A second track from the upcoming album Collapse Into Now from R.E.M. (due to drop 8 March) has leaked: "It Happened Today," a catchy bit of jangly pop complimented by the backing vocals of Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder.
Paste reports that other guests on the CD include Patti Smith (long considered the band's musical godmother), Smith's long-time musical cohort Lenny Kaye and Peaches.
The rock musician Patti Smith won the National Book Award for nonfiction on Wednesday night for “Just Kids,” a sweetly evocative memoir of her relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe and life in the bohemian New York of the 1960s and ’70s.
Accepting the award to applause and cheers, Ms. Smith — clearly the favorite of the night — choked up as she recalled her days as a clerk in the Scribner’s bookstore in Manhattan.
“I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf,” she said. “Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.” “Just Kids” was published by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins.
"Changing of the Guards"Patti Smith Original Dylan version found on Street Legal (1978)
Patricia Lee Smith was born in Chicago and raised in New Jersey. Her dream of attending school derailed for a number of personal and economic reasons, she adopted the bohemian life by moving to New York City in 1967 in order to write poetry and study art.
Patti Smith's early years living in Brooklyn and the lower east side of Manhattan with her closest friend Robert Mapplethorpe and their eventual involvement in the orbit of other noted artists is vividly portrayed in her memoir Just Kids, recently nominated for the National Book Award.
In the book Smith writes of her reverence of Dylan, especially as poet. They both share a particular fondness for the work of Frenchman Arthur Rimbaud, a like-minded restless and rambling soul who influenced music, art and literature in the Europe of the later 1800s.
One of Mapplethorpe's first Polaroid pictures taken in 1970 shows Smith surrounded by three album sleeves: a Lotte Lenya LP of Weill/Brecht songs, as well as Blonde On Blonde and Bringing It All Back Home.
By 1975, she had taken to music and formed the Patti Smith Group. The band was starting to make its mark on the New York City music scene at places like Max's Kansas City and CBGB. But on a summer night that year Smith "merely had to lace up my boots, throw on my jacket and walk to work" at the Other End in Greenwich Village. It would be the group's first performance with a drummer. Smith continues:
The night, as the saying goes, was a jewel in our crown. We played as one, and the pulse and pitch of the band spiraled us into another dimension. Yet with all that swirling around me, I could feel another presence as surely as the rabbit senses the hound. He was there. I suddenly understood the nature of the electric air. Bob Dylan had entered the club. This knowledge had a strange effect on me. Instead of humbled, I felt a power, perhaps his; but I also felt my own worth of my band. It seemed for me a night of initiation, where I had to become fully myself in the presence of the one I had modeled myself after. In just a few months, the Patti Smith Group would record their debut album,Horses, at Electric Lady studios.
And so it should come as no surprise that on the 2007 compilation of covers Twelve, Patti Smith would finally record a nod to one of her chief muses. But the selection of the song was somewhat curious . . .
I only had one friend who would listen to Street Legal with me. She was very intellectual and artistic, and would sit cross-legged on her couch smoking cigarette after cigarette. We both thought that the newest Dylan record (save the horrible "New Pony," for which we would take turns getting up and lifting the phonograph stylus up and over to the next cut) was quite daring from both a musical style and lyrical standpoint; it was what attracted to us about Dylan: his chameleon-like persona, from large arena rock god with The Band to pancake makeup troubadour wandering the countryside in the Rolling Thunder Revue. And now here was Street Legal, drenched with background female call and response singers seemingly influenced by Bob Marley's I-Threes. And it wasn't just a whim limited to a disc; he took the album on the road and plowed through almost all of it, much to the audience's chagrin . . .
"Changing of the Guards" has been interpreted by many as a thinly veiled history of Dylan's career up to that point (literally, "sixteen years," the opening line of the song). It is the aggressive seven minute opening salvo which opens Street Legal and was oddly chosen as a single (it did not make the Top 100).
Smith's take is much gentler and almost wary, and the lyrics are more pronounced as a result. Why did she choose this song above all others? Who knows. Maybe its apocalyptic nature fit the time in which it was released in 2007, with the country mired in two wars and partisan bickering more intense than usual. Maybe it is the stark imagery in Dylan's poem. Maybe both. Maybe neither. But isn't that the point?
Spinner reports that Patti Smith has recorded a new album and it is set to be released in early 2011. Sessions took place in Italy and France, but the bulk of the studio work apparently was done at Electric Lady in New York City.
"My work on the book sidestepped the album for awhile, but Columbia [Records] has been patient," Smith tells Spinner. "I recorded it with my band and my daughter [Jesse] played piano on it. [Television's] Tom Verlaine played some guitar on it."
Verlaine contributed guitar on some very early Smith sides and the two have been acquaintances since the halcyon days at CBGB.
Electric Lady is the studio created by Jimi Hendrix. In her memoir Just Kids, Smith recounts her initial, accidental encounter with Hendrix on the stairs leading up to the recording lair. Years after his death, she cut her first 45 rpm single there: "Hey Joe" (whispering hello to the guitar hero in the opening of the song that Hendrix made famous on his first album) b/w her own composition "Piss Factory," an elegy to Smith's days on a non-union manufacturing line.
Patti Smith and her band, led by long-time collaborator Lenny Kaye, will once again play a three night stand 29-31 December at the Bowery Ballroom in New York.
Here's a classic performance of "Horses" and the aforementioned "Hey Joe" by the Patti Smith Group - Kaye on guitar, Ivan Krall on bass, Jay Dee Daugherty on drums and Richard Sohl on keyboards - from the Old Grey Whistle Test back in 1976:
This coming Tuesday 16 November Columbia Records will release the outtakes of Bruce Springsteen's Darkness On The Edge Of Town sessions, recorded back in 1977 and 1978. The Boss & The E Street Band had famously been away from the recording studio for almost three years due to a managerial dispute. But then Springsteen came to The Record Plant in New York City with a wealth of material, and this 21 (22?) track archive stands as a great double LP addition to his wonderful catalog.
The majority of the record could be peeled off and titled Born To Run 2.0. "Gotta Get That Feeling" is a full-on Phil Spector era tribute which could have been sung by one of his stable of great girl groups. (Hint to Darlene Love - make this your next single.) The British Invasion is revisited in "Outside Looking In" and The Righteous Brothers are bowed to with reverence via "Someday." And Bruce's deep affection for Memphis soul is reflected in two of the best tracks on the record: the call and response anthem "Ain't Good Enough" and the Miami Horns powered "It's A Shame," punctuated by a fine harmony vocal from Little Steven Van Zandt.
But The Promise also provides a glimpse of what an extended Darkness might have been. And while it's certainly hard to quibble with the tight structure of a four-star album, there are definitely some tunes that must have come close to making the cut. The title song and "One Way Street" are in the same vein. And a serious argument can be made for "Because The Night": alas, Springsteen couldn't find the right lyrical fit until he handed it off to Patti Smith, who then took her version to the Top 10 a year later.
What is also revelatory about this compilation are the compositions that ended up in the hands of or influenced other artists, showing the versatility of Bruce the songwriter: "Fire" (The Pointer Sisters), "Talk To Me" (Southside Johnny & The Asbury Jukes) and "City of Night" (certainly meant for Willy DeVille).
The Promise is no throwaway of odds and ends. It is a worthy addition to the Bruce Springsteen canon.
Rock royalty Patti Smith has been nominated for the National Book Award in the non-fiction category for the memoir about her long friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe entitled Just Kids. The National Book Foundation provides the following synopsis of the tome:
In Just Kids, Patti Smith’s first book of prose, the legendary American artist offers a never-before-seen glimpse of her remarkable relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the epochal days of New York City and the Chelsea Hotel in the late sixties and seventies. An honest and moving story of youth and friendship, Smith brings the same unique, lyrical quality to Just Kids as she has to the rest of her formidable body of work—from her influential 1975 album Horses to her visual art and poetry.
Below is a video of Patti reading an excerpt from the book, recalling how Mapplethorpe shared the triumph of Smith's 1978 hit "Because The Night." An impromptu, very sweet a cappella performance follows.
"Changing of the Guards" Patti Smith
knowledge had a strange effect on me. Instead of humbled, I felt a power, perhaps his; but I also felt my own worth of my band. It seemed for me a night of initiation, where I had to become fully myself in the presence of the one I had modeled myself after.
And it wasn't just a whim limited to a disc; he took the album on the road and plowed through almost all of it, much to the audience's chagrin . . .
This coming Tuesday 16 November Columbia Records will release the outtakes of Bruce Springsteen's Darkness On The Edge Of Town sessions, recorded back in 1977 and 1978. The Boss & The E Street Band had famously been away from the recording studio for almost three years due to a managerial dispute. But then Springsteen came to The Record Plant in New York City with a wealth of material, and this 21 (22?) track archive stands as a great double LP addition to his wonderful catalog. 
Rock royalty Patti Smith has been nominated for the National Book Award in the non-fiction category for the memoir about her long friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe entitled Just Kids. The National Book Foundation provides the following synopsis of the tome:
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