Anti-Climacus

BECAUSE THE NIGHT/DANCING BAREFOOT:

Patti Smith is another of those formative musical experiences of mine. I bought my copy of Horses at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, for $5.99, spring break of 8th grade, and listened to it, approximately twice a day for the next year (and with frequency since). Smith was one of those fascinating interviews--she had interests in poetry, and art, and literature, and recommended (frequently) the music of people who she liked and inspired her (she was a great font of things I would come to like); she wrote interesting songs about religion, and what it was like to be an artist.

Then there was her relationship with Fred "Sonic" Smith, formerly of the MC5 (one of Detroit's great bands; you can hear later-period Sonic Smith being awesome here). She met him, so the story goes, outside a hot dog stand somewhere in New York, and their first meeting was a much bigger deal to her longtime guitarist Lenny Kaye, for whom the late-60s Detroit scene was a big influence.

At the point I became a Patti Smith fan, which would've been 1995 or 1996, her career had an odd coda. She met Fred in '77 or '78, and in '79, she gave up her music career (as much for reasons internal to that career as anything). They got married, and lived, more or less privately, outside Detroit until Fred died. What impressed me at the time was how punk that decision was: it's what she was happy doing and so she did it, even if it didn't precisely fit in with feminist categories of the time.

But in that period after they met, before they were married, she wrote songs about him, of which I think the best is this:



Because it's a love song, from a distinctly female perspective (or so it always seemed to me), that acknowledges what's overwhelming about falling in love, in its good, bad, and complicated ways. There's a real joy to it, even if it's not quite happy in the way one expects love songs to be.

And then there's "Because the Night", which is more famous. The words seem so perfectly chosen, in the way only a Bruce Springsteen/Patti Smith collaboration in 1977 could possibly be (this is, for a certain kind of music fan, the equivalent of Batman and Superman teaming up)--too verbal, and still not saying enough, expressing the real difficulty of expressing these things.