The Patti Smith song written about the birth of rock and roll: “He’s entering the world”
There was a time when women were not commonly involved in rock music. Many people frowned upon the idea that women could pick up guitars or present themselves with the dripping self-confidence and stage persona utilised by many frontmen. While there were various all-female garage-rock bands in the 1960s, it took a while for women to be taken more seriously as musicians.
For Patti Smith, poetry became her ‘in’ to the music world, and she soon started accompanying her poems with instruments during live performances, becoming a pioneering punk. It was the early 1970s, and there she emerged in New York’s underground scene: androgynous, messy, obsessed with poetry – people weren’t used to this kind of female musician.
With her debut album, Horses, Smith helped to transform the musical landscape, taking an unconventional approach to the burgeoning punk genre by ranting her hallucinatory lyrics over sparse instrumentation, bending and snarling her words. She presented as herself and no one else, wearing her influences on her sleeve.
The beauty of Horses is that Smith allows her poetry to become such a central force, which is best demonstrated on the almost-ten-minute-long song ‘Land: Horses/Land of a Thousand Dances/La Mer (de)’. The song started out as a poem, but it transformed into something bigger and experimental when Smith turned it into a song. It begins with Smith talking gently, telling us about a “boy” who “was in the hallway drinking a glass of tea”, coming across another boy who “merged perfectly with the hallway” and “looked at Johnny”, who “wanted to run”.
These lines are ambiguous – who is Johnny and who is he meeting? Smith describes a sexual exchange, but how consensual it is remains a mystery. “The boy disappeared, Johnny fell on his knees,” Smith continues. The song picks up speed, with Smith’s backing vocals chasing behind. “Horses,” she repeats with a rapturous sensibility, hypnotising us with her chants.
From there, the song segues into a steadier pace, with Smith interpreting ‘Land of a Thousand Dances’ by Chris Kenner. Johnny reppears in the lyrics, with the poet telling a story about the character laying in his “sperm coffin”, doing drugs, and referencing Arthur Rimbuad, one of Smith’s favourite writers.
In an old interview, she explained that Johnny is a “pre-punk rock kid”, continuing, “He’s entering the world, ready to take it on. It’s a metaphor for the birth of rock ‘n’ roll.”
The song sees Johnny enter into a world of danger, with Smith’s lyrics referencing, sex, drugs, violence. He is born into a world that is dramatically different to the past, where everything is changing, and the soundtrack of rock and roll carries him.
The name ‘Johnny’ was taken from William S Burroughs’ The Wild Boys, which also contains a homosexual protagonist of the same name. The pair were friends, and after she read the novel, she knew that she had to lift the character for her own song.
Jimi Hendrix is also referenced in the line “In the sheets, there was a man/ Dancing around to the simple/ Rock and roll song”. By closing the song with these lines, Smith salutes the rockstar, who simply wanted to be a musician, only for the rock and roll lifestyle to catch up with him too fast.
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