It is November 1975. I am a high school senior at a Catholic high school. All male. In the suburbs. I think myself worldly, but I know nothing. Unaware how ripe I was to have most everything I knew about how to live blown away.
Enter Patti Smith. I’d been reading about her, though never actually heard her music. When she released her first album, “Horses,” I scraped together enough money to drive to Korvette’s to get my copy.
The cover alone entranced me. A Robert Mapplethorpe photograph, not that his name meant anything to me. Unadorned by make-up or jewelry, Patti Smith stared me down, androgynous, powerful and stirring things inside me. I stood in the record aisle staring. She had a beauty I had never seen before driven by the look in her eyes that foretold a hurricane ready to blow.
I came home, hurried up to my room and my little turntable. Those are moments I can never forget, and never relive, because innocence lost is gone forever. First song, her reimagining Van Morrison’s “Gloria,” starts with a deliberate piano as large as a cathedral compressed into something private, pulling me forward. Then the guttural voice, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.”
Everything I thought I knew came undone. Deadly serious, Patti Smith uncoiled, the music gaining volume,
People say beware
But i don’t care
The words are just rules and regulations to me
What strength. What freedom. She could not be controlled. No one could shame her into proper behavior.
Raw. Vulnerable, yet powerful. Undeniable. No excuses for her and how could I ever go back to the world I once knew? It no longer existed.
And the song kept going. She’s on the move. The woman both the stalked and the stalker. Gender no longer existing. Desire made palpable. Sexual energy as the fuel. The music now breaking into a frenzy. And we’re spinning.
The only connection to the Van Morrison song coming near the end when she breaks into the chorus “G-L-O-R-I-A Gloria.”
It is a prayer. It is a declaration. It is the call of the wild. It is a revelation as great as Moses seeing the bush turn into fire.
There was life before “Gloria,” and life after. Just a song, but Patti Smith showed me a new way to see the world, a new way to think. Once you know, you know.
#Songoftheday #spreadinghappiness #PattiSmith #Gloria #Punkmusic
YouTube: https://youtu.be/bPO0bTaWcFQ?si=f5o-9RdNO5_OqIir
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/272Z4tzaSMMcgrZ0R494S2?si=a3ba733b75c54334