Bite-sized posts about 7″ singles I own – shameless nostalgia from the days of vinyl.
Patti Smith – Gloria b/w My Generation (Arista, 1976)
This is a kind of brief postscript to yesterday’s review of Just Kids.
In this book, Patti Smith wrote how she “wanted to infuse the written word with the immediacy and frontal attack of rock and roll”.
While her own poetic songs follow this path, she also proves the fulfilment of this objective with the pair of blazing covers on this single.
Van Morrison‘s Gloria (written while part of Them) is also the opening track on her sublime debut album Horses and is prefaced by her own ‘In excelsia deo’ poem with the memorable opening line “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine”.
This could be taken as a defiant stand against religion, although personally I think she was hitting on the Church as an institution rather than rejecting the notion of faith. To her mind, Jesus should be big enough to take the hit anyway; as she says in Just Kids: “Christ was a man worthy to rebel against, for he was rebellion itself”.
Rebellion is certainly the mood of her demolition job of the Who’s song which uses the Mod classic as a framework for a frenzied blast of pure punk energy. She barely even bothers to sing the words as if to say ‘fuck it you know how it goes anyway’. It was recorded live in Cleveland on January 26th, 1976. The track did not appear on the original vinyl release of Horses but subsequently was added to the CD version. At one point, I’d swear she sings “I hope I die before I get ill’ which, if so, would scupper Townsend’s live fast-die young message. “We created it – let’s take it over!” – she declares enigmatically at the end.
She should have run for President!
‘Just Kids’ is a fascinating and poetic account of an era when beat culture evolved into punk rock. It is also an honest and touching diary of a love affair and friendship between two unique artists.
