Midwinter in Bearsville: Why Patti Smith’s ‘Wave’ would have died without Todd Rundgren
When you’ve released three instant classics back to back at the start of your career, you have to wonder when the creative juices are going to stop flowing for you. For Patti Smith, coming off the back of Horses, Radio Ethiopia and Easter, releasing something just as triumphant to round off a productive half-decade was immediately going to be a challenge.
A poet in the purest sense of the word, Smith possessed the true spirit of punk to a far greater extent than most of her posturing male contemporaries. Everything that she expressed on her first three albums felt as though it was coming out of her naturally rather than as part of an attempt to seem like she had something to say, leading many to praise her for her authenticity.
Scoring a hat-trick at this early stage of one’s career is great inasmuch as it highlights your brilliance and the essential nature of what you’re producing, but it piles the pressure on to an enormous extent. How you can live up to such high expectations on demand is beyond belief, and this evidently took its toll on Smith after a point.
When Smith settled down to work on the album that would become Wave, something was amiss from the start of the sessions, and Smith suddenly felt unsure of her place in the music world, questioning whether she should even continue to make music.
“Wave was a difficult record to make,” Smith admitted to Uncut in a 2004 interview. “We were out of the city, in the middle of winter in Bearsville, pretty much snowed in, and I thought it might be the last album I did. I felt it was time for me to evolve as a human being.”
She went on to explain that it was never her intention to make music in this manner, and that she had only ever fallen into this avenue through a mixture of accident and good fortune. By this stage of her career, she felt creatively spent, and there wasn’t a great deal left for her to say that could be reasonably presented in the form of an album, hence the range of emotions expressed over the record.
However, Smith noted how if it hadn’t been for the assistance of producer and long-time friend Todd Rundgren, the album would have been an unmitigated disaster. Helping the songs to evolve around her deeply personal lyrics while building on the increasingly commercial sound that she had explored on parts of Easter, Rundgren rescued Wave and turned it into a triumph.
“It was not an easy record to make, and Todd works very quickly,” Smith admitted. “I work quickly, too, but not as quickly as Todd, but I think the sound of that record is beautiful.”
It may have been her last album for nine years, and the last she released with the Patti Smith Group, but it’s still a remarkable way to cap off the most fruitful era of her career, especially considering the turmoil that she faced attempting to make it.
