The album cover Patti Smith masturbated over: “It would make me very happy”
Long before her breakthrough debut album, Horses, Patti Smith was a prominent figure in New York City’s artistic community. In the early 1970s, Smith lived at the famous Chelsea Hotel with her then-partner photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and scrawled a profusion of progressive urban poetry, some of which would appear in her legendary spoken word performances.
Smith’s first public poetry performance occurred in February 1971, with Lenny Kaye accompanying on the electric guitar. This was a landmark moment on the road to punk and is, by many musicologists’ estimations, the starting point for punk poetry. In many ways, punk was the birthchild of Iggy Pop and Smith; it stripped rock ‘n’ roll back to a primitive force of emotional expression in an age distracted by the complexities of progressive rock.
When Horses arrived in 1975, Smith successfully bottled her unique artistic approach to rock music. The energising collection of songs is packed with compelling poetry, some of it delivered in a spoken word style, some of it with the yodel-like vocal style that directly inspired Blondie’s Debbie Harry, among others.
In 1976, Smith released the follow-up album, Radio Ethiopia, which wasn’t particularly well-received by the critics. The detractors mostly cited a lack of the creative urgency experienced in Horses in a self-indulgent cash grab. It appeared that Smith could have used a little more time to develop content for the album. However, retrospective reviews are much more favourable.
In 1978, Smith returned with the Patti Smith Group to release her third album, Easter. In response to the criticism of Radio Ethiopia, this third record was more streamlined and is widely considered the most commercially accessible of her studio albums. Highlighted by the Bruce Springsteen-penned classic ‘Because the Night’, Easter heard Smith firing on all cylinders despite being in a neck brace at the time of recording.
While touring with Radio Ethiopia, Smith misplaced her foot on the stage and took a tumble, which resulted in cracked vertebrae in her neck. “I didn’t whirl around as much as usual, but when I hit the monitor with my foot, it was half hanging over the lip of the stage,” she told Uncut in 2012. “We needed more space and light, and we didn’t get it, and I had an accident. Those are the practical aspects of it.”
By all accounts, Easter was a triumphant comeback for Smith. It reconciled her with fans from the Horses era and gained her an ardent global following as a major commercial breakthrough. So besotted was Smith with the record’s success that it occurred to her to masturbate in its presence. Indeed, this is a strange thing to do, but Smith is the ‘Godmother of Punk’, and had a kooky reputation to uphold.
Although therapists encourage us to love ourselves, masturbating to an image of one’s self on the cover of an album is not quite what they mean. All the same, Smith had her reasons for experimenting with the Easter cover photograph taken by Lynn Goldsmith. When quizzed on the rumours in a 1978 interview with Rolling Stone, Smith confirmed, “I meant it just as I said it”.
Elaborating, Smith explained that she wasn’t “sexually attracted to herself”. Instead, it was just “one of those moments, ya know?”—I can’t say that I “know”, but it is undoubtedly fascinating. “I thought if I could do it as an experiment, then 15-year-old boys could do it, and that would make me very happy,” she explained. “Ya know, people say to me, ‘Aren’t you afraid of becoming a sex object?’ Especially a lot of writers are obsessed with making you feel guilty or upset because you might become a sex object. Well, I find that very exciting”.
In her openness, Smith touched upon an interesting point about the stereotypically bashful approach to the topic of sex. Sex is often discussed in muted voices and optimal discretion. However, Smith felt that people should have nothing to hide, that it is of spiritual importance. “I think sex is one of the five highest sensations one can experience,” she said. “A very high orgasm is a way of communication with our Creator.” Later in the conversation, Smith admitted that she often masturbates to the Bible in a similar sense.
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