The final tour of the Patti Smith group
Bruce Springsteen originally wrote the chorus to ‘Because The Night’ but, upon hitting a creative wall, let the song gather dust. It wasn’t until he showed it to Patti Smith and she wrote the verses that they both released the track. If, without knowing that, the average music listener was asked to pick which bits in ‘Because The Night’ Patti Smith wrote, thanks to her unique style, it would be an easy job.
Patti Smith’s writing style made her stand out in music and still resonates today. She would take from books and poems, injecting themes and narratives in her music, which separated her from other artists at the time in a beautiful and enchanting way.
Something else that separated her and the rest of the Patti Smith Group was that even when taking on much more conceptual narratives, they still put their music and musical ability at the forefront of the creative process. It tends to be the case that when artists go down a conceptual route, despite producing good music, they are somewhat handcuffed by the concept, but this was never the case with the Patti Smith Group.
One of the best examples of this is in the last tour they did together following the release of ‘Seven Ways Of Going’. This was a track from the 1979 album Wave in which every member of the Patti Smith Group, Lenny Kaye, Richard Sohl, Ivan Kral and Jay Dee Daugherty, are credited. They all had their own part in the song and were listed as songwriters.
The track follows a narrative like most of her music does, as it is based on an old fable. “’Seven Ways’ was originally about the Ninja of Japan,” said Lenny Kaye when interviewed by the New York Rocker, “who were these 16th-century assassins, like a martial arts offshoot in Japanese medieval times. They wore black, and they developed these techniques where, for instance, they could walk in the snow without showing which direction they were walking in, or they could go against that wall and become that wall. That kind of transformation is really what we’re into.”
Given it was a song that the entire band had a hand in writing, it was one that they all had an in-depth knowledge of. For that reason, it became an intrinsic part of their setlist, as they would play it every night on the Wave tour but weren’t afraid to improvise. It took a different shape every night as the song would build slowly into a flurry, with other musicians taking the spotlight at different times. In that sense, the song was as adaptable as the ninjas it was written about.
Despite crowds everywhere enjoying the track, they could only see it played with this outfit once, as the Wave tour would be the last one the Patti Smith Group embarked on. Once over, Smith broke up the band and married Fred “Sonic” Smith of the MC5. She semi-retired when they got together and had children, and when she eventually returned, she did so as a solo artist.
The Wave tour marked the last one the band would go on together, but with such a set built around improvisation and an understanding of everyone on stage, it was an excellent tour to go out on. There are a lot more than seven ways of going about breaking up a band, but this might have been one of the better options.
