Patti Smith – ‘Radio Ethiopia’
“I had a strange reaction watching Jim Morrison,” Patti Smith writes in Just Kids. It was 1968, she was new in New York and broke, but just enough money had been scrounged together to get a ticket to see The Doors at Fillmore East. In the crowd, however, everyone was transfixed, while she felt something else. “I remember this feeling much more clearly than the concert,” she said. “I felt, watching Jim Morrison, that I could do that. I can’t say why I thought this. I had nothing in my experience to make me think that would ever be possible, yet I harboured that conceit.”
It’s a powerful passage in the book. Smith watched on with a mix of awe, jealousy and drive. She recalls a James Joyce quote that seemed to haunt her at the time: “The signs that mock me as I go.” When she later told a friend this secret, itching half-desire, half-delusion the gig had left her with, he returned with a gift, a record by The Byrds and a note to pay attention to one song in particular, ‘So You Want to Be a Rock ’N’ Roll Star’.
It would be several years from that point until Smith would release her debut album, Horses, in 1975. It would be several more years until she released Wave in 1979 with a nod to this origin through a cover of that song. But in 1976, with the release of Radio Ethiopia, she embodied it. Suppose Horses was the launch of Patti Smith. In that case, the unique and singular punk poet trying to find her position in the music world, almost still not quite daring to full embody the Morrison makeup of what she perceived a rockstar to be, avoiding it with long, improvised poetic pieces that stayed comfortably in the vein she’d taken her first steps in with her Rock and Rimbaud shows — Radio Ethiopia was the launch of Patti Smith, the rock star.
Proof is there in an instant. ‘Ask The Angels’ launches into the album with exactly the kind of outright rock riff that is missing on Horses. Onto the next track, and ‘Ain’t It Strange’ delivers the same type of almost-scary energy that she witnessed live that night with Morrison. “I spin, I spiral, and I splatter / I feel the fever / Hand of God, and I start to whirl,” she wails at the climax of a song that builds and builds and builds as if she’s overtaken by something.
This time round, though, it’s not Rimbaud or any of her other distinctly poetic muses tacking control; it is very obviously the same kind of higher rock power that captures her musical idols. Just like Morrison throwing himself around a stage, like Mick Jagger’s frantic dancing, Iggy Pop’s scary antics, Smith had her own with this song as she performed it once and quite literally spiralled and splattered, falling off the stage and genuinely nearly dying when hooked by her own work. The grip is heard on the track. No, the grip is heard on the whole album.
Because here we have a truly electrifying rock record. There were moments of that on Horses, sure, but here we have an all-in commitment to it as if Smith finally felt the courage to admit that what she’d been wanting, and what Morrison made her feel that night, was a desire to do just that. ‘Pumping’ is the pinnacle of that and sits as perhaps the most high-octane and all-out track the artist has ever released as the strong band she’d built around her, now registering this record under Patti Smith Group rather than just Patti Smith, plays at full force. It’s a song that serves as a reminder of Smith’s stance in the CBGB scene and a reminder that her punk label was just as powerful as her poet one.
But the poet is still there. While undeniably adopting the swagger of a rockstar on this record, Smith’s literary voice is still strong and singular. ‘Pissing In A River’ marries the two beautiful as a truly staggering and impactful ballad that only she would or could write, crescendoing to another almost spiritually charged climax where Smith’s vocals position her as a real rock crooner. Elsewhere, closer ‘Abyssinia’ steps back inside those old church performances where Smith’s poetry feels way more like performance art than a radio hit, while on ‘Poppies’ and ‘Distance Fingers’, there’s proof that all these things can exists at once; poetry, experimentation, hooking instrumentation, fascinating artistry and classic rock seduction.
Radio Ethiopia does it all, really, and does it in the way that Smith seemed to be waiting and wanting to do up to this point. She allows herself to play Jim Morrison, to be the rockstar. But then a track like ‘Radio Ethiopia’, choosing to dedicate the album’s title and its centre point to one of her signature meandering ten-minute-long improvised pieces, keeps the core of her artistry nowhere but in the core of her. This is a Patti Smith Group rock record, the kind only Patti Smith, leaning into but expanding her myriad of influences, could make.
