The one singer Patti Smith said laid foundations for everyone: “She redefined what it meant”
Patti Smith didn’t make it a secret about standing on the shoulders of rock and roll giants.
She was always going to bring something new to the genre when she started cutting her records, but some of the finest records that she ever made usually came from taking the common tropes everyone learns about rock and roll and turning them inside out with the best wordplay of all time. Her music was about trying to subvert people’s expectations, but she was far from the first frontwoman to have that idea when she first took the stage.
But the biggest lessons that every female rockstar learned afterwards had a bit of help from Smith’s stage presence. You could feel the pure energy in the air whenever she worked on one of her classics, and even if the rest of her band wasn’t playing the most complicated things in the world, her version of ‘Gloria’ is always going to be considered one of the greatest covers on Earth because of how much she means every word she said.
When it comes to lyrics, she had everything covered, but being able to engage a crowd is a much different thing. She knew how to recite her poetry, but it wasn’t until looking at what people like Jimi Hendrix and Lou Reed were doing that she understood what rock and roll was all about. These people were trying to give everyone a spiritual experience through music, and when Janis Joplin arrived on the scene, she was one of the wildest artists that anyone could have imagined.
Granted, Grace Slick had helped set the stage for what Joplin was doing, but no one in Jefferson Airplane could have had the kind of momentum that Joplin did. Her idols were always the biggest names in blues music, and when she debuted that husky voice of hers in her prime, there were more than a few frontmen that were taking notes from everything she was doing when Big Brother and the Holding Company came to town.
And while most people prefer to listen to Joplin at the highest volume they possibly could, you can’t discount what ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ was able to do. The biggest names in music had already been taking swings at folk music, but the kind of vulnerability that she brought to that song reminded people like Smith that artists could still be sensitive without letting go of that tough exterior.
It was the heart that mattered behind every performance, and Smith knew that Joplin was working with something much stronger than anyone else when she started following in her footsteps at CBGBS, saying, “Janis laid the foundations for all of us. She redefined what it meant to be a woman in rock.” But that didn’t mean that Smith was going to be doing an impression of what Joplin was doing.
She felt that she could bring her own spin to music, and her performances were partway between Joplin’s intensity, Lou Reed’s snark, and the matter-of-fact delivery that you would get out of a typical Rimbaud piece. Her music was a lot more simple, but every lyric seemed downright visceral whenever she started singing a song like ‘Elegie’ or even her poppy tunes like ‘Dancing Barefoot’ and ‘Because the Night’.
So while Smith didn’t need to sing like Joplin to be considered one of the greatest artists of her time, sometimes you need that foundation to remind you of why you’re doing this in the first place. She had the spiritual power of rock and roll on her side in many respects, but her real allure was being able to take what Joplin did and take it to a whole new place.
