| February 19th, 2005 01:28 AM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
The vision of a rock'n'roll past
By Warwick McFadyen
February 19, 2005
A stellar moment in rock music is commemorated this year with the 30th anniversary of the release of Patti Smith's first album, the classic Horses. Warwick McFadyen explores an unusual influence behind the album: the poet William Blake.
The British visionary artist and poet William Blake lived among angels and devils. They were with him always. Imagined creatures, bustling among the hedgerows, looking over his shoulder as he drew, whispering into his ear as he wrote of spears, chariots, gold and fire, satanic mills and tigers.
Blake's imagination carried him outside society. It's little wonder that American poet-singer-songwriter Patti Smith looks to him as the map of her artistic designs.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the release of Smith's debut album, Horses. A generation ago it made the Top 50; now it features in almost every list by music magazines and critics of rock music's top albums.
In Horses, Smith took a poetic vision, part surrealist, part hallucinatory, part rebellious destroyer of worlds, which before had been words on a page or merely spoken at readings, and melded it with the thundering chords of electric guitar and drums. The result was both explosive and the echo of an explosion. A new force had arrived and, as she would later incant, "I am an American artist, and I have no guilt".
Stir in revolutionaries, virtuosos and geniuses such as John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Beethoven, Arthur Rimbaud, Virginia Woolf and Blake and the mix becomes volatile, cracking and shredding the sky like a tropical storm that throws down flashes of light on to the land.
Behind the clouds though, one imagines the figure of Blake, wrestling his vision into his songs of innocence and experience, his auguries, his worlds of Thel and prophecies, his fantastical new Jerusalem, his glinting eye of a tyger.
In an article in The Observer newspaper in Britain in 2003, a New Yorker piece is quoted in which Smith spoke of growing up with dreams and of her debt to Blake, who died almost 200 years ago: "She recalls seeing ghostly figures moving through the fields opposite her home. 'It was an eidetic vision, much like those that Blake had as a child. I believed that those people lived there, gathering light. And I believed that God inhabited that place.' "
She told The Observer: "Blake has always been my guide and my comfort. I often think of him, especially of late when I have had a lot of difficulties. I mean, you plug away and it's not always appreciated in one's own time. That can be frustrating, but then I always think of William struggling his whole life with so little feedback, so little fame or fortune. He held on to his vision until his death. He's a constant inspiration. The template for all I do."
In the song Birdland, the magnum opus of Horses, Smith lays down that template - the markers of her vision - and makes reference to her hero ("He saw the lights of traffic beckoning like the hands of Blake/grabbing at his cheeks, taking out his neck"). She transmutes rock and roll into an art form, her art form of glorious exaltation to the power of words and music. It was sacred text through a microphone.
The love of Blake has stayed with her. Her website (www.pattismith.net) opens to Blake's painting Glad Day. Of the song My Blakean Year, from her latest album Trampin', she writes: "I have worked on this song for awhile. Reading a lot of William Blake as well as the wonderful Blake biography by Peter Ackroyd.
"His life (Blake's) was a testament of faith over strife. He suffered poverty, humiliation and misunderstanding yet he continued to do his work and maintained a lifelong belief in his vision. He has served as a good example in facing my own difficulties and feeling a certain satisfaction in doing so."
Even Jubilee, the first song on the album, echoes Blake. Its first line reads: "Oh glad day to celebrate."
Smith is enough of an admirer to have visited Blake's grave in Bunhill Fields, Finsbury, London. She has said in an interview on the internet: "I have been reading, studying or looking at Blake's work since I was a child. I had my own copy of Songs of Innocence and Experience in grade school. I am always revisiting him.
"I was just happy to be near him. Also John Bunyan is very close by. Pilgrims Progress was another favoured childhood book of mine."
This lifelong link has also resulted in Smith appearing for readings at Blake exhibitions in London, at the Tate Gallery, and the Metropolitan in New York.
The most obvious link, of course, is through words. Blake carried within him a deeply personal and mystical view of Christianity. From The Cradle Song: "Sweet babe, in thy face/Holy image I can trace; Sweet babe, once like thee/Thy Maker lay, and wept for me/Wept for me, for thee, for all/When He was an infant small./Thou His image ever see,/Heavenly face that smiles on thee."
So does Smith. This from the song Hymn, from her album Wave: "When I am troubled in the night he comes to comfort me. He wills me thru the darkness and the empty child is free to take his hand his sacred heart the heart that breaks the dawn. Amen. And when I think I've had my fill he fills up again."
The language between the two flows in nuance and sentiment. While Blake would never have been a hard-driving, foot to the floor rocker, he would have delighted in this from Smith.
The song Ravens, from the album Gone Again, has an archaic, almost fussily Arcadian, quality to it in its rhythm and rhyming.
"Common fortune seeks us all
and slips our binding rings
we'll turn our heads
and make us reel
we'll bare our arms as wings
before our feet a feather drifts
beyond us it will fall
cause time will bid and make us rise
make ravens of us all."
The piece could easily have come from Songs of Experience.
Smith is unique in modern music in wearing her influences so openly on her sleeve. It bespeaks her devotion to the creative life. To her, she is but a link in a chain of words stretching back 200 years that is both Gloria in excelsis and G.L.O.R.I.A..
The Age
Warwick McFadyen is a staff writer.
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| February 19th, 2005 03:26 AM |
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| Brainbell Jangler |
Patti is so great. She wrote a terrific homage to the Stones, "Jag-Ahr of the Jungle," which was published in David Dalton's "The Rolling Stones: The First Twenty Years." Here's an excerpt about the first time she saw the boys on TV:
"there was pa glued to the tv screen cussing his brains out. A rock'n'roll band was doing it right on the ed sullivan show. pa was frothing like a dog. I never seen him so mad. but I lost contact with him quick. that band was as relentless as murder. I was trapped in a field of hot dots. the guitar player had pimples. the blonde kneeling down had circles ringing his eyes. one had greasy hair. the other didn't care. and the singer was showing his second layer of skin and more than a little milk. I felt thru his pants with optic x-ray. this was some hard meat. this was a bitch. five white boys sexy as any spade. their nerves were wired and their third leg was rising. in six minutes five lusty images gave me my first glob of gooie in my virgin panties.
"That was my introduction to the Rolling Stones. they did Time is on my side, my brain froze. I was doing all my thinking between my legs. I got shook. light broke. they were gone and I cliff-hanging. like jerking off without coming.
"Pa snapped off the tv. but he was too late. they put the touch on me. I was blushing jelly. this was no mamas boy music. it was alchemical. I couldn't fathom the recipe but I was ready. blind love for my father was the first thing I sacrificed to Mick Jagger."
It may be impossible for those too young to remember the world Before Stones to appreciate their impact at the time. But Patti Smith does a good job of communicating it. |
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