Patti Smith's Horses (13 page)

After a change to shuffle rhythm, Smith alternates her mimicry of macho bravado with a breathier, more sibilant style, confusing, once again, the boundaries between gender roles. As the song progresses, the use of shrieks, sobs, sliding pitches, wide glissandos, and other vocal effects complicates the significance of the text further. In the space of a single line, for example, “I I walk in a room you know I look so proud,” the voice moves from an impassioned sobbing effect, (“I I walk”), to breathiness (“in a room”), to hard and nasal (“you know I look”), to clipped and cocksure (“so proud”). Further along, the sense of solitary defiance is emphasized by the casually slurred “I go to this here par-ty,” and the closed, croaked effect of “bored.” In the lines that follow, and as the tempo accelerates, Smith deploys her most characteristic vocal device, an “upward octave portamento” (Daley, 1998). Used at the ends of certain phrases (for example, “oh she looks so fine”), the device seems to transform otherwise straightforward sexual assertions into “coy rhetorical questions.” The effect, as Daley notes, is certainly playful, but it also “functions as a critique and a grab for power.” Thus, in the song’s midsection, the voice mimics the brute physicality of phallic penetration via the staccato stress on “unh! unh! make her mine.” Following on from this, “Gloria” begins to resemble something like a conventional cover version, with Smith drawing more closely on Morrison’s original text. But as the tempo increases, moving from 100 beats per minute to 150 beats per minute, the sense of febrile abandon contrasts with Morrison’s more controlled approach. In Smith’s version, the breathy, semicoherent
delivery of the lyrics emphasizes the vertiginous effects of sexual desire; the sense in which language, à la Rimbaud, cracks in response to the demands of the body.

When, finally, the sexual encounter climaxes in the closing section (“and the name is and the name is GLORIIIIIIIIA”), the release of tension is ecstatic, orgasmic even. There is, indeed, an element of
jouissance
, a dangerous excessive pleasure, in the octave leap that accompanies the enunciation of the climactic “A.” But in a song that launches multiple excursions into the realm of orgasm, this is only one of many peaks. And lest we be tempted into assuming that the eruptive, noisy, paralinguistic dimensions of Smith’s performance signifies a realm of feminine pleasure beyond the law of the phallus, we should note that “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo)” places much emphasis on the lability of male and female subject positions. The phallus, in other words, by virtue of its status as a signifier, is subject to co-optation by the feminine. Thus, in the lines that follow, Smith changes the focus to the scene of a rock show at the New Jersey Roosevelt Stadium, where the singer hears the sound of “twenty thousand girls call[ing] their name out to me.” Here, however, the indeterminacy of the singer’s gendered identity and sexual orientation is relieved by the sight of “the big tower clock” with its bells chiming “ding dong ding dong ding dong.” We have returned, in other words, to the scene of phallic authority with which the song began. The Holy Father may be challenged, the song suggests, but ultimately the fact that Gloria’s name is constituted only in the interplay between Smith, the female singer, and her male band members (“G-L-O-R-I-A
[Gloria]”)
implies that she must remain an object of exchange: a glory to God the highest, but not to herself.

In a sense, then, Gloria signifies the impossibility of woman herself (see Lacan, 1999, and Žižek, 1999). Since she appears only as an object of exchange and not as a person in her own right, Gloria functions as a symptom of Smith’s alienation as a woman in a male-dominated cultural environment. At best, in moments of ecstasy, she appears to mark a potential space beyond the control of the patriarchal god; as the Lacanian Real (see Lacan, 1979), she thus emerges as unreachable, excessive, and sublime. Yet, as Richard Middleton has argued (2006), the notion of the feminine as a sublime object of desire (Žižek, 1989, and Shaw, 2006) lends itself equally to the shoring up of patriarchy. By designating femininity as a zone of excess, the phallic order effectively shields itself from its own capacity for self-contestation. In the end, however, “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo)” leaves the question of the success or failure of its challenge as a matter for the listener to decide. As Middleton goes on to suggest, the mere fact that the song uncovers the perverse nature of the Name-of-the-Father points to an alternative and perhaps more positive outcome.

The next song is “Redondo Beach”; named after the city in the South Bay region of the greater Los Angeles area, its beach area is a focus for the local lesbian and gay community. Set to a reggae-inflected beat, crisply accented by Sohl and Daugherty, and based around a twelve-bar blues progression in C, the song appears to sustain the exploration of alternative sexuality begun in “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo).” It was composed in the latter half of 1974, but with lyrics dating from 1971 (a version of these lyrics appeared in 1972
in
Kodak
as “Radondo Beach” [
sic
]). For
Horses
, Smith chose to omit the syncopated lines that she used to introduce the song live: “Redondo beach! Is a beach! Where! Women! Love! Uthhhaargh! Women! [kissing noises].” The effect of this elision on the meaning of the recorded version depends a great deal on the competence of the listener; while listeners familiar with the sexual topography of southern California will, of course, supply their own contextual meanings, other less knowledgable listeners must rely on the evidence presented by the song itself: the fact that it is sung by a woman and that it is addressed to the memory of a beloved “pretty little girl.”

But who, precisely, might this girl be, and why should the song center on her death by suicide? Or, for that matter, why should an ostensibly straight woman come to write a song with a lesbian connotation? To answer the first question, it is helpful to consider Smith’s own reflections on the song. Some time after the recording of “Redondo Beach,” the singer claimed, in a note for
Complete Lyrics
(1998), that the song was inspired by a quarrel with her sister Linda. Smith has testified on many occasions to the unusually close bond she shared with her younger brother and sisters. With Linda, she travelled to Paris in the late 60s; Todd was a member of her road crew for many years; and Kimberly, her youngest sister, has appeared on recent albums playing mandolin and occasionally in concert playing guitar. The text that emerged from this argument might seem, at first sight, to belie the notion of a sympathetic and loving relationship between Patti and Linda, but it is important to remember that “Redondo Beach” is fashioned from the outset as a sort of dream-text: “late afternoon dreaming hotel” is the song’s suggestive opening
line. The dream of the death of a beloved sibling, as Freud suggests
(The Interpretation of Dreams
, 1900; Freud, 1976), is not uncommon and its implications need not be disturbing. Put simply, where there is love, there is also hate; and the emotional ambivalence felt by one sibling toward another may sometimes find expression in dreams of murder, accidental death, or suicide. Freud thus cautions against using the dream “as evidence that [the dreamer] wishes for that person’s death
at the present time.
” Though this does not discount “the inference that this death has been wished for at some time or other during the dreamer’s childhood” (Freud, 1976), the fact that the adult protagonist of “Redondo Beach” is grieving qualifies the sense in which the dream expresses a wish for such a death in the present.

Rather than approach the song as disguised sibling death-wish, it is perhaps more interesting to ponder the reasons why the lyric is set in Redondo Beach, rather than Coney Island, where the song was conceived. What, to put it crudely, is signified by the shift from death to sex and to
lesbian
sex, at that? One obvious answer is that Smith, after Bowie and Reed, wished simply to contribute to the then fashionable “gender bender” genre. But given that the song follows on from the deeply ambivalent “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo),” it might make more sense to consider “Redondo Beach” as yet another attempt to engage with the conceptual hegemony of the phallus. When considered, however, as a form of mental topography, “Redondo Beach,” unlike “Gloria,” seems at first sight to have nothing to do with the Name-of-the-Father. Here, for example, there are no looming towers, no symbols of masculine penetration to disturb the playful, oceanic setting. But this, as the central narrative makes clear, is not a song of celebration.
Faced with the prospect of the girl’s “sweet suicide,” the women “stand with shock on their faces” while the singer, for the greater part of the song, gives expression to trauma through repetition: “I was looking for you are you gone gone.” Like Gloria, the unnamed girl is only ever encountered as missing or lacking, and as such she suggests, once again, the Lacanian idea of woman as excessive or “impossible,” a sublime object of desire that must be excluded if the symbolic order is to take effect (see Lacan, 1999 and Žižek, 1999).

When, at the close of the song, the singer expresses acceptance (“Never to return into my arms you are gone gone.… Good-bye”), the tone is disarmingly light, resigned—comic even. In performance, throughout 1975, Smith accentuated this latter aspect of the song by mimicking the act of drying tears. As several critics have noted, while the gesture fits well with the song’s playful reggae rhythm and the knowing harmonic gesture toward doo-wop, it contrasts with the song’s morbid lyrical content. To explain this apparent disparity, it is worth pausing to reflect on the significance of play and its unexpected relation with loss. If, as I have suggested, the greater part of “Redondo Beach” is preoccupied with the repetitive expression of loss (“gone gone”), then the final acceptance of loss (“Good-bye”) suggests a point of closure. As Freud postulates in his discussion of the
fort-da
game in his 1920 essay
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(1984), the ability to overcome grief may originate in early childhood when the young infant is forced to come to terms with the absence of the mother. Observing the behavior of his grandson, Freud noticed the boy playing with a reel of cotton, uttering the word
fort
, or gone, when the reel rolled away, and a joyful
da
, or there, when it was returned. By mastering loss in symbolic
form, the boy was able to resign his instinctive desire for the mother’s return. As Lacan goes on to argue, conceived thus, the
fort-da
game might be read as an early (pre-Oedipal) entry point into “the structure of signifying lack which is constitutive of the symbolic order itself” (see Lacan, 1979, and Middleton, 2006). For Smith, in “Redondo Beach,” the presymbolic girl, herself a little piece of the excluded maternal body, must be casually dismissed if the subject is to be allowed access to the patriarchal realm of language and culture. The song may therefore be considered as a form of play, a little game within which the female subject learns to resign her love for mothers, for women, for girls, and ultimately for herself. Equally, however, as is the case with “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo),” “Redondo Beach” is open enough to allow scope for the development of qualifying perspectives, enabling the listener to countenance the idea of same-sex desire running alongside and perhaps intertwined with the operation of heterosexuality.

In an interview with
Crawdaddy
, Smith explained the inspiration behind “Birdland,” the ten-minute speech-song that forms the centerpiece of side one of
Horses:

I got the idea for “Birdland” when I read this book by Peter Reich called
Book of Dreams
… there’s a passage in it about when he was little and his father [the maverick psychiatrist, Wilhelm] died. He kept going out into the fields hoping his father would pick him up in a spaceship, or a UFO. He saw all these UFOs coming at him [later revealed to be a flock of blackbirds] and inside one was his father, glowing and shining. Then the air force planes came in and chased the UFOs
away and he was left there crying: No! Daddy! Come back! It really moved me. (Shapiro, 1975)

Trained under Freud, Wilhelm Reich became a practicing psychoanalyst in the 1920s. As an exile from Nazi Germany, he moved to the United States, where his controversial theories on the function of the orgasm, his unorthodox scientific claims, and his left-wing politics summoned the unwelcome attentions of the Federal Bureau of Investigations and the Food and Drug Administration. It was Reich’s research into sexual energy and his development of the “orgone accumulator,” a wardrobe-sized box that purported to concentrate life-enhancing orgone energy, that led to his eventual arrest and imprisonment in 1957. In the aftermath of the trial, the FDA burned Reich’s books and pamphlets and destroyed his collection of accumulators. He died of heart failure in prison a few months later.

In the years that followed, due in part to his championing by William Burroughs, Reich became a revered countercultural figure. His controversial theories on politics, sex, alternative medicine, and UFOs seemed, in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, to make a curious kind of sense. Essentially a paranoid worldview for paranoid times, Reichianism held up a mirror to a world increasingly given over to the monitoring and control of individual desires. When, in 1973, Reich’s son Peter published a memoir of his father,
A Book of Dreams
, the time was ripe for a critical reappraisal of his work. For Patti Smith, however, the efficacy of Reich’s psychological and scientific research paled before the emotionally compelling account of the relationship between father and son. Written in a sketchy, impressionistic style, Peter presents a father who is both human and mythic, a manifestly eccentric man who
happens also to be a genius and a prophet. There is, I think, something of Smith’s own relationship with her father, Grant, in this account. As she commented in a recent interview:

Starting with the young Reich hallucinating his father at the controls of the flying saucer, there’s a motif running through the song: “You are not human” turns to “I am not human” and then “we are not human” … that’s really talking about myself. From very early on in my childhood—four, five years old—I felt alien to the human race. I felt very comfortable with thinking I was from another planet, because I felt disconnected—I was very tall and skinny, and I didn’t look like anybody else, I didn’t even look like any member of my family. (Reynolds, 2005)