Patti Smith - Gloria: In Excelsis Deo

Her Sins Her Own

For Bella

1. Sometime in 1975, a fiercely literate post-Beat Generation poet from the City of Broad Shoulders stepped to a microphone and half-growled, half-whispered the hardest, most self-assured line in the history of punk rock.

   Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine

   And Jesus pumped his fist.

   In an instant, Patti Smith usurped Jim Morrison as the Poet Laureate of Rock (Bob D is folk, don’t give me shit), and accepted responsibility for all her misgivings in totality. The Stooges and MC5 carpet-bombed the area for the Sex Pistols, and Ramones’ landings, but Patti Smith arrived on a full sneak attack mission in the dead of night when Elton John, the Eagles, and John Denver sat atop the charts. Her vision of Gloria and the entirety of the album it began, Horses, would unsettle the established order and provide the needed rocket fuel for an entire generation of snarling, snotty, shit-disturbers to achieve lift-off. Horses is to punk as Cape Canaveral is to NASA. What she also did, and this was possibly her greatest, most difficult achievement, was firebomb the men’s room in the established Rock and Roll world to make room for everyone else. She stood there in the fire, with a group of men standing in formation behind her, clad in white shirt and black leather, androgynous as Bowie and probably tougher, and said:

   People said beware, but I don't care
   Their words are just rules and regulations to me

   Patti just didn’t have the time for the impositions of religion, society, or the state itself.

2. The original Van Morrison/Them Gloria was a cocksure strut imagined as an American Blues workout. Patti adds doses of humor absent in the original and is far more openly sexually desirous than Van or Jim Morrison ever were.

   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

   And of course, all the blinkered homophobes raised eyebrows at those lyrics. Was Patti declaring herself queer??? Oh, these kids these days! To paraphrase a Brooklyn-based poet, a lot of pearl-clutching and silent judging… freedom of expression begrudging. Not that it mattered in any way, shape, or form. It’s honestly no one’s business. Musically, Patti’s reworked Gloria takes a dirge-like approach at the onset, fitting considering she mentions Jesus’ death in the first two words, don’t ya think? By the end of the first minute, the band couldn’t help themselves as Patti (and not Jesus) took the wheel. Then they begin propelling each other, which is altogether ideal because this isn’t an American Blues workout - it’s punk rock. We don’t need sophistication. This is not that arena. We can accept the primal. The urgency and the intensity get dialed up as a matter of course because of course OF COURSE.

3. In an interview with luminary Terry Gross some 30 years ex post facto, Patty set the record straight on that opening lyric.

   People constantly came up to me and said ‘You’re an atheist, you don’t believe in Jesus,’ and I said ‘Obviously I believe in him’… I’m saying that, y’know, that the concept of Jesus, I believe in. I just wanted the freedom. I wanted to be free of him. I was 20 years old when I wrote that, and it was sort my youthful manifesto. In other words, I didn’t want to be good, y’know, but I didn’t want him to have to worry about me, or I didn’t want him taking responsibility for my wrongdoings, or my youthful explorations. I wanted to be free. So it’s really a statement about freedom.

   -Patti Smith, Fresh Air

   In the land of the free, Patti just wanted to be exactly that (The AUDACITY). In about 508,955 college dorm rooms the world over (give or take a thousand) is a poster or piece of graffiti with an Albert Camus quote reading something like this:

   The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

   There’s some conventionality in Patti, as there is all of us, and she might go so far as to borrow from French existentialists, but there’s ALWAYS room for absurdity and existence, especially absurdity IN existence. How delightfully absurd a human being with agency would accept full responsibility. How human to be sexual. How full of existence to embrace it all as a measure of freedom under the eyes of God. What’s more, Patti added In Excelsis Deo - glory to God in the highest. This is her way of honoring He who is called I Am. Genesis 1:27 tells me God created humankind in his image. It stands to reason then, if you subscribe to the Book of Genesis, that He foresaw Her, and He was here for Her.