‘Gloria: In Excelsis Deo’: The song only Patti Smith could sing
It’s a well-told tale in musical lore, but it can’t be overstated how lifeless rock had largely become as the 1970s rolled on. Many disciples of the prior decade’s countercultural ambitions became disillusioned with the bloated loftiness that clogged the charts, ever unmooring itself from 1950s’ rock ‘n roll Big Bang that upended mainstream society and invented teen rebellion. One such alienated devotee was poet and artist Patti Smith, whose relationship with rock reached a spiritual and religious depth of belief with all the moments of divine inspiration and waning faith that come with it.
Smith dreamed of carving a standing in the art world since working in a pram factory. Committed to the bohemian lifestyles of her Beat heroes, Smith and her sister busked around Europe before immersing herself in Manhatten’s cultural community, living in the Hotel Chelsea with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and hanging out at Max’s Kansas City.
Alongside near recruitment as Blue Öyster Cult’s vocalist and performing in fringe theatre, The Patti Smith Group was assembled to inject vibrancy into her poetry, cutting 1974’s quasi-cover of ‘Hey Joe’ as popularised by Jimi Hendrix artfully deconstructed with a monologue inspired by fugitive heiress Patty Hearst.
Smith’s ebbing faith in rock and intuitive hunt for the new counterculture naturally led her to East Village’s CBGB. Lighting New York’s punk fire among like-minded but disparate artists from Ramones, Suicide, Television, and Blondie, Smith joined their collective clamour to resurrect rock’s revolutionary spirit before it turned stale.
Recruiting former Velvet Underground’s John Cale for production, The Patti Smith Group cut their debut LP Horses in 1975, a poetically firey riposte against her beloved rock that had grown too comfortable and spiked with further urgency following the recent deaths of Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison and their symbolic chapter close of music’s once insurrectionary reach.
Smith’s most famous and celebrated lyric is still the first line uttered on Horses‘ opener. “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine,” Smith snarls on ‘Gloria: In Excelsis Deo’, a shaking-off of her Jehova’s Witness childhood and an explicit embrace of music and art’s lack of dogma that forms her new house of worship.
Further instilling rock and theology’s strange intersection in Smith’s worldview, ‘Gloria: In Excelsis Deo’ borrows from Northern Irish garage rockers Them‘s—featuring an early Van Morrison—1965 cut sharing a title with the Greater Doxology Christian hymn dating back to the 2nd century.
It takes steely confidence and unerring authority to raid the garage rock trove and add your own poetry. Welding the words of her years-old ‘Oath’ spoken-word poetry with the Them B-side, Smith plays the part of rock journalist, music fan and faith healer all at once, brandishing an iconoclastic flex miles away from punk’s oft-nihilistic lapses but aiming straight for the heart, almost shaking rock’s tired husk and wanting to slap the life back into it. There’s a fervent passion amid the fury delivered with a level of sincerity hard to envisage anyone else from the CBGB conveying in the same way.
