“I spin, I spiral, and I splatter”: How Patti Smith’s ‘Ain’t It Strange’ performance in Florida almost cut her career short
January 23rd, 1977. Patti Smith is working towards the peak of her power. Horses saw her kick the door down into the music world with her notebook of poetry in hand, set to reshape punk in her own literary image. In 1976, Radio Ethiopia was slandered, but she didn’t care. She kept gigs, now dominated the New York City scene as its new leader and grew a cult of fans worldwide who were enamoured with her unique sound, her mission to serve nothing and no one beyond her own inspiration, and her all-out rebellion against expectation. In 1978, she released ‘Because The Night’ and became a sensation. But this night almost stopped her career in its tracks.
Smith was in Florida, playing a show with Bob Seger. She’s always been a hard worker. To her, gigs are jobs, as she defines them as on her own website. “Truthfully, I think of myself as a worker,” she said to Interview Magazine, talking about the ethics her parents and her old blue-collar life instilled in her. But the thing with working as an artist is that you exist, in some way, as a bridge between strife and the divine. Like Leonard Cohen, Smith talks a lot about the effort and day-to-day task of actively being an artist. She goes out and goes to work. She sits at her desk and works. She travels to shows, gets up on stage and works, But the talent is arguably god-given, and in that moment where the flow state comes in, and the artist is swept up in a wave of inspiration, there seems to be no real-world explanation for how and why it happens, it is simply too magical.
It’s spiritual even as if some higher force is grabbing control of the artist and moving them. And on this night, Smith was moving, spinning and spinning as the divine moment of getting lost in the art took hold. Caught up in this shroud of power, as if her limbs were being involuntarily manoeuvred by a force bigger than her, she said she was “spinning like a dervish”, as if caught up in a religious ritual. But then, she fell.
Suddenly feeling her body go, she tried to steady herself with a foot on the monitor at the front of the stage, but it was barely balanced. The monitor slipped, Smith went with it and her body, now out of the spell and mortal again, fell 14 feet into a concrete orchestra pit below. The crowd gasped and screamed, and the performer was really, badly hurt.
“It was a bad fall,” Smith recalled to The Guardian, describing how her injuries could easily have been fatal or at least career-ending. “I fractured my skull, several vertebrae in my neck, my back, my tailbone. I broke some teeth. It was serious,” she said, adding that she still feels the impact today, “I still have certain repercussions – I never got my full eyesight back. I don’t have the range of movement that I used to.”
But there’s something more in this story. Smith thankfully recovered over time, but this image and story stuck with fans. As the musician spins, the song in the background feels oddly prophetic now, as the spell she was under was weaved by her own words. “Down in Vineland,” she begins, with the song being set in Florida, in a town not far from where she was. “Come and join me, I implore thee,” she sings as if calling out to some power. She even sings about a collapse; “And they come and call, and they fall on the floor.”
As the song hits the climaxing breakdown, exactly at the moment Smith was spinning and spinning before a fall, she howls, “I spin, I spiral, and I splatter / I feel the fever / Hand of God, and I start to whirl.”
Screaming, “I move in another dimension,” thankfully, the fall didn’t take her there, though, as the song’s powerful energy almost ended her career right at the moment when she was proving her near spiritual worth as a star.
