‘Break It Up’: Patti Smith’s ode to Jim Morrison and the myth of the rock ‘n’ roll frontman
Being a rock star comes with a level of myth-making. Artists are elevated to the stature of gods as their fans idolise them and turn their origin stories into grand tales. Some lean into that as acts like Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison and more imbued their past with elements of mystery or even fiction. For Patti Smith, whose business has always been storytelling, that’s fascinating.
Even though Smith is rightfully crowned the ‘Godmother of Punk’ for her vital impact on music, she is just as much of a music fan as anyone else. In fact, before she’d even made a step into the industry, she was working as a music journalist for Rock Magazine just to hear new tunes and get closer to the people who made it.
Born and raised in a small town, Smith has always had a soft spot for rockstars or for larger-than-life male artists and writers who seemed to embody this kind of otherworldly artistry. She has vivid memories of meeting Jimi Hendrix as a young girl, stating, “For a young girl, he was everything you would want in your rock and roll star. He was beautiful, intelligent, and hungry. Just to look at him was an experience.” Even when she ran away to New York to pursue her own creative goals, she carried an obsession with these men with her, treating her love for Arthur Rimbaud, Bob Dylan, Keith Richards and more as a kind of religion. It was a total fascination as Smith, who would later become one herself, was obsessed with the energy and power of rock legends.
In particular, she was fascinated by Jim Morrison. When people talk about the greatest frontmen of all time, The Doors leader comes up time and time again. He could whip his crowds into a frenzy and have them following his every word to an almost terrifying effect, leading to the band’s shows causing clashes with authorities repeatedly when things got out of control. Part of that came from the fact that on every level, Morrison made a messiah of himself, from the way he held himself on stage to the story he’d sold the world.
For Smith, as a writer who is just as in love with storytelling as she is with music, the myth of Morrison gripped her. In 1975, on her debut album, she dedicated a track to retelling it, as ‘Break It Up’ dramatises The Doors’ singer’s so-called origin story in the kind of theatrical rock track it feels crafted for.
“Car stopped in a clearing / Ribbon of life, it was nearing / I saw the boy break out of his skin / My heart turned over and I crawled in,” Smith sings as the tension builds and builds. She borrows the voice of the soul that Morrison claimed took over him, as he always said that at three or four years old, after seeing some Native Americans dying at the side of the road, the spirits or the ghosts of those “dead Indians leaped into [his] soul,” as he was “like a sponge, ready to sit there and absorb it.”
Whether it’s true or not has always been contested, but really, it doesn’t matter. The fact is unimportant as the fiction is so fantastic that it served to help build this aura around Morrison. It’s part of what makes him such an incredible cultural presence and what made him so gripping back in his prime. It’s also part of what made Smith so utterly fascinated with him and want to retell his tale.
As the song builds and builds, it’s like Smith is putting sound to the building of the myth of Morrison and his elevation to a God-like status. As she howls “break it up” again and again, it’s like hands being thrown in the air by the congregation during a praise song, but rather than telling the story of a religious figure, it’s an ode to a cultural or musical one that Smith, like so many other fans, worships.
