March 10, 2024

Tomorrow I deliver Day One of my punk lecture for SMC's Popular Culture class. As discussed numerous times through these blogs, it is one of my favorite days of the year. The highlight for me comes when I am able to move from a general brief opening lecture to playing examples of popular music in 1975: brief clips of Captain & Tennille, John Denver, and Neil Sedaka, all to set up why, all the social milieu stuff notwithstanding, for most of us we were just desperate for better music, or more accurately, music that spoke more to teenagers.

To go from those clips to showing a performance of Patti Smith's "Gloria" feels like a transformative moment for the class (or at least I can dream). To be able to engage the class in a discussion of how Smith and her lyrics portend what the punks will project is so rewarding. In addition, "Gloria" provides so many moments to answer the question: "how does this song and performance betray the common expectations of the greater society?" If students hesitate to answer, I might lean into them and whisper, "'Jesus died for somebody sins but not mine?' You don't think that didn't piss off your Dad in 1975? Or how about 'see a sweet young thing humping on a parking meter?'" Even the more reticent of students will react in some way to my punk teacher approach of getting in their faces.

The truth is, I also wish I could use "Pissing In A River" (we already devote two days to covering punk, if I added more songs, the class sessions will be longer than the original punk movement). "Pissing In A River," off Smith's second album, Radio Ethiopia, is a song equally dramatic as "Gloria," but lyrically more abstract than that first song off of her debut Horses. The shock moments are there, although "pissing in a river/watching it rise" may ultimately offend (do I dare say, "piss off") fewer people than "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine." The shock moments can take awhile to appear (although that is also what "Gloria" does after that religion-defying open line) as the song projects rather random ideas through the first half: tattoo fingers, wheel spokes, spoon tips. What ultimately Patti Smith (and the Patti Smith Group) did on these first couple of albums was play the slow rise of intensity so well. "Gloria" ends up from the whispered opening to all-out assault almost without recognition, the frog in boiling water metaphor. "Pissing In A River" also builds the musical intensity in the same kind of ways, the tempo rise perhaps no different than the lyrical river's rise.

However, when Smith transitions, after the fantastic guitar fill of Lenny Kaye, to the "my bowels are empty, excreting your soul" second half of the song, that is when the blood races and the desire to rebel wants to come out. However, for the rest of the song, the confidence of the "Gloria" narrator seems broken:

Should I pursue a path so twisted/

Should I crawl defeated and gifted/

Should I go the length of the river

eventually leading to the climax of the moment:

What about it? You're going to leave me/

What about it? You don't need me/

What about it? I can't live without you/

What about it? I never doubted you.

What about it? What about it? What about it?

The emptying of her emotional bowels culminates in the resounding final "I'm pissing in a river." However, it all begs the question: Is this a song of defiance or a song of resignation? Is pissing in a river an act of rebellion, of breaking the same kind of societal taboos as implying Jesus didn't die for my sins?  Or, is pissing in a river an act of abdication, realizing that no matter how much urine you got, you really aren't making the river rise? It seems to me that Smith is suggesting the later, the releasing of her bowels as the figure of speech for abdication of the defiance behind Horses and maybe the punk movement overall. After all, the recurring plea throughout the song is "come back/come back/come back/take me back." However, the river has long since flowed from the water where you are standing.

Radio Ethiopia was a bit of a mess of an album, with most people criticizing (or eventually skipping) the ten-minute title track of mostly noise. "Pissing In A River" may suffer from its surroundings. Even if recorded within a year of Horses, Radio Ethiopia already seems to reveal the limitations of punk, the inability to sustain the anger, to revel in loser-ness, to be unique. Heck, "Radio Ethiopia" suffers from the same indulgences as the filler on The Clash's Sandinista. Maybe it's not quite "Silicone on Sapphire," but it is dangerously close.

Do you need more evidence of how punk's dying days can be found by "Pissing In A River?" Well, how about in a 2022 live performance, Smith, delivering a pretty inspiring version of "Pissing In A River" changes that crucial transitional moment from "my bowels are empty, excreting your soul" to "my body is aching, excreting your soul"?  Yes, Johnny Rotten, sometimes I do feel cheated. Not sure why she felt she had to change the line, as far as I can tell the performance is a show in Dresden, Germany, filmed by some dude's shaky cell phone. Are the Germans too sensitive to emptying bowels? Something tells me not.

Perhaps this all has been a metaphor for my punk lecture overall. Today's students are now two generations removed from the era. Is my lecture more just pissing in a river that is passing me by?

The Patti Smith Group. "Pissing In A River." Radio Ethiopia. Arista, 1976. Link here.

Day 332: Planet P Project "Why Me"

Day 334: The Notting Hillbillies "Feel Like Going Home"

See complete list here.