When Patti Smith returned to performing in the ’90s, after more than a decade spent as a housewife in Detroit during her marriage to the MC5’s Fred "Sonic" Smith, she was pretty much beyond reproach. Yes, she’d released a subpar and disappointingly "normal"-sounding album in 1988 titled Dream of Life (Arista) while she was married to Smith, but that could be written off as an aberration — an understandable symptom of her self-imposed exile from New York, the city that had given her music life. Besides, in 1988 the world wasn’t ready for Smith’s return. The punk revolution that she’d help foment in her early years on the CBGB scene had yet to be adopted as the new rock-and-roll gospel by yet another generation of alienated rebels without a cause — this one the alternative explosion of the ’90s. And except for her one collaboration with classic rocker Bruce Springsteen (the single "Because the Night") and maybe a couple of the covers she recorded with the original Patti Smith Band ("Gloria" and "Rock and Roll Star"), she’d been forgotten by the mainstream of American rock.
But eight years later, in 1996 (two years after Fred passed away), when Smith relocated to NYC and was once again drawn into the realm of rock and roll, everything had changed. She was no longer a oddball outsider; she was the mother of punk’s invention, and therefore royalty in the alternative cosmos. Add to that the unprecedented success that female artists were enjoying in the mid to late ’90s and Smith’s musical reincarnation seemed meant to be. After all, if you were looking for a common ancestor for artists as diverse as PJ Harvey, Courtney Love, and Alanis Morisette, Patti Smith was pretty much it. Period. Case closed. No more questions, please.
Fortunately, Smith was much more up to the task in ’96 than she’d been in ’88. She’d surrounded herself, once again, with the right people, including her old pals from the Patti Smith Band, Television’s Tom Verlaine, R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, rising star Jeff Buckley. And the music she proceeded to make on the three CDs from phase two of her career — ’96’s Gone Again, ’97’s Peace and Noise, and 2000’s Gung Ho (all on Arista) — found her regaining the edge she’d had on her first four Arista albums, Horses (1975), Radio Ethiopia (1976), Easter (1978), and Wave (1979). She’d reclaimed her natural sense of balance between the primal noise of rock and roll and the stream-of-consciousness flow of poetry as an active, spoken art.
Smith hasn’t retired from music for a second time, and she may never do so. But the recent release of the career-spanning two-CD compilation Land: 1975-2002 (Arista) suggests that phase two of Patti Smith’s career has reached a logical conclusion — that at 55 years old, she’s reached a new crossroads. The first-ever compilation of her career, Land is a modest package that brings together 17 studio tracks (reported to have been selected by her fans during her recent tours as well as via Internet voting) on disc one, 13 rarities (including demos and live recordings) selected by Smith herself on disc two, and a small booklet of photos and free-form writings.
It’s hard not to see this collection as signaling a kind of closure by giving fans access to original recordings of Smith classics like "Piss Factory" and "Redondo Beach," along with her more recent cover of Prince’s "When Doves Cry" and "Wander I Go," a ’96 recording featuring both Tom Verlaine and Jeff Buckley on guitar. After all, the alternative revolution is over, women artists no longer enjoy the freedom and the access to the airwaves they had in the ’90s, and Smith’s second chance to move beyond being a cult artist to reaching a mainstream audience has almost certainly come and gone. From here on out, she’ll be preaching to the converted — to the 10,000 fans who cast votes to determine what would be on disc one of Land. That’s pretty much the same position she was in when she took that first hiatus from rock and roll in 1980. She seems too entrenched in what she’s doing right now to call it quits again. But then, who would have predicted that she’d be disappearing from the scene back in 1979?
