On 4 October 2021, a sprightly Patti Smith—dressed in her customary attire: a white t-shirt with a black blazer, black trousers, and black boots—ambles onto the stage of the Royal Albert Hall as if stepping out into a Parisian street after having been holed up in a garret for months on end writing. Smith is full of references that you wonder if she is real—believe me, she is. With a cascade of grey hair shaping her unadorned face, Smith marks the significant occasion—her first time playing at the historical Kensington venue—with the only song she can (in theory) start with: “Piss Factory“, a self-fulfilling prophecy ode of leaving the confines of rural South Jersey and making it in New York City—London, further still.
Surely Patti Smith could not have anticipated reciting the words to her first B-side—then recorded 47 seven years ago—at the Royal Albert Hall, where the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg howled out his poems at the International Poetry Incarnation in June 1965, a month after Bob Dylan performed two concerts there as partly seen in D. A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary Don’t Look Back, from which Smith, in her early days, aped Dylan’s walk. Few artists’ first singles are prescient. Then again, this is Smith, who works in the tradition of a poet as a prophet, like Dylan does, as well as previous bards, such as Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Blake.
Prophecy goes hand in hand with Blake, whose poem, aptly titled “Auguries of Innocence” (published posthumously in 1863), provided Smith with the title of her 2005 poetry collection. To conclude this pairing, Smith references Blake and a prophet in the same song: 1975’s “Birdland“. Who knows if Smith was exploring the idea of the prophet as a poet? For sure, Smith has had a life-long love affair with the pale-blue-eyed Arthur Rimbaud, the 19th-century French Symbolist poet who, in a letter to scholar Paul Demeny on 15 May 1871, writes, “I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer.” Therefore perhaps she had read the missive at that point.
Prophecy in poetry can be traced to Hebrew prophets who, “chosen” by God, were commonly known as poets and took on a public role as a spokesman for God; they principally sang rather than wrote and were less concerned with the rules of versification than being receptive to divine inspiration—and addressed the social and moral issues of the community. Moreover, for the ancients, the word for poet in Latin is “vātēs“—meaning diviner, foreseer, or prophet. Therefore, in many ways, poets and prophets were identical. Yet, rather than the ability to peer into the future, prophets’ expression of eternal truths drew parallels with poets and vice versa.
Anyone slightly conversant with Patti Smith knows that she speaks out on environmental and governmental issues and personal strife. This, along with her seer-like qualities, screams a prophetic bard. Oh, and that she can write—well. Thus perhaps Smith was always destined to recite “Piss Factory” at the Royal Albert Hall, complete with the tincture of her blue-collar, South Jersey accent emphasising how far she has come. And, even if not, it still worked and lost none of its vatic meaning. Yet this is in recent history, not half a century ago when a twenty-eight-year-old sinewy Smith entered Electric Lady Studios to record “Hey Joe” and ended up with a take of “Piss Factory.”
Recording “Hey Joe” was more than an homage to the late Jimi Hendrix—who famously covered and recorded it in 1966 as his first single with the Jimi Hendrix Experience—it was personal. In August 1970, Smith attended a party celebrating the opening of Electric Lady Studios after receiving an invitation from her friend, Jane Friedman, who ran Wartoke Collection, a management company in charge of that night’s press. The newly constructed studio was built according to Hendrix’s vision of wanting a hallowed space to fuel his creativity.
Despite being buoyed to attend the gathering—having walked from midtown to downtown wearing a straw hat—Patti Smith was too nervous to enter the gathering; instead, she sat outside gauchely like a street urchin. But soon, the alluring and high-cheekboned Hendrix ascended the stairs. There, he sat and conversed with Smith, confiding that parties also made him uncomfortable. He spoke of his plans with the studio: to create a universal language of music before heading off to catch a flight to London to play the Isle of Wight Festival. Three weeks later, Hendrix was found dead, aged 27.
In 1970, Patti Smith visited Paris with her sister, Linda, and her friend, Anne Powell (Smith called her Annie), a poet whom she first met and worked with at the Scribner Book Store after returning from Paris in 1969 with Linda when, on that occasion, Smith read about the death of the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones. Walking along Boulevard du Montparnasse, Smith read the headlines of Hendrix’s death in French. “When I was a young girl I met him once [Hendrix],” Smith told Steve Baltin of Forbes in 2020. “I saw him a few different times in places I was having dinner or something. But I got to talk to him once about 50 years ago. And for a young girl, he was everything you would want in your rock and roll star. He was beautiful, intelligent, and hungry. Just to look at him was an experience, I’m talking about when I was in my early 20s. But he was quite something.”
Originally published in the December 1969 issue of Jazz and Pop, “The Best of Acapella” was written by budding music journalist Lenny Kaye and was included in The Age of Rock 2: Sights and Sounds of the American Cultural Revolution—a 1970 anthology of some of the latest and best writing on music from the year—where Smith read it. The essay, an exploration of the South Jersey/Philly doo-wop movement, in which close-harmony groups sang a cappella on street corners, resonated with Smith, as it was the form of music she grew up with.
Moreover, she was also interested in the soul records of Philadelphia International Records, also known as Philly Soul—and why, in “Piss Factory”, there is a reference to Georgie Woods, an American radio personality who was best known for his broadcasting career in Philadelphia. Getting Kaye’s phone number from Steve Paul—owner of the nearby Times Square rock club, the Scene, and manager of blues musician Johnny Winter—Smith called him. They met on a Saturday night at Village Oldies, a record store where Kaye worked, on Bleecker Street.
Opening for poet and photographer Gerard Malanga on 10 February 1971—the date marked the birthday of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht—Patti Smith gave her first poetry reading at the weekly Wednesday reading sponsored by the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. Smith recruited Kaye to give her some guitar feedback and rhythmic backing while she recited poetry; it was the first time an electric guitar had been played in the church, thus it divided attendees. Instantly, though, offers came flooding her way: Creem agreed to publish a selection of her poems, Middle Earth Books offered to produce a chapbook of her poems, proposed readings in Philadelphia and London—and a potential record contract with Paul’s Blue Sky Records. Finding success had come her way too easily, and many poets she admired struggled for years before recognition; Smith felt uncomfortable and rejected most of the proposals.
After her performance at St. Mark’s Church, Patti Smith did further public readings with aide-de-camp Lenny Kaye. But soon, they wanted greater compositional freedom; they wanted to be unfettered and break new ground; they wanted to merge poetry with music, music with poetry. As much as Smith was following in the footsteps of other rock poets—Dylan, Lou Reed, Jim Morrison—it was the enfant terrible Rimbaud who, having inspired the others, was at the forefront of her mind. Ever since stumbling across a copy of Les Illuminations (1886) at a bookstall opposite the bus depot in Philadelphia, aged 16, Smith had found a perennial kindred spirit.
Yet, on that day, Rimbaud’s surly gaze on the book’s cover first caught Smith’s, like lovers. With a guttersnipe vulgarity and an irreverence, Rimbaud had a penchant for breaking rules—a punk who dealt with verse rather than gut-punch three-chorded riffs. In short, Rimbaud travelled from Charleville to Paris, where he shook up the elite of the literary world with his visionary and obscene poems before renouncing literature at the age of 20 and heading to Ethiopia.
Needing a rhythmic structure to serve as the bedrock of their sonic and word explorations, Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye sought out a pianist. In March 1974, in one of the rooms Jane Friedman rented above the Victoria Theatre on Forty-fifth Street and Broadway, they held auditions for several keyboardists. After trying out talented players, in came the last, pianist and songwriter Richard Sohl, sent by Danny Fields, the journalist and, later, manager of the Ramones. Garbed in a striped boatneck shirt, Sohl supported golden coiffed curls and had a graceful disposition.
Immediately, for Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye, the prepossessing and youthful-looking 19-year-old Richard Sohl evoked Tadzio, the beautiful boy in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 Death in Venice, based on the 1912 novella of the same name by the German author Thomas Mann. More importantly, Sohl was classically trained and went straight into a medley of Mendelssohn, Marvin Gaye, and the Jimmy Webb-written song “MacArthur Park“. Yet he was comfortable playing a three-chorded pattern—they found their pianist. We three were born.
In February 1974, 19-year-old media heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped in her house by the Symbionese Liberation Army, also known as SLA, a radical urban guerrilla left-wing group, who exacted millions of dollars in food donations in exchange for Hearst’s release. The event gripped the nation, and, like most people, Patti Smith paid close attention. This was in part due to her mother’s interest in the Lindbergh kidnapping: aviators Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s 20-month-old son was snatched from a crib on 1 March 1932. Also, for the naif reason of hearing her name said on television.
On 14 April 1974, Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye arrived at the Ziegfeld Theatre for the premiere of Rollin Binzer’s Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones. In stark contrast to the gaudy excess of the glam-rock concert film, Smith wore a black, velvet Victorian dress adorned with a white lace collar, half-evoking poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Afterward, they headed to CBGB, a Bowery music club, which would birth New York punk and new wave. There they saw the band Television. Smith had come to know Richard Hell, the band’s bass player, in early 1974. She promised to catch one of their live performances.
Television grabbed Smith’s attention due to their sinuous rhythms, jazz-infused instrumentals, and art-punk sensibility. But, most of all, it was Tom Verlaine. With his rangy physique, angular features, nonchalantly cool charisma, and deft handling of a Fender Jazzmaster, Verlaine appeared poised between this world and the next—and, with one guttural lick, could bring angels earthbound. Moreover, with his spindly fingers wrapped around the neck of his guitar, he played as if in search of an invisible chord, as if creating a new vernacular, without indulgence, without constraint, wholly inimitable.
Between sets, Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine talked about their childhood in South Jersey, quickly establishing that they had more in common than just their love of literature—Tom Miller’s stage name, Verlaine, was a reference to the French symbolist poet Paul Verlaine. The next day, Patty Hearst, abetted by SLA, was recorded on a surveillance camera holding an assault weapon while robbing a bank in San Francisco.
After moving from South Jersey to New York City in 1967, Smith—to support her creative endeavours—mostly worked at various bookshops. At Strand Bookstore, she first met Robert Mapplethorpe, who would go on to become a renowned photographer known for his black-and-white portraits, as well as erotic images of the BDSM subculture of the city in the late ‘60s and the early ‘70s. Mapplethorpe financed the recording and manufacturing of Smith’s first 45: “Hey Joe” and its B-side “Piss Factory”. On 5 June 1974, they walked through Electric Lady Studios’ space-age-mural corridors to reach Studio B, which had a small eight-track setup in the back of the room. Before starting, Smith whispered “Hi, Jimi” into the microphone; the following year, Smith would pen the nebulous “Elegie“, an ode to Hendrix, where loss enervates the narrator into a state of torpor, bereft of memory. Ironically, an elegy is, of course, about remembering. After two false starts, they got the studio take of “Hey Joe”.
At the start of “Hey Joe”, Patti Smith wavers between childlike and fiendish tones repeating words as if there is a coded meaning hidden within: “feel so”, “anything”, “he said”, then, snarls “child”. The drawling diction and the sprechgesang take you by force. Immediately, this is neither a chanteuse nor a blues female singer with breath like fire—it’s something else. Perhaps the street attitude of Lou Reed. Perhaps a hint of Jim Morrison. Naked desire? Desperation? Sure. But, above all, it is the voice of a young, revolutionary artist—an artist staring destiny in the face that, in turn, timorously returns the gaze.
The murder ballad “Hey Joe” tells the story of Joe, who, after shooting his unfaithful partner, is on the run and plans to head to Mexico. While the authorship of “Hey Joe” is contested—either to Billy Roberts, Dino Valenti or it could be a traditional song—the lyrics are reminiscent of the early 20th-century traditional ballad “Little Sadie“, in which the speaker is arrested after shooting a woman. Like an outlaw in the Old West, Joe is less flesh-and-blood than archetypal, less real than imagined—the type whom Woody Guthrie loved to write: an unregenerate, grizzled, shifty-eyed fugitive who couldn’t tell the truth, even if he tried, or chanced upon it.
Patti Smith interpolates the story of Hearst into her version of “Hey Joe”. It is a radical reworking that foreshadows the opening track of her 1975 debut album Horses “Gloria“—written by Van Morrison, and recorded by his band Them in 1964—in which she transforms the lascivious boy-meets-girl story into a feverish hymn, a declaration of existence, not eschewing from lust and flesh—taking a big plunge. The fictional character Joe, the fictional account of a real-life Hearst, and Smith (from biographical criticism) are entwined like vines around a trellis. While Hearst and Joe are fugitives, Smith, by intoning “Patty”, expels an older version of herself.
Put differently, Patty Hearst proxies for Patti Smith: Hearst’s transformation from a sweet-innocent girl to a revolutionary figure is a metaphor for Smith finding herself as an artist. Smith turns an outlaw ballad of a vindictive murder (Joe) and domestic terrorism (Hearst) into a quest for freedom—personally, politically, and spiritually. Despite fleeing from authorities, such as the F.B.I., Hearst feels free, as does Joe. As Smith puts it, Hearst isn’t a patsy, neither to her million-dollar grandfather and media tycoon William Randolph Hearst nor perhaps to the Symbionese Liberation Army, as if she is not suffering from Stockholm syndrome; that is, she is free and independent, acting on her own accord. By the end, the identities of the three coalesce into one.
Musically, “Hey Joe” is as liberating. Starting with faint reggae-inflection licks that work as a harbinger of the intro of 1975’s “Land“, the moaning electric guitar eventually becomes fiendish and otherworldly, as if the guitarist is riffing a malediction. This is augmented by the R&B piano chords played by Sohl, who hammers down at the keys with the violence of Zeus’ thunderbolts. After the bass drum kicks in, “Hey Joe” develops into a ballad, helped along by Smith’s banshee-like, keening vocals. For the guitar solo, Verlaine overdubbed two tracks, which Kaye mixed into one whirling lead—and then added a bass drum played by himself.
After “Hey Joe”, and with 15 minutes to spare, they recorded “Piss Factory”—finishing exactly at midnight. At the heart of “Piss Factory” is Smith’s story: one summer in South Jersey, a 16-year-old Smith worked in a nonunion factory inspecting handlebars for tricycles; it was a dreary and mundane existence. It brings to mind the French philosopher Simone Weil, who spent a year as a factory worker at three factories in Paris in 1934-35. But this was not a gap year or a Marxist experiment. Smith had nothing to fall back on besides her dream of being an artist or an artist’s mistress. The menial job left her feeling fettered, as well as ostracised by colleagues, who harassed Smith for reading Rimbaud and suspected her of being a communist for reading a book in a foreign language.
Originally, the bildungsroman-esque “Piss Factory” was a poem. The original typescripts of the poem Mapplethorpe had rescued from their first studio apartment—the second floor of 206 W. Twenty-third Street—after it was broken into. As a result, they soon moved out—on Rimbaud’s birthday, 20 October 1972. Like Dylan’s 1962 “Song to Woody“, “Piss Factory” is a bold statement by an emerging artist both honouring the past and staking a claim on the future. Infused with R&B and polka, Sohl’s stomping piano line evokes Steely Dan’s “Do It Again“, abetted by a jazzy electric guitar.
Of course, Patti Smith’s first single, along with Horses, brought a poetic sensibility to a nascent punk rock movement. But it is the recalcitrant approach that is engrossing, not just the lyrics. Metaphorically, Smith slides up to you like a beggar and starts talking at you as if you understand the score—you follow nevertheless as she knows something. It is the candid poetry of François Villon laden with colloquial dialogue, a technique similarly deployed on Dylan’s 1966 track, “Visions of Johanna”. While the reference to “And way their dicks droop like lilacs” echoes the sensuality of Mapplethorpe’s photographs of flowers.
To a certain extent, “Piss Factory” is deliberately misleading, as it was not penned around the time that Patti Smith worked at the factory or when she was isolated in pastoral South Jersey; though, it gives this impression due to it being written in the present tense. Therefore, at the time of writing, Smith had already made the journey to live in New York City. But the foreknowing is authentic. By this point, Smith had not recorded music and, thus, reached commercial success or making it as, in her own words, “a big star”. In any case, she has gone one better: created a universe for new artists to inhabit.
“Hey Joe” and “Piss Factory” expresses Patti Smith’s unremitting fight for freedom: when she went from a factory girl to a poète maudit. Both are united by the pursuit of transcending the quotidian and reinventing oneself. The single was self-released through Smith and Kaye’s label, Mer—the French word for sea and most likely a reference to Rimbaud, who adopted the sea as a motif in his poems, such as 1871’s “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) and 1872’s “Eternity“. Moreover, Smith often used the imagery of the sea, for example, “sea of possibilities” from “Land”.
At the end of July 1974, Lenny Kaye collected the 1,500 copies of the single that had been pressed at a small plant on Ridge Avenue in Philadelphia; they distributed them to record stores and bookstores for $2 each—and, soon, discerned that “Piss Factory” was more popular than “Hey Joe”. Overall, these songs remain as raw, revolutionary, and prophetic as the day they were recorded—the only thing to have aged is us.
Works Cited
Baltin, Steve. “Patti Smith Calls For Unity: ‘We’re Gonna Have To Unify Globally. We Have To Unify As Americans, As A People’”. Forbes. 21 September 2020.
Johnstone, Nick. Patti Smith: A Biography (Rev. ed.). Omnibus Press. 2012.
Kaye, Lenny. Lightning Striking. White Rabbit. 2021.
Levy, Aidan. Patti Smith on Patti Smith: Interviews and Encounters. Chicago Review Press. 2021.
Paytress, Mark. Patti Smith’s Horses: And the Remaking of Rock ‘N’ Roll (Rev. ed.). Piatkus. 2010.
Pollard, Edward B. “The Prophet as a Poet”. The Biblical World, Vol. 12, No. 5 (Nov., 1898), pp. 327-332. JSTOR. Accessed 10 July 2024.
Smith, Patti. Just Kids. Bloomsbury. 2010.
Smith, Patti. “The Poet as Seer“, Substack. Accessed 10 July 2024.
Thompson, Dave. Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story. Chicago Review Press. 2011.