Go Rimbaud and go Johnny go!

A love letter to the lyrics of Land by Patti Smith

There are 1,069 words in Land.

You’d recognise some of them. They’re the words you might meet at a party. Words that want to get down. Dance the night away. Rock and roll phrases riffing with each other, just like old times.

But some words seem new here. They don’t quite fit. Awkward, esoteric words. They’ve never been to a party like this.

In Land words from different worlds first collide, then elide, with each other. By the end they get on famously. They practically finish one another’s sentences.

There are 1,069 words in Land. It’s a song that covers a lot of ground.

There is nothing in rock and roll quite like them.

Land comes in three distinct parts. First, the dangerous and dimly lit spoken intro where we meet our hero, Johnny. There’s a stabbing, which is filmic and detached (“Johnny wanted to run but the movie kept moving as planned”). Next, we enter a new realm — a rabid, vivid version of the corny dance craze classic, Land Of A Thousand Dances; its celebratory, throwaway urgency intertwined with Johnny’s struggle to stay alive. The final section charts the last moments of Johnny’s consciousness. The words slow down. It’s almost hallucinatory. It’s what Patti Smith does best — the visceral and the visionary merging perfectly.

The intro was inspired by William Burroughs’ novel Wild Boys, as was Bowie’s dystopian vision for Diamond Dogs. A similar threatening violence hangs in the air before it turns explicit.

He drove it in
He drove it home
He drove it deep in Johnny

Smith flips to incantation mode. Johnny starts “laughing hysterically”. He is beset by equine visions.

Suddenly
Johnny
Gets the feeling
He’s being surrounded by
Horses
Horses
Horses
Horses.
Coming in in all directions white
shining
silver
studs,
with their nose
in
flames.
He saw
horses,
horses,
horses,
horses,
horses,
horses.

And then the switch.

Do you know how to pony?
Like Bony Maroney

It’s a jump cut as audacious as Kubrick’s bone-to-spaceship edit in 2001: A Space Odyssey. From horses to pony. A juxtaposition to make high art urgent and the populist epic.

Of course it’s a pun, and there are others. One section of the song is called La Mer De. Mer suggests mare, but it’s also sea in French. The sea appears quite a bit in Land. Fittingly, perhaps, at its edges. Like when “The sea’s the possibility” mutates through repetition to become “one who seizes possibilities.” Or when Smith intones, repeatedly,

There is a sea — up there
There is a sea — up there
There is a sea — up there

It’s one of many times that Smith finds a phrase and lingers over it. Started crashing his head against the locker; dig your baby sister; you like it like that; across the tracks. These momentary repetitions are landmarks amid the imagery overload — driftwood in a sea of words. But they also come off like short-lived riffs. Just as a jazz soloist discovers and dwells on a phrase before leaping off again into the unknown, so these verbal phrases allow Smith to explore Land’s dark hallways and labyrinthine layers.

Land has the intensity of jazz delivered through words. Smith’s Coltrane crescendos are deliberate, masterful. Powerful surges and moments of quiet softness. Not just multiple voices but multiple threads of language. It’s a world where land blurs into sea, and where visionary poetry collapses into rock and roll.

There are 1,069 words in Land. There is really nothing in rock and roll quite like them.

And yet. Though unique, Land epitomises Patti Smith, and Patti Smith epitomises rock and roll. She is its vital, shamanic essence. That’s how she was when I saw her recently perform on the Horses tour. This was no ritualised replay of songs, safely sequenced. It was truly alive.

When asked recently if the tour was a nostalgic experience for her and her band, Smith replied:

“Memory is always with us. But we perform in the present tense.”

That they did is thanks mainly to Smith’s words, and her performance of them. Poetry doesn’t reminisce. It’s experienced in the moment. Poetry, for performer and audience, happens right in front of you.

Patti Smith blends this world with the world of soaring, urgent rock and roll and in so doing finds its essence.

Life is full of pain
I’m cruisin’ through my brain
And I fill my nose with snow
And go Rimbaud,
Go Rimbaud,
Go Rimbaud,
And go Johnny GO!
And do the Watusi!
Oh do the Watusi!

36 air-punching words that take us from defeat to celebration. They take in pain, self-knowledge, hedonism, poetry, hero worship and dance — pretty much (excepting names) in words of one syllable.

That ‘do the Watusi’ is some comeback, too. The lines that go before are drained of sympathy and sentimentality. Cool, detached, mocking:

Life is filled with holes,
Johnny’s laying there in his sperm coffin
Angel looks down at him and says, “Oh, pretty boy, can’t you show me nothing but surrender?”

The body just a vessel. A life, wasted. But something — some rock and roll spirit, perhaps — surges through him. He bounces back.

Johnny gets UP
Takes off his leather JACKET,
Points to his chest — there’s the answer,
You got pen knives and
Jack knives and
Switchblades preferred
Switchblades preferred

The damage is done. Eventually Johnny starts to lose his battle. As death approaches, the tone softens and lucidity ebbs away. The final third of Land is surreal and strange. The words are spoken rather than sung, and full of metaphors and portals. Those verbal puns of mer/mare and sea’s/seize are replaced by more subtle double meanings. Images conflate, objects change state. What seems imaginary becomes very, tangibly real.

There’s a mare black and shining with yellow hair,
I put my fingers through her silken hair and found a stair,
I didn’t waste time, I just walked right up and saw that
up there — there is a sea

I could feel it, it was the hair going through my fingers,
The hairs were like wires going through my body
I I that’s how I
that’s how I
I died

looked at my hands, and there’s a red stream
that went streaming through the sands like fingers,
like arteries, like fingers

Johnny’s faltering, flickering consciousness creates new neural pathways. The brain’s lateral connections obliquely reveal life slipping from Johnny’s grasp. He slips away slowly, the words and music edging back into the quiet distance. In the end, the music becomes a spare, pared-down beat. The words go back to basics too.

In the sheets
there was a man
dancing
around
to the simple
rock and roll
song.

Patti Smith is a believer. When I saw her perform she invoked the memories of Hendrix, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, the MC5, Kurt Cobain and others as she pied-pipered a loving crowd through Horses and beyond.

This belief burns with a palpable intensity. She brims with a shamanistic, transcendent power that’s as much to do with the mysticism of Blake and Rimbaud as it is the Rolling Stones. So while she casts herself as the keeper of the flame, I think she’s more than that. She IS the flame. Her art is an elision of two worlds, two realms. The now and the noise and the grit and the grind of rock and roll. The possibility and the expression and the performance of poetry.

By bringing them together she defines the essence of each. In Land you can see these worlds as separate states and watch them merge.

There are 1,069 words in Land.

It covers a lot of ground.

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