i was talking today to an older, successful writer. She was saying there isn’t a good how-to writing book about how to live a life and still write. Make a living, manage the paid work with the passion work, retain relationships, attend events, juggle pitches and poems, save time for spacing out. Wish i could write that one but i can’t/ Don’t know the how-s or the to-s of it.
side 2 (of Horses) feels older, a little bit. Side 2 is about longer-ness and loudening and farewells, but also about really becoming yourself.
So, why the post-adolescent confessionals in response, all typed out like a Beat, what’s up with the question marks and where’s the rock and roll analysis, what gives with the girlish need for perfection, the romance of artistic superlatives?
Because, patti smith, your work — music, words, all — connects me with something tiny and true and wonder in here, something that tells me, remember?, and remember. the something never satisfied, the something keeps you making, the something that always asks for more. greedy in its own gifting, this something.
A million and a half smart people have written briliant critiques of your album, patti, saying things like gamechanger, like godmother, birther of a vivid nascent howl of culture (and your flow, your sweet rapper’s flow, they sing of you!) sing how you traveled time for generations of us, young, who heard you first in others, who only later really noticed hearing you. for me you followed your own influence, the way the jump-cuts of Jean-Luc Godard came for me after MTV: by the time we got it it was quotidian, even typical.
i ask to let me never think of voice as everyday, be it raw people poems or Fenders or my own. i ask to let them also be this way: unleashed like potential, like the tremor in a land-owner at hearing the pump-slash-gutwrench of electric guitar meets angelic imagery, accessed like an every-day how-to.
Like young you, standing in an ideal triangle of light before the shutter of the artist of your life, we ask for more so we can become it.
cuz we can only try, sweet girl, to be the artists of our lives.
1985. The year of We Are The World. The year of more bullshit from Reagan and something grownups kept talking about I’d never heard before, something called Lebanon. The year Talking Heads released Little Creatures, in which David Byrne sang of a girl lying on the grass and floating through the air, of a perfect universe and a road to nowhere. The year I found out what a virgin was, thanks to Madonna.
This was the year that pop music was everything to me, and I used to call up my best friend on the telephone and bemoan Sunday nights, because they only led to Mondays, because Monday was when we had to return to the dreaded School. At nine years old, I knew nothing about getting to work late, or kissing Italian-named boys in my dreams, but I knew that Mondays sucked, and every week I came down with a case of them.
I stumbled into 1985 on the way back from a trip to southern California this weekend. My mind and heart and body were already reeling from the many-pronged assault of family baggage, the weight of Time and Mortality, the physical displeasure of sitting in cars on your days off and eating many fried things, and… Riverside County. We made it through LA and the rain started up again. The bumped and tarred veins of Highway 101 were slick and everything had that daytime-dark glow, when you know there’s sun behind the cloud but its light is filtered through the unseasonable condensation of this atmosphere: heavy with light.
Our state is beautiful. Hills like bleachers surround the car, the unusual greens plastered by the rains on the meadows contrasting with the deep gold of summer hay waiting for it to actually be summer. Black cows as freckles. Oaks to make a conquistador sigh with homesick. The ocean water is still beneath the rain water and the palm trees shake in the quiet storm’s path, defiant. One or two surfers defy it, too.
We stopped in Santa Barbara to surprise my dear friends and check out their amazing new record store in person. I am jealous in all the right ways, sitting on the floor of the stock room eating tacos and being thrilled at the physical realization of all the ways in which I always thought, “If I had a store, this is how I’d do it.” Good work, kids.
The rain calmed and the lunch break was over and we had to get on the road again. Max remembered that we needed music for the car, thanks to a temper tantrum (only half-joking) I threw on the way out of town Friday when I realized I had forgotten my chosen stack of road trip CDs and Max, unaware of my very specific driving-music needs, had brought nothing but soft indie rock and West African guitar music.
“No,” I had explained, astounded that I even needed to clarify. “Road trip music should be music that I know the words to, music with a driving rock backbeat, with drums and bass, and preferably bar chords. White Americans with guitars, that’s what I need to start off a road trip. Later when the road gets blurry we can segue into the filmic African soundtrack, or ladies singing old-timey labor movement songs, but I want to sing along as I pull out of town.”
With this in mind, I chose a couple cassettes from the small selection on the back wall of the store, a dollar each because that’s how old we are now, and we pointed the car back onto the north-south path. The best options to fulfill my overly specific yet still vague demands were Little Creatures, by Talking Heads, and the Bangles album Different Light. Both were recorded in 1985.
The tape starts, and now the clouds are mountains themselves: inverse ranges of hip-shaped rows in alternating light and dark greys. I remember: this is one of my favorite things. Road trippin’, California style, with a person you love and music you know the words to. I turn it up and Max grins in sort-of amazement as I start singing along, hitting every word with the correct inflection and timing. It’s like riding a bike. The gold tipped hills of California are my onlookers and if I had a hairbrush I’d use it as a microphone. It’s just another Manic Monday…
The song’s goodness stands out on an otherwise pretty mediocre album of songs the Bangles didn’t write (including a bizarrely bad “September Gurls”) that was recorded more slickly and gently then their previous 60’s girl-group inspired album. It’s only after sitting down to write about this that I am reminded “Manic Monday” was written by Prince and duked it out on the charts against “Kiss,” my other favorite 4th-grade song. (Like Cyndi Lauper’s Prince-written hit, “When You Were Mine,” the gender pronouns in a love song by a male songwriter sung by a female singer within the presumed heterosexual context of pop music, and when and where they are switched, are sometimes interesting, especially to a nine-year-old).
This song is bedroom phone conversations and fantasies of adulthood and 1985 and the sound of pop, then. In 1985 I probably drove this route with my mom and brother on Christmas, stopping at Pea Soup Andersen’s at night for me to gaze in the bright-lit windows at dimly lit figurines that moved and sang. Then it was back to sleeping in the back seat of the Mazda again, mildly dreading the oncoming crush of family and worlds that I never considered mine, driving and tanning and buying and the southern California-ness of it all, my richer Republican relations and their questions and amazement at us, brown-haired Northern non-Christian children among a sea of blonde ornaments with our skateboards and our books.
1985 must have been shortly after the year my cousin Christie and I staged a riveting lip sync choreography routine to Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” in the living room of a soul-free condo in Palm Desert, and certainly after the at-home choreography sessions in my best friend’s living room back north in Santa Cruz, which often involved the soundtrack to Flashdance. It was not long after I listened to the Top 40 countdown every Sunday morning on the radio, tape recording my favorite songs on a handheld player borrowed from my older brother and dreaming up ways to call in to the station to win those free Prince tickets.
This was a moment of childhood, but also of growing older. Of no more performing in living rooms, of learning to live lives in public away from the family’s realm, learning to make excuses for being late, and beginning to concoct a fantasy of a glamorous future in which I was a city girl, shook out of dreams by alarms the morning after, just tryin’ to make it to work on time and blamin’ it on the train.
[PS - My camera is having a moment of deadness, so a pretty picture of the vinyl version's cover art will have to wait...]
Consider Linda Ronstadt. No really, consider her. Country singer turned chart-topper. Latina pop superpower. Roller skate wearer. Rock and roll success in an era where most stars were men.
When I talk about Linda Ronstadt, I often automatically start off by being defensive on her behalf. Maybe it’s because at first glance, to a modern-day kid, she doesn’t seem the most legit: she doesn’t play an instrument, doesn’t write her own songs, and was frequently photographed in less than feminist ways. But in fact, her musical prowess is immense, she has managed to be a commercial success with (mostly) control over her own career since the 70s, and she’s always reckoned with being a sometimes scantily clad woman rock singer in honest and interesting ways, in public.
And that’s all before you hear her sing.
Ronstadt often talked in interviews about preferring to record music that she grew up with. Her early albums display a mix of country music with ranchero-style rhythms. And Ronstadt herself was a lot of the music I grew up to.
There’s an impression in my musical memory: my mom sitting on the front steps, probably grading papers or doing accounting work, singing Ronstadt versions of classic songs to me as I circled our small carport on rollerskates, practicing. The carport was the only cement surface in reach near our house; after its small square of smoothness, our long gravel driveway connected to a potholed, barely paved road. I considered myself well-practiced once I could hit a stray gravel rock without falling, instead stopping and catching myself and immediately starting off again for another go around the miniature rink, skinned knees and all.
Nowadays we would call Ronstadt a cover singer—most of her dozens of hits were songs written, and often made famous, by other people. She didn’t play a guitar onstage. She just stood there, singing. “I Can’t Help it if I’m Still In Love With You” (written by Hank Williams; also iconically performed by Patsy Cline). “When Will I Be Loved” (by The Everly Brothers). Her renditions of songs became the go-to ones for my parents’ generation, booting out the performances of such artists as Betty Everett (“You’re No Good”) and Wanda Jackson (“Silver Threads and Golden Needles”) for more decade-appropriate interpretations.
Before the “alternative” rock era ushered in the need for singers to write their own material and “do” more onstage, Ronstadt would have been called “an interpreter of the Great American Songbook.” Whether or not you agree with the limited concept and scope of a “great” “American” songbook (I think it’s both sort of sentimental and totally exclusive of non-mainstream artists and art), Ronstadt’s role in recording popular American songs from the span of the 20th century is not that different from revered vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald or even Patsy Cline. It matters. And it’s so, so singable. Seriously. This woman has sung every song. It’s insane.
Say what you will about the seventies being a decade of odd, derivative, yet oddly influential rock music. Ronstadt managed to provide the requisite interpretation of the “songbook” appropriate to her period of ascendance—slow ballads and easy-swinging rock tunes with guys dropping in guitar solos during which she stood silent. She felt the songs, “Desperado” and all. And she did the songs justice. Hers remain good musical choices, even if the fashions and pretentions of the era may not. (And we all know all eras have pretentions, in hindsight.) Her voice is powerful.
There is something about Ronstadt that is indeed truly seventies, despite her career encompassing every decade since the sixties. She’s not a folk or protest singer, and not a groomed offspring of the fifties and sixties. She was a contemporary of Janis Joplin, yet despite her grounded and powerful tone most of the music Ronstadt performs is much less rockin’ than Janis’s music. Poking around the internet for videos to post, I remember how seventies Ronstadt makes me feel, even down to the fact of my existence being a product of that decade. The softness of the rock with the guitar focus. The girl singer acting tough while being sexy and girly. The retrospective gentleness of popular music. The groovy sexual expression, the return to the personal and the focus on emotion and after the political and game-changing foci of 60s popular music. Ronstadt embodied this all, contradictions and all.
She also remains an anomaly as a mega-selling Latina pop star, having always loudly and proudly credited her Mexican heritage as a formative part of her identity, musically and otherwise. She has released several Spanish-language albums. She’s also performed opera, collaborated with classic composers, and I’m sure more that I don’t even know about. Despite the facts that her hands are empty onstage, the woman is a musician.
I wish I had a Stone Poneys record. I don’t. I have one of her many greatest hits comps, one I probably picked up in a dollar bin somewhere. It was released in 1976, the year I was born. And every time I put it on I’m spinning around the carport again, learning the songs of my century through the robust, emotional, smooth, and sweet renditions of a terrific, trailblazing “lady singer.”
When I heard X-Ray Spex for the first time, my mind was entirely blown. By that time I was pretty familiar with 1970s punkk music. But this was something else. X-Ray Spex made punk music that was mature beyond its genre. They combined art with artifice with amps, and they blew most dude-fronted rock bands out of the water. Poly Styrene’s singing and performing contained the sonic genesis of every riot grrl band I ever loved in the ’90s, except this was in the ’70s, when even punkers didn’t sound like this. Bands like the Buzzcocks were a pop factory compared to the gutteral growls of the Spex; and they backed up those growls with downright avant garde arrangements. A fucking saxaphone in a punk band. Their outfits were rad, too.
The other night, I was talking about this record project with my friend Peter and he gave me a great compliment. He said that he likes it because I don’t write about music the way a lot of critics write about music, which is to say in a way that makes him want to kill them. (Thanks, Peter!) That’s not an accident. I believe that music connects with an undefinable cross-section of many non-critical aspects of humanity and personality and experience and time. So do most critics. But somehow, at least in a lot of contemporary criticism, this macho, collector-dude, completist ego thing gets in the way and a lot of critics have to spend time talking like they know more than anyone else about music. Which makes us hate them, because that’s annoying.
I’m probably as annoying as the next music writer; the point of this story isn’t to prove my ego is less than that of some guy who’s invested his entire life in knowing about music. Sure, I probably know more than some people about certain musics. Of course I say things like “avant garde arrangements,” just like other critics.
But the point is, we all know about music. If we love even just one song, whether a pop teenage hit or an epic symphony of old, we know enough about music to talk about it with each other. We may not have all the context, and we still like to hear from people who do have that context, but when it comes to popular culture we are our own best experts. You can feel it in the way your feet won’t sit still to certain songs, in that universal and enduring human need to lip sync into a hairbrush, and in the chill that whispers across my arm hair when Poly Styrene screams.
Sometimes I feel made tired by writing about music. Sometimes it’s nice to just listen to it. So today, listen to some X-Ray Specs with me, and think about their context and influence and all that stuff if that’s what the record makes you think about. But mostly just listen. Do you like it? Why? Why not? What does it make you feel?
dear Patti,
