Smith was born in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Her mother, Beverly, was a jazz singer, and father, Grant, worked at the Honeywell plant. She spent her entire childhood in Deptford, New Jersey. Raised the daughter of a Jehovah's Witness mother, she claims she had a strong religious, Bible-based education but left organized religion as a teenager because she felt it was too confining. (She later wrote the opening line of her cover version of Them's Gloria in response to this experience.) After graduating from Deptford Township High School in 1964, Smith went to work in a factory.
In 1967 she left Glassboro State Teachers College (now Rowan University) and moved to New York City. She met photographer Robert Mapplethorpe there while working at a book store with friend, poet Janet Hamill. Mapplethorpe's photographs of her became the covers for the Patti Smith Group LPs, and they remained friends until Mapplethorpe's death in 1989. In 1969 she went to Paris with her sister and started busking and doing performance art. When Smith returned to New York City, she lived in the Hotel Chelsea with Mapplethorpe. The two frequented the fashionable Max's Kansas City and CBGB nightclubs. The same year Smith appeared with Wayne County in Jackie Curtis's play "Femme Fatale". As a member of the St. Mark's Poetry Project, she spent the early '70s painting, writing, and performing. In 1971 she performed – for one night only – in Sam Shepard's "Cowboy Mouth". (The published play's notes call for "a man who looks like a coyote and a woman who looks like a crow".) She collaborated with Allen Lanier of Blue Öyster Cult, who recorded several of the songs to which Smith had contributed, including Debbie Denise (after her poem "In Remembrance of Debbie Denise"), Career of Evil, Fire of Unknown Origin, The Revenge of Vera Gemini, and Shooting Shark. During these years, Smith also wrote rock journalism, some of which was published in Creem magazine.
By 1974 Patti Smith was performing rock music herself, initially with guitarist and rock archivist Lenny Kaye, and later with a full band comprising Kaye, Ivan Kral on bass, Jay Dee Daugherty on drums and Richard Sohl, on piano. Financed by Robert Mapplethorpe, the band recorded a first single, "Hey Joe/Piss Factory", in 1974. The A-side was a version of the rock standard with the addition of a spoken word piece about fugitive heiress Patty Hearst ("Patty Hearst, you're standing there in front of the Symbionese Liberation Army flag with your legs spread, I was wondering were you gettin' it every night from a black revolutionary man and his women..."). The B-side describes the helpless anger Smith had felt while working on a factory assembly line and the salvation she discovered in the form of a shoplifted book, the 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations.
Patti Smith Group was signed by Clive Davis of Arista Records, and 1975 saw the release of Smith's first album, Horses, produced by John Cale amidst some tension. The album fused punk rock and spoken poetry and begins with a cover of Van Morrison's Gloria, and Smith's opening words: "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine."
As Patti Smith Group toured the United States and Europe, punk's popularity grew. The rawer sound of the group's second album, Radio Ethiopia, reflected this development. Considerably less accessible than Horses, Radio Ethiopia received poor reviews. However, several of its songs have stood the test of time, and Smith still performs them regularly in concert. On January 23, 1977, while touring in support of the record, Smith accidentally danced off a high stage in Tampa, Florida and fell 15 feet into a concrete orchestra pit, breaking several neck vertebrae. The injury required a period of rest and an intensive round of physical therapy, during which time she was able to reassess, re-energize and reorganize her life. Patti Smith Group produced two further albums before the end of the 1970s. Easter (1978) was her most commercially successful record, containing single Because the Night co-written with Bruce Springsteen. Wave (1979) was less successful, although songs Frederick and Dancing Barefoot both received commercial airplay.
Before the release of Wave, Smith, now separated from long-time partner Allen Lanier, met Fred Sonic Smith, former guitar player for Detroit rock band MC5 and his own Sonic's Rendezvous Band, who adored poetry as much as she did. ("Wave"'s "Dancing Barefoot" and "Frederick" were both dedicated to him.) The running joke at the time was that she only married Fred because she would not have to change her name. Patti and Fred had a son, Jackson, and later a daughter, Jesse. Through most of the 1980s Patti was in semi-retirement from music, living with her family north of Detroit in St. Clair Shores, Michigan. On June 1988 she released Dream Of Life, which included song People Have the Power. Fred Smith died on November 4, 1994. Shortly afterward, Patti faced the unexpected death of her brother, Todd, and original keyboard player, Richard Sohl. When her son Jackson turned 21, Smith decided to move back to New York. After the impact of these deaths, her friends Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and Allen Ginsberg (whom she had known since her early years in New York) urged her to go back out on the road. She toured briefly with Bob Dylan in December 1995 (chronicled in a book of photographs by Stipe).
In 1996, Smith worked with her long-time colleagues to record the haunting Gone Again, featuring About a Boy, a tribute to Kurt Cobain. Smith was a fan of Cobain, but was more angered than saddened by his suicide. That same year she collaborated with Stipe on E-Bow the Letter, a song on R.E.M.'s New Adventures in Hi-Fi, which she has also performed live with the band. After release of "Gone Again", Patti Smith has recorded two new albums: Peace and Noise in 1997 (with the single 1959, about the invasion of Tibet) and Gung Ho in 2000 (with songs about Ho Chi Minh and Smith's late father). A box set of her work up to that time, "The Patti Smith Masters", came out in 1996, and 2002 saw the release of "Land (1975–2002)", a two-CD compilation that includes a memorable cover of Prince's When Doves Cry. Smith's solo art exhibition, "Strange Messenger" was hosted at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh on September 28, 2002.
On April 27, 2004 Patti Smith released Trampin' which included several songs about motherhood, partly in tribute to Smith's mother who died two years before. Smith curated the Meltdown festival in London on June 25, 2005, the penultimate event being the first live performance of "Horses" in its entirety. Guitarist Tom Verlaine took Oliver Ray's place. This live performance was released later in the year as "Horses/Horses". In August 2005 Smith gave a literary lecture about the poems of Arthur Rimbaud and William Blake. On July 10, 2005, Smith was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. In addition to her influence on rock music, Minister also noted Smith's appreciation of Arthur Rimbaud. On October 15, 2006, Patti Smith performed at CBGB nightclub, with a 3½-hour tour de force to close out Manhattan's music venue. She took the stage at 9:30 p.m. (EDT) and closed for the night (and forever for the venue) at a few minutes after 1:00 a.m., performing her song Elegie, and finally reading a list of punk rock musicians and advocates who had died in the previous years.
Smith was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame March 12, 2007. She dedicated her award to the memory of her late husband, Fred, and gave a performance of The Rolling Stones classic, Gimme Shelter. As the closing number of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony, Smith's "People Have the Power" was used for the big celebrity jam that always ends the program.
From March 28 to June 22, 2008 the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris hosted a major exhibition of the visual work of Patti Smith, "Land 250", drawn from pieces created between 1967 and 2007. At the 2008 Rowan Commencement ceremony, Smith received an honorary doctorate degree for her contributions to popular culture. Smith is the subject of a 2008 documentary film, "Patti Smith: Dream of Life". http://www.dreamoflifethemovie.com/
In June 2012, Smith released her 11th studio album, "Banga." In an interview on CBS News Sunday Morning on April 1, 2012, Smith explained the album's title: "for those who are curious, you can find what Banga is if you read The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov." In The Master and Margarita, Banga is Pontius Pilate's dog who Pilate could freely complain about the hemicrania that tortured him. Other songs on the album were also inspired by literature, particularly "April Fool," inspired by Nikolai Gogol.
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Piss Factory
Patti Smith Lyrics
Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴
I got this job in a piss factory inspecting pipe
Forty hours thirty-six dollars a week
But it's a paycheck, Jack.
It's so hot in here, hot like Sahara
You could faint in the heat
But these bitches are just too lame to understand
Too goddamned grateful to get this job
All these women they got no teeth or gum or cranium
And the way they suck hot sausage
But me well I wasn't sayin' too much neither
I was moral school girl hard-working asshole
I figured I was speedo motorcycle
I had to earn my dough, had to earn my dough
But no you gotta, you gotta [relate, babe,]
You gotta find the rhythm within
Floor boss slides up to me and he says
"Hey sister, you just movin' too fast,
You screwin' up the quota,
You doin' your piece work too fast,
Now you get off your mustang sally
You ain't goin' nowhere, you ain't goin' nowhere."
I lay back. I get my nerve up. I take a swig of Romilar
And walk up to hot shit Dot Hook and I say
"Hey, hey sister it don't matter whether I do labor fast or slow,
There's always more labor after."
She's real Catholic, see. She fingers her cross and she says
"There's one reason. There's one reason.
You do it my way or I push your face in.
We knee you in the john if you don't get off your get off your mustang Sally,
If you don't shake it up baby." Shake it up, baby. Twist & shout"
Oh that I could will a radio here. James Brown singing
"I Lost Someone" or the Jesters and the Paragons
And Georgie Woods the guy with the goods and Guided Missiles ...
But no, I got nothin', no diversion, no window,
Nothing here but a porthole in the plaster, in the plaster,
Where I look down, look at sweet Theresa's convent
All those nurses, all those nuns scattin' 'round
With their bloom hoods like cats in mourning.
Oh to me they, you know, to me they look pretty damn free down there
Down there not having crystal smooth
Not having to smooth those hands against hot steel
Not having to worry about the [inspeed] the dogma the [inspeed] of labor
They look pretty damn free down there,
And the way they smell, the way they smell
And here I gotta be up here smellin' Dot Hook's midwife sweat
I would rather smell the way boys smell--
Oh those schoolboys the way their legs flap under the desks in study hall
That odor rising roses and ammonia
And way their dicks droop like lilacs
Or the way they smell that forbidden acrid smell
But no I got, I got pink clammy lady in my nostril
Her against the wheel me against the wheel
Oh slow motion inspection is drivin' me insane
In steel next to Dot Hook -- oh we may look the same--
Shoulder to shoulder sweatin' 110 degrees
But I will never faint, I will never faint
They laugh and they expect me to faint but I will never faint
I refuse to lose, I refuse to fall down
Because you see it's the monotony that's got to me
Every afternoon like the last one
Every afternoon like a rerun next to Dot Hook
And yeah we look the same
Both pumpin' steel, both sweatin'
But you know she got nothin' to hide
And I got something to hide here called desire
I got something to hide here called desire
And I will get out of here--
You know the fiery potion is just about to come
In my nose is the taste of sugar
And I got nothin' to hide here save desire
And I'm gonna go, I'm gonna get out of here
I'm gonna get out of here, I'm gonna get on that train,
I'm gonna go on that train and go to New York City
I'm gonna be somebody, I'm gonna get on that train, go to New York City,
I'm gonna be so bad I'm gonna be a big star and I will never return,
Never return, no, never return, to burn out in this piss factory
And I will travel light.
Oh, watch me now.
"Piss Factory" by the Patti Smith Group is a powerful and evocative song about the experiences of working-class women in the factory industry. The lyrics describe the singer's own experiences working in a "piss factory" where she inspects pipes for forty hours a week at the rate of thirty-six dollars. The factory is a hot and oppressive environment, with the women who work there being treated horribly by their bosses and forced to work long hours with little pay.
Despite the harshness of their working conditions, the women in the factory are grateful just to have a job. Their lack of education and opportunities means that they are powerless to improve their lot in life, and the singer is surrounded by colleagues with "no teeth or gum or cranium." At first, the singer herself feels resigned to her fate, describing herself as a "moral school girl hard-working asshole" who is only motivated by the need to "earn my dough."
However, as the song progresses, the singer becomes increasingly disillusioned with her job and more determined to escape. She confronts her boss and demands to be treated with respect, telling him that she will not be forced to work at a quota that is impossible to meet. She dreams of leaving the factory and heading to New York City, where she hopes to become a big star and escape the monotony of her life.
Overall, "Piss Factory" is a powerful and evocative song that captures the realities of working-class life in America in the 1960s. Through the experiences of its narrator, the song highlights the lack of opportunities available to women in this era and the ways in which they were often forced to accept degrading and low-paying jobs simply to survive.
Line by Line Meaning
Sixteen and time to pay off
I’m sixteen and I need to make money
I got this job in a piss factory inspecting pipe
I began working in a factory that manufactures pipes
Forty hours thirty-six dollars a week
I work 40 hours per week and earn $36
But it's a paycheck, Jack.
I’m grateful to have a steady income
It's so hot in here, hot like Sahara
The factory is extremely hot
You could faint in the heat
It’s so hot that a person could faint
But these bitches are just too lame to understand
My coworkers are ignorant and unhelpful
Too goddamned grateful to get this job
They are grateful for the job but don’t realize its negatives
To know they're getting screwed up the ass
They are being taken advantage of
All these women they got no teeth or gum or cranium
My female coworkers are uneducated and unskilled
And the way they suck hot sausage
They cater to men and try to fit in with them
But me well I wasn't sayin' too much neither
I don’t talk much either
I was moral school girl hard-working asshole
I was a hardworking student in high school
I figured I was speedo motorcycle
I want to live a fast-paced life
I had to earn my dough, had to earn my dough
I need to work hard to make money
But no you gotta, you gotta [relate, babe,]
But you have to find your own way, sweetheart.
You gotta find the rhythm within
You have to find your own unique way to succeed
Floor boss slides up to me and he says
My boss walks up to me
"Hey sister, you just movin' too fast,
"Hey, you’re working too fast
You screwin' up the quota,
You’re not meeting the production quota
You doin' your piece work too fast,
You’re working too quickly on your individual tasks
Now you get off your mustang sally
Slow down and take a break
You ain't goin' nowhere, you ain't goin' nowhere."
You’re not going to get anywhere working like this
I lay back. I get my nerve up. I take a swig of Romilar
I take a deep breath and take a sip of cough syrup to help me relax
And walk up to hot shit Dot Hook and I say
I approach my coworker, Dot Hook
"Hey, hey sister it don't matter whether I do labor fast or slow,
"It doesn’t matter how fast or slow I work
There's always more labor after."
There will always be more work to do
She's real Catholic, see. She fingers her cross and she says
My coworker is religious and crosses herself before speaking
"There's one reason. There's one reason.
"I have one reason for making you work harder
You do it my way or I push your face in.
Do what I say or suffer the consequences
We knee you in the john if you don't get off your get off your mustang Sally,
We will physically hurt you if you don’t take a break
If you don't shake it up baby." Shake it up, baby. Twist & shout"
You need to change things up or move around
Oh that I could will a radio here. James Brown singing
I wish I had a radio to listen to music
"I Lost Someone" or the Jesters and the Paragons
Songs by James Brown or other similar artists
And Georgie Woods the guy with the goods and Guided Missiles ...
References to popular DJs and music shows
But no, I got nothin', no diversion, no window,
But I have nothing to distract me
Nothing here but a porthole in the plaster, in the plaster,
The only thing I have to look at is a small hole in the wall
Where I look down, look at sweet Theresa's convent
I look down at the nearby convent
All those nurses, all those nuns scattin' 'round
I see the nuns and nurses going about their business
With their bloom hoods like cats in mourning.
The nuns' hoods look like cat ears
Oh to me they, you know, to me they look pretty damn free down there
To me, they look really free where they are
Down there not having crystal smooth
They don’t have to deal with difficult machines and tasks
Not having to smooth those hands against hot steel
They don’t have to work with hot steel like I do
Not having to worry about the [inspeed] the dogma the [inspeed] of labor
They don’t have to deal with the strictness and monotony of factory work
They look pretty damn free down there,
They look really free down there
And the way they smell, the way they smell
The nuns and nurses smell good
And here I gotta be up here smellin' Dot Hook's midwife sweat
Meanwhile, I have to smell my coworker’s body odor
I would rather smell the way boys smell--
I’d rather smell the scent of boys
Oh those schoolboys the way their legs flap under the desks in study hall
I miss the sight of boys’ legs flapping under their desks
That odor rising roses and ammonia
I miss the smell of roses and ammonia that came with being around boys
And way their dicks droop like lilacs
I miss the way their genitals would hang down
Or the way they smell that forbidden acrid smell
I miss the way they smelled attractive and intriguing
But no I got, I got pink clammy lady in my nostril
Instead, I smell my female coworker
Her against the wheel me against the wheel
We’re both working hard and sweating
Oh slow motion inspection is drivin' me insane
These slow inspections are driving me crazy
In steel next to Dot Hook -- oh we may look the same--
Dot Hook and I work together in the steel factory
Shoulder to shoulder sweatin' 110 degrees
We’re standing next to each other, sweating in the heat
But I will never faint, I will never faint
I won’t ever let the heat get to me
They laugh and they expect me to faint but I will never faint
My coworkers make fun of me for not fainting
I refuse to lose, I refuse to fall down
I won’t let them beat me down
Because you see it's the monotony that's got to me
It’s the repetition that’s getting to me
Every afternoon like the last one
Every day feels the same
Every afternoon like a rerun next to Dot Hook
Every day feels like a repeat
And yeah we look the same
Dot Hook and I look alike
Both pumpin' steel, both sweatin'
We’re both working hard
But you know she got nothin' to hide
But Dot Hook doesn’t seem to have anything to worry about
And I got something to hide here called desire
Meanwhile, I have something to hide: my passion for something more
I got something to hide here called desire
I keep my desires locked up inside
And I will get out of here--
But I will escape this place
You know the fiery potion is just about to come
I sense that my big break is coming
In my nose is the taste of sugar
I can taste something sweet in the air
And I got nothin' to hide here save desire
I have nothing to worry about except for my desire for a better life
And I'm gonna go, I'm gonna get out of here
I’m going to escape this place once and for all
I'm gonna get on that train,
I’m going to board a train
go to New York City,
I’m going to travel to NYC
I'm gonna be somebody,
I’m going to make a name for myself
I'm gonna be so bad I'm gonna be a big star and I will never return,
I’m going to be successful and never come back to this place
Never return, no, never return, to burn out in this piss factory
I don’t want to end up like I would have if I stayed in this factory for too long
And I will travel light.
I won’t bring much with me on my journey
Oh, watch me now.
Just watch me go
Lyrics © Warner Chappell Music, Inc.
Written by: PATTI SMITH, RICHARD A SOHL
Lyrics Licensed & Provided by LyricFind