How a village in Yorkshire and ‘Wuthering Heights’ gave Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen a timeless hit
In 1977, Bruce Springsteen was struggling with a song; he had his signature big chorus, designed to get the crowd fist-pumping and singing along, but the verses simply wouldn’t come, and so frustrated, he gave up, but his sound engineer didn’t.
Imagine hearing the huge chorus of ‘Because the Night’, and then hearing the artist throw it in the trash. For Jimmy Iovine behind the recording desk, it seemed like a crime as he watched Springsteen get more and more frustrated by the song as the words for any bridge or verse just evaded him. It was a classic case of writer’s block, if you want to put it plainly, but for the more woo-woo at heart, his failure felt fateful.
At the same time, working with Springsteen, Iovine was working with Patti Smith. Both of them were chipping away on their new records at the Record Plant in New York, and the closer Iovine crept to watching a musical tragedy be committed with the trashing of the track, the more certain he was getting that Smith could make it magical.
While Horses or Radio Ethiopia might not have suggested an artist who could take on a Springsteen ballad, Easter did. As Iovine was producing the record, he was hearing the tenderness as the titular track especially is tender and adoring, written to honour Arthur Rimbaud and showing a softer touch. Contrast that with something like ‘Privilege (Set Me Free)’, or ‘Pumping’ from her previous record, and it becomes clear that she does have a stadium-sized ambition in her.
It felt like a perfect equation: Springsteen needed poetry for the verses, and Smith needed a vehicle to go all-out rockstar in. “I told Bruce I desperately wanted a hit with Patti, that she deserved one. He agreed,” Iovine recalled, “As he had no immediate plans to put ‘Because the Night’ on an album, I said why not give it to Patti. Bruce replied, ‘If she can do it, she can have it’.”
However, the final piece of the puzzle comes from far off from New York. Part of it came from Michigan as Smith, on the track in one night, yearned for a call from her then-boyfriend but soon-to-be husband, Fred Smith, who was on tour at the time. But really, her masterclass in yearning came from years before and miles away, rooting all the way back to Haworth in Yorkshire, and to Brontë country.
The Brontë sisters, and in particular, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, were by no means a new reference to her in the late 1970s. Instead, this was a book she’d loved since being a kid, but had come to understand better and better with each re-read as she grew up. By 1977, when she was now in her 30s and intensely in love with the man she’d marry, the adoration and emotion written by Brontë in that book took on new life. She was yearning for a man who was far away, just as Cathy and Heathcliff spent a lifetime yearning for one another.
With the chorus of a love song on her hands, Wuthering Heights came to mind as the ultimate Patti Smith way to finish it off, allowing her to bring in poetry and literary reference. The result was a huge hit, giving Smith her first commercial smash and Springsteen another victory under his belt.
In 2014, Smith wrote a foreword for a new version of the book, musing, “In the writing of Wuthering Heights, she did not give what she wanted; she gave what she had”. It seemed to be the case for her song, too, as her more impassioned tune came together in one night. But her passion is matched by her love for the Brontë’s, as in 2013, she played a concert in the tiny Yorkshire town simply to raise money to keep their home open to the public.
