round 2
(6) Patti Smith, “Gloria”
smashed
(3) Smashing Pumpkins, “Landslide”
211-103
and will play on in the sweet 16
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on 3/16/22.
patrick masterson: Let’s Talk About the smashing pumpkins’ “Landslide”: A Journey to the End of Hate
A landslide is a mass movement of soil, rocks or other debris down a slope or across the surface of the earth; a mudslide is distinct, defined as the large-scale movement of fine particles that are partly liquefied down or along a slope.
It’s late 1973. On one side of the country living in and around New York City and Long Island, my parents don’t yet know each other.
In the middle of the country, Mick Fleetwood is calling time on the Mystery to Me tour following a concert at Lincoln’s Pershing Auditorium: Fleetwood Mac are breaking up. Emotionally wrecked by the recent revelation that his wife Jenny Boyd was cheating on him with guitarist Bob Weston, Mick says in a meeting after the show that he can’t continue playing in the same band as Bob. Road manager John Courage fires Weston and sends him on the first plane back to the UK in an effort to save the tour, but it’s a wasted effort. The rest of the band packs up and heads home shortly thereafter.
And somewhere out west in Aspen, Stevie Nicks is at a crossroads. She’s 27 years old and alone at a house overlooking the picturesque Rockies while boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham is out touring for Don Everly. Her record with Buckingham is tanking and they’re about to be dropped by Polydor. After trying to make it in Los Angeles, she’s wondering what happens next: Do we fight to stay in this business? Do we fight to stay in this business together? Do I just call time on L.A. and find a real career in something else back home in San Francisco? Mirror in the sky, changing ocean tides and seasons: The questions are sliding down, piling up; the answers remain out of reach, buried in the snow. There’s a weight with no relief and she’s no kid anymore.
The taxonomy of landslides began in 1978 and was being refined as late as 2014 into what is known as Hungr-Leroueil-Picarelli classification, which distinguishes slides by three elements: type of movement, rock and soil.
It’s late 1993. On one side of the Atlantic, I’m in South Carolina and just starting the fourth grade. I can do extremely basic songs on a beige Yamaha recorder and I’m taking once-a-week piano lessons, but it goes without saying that I am, broadly speaking, a terrible musician. I like Hendrix, Zeppelin and Floyd but have no substantive opinions about music. The only subcultures I’m familiar with involve cars and airplanes.
On the other, Billy Corgan is 26 and on the ascent. After six years of dating, he’d quietly married girlfriend Chris Fabian over the summer. And after a promising debut, the sophomore Smashing Pumpkins album he put together practically alone with producer Butch Vig down in Georgia that spring while he grew increasingly suicidal and the rest of his band processed breakups and drug addiction is now drawing unanimous praise; for all the physical and psychological toil, months of recording and going $250,000 over budget, Virgin has a hit and Siamese Dream is gaining a legion of followers among the grunge faithful. The man and the band have found their footing, some stability, and they’ve just landed in the UK for 11 shows that will start with a brief session at the BBC and finish at Brixton Academy, both in London, to cap off a monthlong European tour. On the recording docket for their first day in England are two Siamese Dream songs, “Disarm” and “Quiet,” plus two covers: Depeche Mode’s “Never Let Me Down” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide.”
The Heart Mountain slide in Wyoming is the largest known landslide above sea level and occurred 48 million years ago, affecting an area of roughly 2,000 cubic kilometers.
It’s the summer of 1996. My cousin Kelley, indisputably the coolest person I know, is down from Long Island visiting for a few days with my uncle and grandfather, and she’s let me borrow her cassette player for a while. On it are songs by a Chicago band called The Smashing Pumpkins, who I have heard in passing on our local alt-rock station but never registered the presence of otherwise. I continually rewind three songs in particular: “Tonight, Tonight,” full of lush orchestral accompaniment and a steadily ascending sense of drama; “Eye,” an addictive bit of synth-rock minimalism that she’s clearly taped off the radio; and “Zero,” which has maybe the coolest guitar riff I’ve ever heard. It occurs to me that I never hear this band on VH1. I wonder what else gets played on MTV that I don’t know about because our cable company is too conservative to provide it. For the first time in my life, I register that there’s a music culture I don’t know anything about but might actually like.
It takes a return visit by Kelley to hear the same cassette a year later and an interregnum where I can’t stop playing Third Eye Blind’s debut, but by early 1999, things are pretty much settled: If anyone asks, The Smashing Pumpkins are my favorite band. I request the remaining albums I don’t yet have for Christmas. I get excited for Machina. I consider the possibility of seeing them live. I’m on messageboards and downloading what I can find from Napster. I’m sliding into serious fandom as the millennium turns over. And I’m crestfallen when Billy Corgan announces the breakup of the band on my 15th birthday and I force a chapter in my life to close.
The largest known landslide is the submarine Agulhas slide near South Africa, occurring approximately 2.6 million years ago and affecting some 20,000 cubic kilometers.
For the number of times it’s come up over the years, I’ve never grown tired of playing devil’s advocate to the critical consensus (Siamese Dream) or popular vote (Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness) that the best album by The Smashing Pumpkins—still my favorite band as I sit here at home, in Chicago of all places, writing this out in the winter of 2022—is (well, actually) wedged between those two. Ostensibly just a loose collection of b-sides and rarities, songs the band didn’t or couldn’t find a home for, Pisces Iscariot was still one of 1994’s best records. There was unrelenting rock ("Frail and Bedazzled," "Hello Kitty Kat"), there were quieter tracks ("Soothe," "Obscured"), there was even a pleasant James Iha number (“Blew Away”); in sum, despite being a bunch of castaways, it had everything you could hope for from a Pumpkins LP ahead of the shark-jumping double album that would instigate the capitalized-article “The” and their ensuing imperial phase, where they’d bleed in their own light once and for all.
An important component to maintaining that momentum in the breather between formal full-lengths, Corgan’s solo cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” recorded live at the BBC was released as a Pisces single in late 1994 and peaked at #30 on the Billboard charts that December. In the land before “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” “Landslide” was ubiquitous on modern rock radio; anecdotally speaking, it stayed that way in certain parts of the country for years after, too, inescapable long after its relevance as a stopgap single. As a result, it’s no exaggeration to say that, “Zero” notwithstanding, “Landslide” is the most important Smashing Pumpkins song to me — not because I love it, but because I really, really don’t.
“I don’t love it” is too tepid for how I feel about the Pumpkins’ “Landslide” cover, actually. Let’s try again: I hate this song. It’s bad in so many ways, and it makes an impressive case both for voting against this essay and for never listening to The Smashing Pumpkins again. But it’s also crucial because it taught me how to think about art more critically, how to consider that even your favorites could be flawed. It taught me to kill my idols. It paved the way for learning there are no heroes. And it prepared me well not just for second-guessing my own instincts, but also for grappling (and coping) with a modern world plagued by everything from environmental disasters to institutional rot to misleading overinformation. It showed, ultimately, how nothing is beyond reproach. Everything good must come qualified. Maybe it’s why I became a professional fact-checker and copy editor.
So, okay: Those are some big, bleak leaps! Let’s take a step back, then, and first address what’s good about this song. Almost half a century ago, Stevie Nicks peered out a Colorado window and came up with a wonderful metaphor. It’s a song about being in flux, the uncertain liminal state between wherever there was and wherever here will be, a place every person knows to some degree. Its lyrics don’t read as forced, Buckingham’s guitar on the original an understated complement allowing Stevie to use the full range of her voice to get her message across. It’s sweet without being sickly sentimental, and numerous covers in its wake only drive home that the jury has long been in, the evidence incontrovertible: There is no better version of “Landslide” than the original.
There is also no worse version than what Billy Corgan offers up on Pisces Iscariot (aside from, I guess I should also qualify this, every other time he’s played it). Let’s leave aside that even Fleetwood Mac didn’t think it was worth making a single. It’s not just that it’s a solo acoustic performance, though that doesn’t help the cause; like cars and jets, I believe rock music is best at high volume (say what you will, but at least “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” has some rich licks scrawled across the underlying histrionics). Still, I’ve never shied away from enjoying a number on the quiet side. Unfortunately, unlike Nicks, who can handle the weight of her own song, Billy evidently struggles and everyone ends up coming off all the worse for it. One of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies says to look closely at the most embarrassing detail and amplify it; “Landslide” offers us the unique thrill of hearing Billy look closely and amplify every embarrassing detail.
He admits in the Pisces liner notes that he didn’t even know how to play this song correctly before Jimmy Flemion of The Frogs corrected him. It’s unclear from the booklet if Billy had figured it out by the time of the BBC recording, but a side-by-side listen with the original sure seems to suggest he didn’t. It’s a lax, spartan interpretation.
Even that could be forgiven, however, were it not for Corgan’s delivery. Can you hear that there, on the breeze? Well, of course you can: The wince you just made was you recalling Billy Corgan’s voice at its most irritating. I once heard his singing described as a drowning rat, which I long found funny but got a little defensive about because there are plenty of instances where that isn’t the case, where his delivery elides his worst characteristics—“Soma,” say, or “Perfect,” which really is, or “French Movie Theme.” Not here. God, just listening back to this again is painful. He repeatedly struggles, then abandons the high notes. In some places he’s rushing his delivery for no reason, others he’s on beat but unwilling (or, more likely, unable) to sustain notes and, thus, the performance. But what might be the real coup de grâce for anyone looking to give this cover (and band) a chance is the way he draws out the “I’m” in “I’m getting older, too”—real mercury-down-the-ear-canal type stuff. I get angry just thinking about it.
Even before they rebooted as a lamentable simulacrum of their first run, The Smashing Pumpkins had a ton of covers both recorded and live. Most of them are inoffensively middling; the band was never better than when they played their own material. But “Landslide” is a special case of musical taxidermy, eviscerating the original’s real-time adult maturation and stuffing it instead with stunted teen angst too ridiculous to acknowledge.
It has, of course, featured regularly in setlists since 2008. Fans love the cover. So does Stevie Nicks.
There is no central database for recording landslides, though some for specific countries or regions (e.g., UNESCO, Norway, the U.S.) do exist.
It’s a fine line. Before The Smashing Pumpkins, it never occurred to me to love music — nor to hate it. I was more naturally ambivalent, content to receive inherited wisdom and nod my head or switch stations, skip to a CD’s next track and move on. But as the years have piled up—I’m 36 right now, and as a little memento mori for you, Billy Corgan turns 55 this year, Stevie Nicks 74—my tolerance for things I don’t like has also worn down. I won’t invest time in fantasy novels or bad TV just because they’re available. I’ve given up on liking fish. And I’m bold enough now to admit I’m never playing “Landslide” again after this essay if I can help it. But I couldn’t have known how much I’d hate it without knowing how much I’d love the band first.
Somewhere right now, a 36-year-old is digging through old CDs, clicking around aimlessly on Spotify, landing on Pisces Iscariot. It all comes rushing back—the disc may be scratched or the laptop beat up, but the people, the places, the adolescent struggle, the scope of their life and everything that’s changed since remains crystalline. Sure, why not? For old time’s sake, on it goes. Somewhere else, a teen is taking a break from TikTok to look through their parents’ music collection and stumbles upon a record with this blurry green face by someone called … Smashing Pumpkins? Pisces Iscariot? Tough to say and strange either way, but maybe there’s something to it. Let’s see, they say, checking their phone to see if it’s also available for streaming. Where one chapter closes, another opens. I know it’s happening. That’s the reflection in the snow-covered hills.
It’s not just about climbing the mountain, though; it’s about having the sense to turn around and take stock of the terrain, gain perspective, heighten awareness, see there are many paths forward. Some people have that. Those who don’t mostly avoid committing themselves to tape for posterity to prove as much. Mostly.
Patrick Masterson lives and works in Chicago, the home of The Smashing Pumpkins, but he promises it’s just an accident of history. He can be found @pmmmasterson.
ALPHABET OF DESIRE: ASHLEY NAFTULE ON PATTI SMITH’S “GLORIA”
G.
A believer is a horse in search of a rider. In vodou a worshiper who is possessed by a Loa spirit is sometimes called a mount. To be possessed is to be ridden, the human acting as a vehicle for the divine. When the avant-garde director Maya Deren documented vodou rituals and dances in Haiti, she called her 1954 film Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. Deren had gone to Haiti to make a recording of ritual dances as an observer, but was so moved by the vodoun tradition that she became an initiate. She left the U.S. as a woman and returned as a horse.
The relationship between a spirit and its rider is the inverse of how humans deal with horses. Normally, we keep our mounts calm and form a rapport with them. We earn their trust so they’ll be willing to carry our weight. It’s different with spirits: you have to make them feel at ease so they’ll take you for a ride. You ply them with offerings of their favorite liquors and treats, maybe bribe them with a hand-rolled cigar or shiny bauble. You decorate your space with colors they like and wear the kinds of clothes they prefer, taking on their mannerisms for your own, hollowing out a space in your skull for them to make themselves at home. You say their name and sing their songs until you’re hoarse, following Aleister Crowley’s credo of “Invoke often! Inflame thyself with prayer!” You live and breathe as them until one day the spirit moves you and you are them. For a time. Until one of you throws the other off.
L.
Before “Gloria,” before Horses, before Mapplethorpe, before fame, before critical acclaim, before fucking Blue Oyster Cultists and playwrights and guitarists named after French Symbolist poets, before tours in Europe, before “Because the Night,” before THAT song that shall remain unnamed, before playing chicken with God, before Fred “Sonic” Smith, before retirement, before motherhood, before Law & Order: SVU guest appearances, before Just Kids, Patti Smith was a poet. She came to New York with dreams of making it as a decadent, renowned artist. Her heroes ran the spectrum of brows from high to low: Rimbaud, Bob Dylan, William Burroughs, Maria Callas, Brian Jones. The Beats, garage rock, and William Blake all vied for Patti’s affections but she wouldn’t commit to a single muse.
There were others who came to NYC with similar outlaw literary dreams: Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell. The three of them quickly realized that the glamourous spirit that once rode the Beats had moved on to popular music. People still fucked and feted writers but not nearly as much as they do rock stars, and besides— the musicians get better drugs and paydays. Had James Murphy written “Losing My Edge” in the early 1970’s he’d no doubt be warbling “I hear that you and your friends have sold your typewriters and bought guitars.” The spirit of rebellion didn’t want ink anymore; it hungered for electricity.
For Patti, the gateway to music was through poetry. It was through her St. Marks Poetry Project readings that she became initiated into the downtown art scene, where she first started working with her musical partner Lenny Kaye, and where she first blew that legendary raspberry at the Almighty: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.”
“Oath,” the poem from which the opening line of Patti Smith’s “Gloria” is taken from, was originally a St. Marks solo piece. As recounted in Ray Padgett’s Cover Me: The Stories Behind the Greatest Cover Songs of All Time, Patti’s performances of “Oath” took on many different forms before it got merged into “Gloria.” The daughter of a Catholic mother and a father who “used to blasphemy and swear against God,” “Oath” is a hard dismount of her past, kicking off Jesus with a dismissive “I am giving you the good-bye/Firing you tonight.” With Lenny Kaye accompanying her on guitar at her readings, Patti heard her future career taking shape one power chord at a time.
O.
“Gloria” is not a cover in the conventional sense. It is a bricolage, a hybrid of the original Them song and Patti’s poetry. “Gloria” is not a cover, it is a hijacking. It changes the original so profoundly that it usurps it, renders it anemic in comparison. Through some kind of artistic time paradox the very existence of Patti Smith’s “Gloria’ has turned the original song into a cover of its own cover. The Them song feels naked without the (many) alterations Smith added to Van Morrison’s song: the “humping on the parking meter,” the stadium full of screaming fans, the tower bell chiming tick-tock tick-tock, “oh my god it’s midnight,” the piano notes that are perfectly timed to mimic knocking as she sings “she’s knocking on my door.” The one thing Van Morrison’s original version has going for it is Morrison’s feral vocals, all full of lusty swagger—the sound of a man who’s so horny it causes him searing pain.
Patti has done these kinds of rewrite covers before: her debut single was a heavily Pattified take on “Hey Joe,” and she would also throw in some choice ad libs when doing live performances of The Who’s “My Generation.” On “Land,” the song on Horses whose ecstatic visions of waves rolling in like Arabian stallions gives her first album its name, Patti breaks up her soliloquies about switchblades and sperm coffins to do a snippet of Wilson Pickett’s “Land of 1000 Dances.” Like so many great folk art traditions, Patti wasn’t afraid to file the serial numbers off of older work and repurpose it for her own ends.
Patti wasn’t the only rock singer/poet who took liberties with “Gloria.” Jim Morrison would do his own wildman poet take on the Them classic during Doors concerts, asking the object of his affections how old she was and what school she went to. Eventually the clumsy seduction between Jim and Gloria builds to the point that she sneaks him into her room while her parents are out and Morrison, in full blustering sex god mode, intones “Now why don’t you wrap your lips around my cock, baby” (the rest of the Doors chiming in with hoots and “suck it” ike the dorkiest wingmen imaginable transforms the line from sleazy to hysterical). Morrison narrates the positioning of Gloria’s lithe limbs around his body like he’s doing play-by-play commentary for a game of Twister. None of his additions to the “Gloria” canon seem essential or even necessary—all the luridness he makes explicit in his version is plainly evident in Van Morrison’s voracious, leering vocals.
Patti’s contributions are far more unexpected and poetic. Beginning the song with a soft piano intro, she sings her famous brush-off to the Lord before the rest of the band joins in. Patti doesn’t change the gender of the narrator or Gloria, singing the song as a woman in a man’s body—which gives the song its off-kilter energy, like an 80’s body-swap film where a woman turns into Van Morrison and immediately goes into horny cartoon wolf mode. The song sways and lurches in its tempo as it struggles to find a shape that will contain it, much in the way that Patti as a singer seems to be teasing out the possibilities of being a male character—taking both the song itself and masculinity out for a bumpy joyride.
“I can’t write about a man, because I’m under his thumb, but a woman I can be male with. I can use her as my muse,” Smith said in Please Kill Me. She would later tell The Observer that she “enjoyed doing transgender songs. That’s something I learnt from Joan Baez, who often sang songs that had a male point of view. No, my work does not reflect my sexual preferences, it reflects the fact that I feel total freedom as an artist.”
The Gloria in the two Morrison versions of the song is a sexual conquest, an object of desire to own and tell the world about (and in Jim Morrison’s case, someone to patronize: “why did you show me your thing, babe”). Patti’s Gloria is more complicated. The singer almost seems afraid of her, intimidated by how wild Gloria is—the sweet young thing enters the song’s orbit humping on parking meters, as uninhibited as Darling Nikki under a magazine. Listen to the strain on Patti’s voice when she sings about “her pretty red dress,” the tremulous gasp of someone who wants something so badly and is afraid they’re going to get it. Smith’s Gloria is a figure of lust and awe, a challenge, a free spirit looking for a body to call home.
When we finally get to the chorus, the guitars and drums gallop as they rush headlong into Smith’s invocation of her lover, inflaming herself with the letters of her name. You can hear the roles shifting as she gnaws and spits out each hickie-mangled letter: she goes from prey to hunter, from deer-in-the-headlights to speeding Cadillac, from horse to rider. Smith’s “G-L-O-R-I-A” is her victory lap, celebrating her freedom from God, from the rules and regulations of Man, from gender itself.
For Van Morrison and Jim Morrison, the song is about a man finding himself by fucking a woman. For Patti Smith, “Gloria” is about a woman finding herself by being a man fucking a woman,
R.
God, sex, and the liberatory power of rock & roll are the animating spirits behind “Gloria.” You can hear Patti wrestling with this trinity in “Piss Factory,” the B-side to her debut single. The Patti in "Piss Factory" is a "speedo motorcycle,” a fast worker whose productivity rate is too high for the pipe factory that’s paying her “screwed up the ass” wages. Browbeaten by her floor boss and by a “real Catholic” coworker who threatens to beat her in the bathroom if she keeps throwing off their quota, Patti daydreams about bringing a radio to work so she can listen to James Brown scream and sigh instead of the mechanized chorus grinding around her. She steals glances at the nuns living in a convent near the factory. “They look pretty damn free down there,” she croons. “Not having to worry about the dogma of labor.” It’s like Dylan says: You gotta serve somebody. At least you don’t get your hands burnt up in God’s factory.
Patti sees a final escape hatch in the form of gender. “I would rather smell the way boys smell,” she snarls as the music thrashes behind her like factory equipment struggling to meet a rush order. She rhapsodizes about the “forbidden acrid smell” of “roses and ammonia” that rise from their drooping dicks, lamenting that all she can smell is the “pink clammy lady” odor of the women laboring around her—hardened, dead-end women with “no teeth or gum or cranium.” She wants the freedom the bad boys sitting in the back of class have—not by enjoying it vicariously through fucking them or hanging on their arms but by taking their cockiness, their who-gives-a-shit swagger, for herself.
“Gloria” is this Promethean moment for Patti, where she steals the fire from the male artistic gods she venerates and runs with it. It’s the moment she was building up to since she arrived in New York. Reading accounts of her time in the NYC scene, it’s easy to see why people accused her of being a careerist: laser-focused on emulating her heroes, hob-nobbing with Warhol at Max’s Kansas City, getting in good with all the local literary luminaries, always “on” as though she were rehearsing for the role of Patti Smith: Punk Poetess before it existed. But from a ritualist’s eye, Patti’s early years take on a different light.
Patti did what she had to do to summon the same spirits that rode Rimbaud and Brian Jones. She left her family, cut ties with her past, and started anew. She inflamed herself with the names of her heroes and invoked poetry and rock & roll as often as she could, until she could hollow herself out enough to coax the same dark angel that spread its wings over the Beats and Lautreamont and Gene Vincent to move into her. And thus the trap was sprung: she grabbed that spirit and rode it for dear life. “Gloria” and the rest of Horses is Patti trying to answer the question “am I the horse or the rider?”
The sound on Horses is unstable and manic, the band trying to keep pace with her hipster glossolalia. Compare it to the music of her fellow poet-turned-rocker Tom Verlaine, whose own masterpiece/debut Marquee Moon takes a more Apollonian approach to her Dionysian rock & verse. Marquee Moon is a twilight rollercoaster, Verlaine and Richard Lloyd’s twin guitars ascending in pristine loops and curves, sliding down through a landscape of neon signs and piss-stained floors and barroom napkin poetry. Television are Apollonian detectives—stiff, beautiful, regulated—forever running in circles after a mystery they’ll never solve. Television’s music is as clean and dry as an unlit match. Every note on Horses is a blackened match-head.
I.
If we could resend the Voyager probe with a new golden record, it only needs two brief pieces of music to represent the whole of rock music: a vocal loop of Iggy Pop screaming “LOOOORD” at the beginning of “TV Eye” and a sample of Patti gnawing on the “I” in “Gloria” like it’s the bar on a jail cell door she’s trying to chew her way out of. Pure lust and rage, defiance and triumph, fuck-you and fuck-me all co-mingled in the briefest of exhortations from two of our greatest singers. The aliens don’t need anything else.
A.
“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, why not mine?” Patti Smith retired in 1979, playing a final concert in Florence. They normally saved “Gloria” as their closing number, but on this last concert before Smith walked away to devote herself to starting a family she made it the opening number. She also changed the opening lyric, offering up a reconciliation of sorts with the Christ she fired back at St. Mark’s.
Smith’s relationship with her fired God had changed over the intervening years. She used to do a bit during live performances of “Ain’t It Strange” where she would challenge God by taunting “C’mon, God, make a move” and start spinning onstage. During a show in Tampa in 1977, her game of chicken with God finally sent her sailing over a cliff—Smith tripped over a speaker while dancing and fell 15 feet into a cement orchestra pit. A freak accident or divine intervention, it had the effect of sidelining Patti and her band right as the punk scene they helped foment in New York went global.
Smith’s late 70’s embrace of faith and family seems baffling at first. So much of her artistic life was a refutation of both traditional religion and domesticity. Her fear of being trapped in another piss factory with real Catholic shithead coworkers fueled her drive. For someone who seemed to devote every waking hour to becoming a rock star, who devoted an entire verse in “Gloria” to the fantasy of rocking a stadium where all the girls are there to scream her name, giving that all up is confounding.
But try to imagine being laid up for a year, recuperating from a fall that nearly crippled you. You think of all your heroes, and how so many of them died young: Jones, Hendrix, Joplin, Rimbaud. The spirit rode them hard and stabled them under six feet of dirt. That’s the trade-off if you stay a horse in the art world for too long: you could end up dying face down in a pool or waste away delirious & one-legged in a hospital in Marseilles.
Faced with the prospect of going from “Piss Factory” to the glue factory, surrounded by scene peers like the Dead Boys who were busy living up to their names, a second act staged around faith and family must have looked like a pretty safe bet. If having a brief Godly face turn was good enough for Bob Dylan, who could blame Patti for wanting to steal one more move from his playbook? And so Patti completed her personal concert tour of Damascus, going from Saul of Tarsus to Saint Paul in just four albums.
P-A-T-T-I
The spirits move in and out of the world, taking their laps on borrowed legs when the right person comes along. Some of their horses die, some are forgotten, and a few are as eternal as Muybridge’s race horse—their grace and power preserved in snapshots by their works on this Earth. Horses, Radio Ethiopia, Easter, and Wave endure because they sound like nothing else. They are messy and beautiful and sometimes they over-reach and fall into orchestra pits. But they all come a distant second before “Gloria,” one of the greatest acts of homage and vandalism ever recorded.
Dave Barry once joked that "if you drop a guitar down a flight of stairs, it'll play "Gloria" on its way to the bottom." At the time he made that joke he was referring to the Them song. Drop a guitar down a flight of stairs today and you’ll hear a different voice echoing out of that hollow body. And her name is, and her name is, and her name is—
Ashley Naftule is a resident playwright and the Associate Artistic Director at Space55 theatre in downtown Phoenix. They’ve written and produced five full-length plays: Ear, The First Annual Bookburners Convention, The Canterbury Tarot, Radio Free Europa, and The Hidden Sea. Their next play, Peppermint Beehive, is set to premiere this summer. As a freelance journalist, their work has been published in The AV Club, Pitchfork, Daily Bandcamp, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Vice, Fanbyte, The Outline, Longreads, Phoenix New Times, Echo Magazine, The Arizona Republic, and The Cleveland Review of Books. Their short fiction has been published in Coffin Bell Journal, AEther/Ichor, The Molotov Cocktail, Cabinet of Heed, Grasslimb, Dark City Mystery Magazine, Hypnopomp, Write Ahead/The Future Looms, and Planet Scumm . Their micropoetry chapbooks Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth and Epoch & Olivetti Sing All The Hits are available (respectively) via Rinky Dinky Press and Ghost City Press. Despite the uncanny resemblance, Ashley bears no relation to country singer Vince Gill nor is in any way an evil Vince Gill doppelganger that escaped from The Black Lodge.