Patti Smith never wanted to end up like Captain and Tennille: “I’d rather be a housewife”
Patti Smith always had a vision for how she wanted to express her art. She knew that she needed some sort of control over everything that she was putting out, but even when fans heard the most accessible music of her career, she knew that there were creative roads that she should never go down.
Because when you think about it, Smith was never really meant to be a popular musician at all. Many of her greatest moments came as an extension of her fantastic poetry, and while some of the tunes did have stellar hooks behind them like ‘Because the Night’, it was almost secondary to Smith. She needed to have something to express, and even if ‘Elegie’ wasn’t going to land on radio stations, everyone who has ever heard it can feel the raw intensity of every single stanza she wrote.
But when Smith was first rising to prominence, she had fallen in between two different creative worlds. For everyone who tries to label her as one of the first punks, she had far more in common with people like Lou Reed than John Lydon. She wanted to create musical art every time she went to the studio, but compared to the rest of the charts, it’s not that hard to see why ‘punk’ was the best label for her.
For the first few years of her career, a lot of the biggest names in rock were not necessarily the most underground thing in the world. The genre had officially gone mainstream, and while acts like Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith did have something genuine to say every now and again, the focus seemed to be more on getting the best groove and making the crowd bounce than leaving them with a feeling.
And if you thought that rock was bad, you should have seen what the charts looked like for pop artists. Despite disco being reviled by everyone in the late 1970s, it would have been a godsend to get away from the kitschy schlock that was happening at the time, usually with a few balladeers in the mix and some truly embarrassing lyrics. And for Smith, no one captured that feeling more grotesquely than the Captain and Tennille.
Their track record with ‘Muskrat Love’ and ‘Love Will Keep Us Together’ did land them some chart hits, but Smith considered them to be the opposite of what she wanted to be, saying, “I don’t have any other motivation than to do something really great; I mean, I wouldn’t want to do a Captain & Tennille record. I’d rather be a housewife, and a good housewife, admired by all the other housewives in the area, than be a mediocre rock singer. The only crime in art is to do lousy art.”
Even though rock and roll still held a firm grip on the charts, a lot of the duo’s songs are what the genre sounds like when it’s dying. Some of the Captain’s piano lines can have some Elton John gusto behind them, but Tennille’s voice doesn’t really suit anything beyond a sultry groove, especially when she takes a stab at ‘Shop Around’ by The Miracles and comes off like someone’s drunk aunt singing karaoke at a wedding.
So while Smith didn’t need to be associated with the punk movement to be a legend, it’s acts like this that prove why genres like punk were needed. Music had become way too comfortable, and it was time for bands to give the charts a collective kick in the ass whenever their records came on.
