When Patti Smith first came lurking out of the hallways of paralyzed slogans, her power rhymes and stark verbal movieolas were peacefully flawed sensations playing with the soul of some long forgotten American dangers. Her littered images grabbed the gaudy tremors of language and soaked them in a trilling human fog of mass attack hysteria. She was a dream Cleopatra who sent a shock wave of stammering energy right to the core of a shanghaied generation who were (and still might be) amoebic boobs of boredom, nuncios of the nod, Rotwangs of why, aborigines of absent-mindedness. When she hit the right word lick, she made everyone count the goose bumps as they formed street corner bunds along arms long atrophied of nervous excitations. But that was in the beginning, and in all beginnings there are endings.
When Patti is good, she’s great; when she’s bad, she’s boorish, and therein lies her contradiction, her genuflect to the grimace of art, her trothplight to the truancy of her age. When she is up on stage, and totally incensed by the feedback fantasy of words eons lost, words arranged so differently that they hit the spine in a cerise spark of racial memory, when Patti is making magic like that, she’s like the cold chill only a city can give you—a sweet rhapsody in concrete—she’s like nothing else in rockdom.
But like I said, that’s when she’s good. When she’s bad, when the demons of danger have temporarily deserted her, she becomes lost in the slick mute pitch of heat sans luminosity; she becomes mistreated, misinformed and misanthropic. And lately she’s become just another beast on the corner do wop a doin’ her way down the strassa in an oblivous cover-up of cool and confusion. Right now, she is just another malihini caught up in the officialese of apocalypse, a sigh here and a sneer there, a moribund matron in search of her own peculiar shopping bag of lost moments.
Her search has apparently ended. Wave is a soggy shopping bag full of fragmented images, failed passions and fawning acquiescence to the complacencies of success. Not even her coy, flensing feminine efficiency can save her from this cerecloth of cranium suspension and ergless excess. Things get so mournful on this LP that Patti becomes a holographic retranslation of Kris Kristofferson in A Star Is Born, the only difference being Kristofferson’s amazing ability to say the word “now”; not even Patti can copy that massive three-lettered assault.
Wave suffers not only from Patti’s ineffectiveness and often overbearing insistence on a supposedly humorous childishness (exemplified by the title song, which comes off as simply a bad Melanie imitation), but also from an absolutely pedestrian production job by Todd Rundgren. And production is important to Patti Smith—on her first LP most of the production was set on her gaunt shoulders and that record still stands the pressures of time. The production on Easter catapulted Patti into the textural realms she always strived for, and why she changed from Jimmy Iovine, who so subtly produced her voice that it projected the true sensual spirit of her subconscious innocence, to the cold calculation of Todd’s mass production is beyond understanding. Iovine understood all the layered interactions between Patti’s flights of verbal rage and her band’s growing maturity into a driving musical power; Todd didn’t seem to care and it shows.
The only tremulous flashes emerging from this shangri-la of de-sensitivity are “Citizen Ship,” which almost mystically reshapes, but all too briefly reaffirms Patti’s sneering bondage to the fortunes beckoning to us all from beyond the ever-encompassing mathematics of rhyme, rhythm and reason and, surprisingly enough, “So You Want To Be A Rock ’n’ Roll Star,” which comes on as a jitterbug heart safari to the rigors, vigors and failures lounging around the monasteries of pure rock ’n’ roll philosophy. And that’s it. The rest of Wave is like a stagnant lagoon in search of a creature to justify its existence. Patti Smith has simply relegated herself to playing the somewhat foppish leading man to the she-opera that is rock ’n’ roll. She has left herself impeachable as the minister of defense with Wave and her convoy of language is surrounded by the smokies of arrogance, ego and sediment.
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