A song of experience

In my Blakean year
I was so disposed
Toward a mission yet unclear
Advancing pole by pole

Fortune breathed into my ear
Mouthed a simple ode
One road is paved in gold
One road is just a road

In my Blakean year
Such a woeful schism
The pain of our existence
Was not as I envisioned

Boots that trudged from track to track
Worn down to the sole
One road is paved in gold
One road is just a road

by Patti Smith

There's a record store called HEAR Music in Santa Monica. It started in Cambridge, and popped up in Berkeley during the late 90s. I spotted one at the Metreon in San Francisco during the boom days, but now it's gone. Relatively few people have ever set foot in HEAR Music. But more than a few have heard their Artist's Choice compilations (Ray Charles, Lucinda Williams, Sarah McLachlan), courtesy of the frothy caffeinated juggernaut and its owner Howard Schultz, who now runs it.

My wanderings around 4th Street's HEAR Music figure prominently in my post-graduate Berkeley days. Sometimes after running to the Marina, I'd stop in and listen to a record I'd never heard before. I believe that store held the record for most listening stations per square foot. That's where I first heard albums by Lucinda, Belle and Sebastian, Nick Drake, Townes Van Zandt, Pink Martinis, Billy Bragg, Caetano Veloso, Art Blakey and the Messengers... This eclectic array of musicians ensured that my adult tastes did not calcify at 22, nor grow bland with radio.

I didn't buy a lot of CDs during those Bay Area boom years. After all, I was a teacher. My road was just a road. Or so it seemed. Those exciting tech jobs held by many friends and acquaintances don't exist anymore, nor in many cases do the companies. But the institutions where I worked are still around, and still needed. My biggest regret? That I virtually stopped writing for an audience, or a cause. I suppose I am trying to, ahem, start up again.

Yesterday afternoon, Jukka and I ran the east-west length of Santa Monica and strolled down the 3rd Street Promenade. HEAR Music's appeal hasn't faded with time and taste. If anything, SoCal's cultural shortcomings make the record store even worthier of a visit. And so I was rewarded with a new discovery, Patti Smith's "Trampin".

This is not a CD review. I and my slight Manichaean tendencies in writing are not suitable for aesthetic criticism. (See what I mean? Not suitable!) I will say a little about why I like her lyrical writing, and what her example means to me.

A look at her discography shows the Patti Smith Group made four albums in five years, the last (1979) capped off by a stadium concert of 70,000 cheering Italians. I knew none of this when I heard "Because the Night" as a college freshman, almost fifteen years later. Or when KFOG played "Dancing Barefoot" or her version of "Gloria", with its defiant opening line torn from her early poem, "Oath": "Jesus died for somebody's sins/but not mine." Or when I discovered her Early Work, and one of my favorite lyrics about being American, "Notebook". Or when I saw her at the Bridge Concert, leading Neil Young and Pearl Jam and the Bridge School children in a rousing rendition of "People Have the Power".

I did not know that she had spent a decade and a half as a housewife in suburban Detroit, with her husband Fred "Sonic" Smith. The godmother of punk and guitarist of the proto-punk MC5, playing house and raising two kids. Imagine that. What is true of most people is also true for most artists: the most fruitful or personally rewarding life may not always be the most ambitious or artistically productive. "I never did miss fame," she has said. "What I really missed was a good cup of coffee."

Or to quote "Oath": "I can make my own light shine/and darkness too is equally fine"

We can take that line to mean confidence in one's ability to choose the good and the "sinful". Or perhaps also, comfort in choosing the path of fame and fortune or a life of obscurity. And not regretting the choice of either. But it is either. And many people are not comfortable with that, because they think they can have both, when in reality not many can live with either well.

If I consider the quiet and fairly happy life of obscurity that was Patti Smith's life, or that William Blake earned a living from engraving in order to support his poetry habit, then I scorn to change my state with kings, or Supreme Court justices. And for a moment I cease to regret that I didn't write in 1999 or whenever, because hey, I was teaching kids algebra in a neighborhood the New Economy forgot. I can make my own light shine, and darkness too is equally fine...

So. What I like uniquely about Patti Smith, is that her voice, her energy, is neither male nor female. Like many 70s icons (David Bowie, for one), her image is essentially androgynous. But I'm talking beyond image, about the music itself. Her voice and lyrics pulse with intelligence and passion. And those qualities are neither male nor female. Often you can read a poem or song lyric and say, oh a guy wrote it, or a girl wrote it. And many fine lyrics are like that. But what a feat of the universal to transcend the experience of gender, how pure is that? How pure is white light? Or the human heart? Or grief? Or being American? And to transcend it in popular music, with a voice both wise and vigorous and kind.