LIKE PUNK NEVER HAPPENED: Patti Smith and the Hall of Fame

Editor’s note: Hey! Look! A Collaborator! And a good one, too. I’m very happy to have Caryn on board here at TATSOL. She has written for Backstreets, Blogcritics (where I first met her) and at her own exquisite spot on the web, jukeboxgraduate.com. Y’all are in for a treat. Also, for the record: I have never set foot in NYC and have been a fan of Patti Smith from the first time I heard her. So there.

When I was younger, I felt like everything I liked was out of style - at least in my peer group. When I was listening to the Jackson Five, they were listening to the Osmonds. When I was discovering the Beatles and the Who, they were listening to Aerosmith and Foreigner and Tales From Topographic Oceans. And, when I discovered The Class of 1977, it was all of the above and more so. (I mean, Jean-Luc Ponty, for heaven's sake. Boston. Styx. And worse.)

There were exactly three people in my high school that listened to punk rock (or at least made the mistake of talking publicly about the fact that they did). In Stamford, Connecticut, one of the few windows into punk rock was Saturday Night Live.  I remember watching Patti on SNL, and holding my breath the entire time, not wanting to act like I liked it too much, but not wanting to appear so bored my father turned off the tv set. And I remember the next Monday in school, as usual, SNL being a breathless topic of discussion in the lunchroom. Except, this time, there was nothing to ridicule or cause amusement: instead, you heard the "L" word being whispered from table to table. The message was clear: if you were so foolish as to espouse favoritism for the wild-haired priestess glimpsed on Saturday evening, you too would be branded with a very different kind of scarlet letter. 

I didn't care much, because I knew she was talking to me, and her words gave me solace:

I got nothin' to hide here save desire
And I'm gonna go, I'm gonna get out of here
I'm gonna get out of here, I'm gonna get on that train,
I'm gonna go on that train and go to New York City
I'm gonna be somebody, I'm gonna get on that train, go to New York City,
I'm gonna be so bad I'm gonna be a big star and I will never return,
Never return, no, never return, to burn out in this piss factory

By that point I had discerned that survival was the easiest way to the other side.  That is, until Lennon died. Somehow that earned me a get out of jail free token from the populace at large. I was given a wide berth. Suddenly I didn't care much about anything. I cut my hair as short as possible, got rid of the perm, and started wearing black as much and as often as possible. And, come September, got on that train and went to New York City and never looked back. By that point, of course, Patti had already called it a day. Aside from missing her, it didn't matter because the damage was already done, and her influence permanently a part of me and who I would become.

15 years later. Cut to 1995, when I am living in Seattle. My first web page is called Radio Ethiopia, and later that year, Patti surfaces and comes to Bumbershoot.  The line to get into the Opera House is endless and it is filled with hushed reverence. No one can believe what they are seeing - she is back.  She returns to her career, recording and touring, with the support of Mr. Bob Dylan (who asks her to open one of his tours), and one J. Michael Stipe, who is almost derided by one element of the Patti faithful for his fanboy behavior - "who does he think he is". To them, he is the pretender, and it amuses me.

It is hard when an artist returns after breaking up the band or any kind of long absence: are you evaluating them through the eyes of gratitude, is it still valid or does nostalgia color everything? There was no way the music or the effect would be as incendiary as it was 30 years earlier - the planet and the musical landscape had already changed too much - but I never walked out of a show feeling sorry I'd come to see it, that she was a shadow of any part of her past, that she was anything but vital. In what is probably one of the most brilliant pairings I have seen in years, Sleater-Kinney opened for her in Seattle in 2001. S-K spent their performance rocking out in inspired fashion, lecturing their audience that they were there to see Patti and that she was a goddess. That night, she ripped the strings off her guitar at the end of the night and you were reminded - again - of her power.

In the last 12 years, since Patti returned, I have never seen her phone it in. She may be tired and she may get pissed at the audience and want to get rid of the cameras in her face, and she may need glasses to read anything onstage these days, and she went through that period when she refused to swear onstage because of her kids - but it changed nothing. She has never been anything but strong and beautiful and relevant.

So it is 2007, and in what is obvious to the entire planet as an attempt to appease the aforementioned Mr. Stipe, Patti Smith is nominated to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame the same year as R.E.M. Patti is one of many on my personal list (Iggy, MC5, Gram) who should have been in a long time ago. And, somehow, I just assumed she was on everyone's list. I mean, I'm not going to start a petition to get Rush into the HOF, but I can certainly see that they deserve a place there.

The murmurings online were easy to ignore, until an individual who styles himself as an influential industry analyst (and, to be fair, he doesn't just style himself that way, people give that to him) writes a long treatise about how upset he is that Patti is in the HOF. (No, I'm not going to tell you who it is or link to it, because that will just give him more publicity for his insane rantings.) It wasn't so much that he went off on her, but the avalanche of echoed support he received from his readers.  If any of them had bothered to make any kind of reasoned case for their position, I could have respected the statements, but no one did. They argued that she was only popular in New York, that no one really 'got' punk rock except on the East Coast, that Robert Gordon (who also covered a Springsteen composition - although one will carefully note he did not receive a co-writing credit for it) deserved as much recognition as Patti did.

But it all boils down to logic that went out of style in 1979, and centers on this theme: you're not a Barbie doll, but you clearly are singing about sex, on your terms. So I can't relate to that. You front a rock band, but aren't blonde and plastic. Can't relate to that either. In fact, I don't understand anything you're singing about but the first two things freak me out so much I can't bother to try, so I'll write you off as insignificant or marginal and snicker something about being a lesbian and some unfounded sexist bs about needing a bar of soap until I remember that it's 2007 and you can't get away with that shit any more. Okay, let me go back to marginal and insignificant.

(And then followed it up with comments like, "Who next, Television" or, ominously, "The New York Dolls might be next." Reasoned individuals might respond: I CERTAINLY HOPE SO. But clearly, to most of these people, who are running today's music business, it's still 1975, when the CREEM Reader's Poll voted the Dolls as both the best band of the year and the worst band of the year.)

Let's completely overlook the scope of her influence: She's created a body of work that resonated in places like Chicago and and Texas Seattle and, um, Athens, Georgia, and France, and Japan, and Eastern Europe, and Australia and the UK.  The woman has fans in the highest reaches of the music echelon and in every corner of the globe. It's one thing to say, "I never really got Patti Smith" or "I don't much identify with her music" but the responses frightened me. It frightened me because they showed that nothing had changed in the cultural or sociological landscape, the old mindset still flourishes under the carpet or behind closed doors.

Have we not progressed one iota? No, seriously - what the fuck? We're dismissing Patti's entire body of work?  The fusion of high art and rock and roll? Patti is a classicist, and with Lenny Kaye as her second in command, meant that the music was always grounded in the essence: the Stones, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Chuck Berry, 50's doo-wop, the British Invasion - you  name it, the influences are there. Yes, it could get odd and experimental and the lyrics were otherworldly, but that was the WHOLE FUCKING POINT. "Rock and Roll Rimbaud" was the mantra, but the "rock and roll" part was hardly insignificant. She was trying, and succeeded in, taking it to another level, another place, spaceships and "Birdland" but "Birdland" also being homage to Charlie Parker and, fuck, she covered "Gloria" and "Land of 1,000 Dances" and "Time Is On My Side" and "Little Wing" and there is no end to the influences (which also go beyond rock into reggae and beyond, with the help of the classically-trained Richard Sohl).

Patti's work was always about rebellion and escape, and if that's not one of the essential rallying cries of rock and roll then I don't know what is.

Patti doesn't need the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, nor does she require me, or anyone else to defend her.  No one can take away what she gave to me, and to everyone else to whom she offered salvation, and no one can devalue her contribution to the planet. They can try, but the music stands in its own defense.

"And I will travel light.
Oh, watch me now."

Comments

[john]

I don't really care one way or the other ...I mean, she deserves to be a hall of famer I guess...but don't you think music is dead as a valid form of expression and as a valid movement in art? Why else would we be talking about the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame instead of new artists?

[jukeboxgraduate]

No, categorically do not think that music is dead in any way, shape or form. We're talking about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame because some dinosaur in the industry pissed me off, and because this blog is talking about music from the 70s. And we're talking about music from the 70s here because we weren't old enough to be writing about it then, and because we write about new music elsewhere.

[bmarkey]

Music: not dead
Reading comprehension skills: on life support