I like sandwiches.: saturday night.

My reading habits have been woeful ever since I moved north over a year ago. I tend to read when I'm not at home or work, which leaves the time I spend waiting for the bus or the train, riding said bus or train, or waiting for someone I'm meeting out in the City somewhere.

In an attempt to correct this, I've been working my way, painfully slowly, through Patti Smith's Just Kids. Not being more than vaguely knowledgeable about Patti, it is a wonderful point of entry. Her early life with Robert Mapplethorpe sounds like an adventure-slash-soulcrushing-struggle. They were so destitute, but they had vision. They made something. It makes me want to make something, even though they were, you know, just kids, living in the 60's, and I am a manboy in 2012. But I digress.

It's lead me to listen to Caitlin's copy of Horses (1975) this week.

Robert Mapplethorpe took this iconic photo/cover.

Surprising no one, this album is farking fantastic.

Then I remembered from my childhood this old Gilda Radner sketch on SNL, where she played a character based on Patti Smith circa 1978, named Candy Slice. The original sketch can be viewed instantly (around the 42-minute mark) on Netflix if you have a subscription. It's a pretty brutal satire of Patti, but at least Bill Murray's sleazy A&R rep is hilarious, asking anyone with a grumpy attitude "can we have a talk?" and then turning his back to the camera so, say, Belushi (or Idle, or Newman, or Curtin) can lean in unseen and take a big SNIFF of ...something. You get it.

The song Radner sings in the sketch as Candy Slice has these lyrics:

I'm sexless, I sing loud
Know that always gets a crowd
I talk dirty and I'm proud
No dry cleanin' is allowed
I am funky, I don't bathe
I am rock and roll's new slave
I am punky to the grave
I can't sing but I can rave
Watch my blouse!
I got the rhythm
High heeled feet
Pants to go with 'em
I am hot
Don't need no bra
Got what it takes
To make a star!
If you look close
You can see my tits
'Cause I want ya to
But don't want ya to know that I do!
I am bitter, I don't care
I have never washed my hair
I'm immoral and a pig
And I'm makin' it real big!
Do you know what I mean?
Do you know what I mean?
Do you know what I mean?

She did Candy Slice one more time, singing a song called "Gimme Mick":

I guess Patti inspired a lot of eye-rolling from the mainstream, including a huge asshole rant from Mick Jagger around this same time, that went like this:

"I think it's crap! I think she's so awful...she's full of rubbish, she's full of words and crap. I mean, she's a poseur of the worst kind, intellectual bullshit, trying to be a street girl when she doesn't seem to me to be one, I mean, everything...a useless guitar player, a bad singer, not attractive. She's got her heart in the right place but she's such a poseur! She's not really together musically, she's...all right."

Fuck's sake, Mick. You sound like that interview I saw years ago with Carlos Santana proclaiming he is "an artist, and Eminem is just an entertainer." Uh huh. We all know where you learned how to sing like that, Mick, and it wasn't choir practice. Therefore watch who yer callin a poseur. I guess you are sort of the same age as my Grandparents, may they rest in peace. Why should I be surprised you don't get the relevance of Patti Smith when she first appears? As I've said before, artists are--sometimes--the least qualified people to talk about their art.

The backlash against Patti Smith wasn't completely unjustified; she was kind of pretentious and clumsy. But that's about where the criticism stops. Meanwhile, she helped build punk, which was a raw new incarnation of rock n roll, and inspired generations of women to be iconoclasts and originals who are liberated sexually and certainly do not take anyone's bullshit. That's some heavy influence. That describes Madonna, Kim Gordon, Beth Ditto, and on and on...

She eventually married Fred "Sonic" Smith from the MC5 and had 2 kids, Jackson and Jesse. Fred died young in 1994, which sucks. Jackson Smith married Meg White from the White Stripes a few years ago, which I find both fitting and sort of tired. Oh and meanwhile one of my favorite Cat Power songs of all time, "Nude as the News," (1997) name-checks the Smith kids: "Jackson, Jesse / I've got a son in me / And he's related to you / He is waiting to meet you." That song, however, is apparently about an abortion.

So anyway on Friday night before the Sondre Lerche show off to the record store we went, to retrieve an LP copy of Easter (1978).

Gilda's lyrics (above) do make you wonder.

It's terrific. I'm such a shameful slowpoke.

The song "Rock N Roll Nigger" was her naive attempt to repatriate the word to have positive connotations, apparently even using it in everyday conversation. What ridiculousness. But DAMN what a track.