Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Patti Smith Goes Under Review
The Under Review series of DVDs focuses and creates a portrait of a rock and roll artist and using clips, interviews with critics and some direct participants in the artist's life. If one is a fan or has an interest in the subject of the DVD, and enjoys delving into rock criticism or analysis, it isn't a bad way to spend time at all. The drawback is that the primarily British rock critics are given equal or more than equal measure to the clips of the artist in performance or in music videos. With this new edition on Patti Smith, I found myself almost shouting "More Patti. Less Patter."
But there was still something substantial about the eleven interwoven discussions of in this ninety minute chronological exploration of Smith's art and career. The video begins with a good illustration of what the state of Rock and Roll was like in the early seventies by contrasting a very menacing Rolling Stones (a model for Smith's art and music) doing Sympathy for the Devil from Rock and Roll Circus to their early music video of doing It's only Rock and Roll while adorned with with sailor suits. My favorite critic in Under Review Anthony De Curtis said that music meant less in the early seventies. Writer Mark Paytress stated that Patti wanted to reactivate the dormant heart of Rock and Roll. Victor Brockis, laid back on a couch in a punk basement with his cigarette and Guinness talked about how Smith linked into the beat style of Burroughs and Ginsberg. He also makes a point that there is a direct lineage between beats to hippies and from hippies to punk, despite the punk hyperbole stating otherwise.
The video does a good job of covering the "Rock and Rimbaud" period where Patti's collaborations with Lenny Kaye lead to the Patti Smith Group. Brockis also talks about how Smith created a personality by appropriating from a group of influences (Bob Dylan, Edith Piaf, Arthur Rimbaud, etc.) and created he own persona from them. The June 1974 release of Hey Joe/Piss Factorybenefited by the timing of the Patti Hearst kidnapping and Patti's splicing of her Patti Smith poem at the lead of her cover of Hey Joe! Patti Smith posed for pictures at the microphone and with her guitar as Patti Hearst was published in newspapers with her Symbionese Liberation Army rifle. It was a Patti revolution in America on multiple fronts.
Horses is depicted by our commentators as being a really important social and musical force in America. And one of the take aways from this video for me is to now think about its impact on a par with say, Rite of Spring or Citizen Kane. Major tracks of the album are analyzed in close detail. De Curtis, for instance, comments the the opening of Gloria ("Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine") as a bold announcement, almost a founding of a new religion.
The critics talked about how adding her own lyrics to covers was a kind of sampling and how putting her own content on an existing framework, like Redondo Beach lyrics being fused on a straight up reggae tune was a forerunner of mashups. Indeed the revolutionary aspects of Smith's art is the heart and soul of this critical exploration.
The clips tease, but they are so strong one can't complain too much. And you know they will surface in full somewhere, someday. There is stuff from the Easter tour from Rockpalast in Germany and their content has been playing on concert.tv on demand cable recently. The Wave Tour is represented on a WDR concert tape from 1979 and is quite tasty, But my favorite are excerpts from the 2000 Experience Music Project Grand opening at the Seattle Center Mural Amphitheater that I and some likely readers of the Buffet attended.
I think the critics were a little unfair on Wave and also on the cover of So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star. But hey, they are wanky critics, that's what they do. Since I field some of those same tendencies, its okay I guess. Yet I do agree with most of their assessments on the post-wave era: the stuff can be good, but it just ain't the same. Although Robert Christgau from the Village Voice complements Patti's transformation into an overt and articulate political presence. He says he just wouldn't have expected that of someone so ingrained with her Bohemian art roots.
There is lots I'm missing here. Under Review videos are tightly paced affairs. Sometimes there are quips that are so right on target such as Victor Brockis when he talks about Patti and Fred Sonic Smith's retreat to Detroit. He claims they weren't necessarily intending to disappear and raise a family, although that, more or less, is what happened. He says Patti had a vision of them becoming the Yoko and John of punk. Alas, a road not taken. But who can complain really about the last 14 years or so of Patti coming back into the public eye, active, on the road with Jay Dee, Oliver, Lenny and her son still standing for something important independent and quite significant?
posted by well-executed buffet at 5:36 PM
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