Get the bootleg if you have any genuine interest in music. (If you don’t, I hear the Kaiser Chiefs have released some new Product.)
Get the bootleg if you have any genuine interest in music. (If you don’t, I hear the Kaiser Chiefs have released some new Product.)
This month we’ve combined an article for our regular "Why aren’t you Listening?" feature, (one of the whole staff’s fave albums; Patti Smith’s classic Horses),with a live review of the said LP being played live at Meltdown. Our good friend, Mr Mark from rockin’ and futuristic band The Polaroids kindly gave us his opinion of the night.
Patti Smith – Horses World Premiere – Live at Royal Festival Hall, London
Patti Smith’s Meltdown Festival
Terrifying. Nervous convulsions. Before this event, I felt like a parent waiting for the curtain to go up on their kid’s debut performance as the lead in a (very Rock’n’Roll) school nativity play. In fact, I was so frozen with fear at the prospect of this gig not being as good as the teenage adulatory part of my brain thought it should be, that when it was first announced I didn’t even try to get tickets for it. That’s how stupid I am and that’s how much this music means to me.
This was the live premiere of Smith’s 1975 Rock’n’Rimbaud Beat Poetry collides with Garage Punk classic LP Horses, an absolute artistic triumph, a fundamental Rock text and one of my own personal favourite albums ever.
This gig clashed with Glasto Saturday night – my Glasto tickets had fallen through and as a consolation, my other half and I bought 2 tickets for this on E-bay. Of course, I should have just gone for it in the first place. There were legitimate reasons for my nerves. I’m not a huge fan of reunions and revivals generally, sometimes they work (Love – Forever Changes, Brian Wilson – Smile) sometimes they are pointless and vaguely embarrassing (Pixies, Velvets).
Also, one of the peculiarities about Horses which makes it particularly difficult to perform live (and presumably why Smith has never attempted it previously), is that large tracts of this most visionary text were reputedly improvised live in the studio. Patti was speaking in tongues, in Babelogues. Not something that’s easy to fake night in, night out.
Still, the fact that the ruthlessly unsentimental John Cale, producer of the original album, was the supporting act gave me some hope that this wouldn’t just be a run through to make commemorative CDs and DVDs to cash in on the 2005 Xmas present bonanza.
So…here we go…it’s a packed Royal Festival Hall. A mixture of Patti obsessives, Time Out readers looking for the "hot" event-du-jour, some stars and musicians, middle aged rock fans, young New Wave of Post Punkers hoping for a glimpse of what kicked it all off originally. Cale performs his support set: a typical uncompromising, awkward, truthful set, peaking with the mountainous emotional landscape of Gideon’s Bible. The guy has such a physical and mental strength. An immense presence.
Gulp – edge of my seat now – the main event. It’s going to be the album track by track. Here she comes now…dressed in her iconic "Horses" cover shot boho chic.
Gloria
First line:
"Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine"
Was that it? Nothing. I didn’t feel anything. F*ck. She’s not going to pull it off. Sounds a bit weak. She is 58 now…
Second line:
"Wildcard up my sleeve…"
She’s uncoiling slightly, getting into the groove. But still sounding like someone going through the motions to me. How many times has she done this before?
"My sins they belong to ME"
And then Patti takes charge, demanding absolute engagement from the audience. I’m not joking – as the dissonant piano chord crashes on the last syllable, Patti grabs the audience by the throat with the sheer power of her ancient shamanic charisma. There is no chance she’s going to let go. I’ve seen her live before and she’s always powerful but I’ve never seen her anywhere near this level of intensity. Patti had said in the press beforehand that she felt she needed to perform Horses while she was still physically, vocally, mentally strong enough to pull it off.
I had about seven electric shivers down my spine during this song. A sobering thought is that, meanwhile, (over in a field in the West Country), Chris Martin’s make up artist was applying that bloody equals sign thing on his hand in time for their Glasto headlining slot; a Nuremberg rally for the terminally vacant if ever there was one.
Back at the RFH, the crowd are already down at the front, acolytes around an Assyrian priestess.
Redondo Beach
A bit of a dud on the album, the original recorded version is an interesting song suffering in a strangely ineffectual cod reggae arrangement. This live version was warm and humane, very enjoyable and thankfully improved upon the Horses version.
Birdland
At this point, my heart is in my mouth as Patti grabs for her lyric book. F*ck. On the record, this is undeniably one of the artistic highpoints. An improvised-in-the studio exploration of a story about a boy watching his father being abducted by aliens, suffused with an almost unbearable emotional poignancy. Patti largely read this out of the book. Passionate but not good enough I’m afraid. A cop-out when dealing with this quality of material.
Free Money
A pretty strong run through but I was still feeling a bit anti-climactic after the Birdland-being-read-out-of-book-debacle. Still, at least it wasn’t an autocue.
Kimberley
Soon things are back on track. Never a favourite of mine on the album, the emotional meaning of the song comes through much more clearly in this much warmer, more humane arrangement, reminiscent of the earlier Redondo Beach reworking.
Then the evening lifts about 7 divisions for me…
Patti reads a poem – new to me, maybe written contemporaneously with or before the song, about a vision of Jim Morrison being petrified in marble and an angel breaking him out of it, seemingly the hidden vision behind the next song…
Break it Up
This really was more of the hairs on the back of the neck stuff I had been hoping she could pull off. Greedily, I hoped for Tom Verlaine to emerge from the wings to give it the abstract punk edged crystalline soloing it needs (close but no cigar, Lenny Kaye), but it didn’t happen. Still absolutely fantastic.
Then it’s the big one. The pivot of the whole album. The moment when the spirit of beat poetry finally broke through 50’s Rock’n’Roll structures and created Punk Art.
Horses/Land/Gloria Reprise
Relaxed, Patti banters with the crowd then utters the defining line of the album. A line so famous even Pete Doherty and Carl Barat have heard of it:
"The boy looked at Johnny"
At this point, some muppet in the crowd shouts out, making his play for immortality on the DVD. Patti stops instantly and viciously cuts him down: "These people have been waiting with baited breath for me to utter those words. You think they want to hear YOU. You may be the 7th son of a 7th son of a 7th son. But I don’t think so."
After this retort, there is a cathedral-like silence in the 2000 capacity sold out venue. The vibe has now been restored. Fear and reverence.
"The boy looked at Johnny"
This time she has no lyric book. She delivers a whole new extended extemporized simpatico introduction to one of the best songs ever written. I can feel tears in my eyes as I write. It was like seeing Lennon writing a new verse to Strawberry Fields Forever, cut from the same cloth as the original in front of your eyes. Or seeing Hendrix free-forming a new outro to All Along the Watchtower. You get the picture. Get the bootleg if you have any genuine interest in music. (If you don’t, I hear the Kaiser Chiefs have released some new Product.)
The Land of 1000 Dances section is superb with again continued improvising, including an impassioned attack on the increased fetishization of communications technology in a modern western society where parents can’t speak honestly with their children. Patti is very fired up. Righteous and (yes) Incendiary™.
Then a totally different middle section intervenes, (yes I’m approaching a state of religious ecstasy at this point) with Johnny being given a ticket to a party. Where he meets…Gloria… where he f*cks Gloria… where the Land song begins to sonically f*ck the "Gloria" song structure … and the band outro with a Land/Gloria hybrid. A brilliant conceit – what a way of getting past the impossibility of rendering live the multi-tracked improv vocals of the recorded version. Again, being greedy, I would have loved some new sampled Patti improvised vocals being mixed in live to recreate some of the recorded textures a bit more directly, but there you go.
A totally triumphant ending. To the extent that the band all left the stage forgetting to do the final track of the album, Elegie.
Standing ovation.
The band come back on and Patti apologises for messing it up and everyone is confused what to do. The moment for Elegie has gone and Patti has been waiting 30 years to perform this suite of songs live.
Patti goes with the flow, falls back on her instincts. She kicks the band into a version of Pissing in a River off Radio Ethiopia in a bid to collect their thoughts.
Then Patti launches into a spoken word version of Piss Factory to a still standing and ovating audience. I have never heard spoken word poetry sound so powerful and attract such silent rapture from an audience in all my life.
A ferocious performance of My Generation follows, again, heavily improvised. One new section seemed to me to be Patti formally handing on the baton of the revolutionary artistic zeal to a New Generation.
"Our generation we had dreams, we gave you George Bush. We have failed. It’s the new generation’s challenge to get out there and change the world. And you know it’s time."
It was so moving to witness such a powerful artist essentially admitting failure in the socially revolutionary aspect of her vocation, yet still believing in the power of art and people, a position totally out of step with the current vogue for artists to submerge themselves into a solipsistic egocentricity (again the contrast with the Chris Martin show couldn’t be more profound).
The artistic arc complete, the band are now once again free to perform a rapturously beautiful Elegie to close the events of the evening. Patti uses the elegiac song to summon a legion of spirits, both from her intimate circle (her deceased husband, Fred "Sonic" Smith from the MC5, Robert Mapplethorpe and so on; such a long, painful list) together with the icons still always present in her art, and it seems to me almost as intimately familiar to her, including Cobain and Hendrix.
When I got home and turned on the TV, inevitably Coldplay were on. I could literally only stand about 10 seconds of it. A man thrusting himself upon the nation as a false messiah was almost impossible to watch. It is the ART that matters not the ARTIST. An artist needs to be genuinely humble in the face of the art – and I do not mean Martin’s manipulative narcissistic pseudo self-effacement.
I feel privileged to have been here. It was a flawed masterpiece of a concert. I was lucky enough to be able to worship with Patti at the altar of the Art itself: the pure righteous energy focused through the power of MC5–powered R’n’R, poetry, free jazz, social revolution.
This was an absolute reminder of how far ahead of the current generation the sixties generation; where Patti’s heart still lies, were. In this age where every band is content simply to pepper their work with actual musical and stylistic quotations from the past, the true visionaries who can transcend their influences become ever more precious.