Patti Smith – Horses: For someone’s sins, not mine.

Thoughts on Patti Smith by Marco Pandin

In the period between my fourth year of secondary school and my first year of university at Ca’ Foscari, i.e. roughly between 1975 and 1977, as well as going to school I did a few odd jobs in the afternoons and at weekends. I was an errand boy, a shop assistant, a warehouseman – cheap stuff, strictly off the books and underpaid, but it gave me the chance to contribute to the household and a minimum personal income. In short, I got by as usual on second-hand and stolen stuff, but I could also afford to buy a pair of shoes, and a few new books and records. As soon as they came out, for example, I picked up the first Patti Smith and Television records: I had read about them in some English magazine like Sounds or NME that a friend of mine sometimes managed to swipe at newsagents in Venice and, according to what they said, they were ‘punk’ records. I liked those records, i.e. ‘Horses’, ‘Radio Ethiopia’ and ‘Marquee moon’, quite a lot: besides intriguing me, they seemed like good stuff, different from the usual. And so from there, I became interested in the ‘punk’ scene, or at least in what was being passed off as such at the time: English people like Elvis Costello and Wire, or American people like Talking Heads and Mink de Ville – all things that only in the years to come I would discover how little they had to do with ‘punk’.

The first Clash album and ‘Never mind the bollocks’ I remember I got them, used practically nothing, from a kid called Ennio who was hanging around the radio and wanted to get rid of them. They were records that had been released in England a long time ago but had not yet been seen in the shop windows here in the area: an unwitting aunt had given them to him as a present on her way back from a holiday in London – and one day Ennio had a bad idea of playing them on his program. Not even half an hour after ‘White Riot’ and ‘God Save the Queen’ had made their debut on the Venetian airwaves, his rocky editorial staff comrades burst into the studio, convinced that ‘punk’ was nothing less than a sleazy fascist phenomenon, and in a matter of seconds they decided in a loud voice that that shit had to stay off the airwaves. Practically all my older comrades thought so: ‘punk’ was rubbish fit for rubbish dumps and sewers, and even the A/Rivista Anarchica (an anarchist journal) thought it was an exhibitionist and consumerist phenomenon completely devoid of any revolutionary significance.

The shouting and screaming on the radio and the whole thing didn’t appeal to me at all. I didn’t like those summary judgments because I found ‘punk’ to be a much more complicated affair: Patti Smith’s lyrics and Tom Verlaine’s guitar were, in my opinion, anything but fascist rubbish. It has to be said, though, that the records of the various ‘punk’ bands that could be found in shops at the time, like Damned or Ultravox, were shit to me, or at the very least, pitiful. The Clash and Pistols and all those like them sat on their arses under the shelter of big record labels, the same multinationals that over the years had sold revolutionary records to blacks, pacifists, and hippies. I was wary of the plasticized ‘punk’ of the collections on special offer, the one with the safety pins and the studs and the purposely ripped T-shirts, I couldn’t find anything in it at all. To say, to me the Sex Pistols were just a banal publicity stunt to sell bad rock played badly: John Lydon all disheveled, saying ‘fuck’ on TV and flicking his tongue at the photographer was anything but a transgressive revolutionary. Worse, he was an irrelevant and insubstantial jerk: I was measuring him and his band by comparing them to the idea of transgression that a twenty-something who grew up on the street in an at-risk neighborhood of a northeastern industrial city, used to swearing and petty hooliganism, who thought it was exciting to go demonstrating in the square with rocks and a slingshot in his pocket – and I’m talking about me. Transgression for me was that very brave ‘Low’ by David Bowie with Brian Eno. Transgression was the Ivan Cattaneo records that every time you dared to play a piece of it on the radio people would phone in to complain (but they also complained if you kept Terry Riley and Philip Glass on the air too much). Transgression was Dario Fo and Franca Rame, Area, OMCI, Lindsay Kemp, and Frank Zappa there.

Punk (without the inverted commas), however, was also a new mentality, something that I did not feel was completely mine but which attracted me, a way of thinking that was debatable and perhaps not entirely agreeable but which served me to revise certain convictions, to rethink certain attitudes and which finally pushed me to measure myself with myself, to re-evaluate my expectations and my abilities and finally take charge of my life.

I would say that it all started with what is considered by most to be a useless thing – a poem. Patti Smith, an American from Chicago, wrote ‘Oath’ in 1970, a courageous declaration of independence – the poem begins with a sentence that no one in this part of the world would have read or heard until at least 1975: ‘Jesus died for someone’s sins, but not for mine’ and continues with: ‘Christ I bid you farewell, tonight I send you away’. At her first reading at St. Mark’s Church in New York, Patti reads ‘Oath’ in front of an audience that includes some already established colleagues such as Allen Ginsberg, Gerard Malanga, and Jim Carroll among others, but leaves it out of her first book ‘Seventh heaven’ in 1972, and also out of the following ‘Witt’. The piece resurfaced perhaps by chance during rehearsals of the rock group Patti had gathered around her, Lenny Kaye, and Richard Sohl. In the rehearsal room, the three of them attack with a cover of Van Morrison’s ‘Gloria’ to warm up, the time of a low E and a whispered phrase: Jesus died for someone’s sins but not mine – the song bursts into their hands, the three of them start a fire. Let’s face it, in the years that followed, she went at it with the fire extinguisher and buckets of water, but somewhere the fire – that fire – still hasn’t gone out.

What happens is that ‘Oath’ ends up here, in the northeastern suburbs of the empire, in a rickety translation inside a self-produced mimeograph circulating on Stampa Alternativa stalls, and begins to blow the valves of years of repression in the white province one by one. It happened in some houses in and around my city, it happened in the countryside and in dormitory neighborhoods where the bus doesn’t even arrive, it happened on the islands of the lagoon, in the Berici hills, in Cadore, along the Brenta Riviera, in the Friulian lowlands, in Merano, in the Natisone Valleys, in Gorizia, Udine, Trieste. It happened in my house too: in a few lines, it quenches the bitterness in my mouth of the drops of fear dissolved in the water I drink every day, the shame and guilt of black powder mixed with bread. I suddenly feel like running away, away from that malaise, that feeling inadequate, dirty, wrong. Patti Smith makes me realize in two minutes that the compulsory balance that holds my life together is off, that normality is just another way of forcing me to shut up and obey, and that silence and obedience are not food for me.

This is “Free money”

“Every night before I go to sleep
Find a ticket, win a lottery
Every night before I rest my head
See those dollar bills go swirling ’round my bed
Oh, baby, it would mean so much to me
Baby, I know our troubles will be gone
Oh, I know our troubles will be gone, goin’, gone
If we dream, dream, dream for free
And when we dream it, when we dream it, when we dream it
Let’s dream it, we’ll dream it for free, free money“

Maybe the speaker in the song is not really her, but it is her mother who dreams out loud. Patti grows up in a poor family, just like mine. I’m sure my parents also put some crumbs of hope every now and then in a lottery jackpot suggested in a dream or in a millionaire’s slip. They were poor people who worked and struggled to make ends meet, as the families of all my friends and schoolmates. Dreaming was beautiful, it was fun that didn’t cost money.

“Horses” was released in the United States in mid-December 1975, and shortly afterward it was also printed in Europe. I was recently eighteen years old. I find a copy in a record shop in Campo San Barnaba in Venice, I give him all the money I have in my pocket, I take the record home. On the cover there is her, photographed by her friend and companion Robert Mapplethorpe: she would talk extensively about them many years later in ‘Just Kids’, one of the books that plunged its fingers into my heart and made me cry.

In “Kimberly” Patti recalls an episode shortly after the birth of her little sister when she was already twelve years old. It is a story of ordinary misery. Her family occupied a house in an unhealthy suburban neighborhood, right in front of an abandoned barn that was struck by lightning one night during a thunderstorm and set on fire. Things that a child finds hard to forget.

“The wall is high, the black barn
The babe in my arms in her swaddling clothes
And I know soon that the sky will split
And the planets will shift
Balls of jade will drop and existence will stop
Little sister, the sky is falling, I don’t mind, I don’t mind
Little sister, the fates are calling on you“

In short, Patti Smith had really got to me: she was ten years older than me, ideally, I saw her as a kind of rebellious big sister who had run away from home and returned one night to tell me family secrets and open my eyes. She was offering me connections and cross-references and connections between the rebellion of the present and the rebellion that had gone before and the rebellions of even before – for me it is a pacification in the rebellion, it is a finding a place in the current.

Those who inside songs and inside books were eighteen years old like me thought they could hold their lives in their hands though they were immortal. There was no place for death in our thoughts, and instead, in my neighborhood I saw my friends’ fathers drink themselves to death in order to forget the factory, and the factory die. And worse, I saw my friends and comrades die of heroin. I still remember them sitting in the park smiling, chasing music that only they could hear. In the morning you would find them leaning against the steps of the tenement, their eyes closed as if they were asleep.

This is “Elegie”, written for Jimi but also for Janis, for Jim, and I am sure also for Dimitri, for Marco for all my comrades who left too soon and too badly:

“I just don’t know what to do tonight,
My head is aching as I drink and breathe
Memory falls like cream in my bones, moving on my own.
There must be something I can dream tonight,
The air is filled with the moves of you,
All the fire is frozen yet still I have the will, ooh, ah.
Trumpets, violins, I hear them in the distance
And my skin emits a ray, but I think it’s sad, it’s much too bad
That our friends can’t be with us today.“

In September 1979 Patti Smith was invited to the Venice Biennale and I found myself with a radio companion chasing her through the “calli“ (typical streets of Venice) only to be locked out of the door at the reading: it took an invitation to get in, or maybe it was just a lie to get us out of the way. We go by train from Mestre to Bologna in a pack a day or two later. Her concert was a celebration of anarchy and freedom, an emotion I will never forget: they started with ‘So you wanna be a rock’n’roll star’ by the Byrds and shortly afterward they did ‘All along the watchtower’ by Bob Dylan, giving us an absolutely explicit link with the protest of ten years earlier, that of our older brothers. The next day they play in Florence, but I can’t go because I haven’t found anyone willing to give me a shift change at work. My friends – all unemployed – go there, and they tell me that the concert this time started with “Gloria”, but the words at the beginning Patti changed them: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, why not mine?”. Jesus died for somebody’s sins, why not mine? What the fuck. So I’m still blaspheming alone. Leave me alone, come on. Go away. Patti, I say goodbye, I’m sending you away tonight.

article by Marco Pandin, stella_nera@tin.it
translation by Max

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