PATTI SMITH: THE ART OF TRAMPIN'
(Photo by Mel Zimmer; Patti Smith in 1976 with Mel's daughter, Suzanne)
If Patti Smith was me I'd have cashed in ages ago. I couldn't keep up. Punk archetype of nine albums, social evacuee, wife to the late Fred "Sonic" Smith, and in some circles, New York poet who's earned kudos to appear on Regis & Kelly one morning and perform at Herbert Huncke's funeral the next. Believe it or not, she's even a sex symbol. The first record I bought of her's (Easter, more disparate than Horses and I'd like to think better) was largely because I had overheard the store-clerk say she worshipped Patti-- I was seeking to impress her (the clerk, that is). This either goes to prove she's a vast legend, or I need more help than I thought, in which case her latest album Trampin' has done the trick...
In the beginning Patti Smith was never a feminist. Men are often the last to know anything about feminism but are generally the first to assign the term to a woman who, they think, undermines them, or at least questions the big machoism of which rock-critics once drummed under (though I'm not sure what critics do now). Instead, she was a woman, first produced by the mutations of John Cale (imagine if it wuz' John Sinclair...), and sang amongst three other guys of scag garage-band dementia (the kinda phrases you write when you listen to Lenny Kaye's guitar). Whether "Pissing In The River" on Radio Ethiopia or the unshaven pits off Easter, what critics have always failed to meet in Patti is that her main priority has always been to become a poet (like Nico that as it turns out just wanted to be Dylan, who also opted as a poet along with Cohen, Morrison, Farina, Reed, Henry Rollins: notice how I have to say his full name), has grown as a bi-standard to her poetry and as an ethic, if not attitude, to music itself.
Yet, like most people who've managed to stick around after '79 and pop up within indexes of all-to familiar books like The Life & Death of Rock n' Roll (screw that!), Patti hasn't sang to any era for a while.
See, ask any true fan what they think of punk music and they'll say it was cool for about two weeks. Those who differ are liars who secretly wish they could meet Mick Jagger. Patti has three solid records which are her quintessential centerpieces. That isn't to say nothing after '78 was good (though according to Lester Bangs' post-Creem writings in New Wave, punk-rock might as well have been Muzak)-- each of her albums are nearly subsequent debuts (minus the nihilism, but a classic, of Gone Again). Believing the theory that punk died when its "icons" became idols, and its "punks" forced into a lot of post-rock banality, Patti's last 25 years have been between a nexus (Dream of Life, Wave, Gone Again), all the while keeping the seventies as her origin (Gung Ho), that whenever faltered, she'd dish out something like "People Have the Power" at a protest rally to, er, remind everyone they still had power (even people themselves would arrest you if you tried that in the seventies).
Her sudden retreat into motherhood with Fred "Sonic" Smith while raising their daughter (now 16, plays duet piano on "Trampin'") before his eventual death (and the MC5, and maybe a few clubs in Detroit), carved the '96 evacuations in Gone Again; picking up an acoustic guitar and reforming with her seminal group from Horses. As she sets up voting booths at concerts, I see a person that, unlike the Annie Lenoxes, David Byrnes, Lou Reeds and Richard Hells (who are all toast), has survived aesthetics by being extroversive and not bearing a hint of vanity. Show me one lyric off any Patti's albums that present an egocentric, self-proclaimed figure covering her ass as a relic as opposed to a sell-out and I'll stop listening to Trampin'.
The album is her best out of the Peace and Noise series and non-jaded, which ultimately would've been the effect if she kept up with the Easter land. This is a fact. In a decade it'll be an instinct. Professionally, she left 29 years at Arista for Columbia which is a giant move PR-wise. Thus, it shouldn't be any surprise that Trampin', most so on the second track "Mother Rose," possesses some of the more poignant verses this world's heard of her, surrendering moments of Dylan's Time Out of Mind or Oh Mercy, and vocally Emmylou Harris (an overused comparison but people are usually right when they say it): Mother Rose/Every little more tender to me/There she stood/Waiting for the door, selflessly...
Remember "Gloria"? She's honed the un-conformed fight into a passion (one of the integral love songs since Lou Reed's ode to Candy Darling, dating back to Patsy Cline's perfect lyricism). This, "Cartwheels" and "Cash" seem to have a lot in common with people standing in doorways; Patti's voice rising with the music's sequence that pulls them out. She's escaped a bit of herself. Found new things out and isn't being "middle-aged" about it (Paul Simon), nor asking why (Mark Knopfler). "Trespasses" suggests Patti's become a storyteller rather the punktress sentiment; the life is designed by unfinished lines that another sings untypical for any, dare I say, alt-country song deriving from years of eternal grace.
I say this is her first record as a "singer". The songwriter has a story and the poet harmony. Half the songs shed redemption-- loss, hunger, freedom-- "Peaceable World's" hope for rebuilding that obvious kingdom-- "Cash's" confessional anthem-- while the others (kicking off with the wop of "Jubilee," not a very good cut, which she sang on Letterman, but then again, Lenny Kaye and Jay Dee Daugherty never sounded better) take on a political vengeance, ending with Patti's spoken-guerrilla rants which David Fricke compares to The Doors' "Five To One"-- but it's more like the last four minutes of "LA Woman" when the booze began to talk.
Her earlier records evolved around demographic class & creeds (Jimi Hendrix wuza' nigger), and then as a latter secularist. I hear Trampin' as both an anti-war statement (two songs) fueled not by leftism, but by her femininity ("Mother Rose"), which spiritually only contradicts itself in "My Blakean Year" (William Blake, aka Rock icon, ironically adapted by music deemed as Satanical). What her last three revival albums lacked were a time (when a country is, so to speak, "democratic", music can only react against the orthodoxy; hence Patti reading Ginsberg's "Howl" on Peace and Noise). "Gandhi's" diminuendo has Patti stabbing the British empire for oppressing the Hindus and also exploiting them for assassinating the pacifist leader (as Gandhi shaped a movement he was transformed into a demigod whose followers killed him for what they originally loved; John Lennon et al). It isn't a protest song, ha, nobody sings protest songs anymore (not intellectually hip). Patti has a bit of this in her, too. The twelve-minute "Radio Baghdad," beginning with Iraqi children on the street, though a savage highlight, never actually yells "no war" or "Fuck Bush". Instead, it's more of an uprise of human pathology (with a neo-Blue Cheer guitar riff): In the realm of peace all the world revolved around a perfect circle/city of Baghdad/city of scholars/imperial humble/center of the world/city in ashes...
America only knows the countries it bombs, Patti. The words seem to be improvised, considering she trails off into a "tree of life" to "shock & awe" rap, concluding with a skronk-clarinet, no doubt the city vacant and the children gone...again. Patti's ashamed she survived. My ears ring.
Think of Trampin' as her photo-album. A self-portrait is too easy, and most of the songs aren't even about her, but rather fragile documentaries. She wins me over with the melodies; beautifully un-decadent, the opposite of what punk has yield to (or was it always that way?). 2004 burns with this. And hey, if I'm wrong and ya think hope is just a bunch of shit and this album sucks, you can always give me a good trampin' when you see me next on the street...I'm the one looking over my shoulder.
--Carson Arnold - April 24th, 2004
copyright 2004 Carson Arnold
H(ear) is an online music column consisting of interviews, articles, and investigations written by Carson Arnold. As a freelance writer for various magazines and liner notes, living in the woods of Vermont with his family, Carson widely encourages one to submit their art, writing or any interesting piece of material that you would like to share. H(ear) is accepting both promos and demos for review or any other valuable music-related subjects. If you wish to make a comment or would like to receive H(ear) weekly by email please contact Carson at [email protected]
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