“You tell them”: The single Patti Smith told her fans not to buy
Most of the best artists in the world have to value their integrity more than money. Even though it’s nice to have residuals from how many people enjoy listening to you, there’s a fine line between making music because someone wants to and becoming a cash cow trying to spew out anything that the audience wants from you. While Patti Smith always stuck to her guns when releasing her classics, it takes a special kind of artistry to encourage fans not to purchase one of her records.
Granted, Smith never seemed to look at herself as someone concerned with a life of fame and stardom. That was reserved for the rockstars of the world, and while she was definitely rock-adjacent, some of her best moments were about her trying to find the best poetry to put down in a song rather than working in some Beatlesque guitar line or some hooky chorus bound to get on the radio.
Even when she took on covers like Them’s ‘Gloria’, the beauty of her version is how she twists it on its head. The original already had a fairly decent guitar hook anchoring everything, but while the riff is still intact, the best pieces of the song come when she turns her vocal performance into a religious experience, almost calling out to a higher power as she sings Van Morrison’s lines about this girl he longed for.
But while speaking what’s in your heart is awfully good, there had to be some parameters around it in the music world. When Smith had started her career, the idea of someone swearing in a song was still fairly unnerving, so when she shouted, “I don’t need that fucking shit” in the middle of her cover of ‘My Generation’ by The Who, her label cracked down hard on her and insisted it be censored.
It may have pleased the mothers and fathers of the kids buying her records, but that was never how Smith thought about her music. John Lennon had only begun to become more honest and let a few f-bombs fly on ‘Working Class Hero’, so what made her version any different, especially when it was a live performance and not in the main lyrics of the song?
Smith remained defiantly proud of her tune, but she did say that anyone buying the censored version of the tune shouldn’t be wasting their money, telling the press, “You tell them not to buy it, and you tell them that I fought for it not to be censored. It’s just American slang, nothing more than American slang that has been abstracted from its physical act. It’s just words, y’know? Rock and roll is my art, and it’s still total warfare all the time.”
And considering the rest of the song is meant to be a nod to The Who, those exclamations are part of what makes Smith’s version so much more exciting. A studio version may have done a serviceable job, but listening to scream about her internal feelings makes you feel like you’re right there in the crowd as she shrieks her way across the stage.
That kind of defiance hasn’t stopped, either. When looking at her use of different slang terms on albums like Easter and her way of using her words as a weapon, Smith remains one of the most determined poets to ever walk the Earth. Because she knows that if her words have the power to spark controversy in someone, they might also have the power to heal someone of their problems in the right context.
