Patti Smith – “Twelve” (2007)

“Well, I’m back…” And this may seem an odd album to re-start with. Patti Smith has been making records for a long time. Her status as a kind of combination crone-priestess (I mean this in an utterly honourable sense) and elder stateswoman is beyond question. Her concerts are still spiritually uplifting events as much as rock’n'roll shows. Meanwhile, new albums are respectfully received but add little to the legacy. Twelve isn’t about to change that and like most covers records, it’s a bit of curates egg.

It starts off strongly enough with “Are You Experienced”. Held together by Flea’s fluid exploratory bass, it comes over as a stately meditation on Hendrix’s original. Then things dip fairly sharply. “Everybody Wants To Rule The World” (yes, that song) is a pedestrian pub re-tread. If Smith’s after a drastic reinvention a la Donnie Darko’s “Mad World, she misses by a mile. Neil Young’s “Helpless” is pleasant but you woldn’t rush to but it on again. “Gimme Shelter” has wispy slide guitar line by Tom Verlaine that deconstructs the already skeletal original leads to two or three nervy notes but the band and Smith are again undone by journeyman competence.

Things look up with “Within You, Without You” and “White Rabbit” which respectively recall the arrangements on Gone Again and replace the flamenco flicker of the original with a military snare and dirgey tempo that actually works quite well. Neither are a patch on the original, though. And lets not even mention “Soul Kitchen” or “The Boy In The Bubble”…

What rescues the record is, of all things a take on Dylan’s “Changing of the Guards” and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.

The Dylan cover does what all great cover versions does – sends you back to the original with a heightened appreciation of what was originally under-achieved and is perhaps more fully realised by the cover. “Changing of the Guards” comes from Street Legal, one of Dylan’s most underrated sets of songs. Dylan was just about to seriously lose his way in the studio, an impasse that would continue for nearly twenty years (bar the fluke of Oh Mercy). The original is lost is a turgid murk of backing singers, horns and a seven piece rock band. Smith and her bands stripped-back, bar-band treatment works brilliantly, bringing out one of Dylan’s last masterpieces of sustained poetic flow and making it utterly her own. It’s that rarity, a single performance that makes an entire album worthwhile. It’s hypnotic, pulsing, a reverie of “menace and prayer” that Smith utterly nails with a performance at once understated and vital – “And cruel death with it’s pale ghost retreating/Between the King and the Queen of Swords.”

“Smells like..” is just plain odd. The sleeve notes describe it as a ‘back-porch’ performance. The main guitar lines are carried by a tentative banjo and the slowed tempo brings out the kind of gravel and gravitas that only Patti Smith seems able to pull off without dipping into parody. She turns the song into a knowing commentary on her own outsider status and it suits her surprisingly well. You’ll want to play it again, and that’s quite an achievement.

For the remainder, “Midnight Rider” has a pleasant lilt and the fact that Coolio has destroyed that Stevie Wonder song forever doesn’t help Patti Smith’s version much either. Buy it for the Dylan cover – why couldn’t she just do a straight album of misunderstood Dylan chestnuts? That would be worth its weight in gold.

Visit PattiSmith.net and the inevitable MySpace page. Or buy Twelvefrom Amazon.