Patti Smith
Trampin’
Columbia Records
Patti Smith never had the best voice, and she never was a great songwriter. What she had at the time of her 1975 debut was a puckish tenacity and a literary flair that made a rare combination in female rock, then as now.
“Trampin’,” her first album in four years, has its share of irate politics — the Iraq war and the Patriot Act presumably don’t please her — but from the incantatory opening track, “Jubilee,” to the quiet catharsis of the title track, a gospel number learned from Marian Anderson, “Trampin’” is redeemed by a craggy optimism.
Miss Smith’s working band includes original members Jay Dee Daugherty on drums and Lenny Kaye on guitar; Oliver Ray (guitar) and Tony Shanahan (bass, keyboards) round out the lineup. Their sound is by turns dreamy and brash, depending on what’s on Miss Smith’s mind.
If it’s war, the band meanders in free-form dissonance; if it’s abstract verse, it tightens into more conventional melodic structures. Maybe it’s because of a short attention span, but I went for the latter.
The self-styled poetess of New York punk makes Columbia Records her home, and in the press notes for “Trampin’,” she says she’s happy about being a label mate of her hero, Bob Dylan.
As noisy, interminable songs such as “Gandhi” and “Radio Baghdad” make obvious, though, Miss Smith’s turgid poesy is more Jim Morrison than Bob Dylan.
“Oh, in Mesopotamia, aloofness ran deep/Deep in the veins of the great rivers that form the base of Eden,” goes “Baghdad.” Ach.
The laggard “My Blakean Year” is weighed down by the same kind of pretentiousness: “Fortune breathed into my ear/mouthed a simple ode.” Sorry. I know Miss Smith is beloved in some circles, but that’s just not good verse.
Conversely, simpler songs, such as “Mother Rose,” “Trespasses” and “Cash,” connect far better — on a singer-to-listener level, as opposed to the podium-to-audience windiness of the 10-minute poem-sermons.
“Peaceable Kingdom” is knockout gorgeous with its spellbinding melody, gentle percussion and warm keyboard filler. “Maybe one day we’ll be strong enough to build it back again.” It could be about geopolitics or a marriage or a friendship. Maybe all those things.
The point is, Miss Smith leaves it to the listener to make up his mind instead of thwacking him over the head with Viggo Mortensen-style versifying.
Patti Smith is 57 years old. She shouldn’t strain so hard for profundity. That stuff is better left to the amateurs anyway.
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