Patti Smith's Horses by Philip Shaw

Author:Philip Shaw [Shaw, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Music, Instruction & Study, Theory, History & Criticism, Genres & Styles, Punk
ISBN: 9781441161567
Google: YHAN_HQYB0gC
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 2008-03-14T11:00:00+00:00

Hey Joe (Version)/Piss Factory

For the Patti Smith trio, working under the guidance of Jane Friedman, the spring and summer of 1974 were spent busily rehearsing. By early June, they were ready to make their first record. Using money donated by Robert Mapplethorpe, Smith, Kaye, and Sohl taped two tracks at Electric Lady Studios, “Hey Joe (Version)” and “Piss Factory.” Released as a seven-inch single a couple of months later on their own Mer label (Mer #601), “Hey Joe (Version)/Piss Factory” was available by mail order and through a handful of record and bookstores, such as Village Oldies, where Kaye had worked, and the Gotham Book Mart, where Smith had been an employee. Since described by Victor Bockris as “perhaps the most important record she ever made” (1998), the thousand or so signed copies of the original pressing, which very quickly sold out, are now expensive collector’s items. Recorded in mono, in the relative confines of studio B, the record’s flip side, “Piss Factory,” is perhaps the best known track. According to Smith, the song was recorded and mixed in just under an hour: “I had my poem, Richard and Lenny did this thing, and I read over it. That was it. We did it twice and picked the best one” (Fricke, 2004).

As noted in chapter 2, the song documents Smith’s harrowing experience as an assembly-line worker in Pitman, New Jersey. Propelled by Sohl’s 5/4 rhythmic bedrock, augmented by Kaye’s jazz and blues flourishes, “Piss Factory” is unstintingly bleak in its portrayal of factory politics, how workforces succumb to petty jealousies and aggressive behavior as a result of the alienating effects of capitalist production. Lacking melody, the song is largely declaimed by Smith, using irregular stress patterns over variable phrase lengths. In the absence of discernable verses, and with no chorus, the relation between Sohl’s keyboard frills and Smith’s vocal emphases is wholly contingent. As such, “Piss Factory” is perhaps best described as a musically enhanced poem, rather than as a fully formed song. There are, nevertheless, some formal features that invite attention. Firstly, Smith uses repetition throughout the piece, both as a mode of rhythmic and semantic emphasis. Thus, “too lame to understand too goddam grateful to get this job,” the repetitive structure, enhanced by the omission of the connective “and,” has the effect of delaying and thus drawing attention to the conclusive punch of “to know they’re getting screwed up the ass.” A few lines later, “had to earn my dough had to earn my dough,” conveys the sense in which the young woman’s dedication to the work ethic is conditioned by the unpunctuated, i.e. unreflective, flow of the assembly line. This impulse is mirrored however, by her overbearingly maternal coworker’s put down: “you ain’t goin’ nowhere you ain’t goin nowhere”; in this instance, the repetition of the negative is used as a curb on the young woman’s self-assertion. As a result of this mirroring, Smith shows how the identity of both sides, the Protestant “moral school girl hard-working

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