“I had no words”: how a hurricane in Long Island inspired Patti Smith’s ‘Radio Ethiopia’
After the release of her evocative debut album, 1975’s Horses, Patti Smith did not foresee writing a follow-up album.
Horses was a project that set Smith and her band – guitarist Lenny Kaye, guitarist Ivan Král, pianist Richard Sohl and drummer Jay Dee Daughtery – apart from their contemporaries. In the punk world, rooted in abrasion, Horses fluctuated from raucous to melodic, incorporating notes of garage rock alongside jazz and the avant-garde.
The album enmeshed her captivating spoken-word with rock ‘n’ roll, taking the adrenaline of live performance and capturing it as vividly as possible in the studio. Horses, then, was not just any rock album; it was a true work of art, reimagining how literature and the written word could coexist with music.
Conjuring this energy after Horses’ release, the Patti Smith Group toured extensively, continually harnessing the thrill of a communal moment between performer and audience. In between tours, the band was asked by their label, Arista Records, to begin conceptualising their sophomore album, but at the time, Smith was struggling to write, caught up in the chaos of tour life that left her feeling detached from her pen.
“More than ever, my writing life was usurped,” she describes in her most recent memoir, 2025’s Bread of Angels, “living fiercely in the present, tour upon tour, a physical external time when the writer deferred to the performer, the pen to the electric guitar. For a time, I lost contact with language; my Fender Duo-Sonic spoke for me, moaning and screeching feedback in place of words.”
The contents of her journals, or lack thereof, contained unfinished song lyrics and drafts of letters to her future husband, Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, but nothing contained in their pages resembled the beginnings of a body of work. The demands of the poet suddenly becoming a rock star were starting to take their toll.
Faced with a blank slate, Smith did what she knew best: she looked to the state of the world that surrounded her, finding inspiration in events, people and talismans that circled back to her. “I laid out the things that were on my mind,” she notes, “Famine in Ethiopia, the fate of a boxer, Rimbaud in Abyssinia and the sonic language of the electric guitar.”
As her words slowly but surely began to flow, there was a glaring issue in the concept for the title track, to be called ‘Radio Ethiopia’, which Smith called “the greatest challenge”. Smith visualised the song as completely improvisational, a tactic that proved fruitful during the recording of Horses, and she relied on Kaye’s menacing, compelling guitar riffs to propel the song forward. But her vision of a sprawling opus was yet to be inspired.
As she recalls in Bread of Angels, it was August 9th, 1976, when their producer, Jack Douglas, halted their studio session because of the impending Hurricane Belle in New York (which made landfall in Long Island), but Smith was undeterred. “I paced the floor like a hemmed-in coyote feeling the effects of both the coming storm and the full moon and was swept by a premonition that we would get the title track that night,” she writes, rallying her band and Douglas to the studio in spite of the weather. Arriving at their studio, the Record Plant, Douglas stuffed towels underneath the doors of the control room to prevent damage from possible flooding. Beginning at midnight, the band conjured the spirit of what would become ‘Radio Ethiopia’.
“I had no words,” Smith writes, “Just a mental map of the sufferings of a people, the death rattle of one of our greatest poets and the desire for us to unleash a torrent of our own.”
In her words, she conjures the revolution in Ethiopia; the last decade spent by her hero, the poet Arthur Rimbaud, who disappeared in Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia); and the work of Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși, crafting a song that champions liberation and independence. Her repeated plea for the listener to probe “deep in the heart” asks to look inward, reckoning with oneself.
“By three in the morning,” Smith recalls, “Four inches of rain had come down flooding the streets, high winds had knocked over trees and power lines, and we had successfully added to nature’s chaotic touchdown.”
‘Radio Ethiopia’ became a ten-minute song of “intentional babbling,” as Smith describes it, writing that it “accomplished all that I had hoped for.” Still, when Radio Ethiopia was released in November 1976, the song (and much of the album) was disliked by critics, cast aside as self-indulgent and incomprehensible.
But, the scorn of those who did not understand Smith’s vision was no match for her artistry, as she and her band looked to a declaration in the album’s liner notes as inspiration: “The art emerging from the boundless scope of rock ‘n’ roll needs no other patron but the people.” For Smith, the people have always been the imperative.
