Patti Smith remembers. Her album Twelve features her
covers of a range of great songs—from The Rolling Stones to Nirvana, from the
Allman Brothers to Stevie Wonder—and she does them all justice. One suspects
that that’s because Smith sees these musical artists as heroes who have
influenced her and added to her sense of the art of rock. That she finds ways
to make the songs hers indicates more versatility than one might have supposed
her to possess—which is a way of saying that Smith has matured considerably by
the time of this album; 60 in 2006, she seems to be in a debt-paying frame of
mind, before it’s time to go (she says she's had lists for covers albums going back to 1978).
Way back in 1979 when Smith released her fourth album, Wave, I compiled a cassette tape on
which I alternated tracks by The Doors with tracks by Patti Smith. It was my
way of attesting to the fact that Smith seemed a true descendant of Morrison’s
sense of lyrical excess as the basis for rock apotheosis. Morrison was dead
eight years by then, four years when Smith’s first album arrived and showed her
debt in what it meant to be a “rock poet.” So, of all the covers on Twelve, my natural choice is today’s song wherein Smith merges with Morrison. She manages more twang—kit-chin,
sto-wove—than he does and it suits the song, which has a hominess that attests to how welcoming a kitchen can be, a hearth, a heart, all that. Oh yeah, and good eats.
Smith refrains from versifying on the song, choosing to play
it very faithfully, even to the point of an exactly rendered drop on the fourth
“learn to forget,” emphasizing “learn,” just as Jim did. That phrase “learn to
forget” emerges as the mantra of the song, suggesting that departing from the
soul kitchen, where the speaker would really rather stay all night, is
something best forgotten later. Maybe even the soul kitchen, with its gentle,
mind-warming stove, is best forgotten, as one lights another cigarette and gets
on with whatever there is to get on with.
The more ambiguous line follows the effects of that
departure: “Streetlights share their hollow glow / Your brain seems bruised
with numb surprise / Still one place to go.” Where is there to go? Having gone
into the street—“stumbling in the neon grove” is a nice figure for it—bruised and
numb, what is the last possible destination? Could it be—death?
If so, the “numb surprise” (Morrison often has a knack for
well-chosen adjective-noun pairings) may be that that’s all that’s left. And
the leaving of the “soul kitchen”—a kitchen with soul food, sure, but also a
kitchen where the soul is “prepared,” where a woman’s fingers “speak in secret
alphabets”—is tantamount to leaving an earthly paradise, or, maybe, the only
reason for living. Still this is a glum song, perhaps even a bit surly, but it
doesn’t seem despairing, and that’s because the imperative, “Let me sleep all
night in your soul kitchen / Warm my mind near your gentle stove,” keeps up a
kind of prospective possibility. Unlike Eden, we may return to the soul
kitchen, eventually. “Turn me out and I’ll wander, baby.” Yes, Cain-like, no
doubt, some misdeed to be forgotten, much like the bliss that preceded the fall.
Then again, the way the part about “the clock says it’s time
to close now / I guess I better go now” comes back around at the end does feel
like an adios to the whole deal. As Groucho says, “I’ll do anything you say / I’ll
even stay / But . . . I must be going . . .”
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