, knowing that
"This Is a Girl" is derived from a poem Patti penned to Winehouse in
Madrid after learning of her death, is a nice little reminder that Smith really
has led quite a life. That she continues to. And, that she keeps on finding
rewarding ways to incorporate those experiences into her art.
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