Day After Day #300: Gloria

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Gloria (1975)

The song "Gloria" had been around for over a decade before Patti Smith got to it. Van Morrison wrote it in 1964 for his garage rock band Them, and it was covered by huge artists including the Doors, the Grateful Dead, David Bowie and Jimi Hendrix. But none of them could touch the incendiary take Smith had on the song in 1975.

Patti Smith was making outsider art right from the start. She moved to Paris in her early 20s with her sister, busking and doing performance art. She returned to Manhattan and lived at the Hotel Chelsea with artist Robert Mapplethorpe; she acted in plays, painted and wrote. In 1971, she held her first public poetry performance, backed by Lenny Kaye on guitar. 

Smith contributed lyrics to several Blue Oyster Cult songs and was briefly considered for the band's lead singer; she dated BOC keyboardist Allen Lanier. She was also a rock journalist, contributing pieces for Rolling Stone and Creem. 

She teamed up with Kaye in 1973 to form the Patti Smith Group, adding Richard Sohl on piano, Ivan Kral on guitar/bass and Jay Dee Daugherty on drums. The band recorded a cover of "Hey Joe" that included a spoken word piece about fugitive heiress Patty Hearst, while the B-side, "Piss Factory," was about working on a factory assembly line before she moved to New York.

In March 1975, the band started playing a two-month weekend residency at CBGB with the band Television. Clive Davis saw them and signed the group to a deal with Arista Records. The band went into the studio to record their debut album, Horses, with producer John Cale. Combining punk rock and spoken word, the album was immediately unique, starting with the opening song, "Gloria," which was merged with lyrics from Smith's poem "Oath." The first line probably freaked out a lot of people at the time, but it's an amazing way to start a song.

"Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine/Melting in a pot of thieves, wild card up my sleeve/Thick, heart of stone, my sins, my own/They belong to me, me/People said, 'Beware,' but I don't care/Their words are just rules and regulations to me, me."

Raised as a Jehovah's Witness, Smith took a rebellious position in the song, although she later backed off it a bit. Smith also shocked some by singing about hooking up with another woman. In 1975, that didn't happen very often.

"I walk in a room, you know I look so proud/I move in this here atmosphere where anything's allowed/Then I go to this here party and I just get bored/Until I look out the window, see a sweet young thing/Humping on a parking meter, leaning on the parking meter/Oh, she looks so good, oh, she looks so fine/And I've got this crazy feeling that I'm going to, ah-ah, make her mine."

The intro of the song is quiet but builds up into a frenzy as Smith continues.

"Then I hear this knocking on my door/Hear this knocking on my door/And I look up to the big tower clock and say, 'Oh my God, it's midnight'/And my baby is walking through the door, laying on my couch/She whispers to me and I take the big plunge/And oh, she was so good, oh/And oh, she was so fine/And I'm going to tell the world that I just, ah-ah, made her mine/And I said darling, tell me your name, she told me her name/She whispered to me, she told me her name/And her name is, and her name is/And her name is, and her name is/G-L-O-R-I-A (Gloria)."

Smith wasn't gay, but said she wrote songs "beyond gender," noting that Joan Baez would sometimes write songs from a male point of view.

"I was at the stadium/There were 20,000 girls/Called their names out to me/Marie, Ruth, but to tell you the truth/I didn't hear them, I didn't see/I let my eyes rise to the big tower clock/And I heard those bells chiming in my heart going/Ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong/Ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong/Calling the time when you came to my room/And you whispered to me, and we took the big plunge/And oh, you were so good, oh/Oh, you were so fine/And I've got to tell the world that I made ya mine, made ya mine."

Smith didn't sound like any other female artist at the time, singing about sex and religion in a combustible explosion of lust and bravado. The Mapplethorpe-shot album cover of Horses was also iconic, with an androgynous photo of Smith with a suit jacket over her shoulder and wearing an untied necktie. 

The album reached the top 50 of the Billboard 200 but more importantly, inspired many female punk artists; the Slits formed the day after singer Ari Up saw Smith in concert. The Patti Smith Group released three more albums in the 1970s, scoring a hit with "Because the Night," which was co-written with Bruce Springsteen. Smith married Fred "Sonic" Smith of the MC5 and had two children. She returned to making music in 1988 with the album Dream of Life, which had a rock radio hit with "People Have the Power." Smith periodically released music and toured, and also collaborated with R.E.M. on the 1996 song "E-Bow the Letter." Her last album was 2012's Banga.