Rock-and-Roll Diva

A discography of Patti Smith's albums.

This week in the magazine, in "The Torch Singer," Sharon DeLano profiles the singer and songwriter Patti Smith, who has been dubbed "the godmother of punk." This month, Smith will release "Land," a retrospective of her twenty-eight-year musical career, which collects her best-known songs and, on a special second disk, showcases her band's power as a live ensemble. Here is a complete guide to Smith's recordings.

"Horses" (1975): This is one of the greatest début albums of all time, packaged with the famous cover photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe of Smith in an androgynous mode. Her first words are "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine," just to set things straight, and then the band whomps into a version of Van Morrison's "Gloria," with Smith snarling and growling about "a sweet young thing / Humpin' on the parkin' meter leanin' on the parkin' meter." Smith still sings most of the songs on this album in her concerts: the pop-reggae "Redondo Beach"; "Birdland," an improvisation about Wilhelm Reich's son thinking he sees his dead father coming to get him in a spaceship; the pure-rock track "Free Money"; "Kimberly," a lilting pop song with apocalyptic images; and "Land," another improvisation, more than nine minutes long, which begins with the horses in the album title coming to rescue a character named Johnny, who has been raped in a hallway, and which ends with a searing vision of the death of Jimi Hendrix. The critics loved "Horses," and it established Smith as a star.

"Radio Ethiopia" (1976): Smith plays guitar, a Fender Duo-Sonic, on this album full of feedback and synthesized noise. In the title song, which is more than ten minutes long, she improvises about Brancusi and her guitar and Rimbaud's attempt to book himself on a freighter to Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia) as he was dying. "I loved it," Smith says now, "but it was our most hated record for a while." And it includes some of the band's most popular songs: "Pissing in a River," "Ask the Angels," and "Ain't It Strange."

"Easter" (1978): Smith was badly injured in a fall off a stage in Tampa early in 1977 and spent most of the year recovering. The album marking her resurrection was closer to a straight rock album than anything else she has made, and it was her most commercially successful record. The single "Because the Night," co-written with Bruce Springsteen, reached No. 13 on the pop charts, the only time Smith has been in the Top Twenty. "Easter" also includes Smith's anthem to the artist as outsider, "Rock n Roll Nigger," preceded by a raucous live reading of her poem "Babelogue," which opens with the line "i haven't fucked much with the past, but i've fucked plenty with the future," and ends with "i have not sold myself to god."

"Wave" (1979): Smith moved to Detroit to live with the musician Fred (Sonic) Smith in the fall of 1978, and "Wave" can be read as a farewell to the band and her fans as she embarks on a new life, although the title track is explicitly addressed to Pope John Paul I, who had recently died after serving as Pope for only thirty-four days. The album is dedicated to Fred, and the first track, "Frederick," is a pop love song. Highlights include "Dancing Barefoot" and Smith's first appearance on an album playing the clarinet, on "Seven Ways of Going," a song about spiritual reconciliation. In the Robert Mapplethorpe portrait on the cover she is wearing a gauzy dress and holding a pair of white doves.

"Dream of Life" (1988): Patti and Fred Smith wrote the words and music to all the songs on this album; two members of the old Patti Smith Group, the pianist Richard Sohl and the drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, played on it. The first cut, "People Have the Power," later became an anthem for Patti and marked her increasing commitment to political causes. Another song, "Where Duty Calls," was written for the soldiers killed in the bombing of the Marine headquarters in Beirut, and there are two lovely ballads, "Paths That Cross," an elegy for a friend, and "The Jackson Song," written for the Smiths' young son.

"Gone Again" (1996): On the first album in Smith's "comeback" after the death of her husband, in 1994, she was accompanied by Jay Dee Daugherty and the guitarist Lenny Kaye, from her old group, and Tony Shanahan on bass guitar—the three musicians who, along with Oliver Ray, would become Smith's new band. Her voice is better than ever, darker and musically more adept. Several of the tracks are elegiac: "Gone Again"; "About a Boy," which was written for Kurt Cobain; "My Madrigal," with the lines "You pledged me your heart / Till death do us part"; and "Farewell Reel," which is explicitly about her marriage.

"The Patti Smith Masters" (1996): A limited-edition boxed set of digitally remastered CD versions of Smith's first five albums, with the original cover art and liner notes. Each CD has bonus tracks, and a sixth CD contains ten of Smith's most popular songs.

"Peace and Noise" (1997): The elegiac and political themes of Smith's later work dominate this album, which is dedicated to William Burroughs, who died just as it was completed. On the first track, the dead, in snow-white shrouds, are "waiting underground." "Don't Say Nothing" was written while Smith sat at the deathbed of her friend Allen Ginsberg and wondered why his passing wasn't treated as a national loss, like Victor Hugo's had been. At the end of "Memento Mori," a searing, ten-and-a-half-minute improvisation about a boy who died in Vietnam, she is caught up in a horrible story about the boy's foreknowledge of his death. "We remember / Everything," she screams.

"Gung Ho" (2000): Smith is drawn to heroic, stubborn, maligned, obsessed, populist figures, and here her touchstone is Ho Chi Minh, the subject of the title track: "He was not like any other / He was just like any other." Her voice has never been more expressive or exhibited greater range than on this album. The band provides anthemic support for her rhetorically hefty sound on the political songs, and on the sexy ones, when she is being seductive, the guitars and drums keep her dancing. She makes "China Bird," a song about her father, sound like a torch song, and then on "Strange Messengers," which is about the slave trade, she rasps and wails and practically spits out the rage of a betrayed black woman. Her son, Jackson, plays the guitar on "Persuasion."

"Land: 1975-2002" (2002): This two-CD retrospective package covering Smith's career to date will be released on March 19th. The first CD contains sixteen of her greatest hits, although only "Because the Night" was actually a hit in commercial terms. The selection was compiled by polling her fans, and includes songs from each of her eight albums. (Curiously, "Land," which is a song suite on "Horses," isn't included.) The final track, a sensual cover of Prince's "When Doves Cry," was recorded for this occasion and is being released as a single for the radio. The second CD is an official bootleg of sorts, with live tracks and demo versions of songs and outtakes. The first cut, the autobiographical prose poem "Piss Factory," was made in 1974 for a private label, before Smith had a record contract. The piano overpowered her voice on the original 45, but it has been remixed here to better effect. Since Smith and the band have always been an improvisational group, much of the interest in the compilation derives from the live performances. Five of the tracks are from last summer's world tour and include an emotionally intense "Dead City" from the Roskilde Festival, in Denmark, and a version of "Birdland" from the Roxy in Los Angeles that sounds like it has been wrenched out of some deep place that Smith barely extricates herself from. There is also a new improvisational piece, "Higher Learning," on which Smith plays a long clarinet solo. The CD's final cut is a hidden track, a hilarious, out-of-tune rendition of "Tomorrow," Little Orphan Annie's plucky aria, recorded in a club in Philadelphia in 1978. That Smith is self-consciously wacky and unself-consciously joyous is only one of the reasons that audiences love her. ♦