The first Patti Smith "group" comprised Patti reciting, with Lenny Kaye on guitar and Richard Sohl on piano. “Birdland” is the one track on their first album using this drumless configuration, plus Ivan Kral’s bass. It is a slow two-chord vamp setting Patti’s semi-improvised, half-sung recitation describing Wilhelm Reich’s son after his father’s funeral, imagining his father turned into an alien (“very different tonight”) coming to take his son away in a spaceship. The implicit promise of the apparition is that Dr. Reich would take Peter away and sidestep the problem of death forever for both of them. As the vision solidifies in Peter Reich’s mind, he is overcome with joy, but then the ship vanishes. He is as alone as he had always been but with a new burning question before him: Can a mind even contemplate a level of grief so intense that one would gladly change species altogether on the outside chance that the metamorphosis might allow you the repose necessary to think it without feeling it? Or could accepting the entire package turn you into a prophet? This song is why I trust everything Patti says about Rimbaud, even when I disagree with it.
Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.
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