The classic Patti Smith song she didn’t want to record
Patti Smith has never sung anything that she didn’t want to. From her humble beginnings in the New York underground in the late 1960s to becoming a musical icon with Horses, Smith always put her poetry before anything else, crafting songs that were as much a reflection of her in the moment as they were commentaries on what the world at large was doing. No artist gets to become a legend without having a hit under their belt, though, but Smith was not happy when Bruce Springsteen presented her with the song that would make her a star.
Then again, there’s a good argument to be made that Smith was never trying to become a major star in the first place. If you look at the groups that she followed, like The Velvet Underground, not many of them could claim to be the most successful artists of their time, usually hanging on the fringes of rock and roll before getting heralded as legends later in life.
Smith’s career wasn’t only going to be confined to strictly music, either. Considering her background in poetry and every other form of artistic expression, Smith looked at the immortal words of artists like Bob Dylan and Lou Reed the same way she looked at artists like Arthur Rimbaud and Jack Kerouac, looking to create pieces that would live on as documents of their time.
For all of the underground music Smith loved, she also believed in the power of rock and roll. When talking about her first years living in the underground art scene, Smith was determined to make her rock predecessors proud, going into Electric Lady Studios to cut Horses specifically because of how important Jimi Hendrix was to her life.
Whereas Smith may have represented rock and roll’s effect in New York, a guitar-slinging kid out of New Jersey was also trying his hand at writing. Modelled after Dylan, Bruce Springsteen was writing tales that reflected all the romanticism of rock and roll, telling stories where characters could have their dreams come true and get their heart broken over the course of three minutes.
Since Springsteen could be prolific with his pen, producer Jimmy Iovine suggested that he work on songs for Smith when he came up with the track ‘Because the Night’. While Iovine knew he had a hit on his hands, Smith was less than thrilled when she started working on the track for her third album, Easter.
For a few months, Smith almost rejected the song out of principle, telling Billboard, “When Jimmy gave it to me, I really resisted … Bruce was already established, and I felt like I should write my own songs. Jimmy gave me this cassette tape — 40 years later, and we still laugh about this — and I looked at it, and I thought, ‘I really want to write my own songs.’ So I put it on my mantle in my little place”.
Since Springsteen hadn’t gotten around to finishing the lyrics, though, Smith was able to add her personal spin to the song. While there are certain parts of the song that sound like a Springsteen rocker, the line “love is an angel disguised as lust” could have only been written by Smith, putting a poetic slant on what could have been a mindless rock song. Smith was never about making anything sound mindless, and if she was going to have a hit with ‘Because the Night’, she was going to pack as big of a punch as possible.
