PATTI SMITH: "Twelve"

 

Original released on CD Columbia 82876.87251.2

(US 2007, April 24)

Depois de toda uma obra sobretudo assente em canções de que é autora (apesar de ter cantado The Who, Van Morrison ou Springsteen), Patti Smith dedicou este disco a uma série de homenagens a heróis e canções que admira. Passam ali memórias de Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Dylan ou R.E.M. entre outros. O disco é uma vénia de uma grande autora feita a artisas que a inspiram (in Expresso)

According to her brief liner notes, Patti Smith indulged the idea of a covers album, considering songs as far back as 1978 on the back pages of Jean Genet's "Thief's Journal" when she was still assembling her groundbreaking early catalog; it's evident she feels that covers have been part and parcel of her recording experience from the outset. Her debut, "Horses", has her own apocalyptic version of Van Morrison's "Gloria" as well as a healthy portion of Chris Kenner's "Land of a Thousand Dances" inside "Land." On 1979's "Wave" she covered the Byrds "So You Want to Be (A Rock and Roll Star)," and scored with the single. Her intuitive reading of Bob Dylan's "Wicked Messenger" was a beautiful aspect of "Gone Again" in 1996, and she paid tribute to Allen Ginsberg by using one of his poems in "Spell," on 1997's "Peace and Noise". And who can forget her reading of Pete Townshend's "My Generation" issued on the 30th Anniversary edition of "Horses"?

While it's a popular notion these days to consider a covers album a stop-gap between albums, the truth is that Smith has never been in a hurry when it comes to recording, though she has been very productive over the last decade. She has always paid tribute in one form or another to her heroes, however disparate. This collection is a wondrous sampling of pop hits, hard rock, ballads, and soul done in Smith's inimitable way of interpreting songs - by getting inside them and breathing their meaning, and often uncovering new shades of meaning - from within. She begins with a newer, more spiritual reading of Jimi Hendrix's "Are You Experienced?" letting her fine band - Jay Dee Daugherty, Lenny Kaye and Tony Shanahan - pulse the tune's changes and vibe while she comes across as a shaman leading the way down into the underworld. Her taking on Tears for Fears' smash hit "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" may come as a surprise, but in her open-throated take, the tune brims with the wisdom of a prophetess proclaiming the folly of humankind's need for power and greed. And while her version of Neil Young's "Helpless" may come across as a bit too reverent, the seed of memory is what infuses her take on this beautiful ballad. Loss and remembrance become a memento mori, an effigy to those who who've traveled on from this plane of existence. "Gimme Shelter" is a natural, and it carries all the foreboding of an apocalypse out the original nearly 40 years later as if to say that Jagger and Richard were right all along. The tune becomes a plea for shelter, rather than a demand. George Harrison's "Within You Without You" is the complete blending of spiritual longing, with droning acoustic guitars, skittering snares and open chord drones from Kaye's electric and fleshly experience. Smith's read of Dylan's "Changing of the Guard" is ambitious. Where the original was drenched in mariachi horns and a female backing chorus, she overturns those trappings and accents Dylan's last expressionistic lyric. She sings as if everything is at stake in this clash between the forces of light and darkness, where Melville, Dumas, Joan of Arc, the myth of Orpheus and the tales of Ovid are informed by both biblical prophecy and the tarot. The meld of acoustic guitars, brushed drums and muted kickdrum wind around her. The piano and Kaye's muted electric guitars fill the space where most of the backing vocals and horns once were - except where Smith's daughter Jesse Paris Smith harmonizes -- and seduce the emotion out of the nearly surreal narrative of renunciation.

Perhaps no tune moves here like Smith's reading of "Smells Like Teen Spirit," with help from Sam Shepherd and John Cohen on banjo, Peter Stampfel on fiddle, and Kaye and Duncan Webster on guitar in a strange dreamscape driven by a standup bass. Smith digs into the lyric and then offers a poem that is as much an early American folk song elegy to the environment Kurt Cobain grew up in as it is to what's happening to America itself, but with current touches. Her poet's heart not only complements the original but makes the song timeless and brings Cobain's mature spirit to flesh once more. It is the most moving track on the set and the most visionary. Smith closes her set with a true outlaws campfire song in Gregg Allman's "Midnight Rider," and a darker than written, sparsely textured, elegiac cover of Stevie Wonder's "Pastime Paradise," with a truly haunting piano by Luis Resto. Her small notes annotating each track are welcome and revealing in and of themselves. If this is truly the covers album Smith has always wanted to record, she's succeeded on a level with the best of her studio recordings and a welcome addition to her catalog. Each song has her imprint without sacrificing the intent or spirit of the original. Full of slow burning passion and emotion, "Twelve" is magnificent. (Thom Jurek in AllMusic)

PATTI SMITH GROUP: "Easter"

Original released on LP Arista AB 4171

(US, March 1978)

Patti Smith came back from the year-and-a-half break caused by her fall from a stage in January 1977 without having resolved the art-versus-commerce argument that had marred her second album, "Radio Ethiopia". In fact, that argument was in some ways the theme of her third. "Easter", produced by Bruce Springsteen associate Jimmy Iovine, was Smith's most commercial-sounding effort yet and, due to the inclusion of Springsteen's "Because the Night" (with Smith's revised lyrics), a Top Ten hit, it became her biggest seller, staying in the charts more than five months and getting into the Top 20 LPs. But Smith hadn't so much sold out as she had learned to use her poetic gifts within an album rock context. Certainly, a song that proclaimed, "Love is an angel disguised as lust / Here in our bed until the morning comes," was pushing the limits of pop radio, and on "Babelogue," Smith returned to her days of declaiming poetry on New York's Lower East Side. That rant (significantly ending, "I have not sold my soul to God") led into the provocative "Rock n Roll Nigger," a charged rocker with a chorus that went, "Outside of society / Is where I want to be." Smith made the theme from the '60s British rock movie "Privilege" her own and even got into the U.K. charts with it. And on songs like "25th Floor," Iovine, Smith, and her group were able to accommodate both the urge to rock out and the need to expound. So, "Easter" turned out to be the best compromise Smith achieved between her artistic and commercial aspirations. (William Ruhlmann in AllMusic)

PATTI SMITH GROUP: "Radio Ethiopia"

Original released on LP Arista ALB6-8379

(US 1976, October 22)

After the success of "Horses", Patti Smith had something to prove to reviewers and to the industry, and "Radio Ethiopia" aimed at both. Producer Jack Douglas gave "the Patti Smith Group," as it was now billed, a hard rock sound, notably on the side-opening "Ask the Angels" and "Pumping (My Heart)," songs that seemed aimed at album-oriented rock radio. But the title track was a ten-minute guitar extravaganza that pushed the group's deliberate primitivism closer to amateurish thrashing. Elsewhere, Smith repeated the reggae excursions and vocal overlaying that had paced "Horses" on "Ain't It Strange" and "Poppies," but these efforts were less effective than they had been the first time around, perhaps because they were less inspired, perhaps because they were more familiar. A schizophrenic album in which the many elements that had worked so well together on "Horses" now seemed jarringly incompatible. With "Radio Ethiopia" Smith and her band encountered the same development problem the punks would - as they learned their craft and competence set in, they lost some of the unself-consciousness that had made their music so appealing. (William Ruhlmann in AllMusic)

PATTI SMITH Debut Album

Original released on LP Arista AL 4066

(US 1975, December 13)

During the late 1990′s, in my young teenage years, I fell deeply into your standard “punk” phase. Naturally I was well aware from day one that "Horses" stood as some sort of ultimate classic among the genre’s first outpour. Teachers would tell you this, parents, Rolling Stone magazine. As a young idiot, i would agree. Maybe out of guilt for not “getting it”. I realize now that that’s total bullshit. "Horses" is not a great punk album. Not anymore. Not to a kid. It is, however, one of the finest rock albums ever crafted. Perfect 70′s, in-the-pocket, electric guitar music stretched across unchained, stream of conscience song writing. It’s so genius in the way that Patti Smith seems to understand that the groove of rudimentary rock music is in itself high art. No need to delude it with prog timing or bloated arrangements. Yet as organic as the record sounds, it still comes across like some wild audio painting with no concrete rules or limits. The way that the band speeds up and slows down through tracks like “free money” or the title track, is so natural, so jammin’, that i find myself uncontrollably shaking my hips with every listen, including right now behind the counter at Jive Time. Now that’s a true monument to American culture, counter or otherwise. For fans of The Stones, The Velvets, or American high art in general. Not for punks. (in RateYourMusic)

It isn't hard to make the case for Patti Smith as a punk rock progenitor based on her debut album, which anticipated the new wave by a year or so: the simple, crudely played rock & roll, featuring Lenny Kaye's rudimentary guitar work, the anarchic spirit of Smith's vocals, and the emotional and imaginative nature of her lyrics - all prefigure the coming movement as it evolved on both sides of the Atlantic. Smith is a rock critic's dream, a poet as steeped in '60s garage rock as she is in French Symbolism; "Land" carries on from the Doors' "The End," marking her as a successor to Jim Morrison, while the borrowed choruses of "Gloria" and "Land of a Thousand Dances" are more in tune with the era of sampling than they were in the '70s. Producer John Cale respected Smith's primitivism in a way that later producers did not, and the loose, improvisatory song structures worked with her free verse to create something like a new spoken word/musical art form: "Horses" was a hybrid, the sound of a post-Beat poet, as she put it, "dancing around to the simple rock & roll song." (William Ruhlmann in AllMusic)