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.

Day After Day #133: It's Too Late

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

It's Too Late (1980)

There are plenty of musicians who also write poetry: Dylan, Jim Morrison, Nick Cave, Tupac Shakur, John Lennon, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush, Gord Downie, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, Patti Smith and Marc Bolan are examples. Hell, even Billy Corgan published a poetry collection. 

There aren't as many who went from poetry into music. Jim Carroll was a well-known poet and author in 1978 when he decided to start a band, inspired by his former roommate Patti Smith. He was traveling with Smith and her band when one night in San Diego, the opening band didn't show up; Carroll ended up performing his poetry while backed by Smith's band.

Carroll then teamed up with a San Francisco new wave act called Amsterdam. After changing their name to the Jim Carroll Band, they were able to score a record deal with Atlantic Records with some help from Keith Richards. They recorded their debut album Catholic Boy in the summer of '79 and it was released in early January 1980. 

Carroll wasn't much of a singer, but since when has that mattered in rock and roll? He was a strong performer and was able to bring his words to life effectively while his band provided a lean, twin-guitar-driven garage sound that fit right in with the CBGB scene at the time. Echoes of Lou Reed, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, solo Iggy Pop as Carroll sang about drugs and death and NYC street life. 

"People Who Died" became an instant hit, written about people Carroll knew growing up who died tragically. It has since been covered by everybody from John Cale to Drive-By Truckers to Gwar. It's a great song, but a few years after the album came out, I would hear "It's Too Late" played every so often on Boston's WBCN and it just resonated. It's dark and nihilistic, has a killer riff and honestly, it's just a  perfect punk song.

"It's too late/To fall in love with Sharon Tate/But it's too soon/To ask me for the words I want carved on my tomb/I think it's time/That you all start to think about gettin' by/Without that need to go out and find somebody to love."

Growing up in NYC in the late '60s, Carroll was a high school basketball star who developed a heroin addiction. He ended paying for his drugs by becoming a prostitute, and later published The Basketball Diaries, an edited collection of his high school diaries. So he knows what he's singing about here.

"It's too late/There's no one left that I even wanna imitate/You see, you just don't know/I'm here to give you my heart, and you want some fashion show/But it ain't no contribution/To rely on the institution/To validate your chosen art/And to sanction your boredom and let you play out your part."

I remember hearing this song for the first time and being shocked it was even on the radio. The band (with a young, shirtless Robert Downey Jr. on drums) played "It's Too Late" in the movie Tuff Turf (see below).

"It's too late/You know, when they got nothin' to give/They only part their legs for what's negative/They're so decadent/Until their daddy's money from home's all spent/So I think it's time, 'cause it's too easy to rely/On worshipping devils and strangers in bed/Though they do get good drugs, and they do give good head."

Catholic Boy was well reviewed and ended up hitting #73 on the Billboard 200. "People Who Died" made it to #103 on the Bubbling Under Hot 100 chart and has been used in many movies and TV shows, including E.T., the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead and Mr. Robot. The Jim Carroll Band made two more albums in the early '80s; Carroll released a spoken word album in '91 and another album of music under his own name in 1998. The Basketball Diaries was made into a movie in 1995 starring Leo DiCaprio as Carroll; it got mixed reviews but the soundtrack featured Carroll backed by Pearl Jam performing the song "Catholic Boy." 

Carroll died of a heart attack in 2009 at the age of 60. He may have only been a part-time musician, but he left an indelible mark. You can definitely hear his influence on bands like The Hold Steady. 

I'm honestly surprised nobody else has covered "It's Too Late," but I suppose it actually isn't too late.