The 1969 song that always reminds Patti Smith of Lou Reed: “Haunted me”
Nothing Patti Smith ever made was meant to be one of the cleanest rock and roll songs ever created.
A lot of her first records did end up sounding a little rough around the edges, but that’s half the reason why people considered her one of the greatest in her field. She was breaking down the barriers for what became known as punk, and the last thing that she wanted to do was make music that fell in line with whatever the hell was going on in mainstream rock around that same time.
Because looking at the music scene circa 1975, rock had severely lost its roots in many respects. Half of the greatest bands of all time felt more like business than proper musicians half the time, and even though Led Zeppelin became one of the biggest groups in the world, it almost felt like they were gods walking the planet. That’s not what rock was built on, and Horses is a record that was about showing everyone the humanity behind all great rock and roll.
Smith was the first to say that she wasn’t the greatest singer in the world, but her spoken word poetry hit much harder than any Kiss lyric ever could have. A lot of what she was doing felt like she was making works of art that would be remembered forever, and that was exactly what the New York underground scene was like years before she had come along.
Bob Dylan had already cut his teeth in New York when making his first major records, but by the time that Flower Power reached the West, ‘The Big Apple’ had something different up its sleeve Jimi Hendrix may have set up his own hub at Electric Lady Studios around the turn of the decade, but everything that Smith wanted in a rock and roll band could be found in The Velvet Underground’s first few records.
Which is strange because half of the Velvets’ best records weren’t acclaimed at all. In most critics’ eyes, they were simply a half-assed attempt at a rock and roll band that were more concerned with art than they were with playing their instruments. But if you looked just a little bit further into what Lou Reed was trying to do on every one of their projects, he was trying to break down the barriers of what rock and roll was supposed to be and used every tool at his disposal to do it.
Not all of their songs were easy to listen to, but Smith would have been satisfied if all that she heard was a tune like ‘Pale Blue Eyes’, saying, “I never fail to think of him and his gaze when I’m singing that or hear that song. Lou had a gift of taking very simple lines, ‘Linger on, your pale blue eyes,’ and make it so they magnify on their own. That song has always haunted me.” And compared to most of their tunes, this is Reed at his most vulnerable.
There are more than a few songs that capture his essence a little better, like ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ and ‘Perfect Day’, but ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ is as pure a love song as he could have made at the time. Every single piece of heartache that he’s ever felt is somehow squeezed into this little bit of music, and Smith practically took that as a challenge when she was making her own records.
There was no sense in trying to eclipse what Reed had done by any stretch, but his music was the perfect guide for how she would measure the rest of her music. She could have kept on trying to make songs that became hits like ‘Because the Night’, but if her tunes never captured the right feeling, it was better for her to scrap them and move on to a song that spoke to her.
