no rules, no limits: Robert Puccinelli on patti smith’s “hey joe”

In 1955, nineteen years before Patti Smith covered “Hey Joe”, a Greenwich Village folkie named Niela Miller wrote a song called “Baby Don’t Go Downtown.” It’s the story of a discontented woman whose man “puts her down,” so she heads to a bar to talk to the young men “hanging around.” In the last verse her man pleads:

Baby, please, don’t go to town
Baby, please, don’t go to town
Cause when you’re flirtin’ and your full of gin
One of those boys is gonna do you in
And your man, he won’t be around,
Your own man, he won’t be around.

The man she’s trying to escape from is warning her of the dangers of escape. He’s telling her to stay home and be an obedient good girl.
Billy Roberts liked the song his girlfriend had written so he stole it, made the man into the murderer of a cheating woman, and copyrighted it. A woman’s song became a man’s song. “Other performers including Pete Seeger recognized that it had been developed from Niela Miller's song. Seeger offered to testify on her behalf so she could claim part of the credit for "Hey Joe", but this was not pursued” (Leonardi, American Pastimes). Countless covers followed, but Niela Miller’s original went unheard until 2009 when the Numero Group released their transfer of “a warped, badly damaged, one-of-a-kind acetate.” Her version outdoes her former boyfriend’s. His voice is nondescript, conventional. Hers chimes yet carries a spooky, haunting intensity, and an undercurrent of sorrow. It’s as if she has briefly stepped out of eternity into time to play us her songs before vanishing again.
Billy Roberts busked around the USA and Europe with Dino Valenti. When Valenti moved to LA he started performing the song and copyrighted it as his own original composition. Roberts eventually won the rights back but was forced to share his profits with the LA publishing company that Valenti had used. In 2011 Niela Miller wrote to a Wordpress site dedicated to the song: “He stole it from me, kept the melody and put different words to it, thereby turning it into ‘Hey Joe’. My music publisher at the time advised me against suing Billy because Dino Valenti’s name appeared on the recording and it would have been a long and expensive process. Please let Billy know that whenever he wants to make amends, I would welcome it.”
The first hit version came from The Leaves, a shard of screaming psychedelia. Their amphetamine rush inspired countless garage bands. Covers from the Standells, the Surfaris, Love, the Byrds, and others followed in quick succession. Then, in 1966, Tim Rose, a Greenwich Village folkie, recorded his version. Rose slowed the rhythm to a crawl and brought out the menace. The narrator asks, “Hey, Joe. Where you goin’ with that gun in your hand?” He replies, “I’m going to shoot my woman. I caught her messing round with another man.” In case we have any questions about whether the act is premeditated, he says it twice.
The Rose version served as the template for Jimi Hendrix’s iconic debut single. Jimi thoroughly personifies the killer. “I gave her the gun,” he brags. “I shot her!” When he hits the chugging riff it’s as if we can see the bullets flying (“alright, shoot her one more time again”) until the woman’s body is filled with lead and his rage is dissipated. Then he is on the run, a glorious outlaw heading to Mexico. There “ain’t no hangman gonna put a rope around me.” He just wants to “be free.”
In 1969 Patti Smith lived in a rent-controlled apartment in the Chelsea Hotel with her boyfriend, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. One day she walked into the bar-restaurant adjacent to the hotel and, as she writes in Just Kids, “at the last table facing the door was Jimi Hendrix, his head lowered, eating with his hat on…. When I went back upstairs I felt an inexplicable sense of kinship…. Infinite possibilities seemed to swirl” (105-6).
On August 26,1970, Patti walked downtown to the grand opening party for the guitarist’s Electric Lady Studios, “but when I got there, I couldn’t bring myself to go in. By chance, Jimi Hendrix came up the stairs and found me sitting there like some hick wallflower. When I told him I was too chicken to go in, he laughed softly and said that contrary to what people might think, he was shy, and parties made him nervous.” Hendrix shared his vision for his studio with her—musicians from all over the world gathering together and just playing. “They would keep on playing through their discordance until they found a common language. The language of peace” (168-9). 23 days after their conversation he overdosed on barbiturates and died.
Smith and Mapplethorpe stopped living together in 1972 (as she writes, his burgeoning homosexuality meant they had to “redefine what our love was called”) but remained close. In 1974 he offered to pay for a one-day recording session at Electric Lady Studios to be produced by her guitarist, rock critic Lenny Kaye. She writes, “In homage to Jimi, we decided to record ‘Hey Joe’” (241).
When Patti entered the studio that June afternoon, her given namesake was on the run. Newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, head of the nation’s largest newspaper chain and Orson Welles’ model for Citizen Kane. On February 4 of that year, at the age of 19, Patty had been kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army from her apartment in Berkeley where she attended university. The story became the first modern media circus. News crews staked out the Hearst mansion and reported on developments daily. The nation tuned in on TV.
Donald DeFreeze had escaped from Soledad State Prison in 1973. White members of the radical left in the San Francisco Bay Area helped hide him. Eleven of them became his soldiers when he created the Symbionese Liberation Army. DeFreeze changed his name to Cinque to honor the slave who’d led a rebellion aboard the ship Amistad. Most people wondered where the country being liberated appeared on a map, but Cinque explained that “the name Symbionese is taken from the word symbiosis and we define its meaning as a body of dissimilar bodies and organisms living in deep and loving harmony and partnership in the best interests of all within the body.... Death to the Fascist insect that preys upon the lives of the people.”
The SLA’s debut “revolutionary” action had been the killing with cyanide tipped bullets of the first ever black school superintendent of Oakland for being a “fascist.” Two members of the group had been caught during a routine traffic stop and charged with the crime; Hearst had been kidnapped to facilitate their release. When the authorities refused to comply, the SLA changed their terms. They stated that her release was contingent upon the immediate creation of a program to feed the poor. Hearst’s father complied and spent 2 million dollars to set up four sites in the Bay Area. However, people fought each other over the food and the distribution descended into chaos. In response the government declared the operation illegal. Subsequently, the SLA sent an audiotape to the media in which Patty herself complained, “No one received any beef or lamb. Sounds like most of the food was of bad quality anyway. It certainly doesn’t sound like the kind of food our family is used to eating.”
On April 3 the SLA released another tape with Patty announcing that she’d changed her name to Tania (after a guerrilla heroine of the Cuban Revolution). She was proud to be working alongside people who were “willing to die for what they believe,” people who were “fighting for the freedom of all oppressed people.”
Then on April 15 Hearst was captured on surveillance video holding a semi-automatic M1 Carbine while robbing a bank in San Francisco. While wielding her weapon she yelled, “I’m Tania. Up, up, up against the wall, motherfuckers.” In the subsequent SLA recording she stated, “Consciousness is terrifying to the ruling class, and they will do anything to discredit people who have realized that the only alternative to freedom is death.”  
The whole country had been longing for a glimpse of Patty ever since the kidnapping and now here she was. She’d discarded her given name and chosen a new identity. She’d left behind her privileged upbringing and joined the revolution. She was a living embodiment of the generation gap. On their 1988 album Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, Camper Van Beethoven released a nostalgic song evoking the perhaps subconscious feelings the story aroused in viewers:  

Oh, my beloved Tania,
How I long to see your face
Photographed in fifteen second intervals
In a bank in San Leandro.
Oh, my beloved revolutionary sweetheart,
I can see your newsprint face turn yellow in the gutter.
It makes me sad.
How I long for the days when you came to liberate us from boredom,
From driving around,
From the hours between five and seven in the evening.
My beloved Tania,
We carry your gun deep within our hearts
For no better reason than our lives have no meaning
And we want to be on television.

When Camper Van Beethoven recorded their song, they knew Hearst had been caught, found guilty, and sentenced to 7 years in prison despite arguing she’d been locked in a closet for 57 days and raped by both Donald DeFreeze/Cinque and Willie Wolfe/Cujo. But on June 5 in 1974, Patti Smith doesn’t know how the story ends. She’s in the middle of it and that’s where her a cappella opening places us:  

Patty Hearst,
You 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
Or were you really dead.
And now that you're on the run what goes on in your mind?
Your sisters they sit by the window.
And all your mama does is sit and cry.
And your daddy,
Well you know what your daddy said Patty,
He said, he said, he said,
Sixty days ago she was such a lovely child.
Now here she is with a gun in her hand…”

Smith has not only reclaimed the song for the woman who wrote it, she has taken the gun from a man’s hands and placed it in a woman’s. Just as Jimi Hendrix became the Joe of the song, Patti becomes Patty. When Patti/Patty sings about being free, the entire meaning of the song resides in that freedom. We can feel it. It’s as if she’s jumped off a cliff but doesn’t fall. As Tom Verlaine’s guitar spirals upwards, her voice chases it to the heavens. There are no rules, no limits, no prison walls. For five minutes we are with her, outlaws on the run, outside of society, the place we wanna be. We are beyond the law, beyond our fear, out there where everything is possible. The song keeps rising and we keep ascending with Patti, hypnotized into sharing her trance, into forgetting the world around us, growing larger and larger, bigger than ourselves until we are mythic heroes building a new world, the vanguard of a revolution. If anyone tries to stop us, they’ll be in a heap of trouble.
In this, her very first recording, Patti is already embodying the figure she will become for so many. In all lives there is fear, but we are attracted to those who seem fearless. Whether or not that fearlessness is only a temporary illusion doesn’t matter—we just want to sense it and feel it and know it is real for at least a moment. Because if it’s real once, it can be real again, it can bolster us in our moments of doubt, and we can revisit that fearlessness each time we play the record. As Viv Albertine of legendary punk band The Slits expresses it in her autobiography, “[Patti Smith] is all the things I hide deep inside myself that can’t come out…. She dares to let go in front of everyone, puts herself out there and risks falling flat on her face.” As Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth says, “People pay money to see others believe in themselves.”
Director Mike Nichols said that there are only three times when we are not ourselves: when we’re sneezing, laughing, or having an orgasm. Patti would add scores of experiences to that number. The spirit of poetry carries her outside herself. She rides the waves of guitars that she calls her “Radio Ethiopia,” inhabiting the nirvana of music. She escapes her mortal coil when she spins like a dervish (in 1977 she lost her balance, tumbled off the stage into the orchestra pit, and broke her neck). As she chants like a mantra in her song “Pumping,” she’s after “total abandon.” “Total abandon” is as appropriate a motto for her art as E.M. Forster’s “Only connect” was for his.
It’s difficult to find such absolute abandon in life, but in music the lines between fantasy and reality blur. If you’ve sung along with gangsta rap, you’ve probably bragged about killing mofos left and right, rejoiced in the gun blasts, and lost count of the corpses. We can’t live as outlaws, but we do in music, pushing past our civilized boundaries. Breaking the rules and defying convention is what gives us that forbidden thrill of total freedom. When queried by Rolling Stone, Patti defiantly said that she jerked off to the picture of herself with unshaven armpits on the cover of her album Easter. “I thought if I could do it as an experiment, then 15-year-old boys could do it, and that would make me very happy…. A very high orgasm is a way of communication with our Creator.” “You jerk off to the Bible too?” the interviewer asks. “Definitely,” she answers.
The strange thing about music and art is that the morality of the world can be briefly jettisoned. The reality is that that the SLA killed innocent people (though Patty Hearst fortunately did not). But in the fantasy of the song, they are Robin Hood feeding the poor. Would any of us really want to escape civilization? Permanently, perhaps not. But for five minutes in a song, we do want to. We want the riffs and the myths to take us into forbidden country. We want to experience the thrill of holding up a bank. We want the fantasy to feel real, to speak for the things “[we] hide deep within [ourselves] that can’t come out.”
That’s what art does for us. That’s what artists do for us. When Patti signed my copy of Just Kids, I said a strange, embarrassing thing. I told her she was my first girlfriend. Thankfully, she wasn’t befuddled by my weird violation of normalcy. She looked at me, nodding, and said, “I understand.”
Someone somewhere in the gendered world of the past said that women have birth and men have war. In the original cover version of Niela Miller’s song, her ex describes what a man does if he catches a woman cheating on him. He shoots her. The power is in the weapon and the weapon is a substitute for his cuckolded penis. Patti takes the power of a man and a man’s song and makes it hers. She gives the gun to a woman, not for revenge but to liberate her from the shackles of her proscribed role. To free her for birth. A birth that happens in the moment as Patti improvises. She demolishes the barrier between thought and expression, collapses the time between impulse and utterance, even reverses it sometimes so that the words come out with no thought whatsoever, an aural equivalent of her friend William Burroughs’ cut-up technique. Something new will be created from the amalgamation.
Patti’s cover version is art being borne out of a collective social process (on a literal level, from Niela to her ex to Tim Rose to Jimi Hendrix to Patty Hearst to Robert Mapplethorpe providing the money that preserved it on wax for our ears to hear decades later). Everything in her experience finds its way into the cosmic soup that is her art. Her lovers who were junkies “with holes in the arms” like Jim Carroll. The artists of the past like Rimbaud who for her are still living presences, as alive as they ever were. Her relationship with Mapplethorpe who left her when he embraced his desire for men. Her verbal improvisations echo the Beats she befriended (like Allen Ginsberg who hit on her because he thought she was a boy). The pianist on “Hey Joe”, Richard Sohl, is nicknamed DNV after Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice because of his uncanny resemblance to the attractive boy the book’s protagonist lusts after. She invites Tom Verlaine (his surname inspired by a French Symbolist poet) of the band Television to overdub a guitar solo and then overdub another atop the first.
Patti doesn’t change the song’s original lyrics. (When she covered Van Morrison’s “Gloria”, she refused to alter the gender to make the song heterosexual.) She seems to instinctively perceive such alterations as a form of self-censorship. For “Hey Joe” she keeps the basic story but grafts Patty Hearst’s story atop it so that Patty becomes the legend of the song. Lenny Kaye strums and then classically trained DNV’s piano adorns the chords with an expressivity that elongates each moment. The primitive elemental drum pattern (overdubbed by Kaye) evokes Maureen Tucker’s work with the Velvet Underground. With its slowly shifting chords, the song is a circle repeating, its bottommost layer in its way as minimalist as Phillip Glass. Atop it all Verlaine’s guitars are like surrealistic dreaming, an apparition lurking behind the music, threatening to break free and overwhelm everything.
In 1974 a woman owning the stage without playing a sex object was fairly unprecedented. Joan Jett has written about how the Runaways provoked hostility because they were female and wanted to rock and that wasn’t allowed. But like her version of “Hey Joe”, Patti steps beyond the boundaries of gender with androgynous swagger. In a live performance from Stockholm, we see her improvising a different beginning to the song, pausing at times for a few seconds, waiting for a crucial word to arrive from the ether, Mapplethorpe in her mind. “If you are male / and choose other than female / you must take the responsibility of holding the key to… freedom. / Every time I swirl down with no word, it doesn’t matter. / Ahh excuse me, for not being free. / Fucking one moment, so precious to me.”
At its climax, Patti transforms Jimi Hendrix’s song of revenge into Hearst’s song of liberation. “No one is gonna give me life,” Patti/Patty declares because she’s seizing it for herself. Patty’s birthright is no longer her heritage but her desire, her desire to live life to its fullest, to live in ecstasy every second of her existence. The stars become holes in the arms of a junkie (a friend told me the first time he injected heroin he saw the face of God). The layers of guitars become a wall of sound, a choir of chaos, the sound of the horizon. They make you want to throw your arms wide like Jesus Christ staring out at the ocean ready to be crucified by nails that will never come. If a penis is a gun, a vulva is a bomb. Patti as Patty stares up at:

The stars as big as holes in the arms.
The sky like a back drop, like a flag.
And I was standin' there in front of that flag
With a car bomb
Between my legs.

What is the primary precept Smith lived by during this phase of her career? She tells us: “Freedom is inside of me. It means I’m not hung up on anyone’s idea of how I should be. I’m outside of society, I’m an artist, rock n roll is my art. I’m free because I can leap up and scream. I can put my fist up in the air. I don’t give a shit. I’m not afraid of death. I’m not afraid of anything except fear itself.” And so she sings:

I feel so free of death.
Beyond me.
I feel so free.
The FBI is looking for me,
But they’re never gonna find me.

When prison awaits, you love your freedom. When death is chasing you, you love life. When you’re running for your life, you’re treasuring your life. Jail awaits, but at the moment of this recording, Patti Smith doesn’t know the ending of the story and so she places us there forever, feeling our freedom as we fuse with her, and she fuses with Patty. Art is a tool for empathy, but it is also a tool for liberation to show us what life can be, how we can feel, because it zeroes in on the transcendent moments of existence and makes them repeatable.
Gloria Steinem has written that the Seventies were the decade when women finally began to break free from the prison of patriarchy. “Who were you when the Seventies began?” she asked. “And who were you when they ended?” In “Hey Joe” Patty Hearst is rejecting the gender role assigned to her. As the song nears its end, she sings:

They can speculate what I’m feeling.
But daddy, daddy, you’ll never know just what I’m feeling.
But I’ll tell you.
I am no little pretty little rich girl.
I am nobody’s million dollar baby.
I am nobody’s patsy anymore.
And I feel
So free.

With those words she falls silent and lets the guitars carry us away across the sea of possibilities. For five minutes we experience absolute freedom. And the promise of that feeling is that we can feel it again and again and again. We don’t need guns to get there. We just need guitars and our ears. We just need to let the music take us until we are whirling like dervishes. Until we are riding the rhythm. Until we have stepped out of time into the eternal present.  

Robert Puccinelli earned an MFA at DePaul University with his thesis Remote Viewing starring Joe Swanberg. He’s currently editing Song for Survival, a film shot in Nigeria in the Egun language, as well as completing his first play and his first novel (he's been published in The Brooklyn Review and The Chicago Reader). His alter ego performs standup (Zanies and The Improv). He played the lead role in Maggot Brain (https://vimeo.com/268491213). He sings and plays keyboards in the band Happy Nice People (debut album coming in 2023). He’s eaten saltah in Yemen, studied drumming in Cuba, and climbed the pyramids in Egypt. On YouTube you can see him dancing in Myro's video for the song "Sugar" (https://youtu.be/1XLMoz45uoI) or see his photos in the Wayne Nelsen videos "With" (https://youtu.be/I59sGSKm2L4) and "Regiment" (https://youtu.be/BMC1JrDqLeQ). His website needs work (https://www.robertopuccinelli.com/). He wonders who wrote this bio.