law called and asked what I was
listening to. When I told him, he replied, "You mean the one from Scandal?"
No, I said, that was Patty Smyth; this Smith was the woman who sang "Because
the Night" nearly 20 years ago. "Oh, yeah—that was a good song," he said,
instantly remembering. "It's a good time for her to come back. That's all I
hear on the radio—broads singin' tunes."
Harsh, perhaps, but point well taken. There are an awful lot of
fretboard-scraping women on the radio and the charts, and many of them owe
something—an edge, a bohemian aesthetic, a shaggy
pageboy haircut—to Smith.
In the mid- '70s, when the coquettish charm of Linda Ronstadt represented
rock womanhood, Smith burst out of New York with an androgynous,
girl-in-the-band image and a belief in the transcendent power of music and
poetry. If she always seemed a more formidable figure than
record maker—try
plowing through Horses now without the aid of a remote
control—her stray-cat
power was unquestionable.
Smith's retirement in 1979, and her transformation into child-rearing
Michigan homemaker, is still one of the most mind-blowing, controversial
retirements in rock. As writer Lucy O'Brien points out in She Bop, her recent
women-in-rock study, "When maturity beckoned, [Smith] lost her nerve." Smith
didn't make a convincing case for her career change on her 1988 comeback,
Dream of Life. The record found her wearing a slew of ill-fitting
hats—lullaby-singing mom, political broadsider—and the
music sounded like
malnourished corporate rock. It felt as if she had lost her voice,
figuratively if not literally.
The Smith who returns on Gone Again after another prolonged absence is a
changed woman once more. In the past seven years, a devastating number of her
family and friends have died, including husband Fred "Sonic" Smith, a
brother, a former band mate, and her most celebrated intimate, photographer
Robert Mapplethorpe. Gone Again is, not surprisingly, an album that dwells on
loss. "I don't know why/But when it rains/It rains on me," she sings in
"Farewell Reel," one of several songs about her husband. She even mourns Kurt
Cobain (yes, another Cobain tribute song) in the elliptical "About a Boy,"
which builds to a feedback-grating mantra, rekindling memories of Smith's
boho-outta-control work on bristling records like Easter. In each case, death
is treated less as a horror than as an escape to a better, more serene place.
As insensitive as it might be to say, the succession of tragedies has lent a
much-needed focus (and terseness) to Smith's work. Death
becomes her—and not
merely in her lyrics. Reunited with guitarist and longtime coproducer Lenny
Kaye (whose absence was felt on Dream of Life), Smith has set most of the
songs to plaintive arrangements that resemble nothing so much as contemporary
variations on Appalachian death ballads. Songs are structured with the
roundelay melodies of folk songs, and Smith's voice has the throaty
cragginess of a woman coal miner. She sounds and looks like an extra in a
John Sayles movie. The album's second half—heavy on stark,
strummed ballads
like "Wing" and "Ravens," which both employ images of flying above the
sorrow—is particularly powerful. "Dead to the World" even finds
her having a
little fun with the Grim Reaper by adopting a hillbilly twang.
What Gone Again lacks is voltage. On only a few of the 11 songs does she
charge ahead like the Smith of old, although when she does—as with the
warpath cry of the title track—the ground shakes. (That song, and the tame
garage-band stomp of "Summer Cannibals," seem to address fame and American
culture.) Still, it is the first Smith album without a pretentious set
piece—an accomplishment in itself—and it retains a sober dignity. Maturity
finally beckons in the album's emotional pinnacle, "My Madrigal." A
tear-jerking requiem for her husband set to piano and cello, it presents the
album's most poignant delivery and lyric ("We waltzed beneath motionless
skies/All heaven's glory turned in your eyes").
To a new generation aware of Smith's legend, Gone Again may sound corny, even
conventional. It's stubbornly old-fashioned in its folkie touches and
Beat-tinged lyrics, and in the way her voice occasionally slips into a
clogged-sinus Dylanesque whine. The music feels meditative rather than
cathartic. Viscerally, it's hard to connect this woman with the wave of
feminist rockers she inspired. Smith's impact was, and is, deeper. Now, as
then, she doesn't make a grand statement about being a woman, or a "woman in
rock." Simply, she's a pushing-50 widow with two children who has decided to
reinvest in the healing power of music and career. Her losses are our gains.
A-
Copyright © David Browne 1996
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