PATTI SMITH - PEOPLE HAVE THE POWER

Patti Smith

 

I have to thank Telma for suggesting this new entry.

PEOPLE HAVE THE POWER is a beautiful song and it tells us what we can do nowadays because politicians can´t forget they are ruling the countries but PEOPLE HAVE THE POWER.

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Patti Smith

Sheryl Crow

Michael Stipe

People Have the Power

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LYRICS

PATTI SMITH LYRICS

"People Have The Power"

I was dreamin' in my dreamin'
Of an aspect bright and fair
And my sleepin' it was broken
But my dream it lingered near

In the form of shinin' valleys
Where the pure air recognized
Oh, and my senses newly opened
And I awakened to the cry

And the people have the power
To redeem the work of fools
From the meek the graces shower
It's decreed the people rule

People have the power
People have the power
People have the power
People have the power

Vengeful aspects became suspect
And bending low as if to hear
Well, and the armies ceased advancin'
Because the people had their ear

And the shepherds [[Incomprehensible]?] the soldiers
And they laid among the stars
Exchanging visions, layin' arms
To waste in the dust

In the form of shinin' valleys
Where the pure air recognized
And my senses newly opened
And I awakened to the cry

People have the power
People have the power
People have the power
People have the power

Where there were deserts, I saw fountains
Like cream the waters rise
And we strolled there together
With none to laugh or criticize

There is no leopard and the lamb
And lay together truly bound
Well I was hopin' in my hopin'
To recall what I had found

Well I was dreamin' in my dreamin'
God knows a pure view
As I lay down into my sleepin'
And I commit my dream with you

People have the power
People have the power
People have the power
People have the power

The power to dream, to rule
To wrestle the earth from fools
But it's decreed the people rule
But it's decreed the people rule

Listen, I believe everythin' we dream
Can come to pass through our union
We can turn the world around
We can turn the earth's revolution

We have the power
People have the power
People have the power
People have the power

The power to dream, to rule
To wrestle the earth from fools
But it's decreed the people rule
But it's decreed the people rule

We have the power
We have the power
People have the power
We have the power

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READING

Remembrances of the Punk

Prose Poetess

Patti Smith, along with her friend Robert Mapplethorpe, lived a particular New York dream—the Chelsea Hotel, Max’s Kansas City, CBGB, superstardom—to the fullest. Now in a great new memoir, she tells it like it was.

Each morning, after she records some “dream residue” in a notebook, Patti Smith walks from her brownstone on the edge of Soho to a coffee shop on Bedford Street, where she orders one cup of coffee and another of hot water, diluting the first with the second as she goes. She misplaced her glasses so she can’t do much in the way of work today—Smith toggles among music, prose, and photography, devoting equal time to each—but yesterday she was diligent, scribbling an elegy to Edgar Allan Poe and shooting some surreal photos in bed of a plaster replica of William Blake’s head, tucking his chin in her sheets. “A day doesn’t go by where I don’t create something,” says Smith. “Sometimes it’s a rough day and I’m about to go to sleep at eleven o’clock, but I’ll get my Polaroid and take pictures of a series of things. Then I go to bed really happy because I have something to look at, something I did.”

At 63, in a striped boater shirt and black combat boots, with her graying hair mostly stuffed under a black watch cap (the rest is massed on her shoulders, with tiny braids embedded here and there), Smith looks like the same punk-rocker who chanted that Jesus was “the great faggot in history” and kicked drinks onto music executives at one of her shows. As a female rock-and-roll star, she was predated only by the more feminine Grace Slick and blues-oriented Janis Joplin—an anti-feminist feminist icon who dressed androgynously, used dirty slang like William Burroughs, and argued that words like Ms. were “really bullshit,” as she said in 1976. “Vowels are the most illuminated letters in the alphabet, and these assholes take the only fucking vowel out of the word miss. It sounds like a sick bumblebee, it sounds frigid.” She’s willing to repent for some of the dicier declarations now. “If I’ve learned one thing in life,” she says, in a low, slow monotone, a little bit dazed, “it’s not to be so judgmental of other people.”

These days, Smith is interested in the earlier part of her life, the years spent aching for greatness in New York until she became famous with the release of Horses in 1975. She arrived from South Jersey nearly a decade earlier with $32 and a copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations in her plaid suitcase, sleeping on subways and in parks until she met the artist Robert Mapplethorpe, a Floral Park altar boy and Pratt student who became her first boyfriend. “I never expected that this modest shepherd-boy fella would one day wear gold lamé with a codpiece,” says Smith, in her unrepentantly thick Jersey accent. “But who would think a Holden Caulfield of a girl would end up fronting a rock-and-roll band?” Next week, Ecco will publish Just Kids, a shockingly beautiful book about their relationship, in which the roles evolved like Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s, or even the siblings of Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles. It’s a classic, a romance about becoming an artist in the city, written in a spare, simple style of boyhood memoirs like Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time.

Smith worked in part from a stack of teenage journals with her astrological sign on the front. “I have a good memory once it’s triggered, so with my notebooks, I could sit back and see things like a little movie,” she says. The process still took ten years and two publishers. She missed a significant deadline, the twentieth anniversary of Mapplethorpe’s death from complications related to AIDS. “It almost makes me cry, thinking about missing that date,” she says. “I was in Tennessee touring with my band, and I had to go in the wheat fields to call my editor with a cell phone. I kept saying to myself, ‘You have to tell him it’s not done. C’mon, be a man, be a man.’ ”

It’s surprising to hear that Smith, the paragon of cool, became so emotional, but Mapplethorpe nicknamed her Soakie because tears come so easily, and after I compliment her on the book, she begins to sob. “I’m so glad,” she says. “The galleys had imperfections, so I haven’t passed it around to my friends. I didn’t even give it to Sam Shepard, and he plays a nice part.” She warms both hands on one of the cups. “It’s so easy to take one aspect of Robert’s life and magnify that,” she says. “I don’t even know the breadth of his nocturnal life in the eighties. So I’m not only glad for me. I’m glad for Robert.”

Smith came on to Mapplethorpe first, when he appeared at Brentano’s bookstore on Fifth Avenue, where she had managed to become a clerk even though she was still sleeping on the street. He bought an ethnic necklace that she coveted: two panels of enamel on silk thread. “Don’t give it to any girl but me,” she declared. He appeared next in Tompkins Square Park, while she was on an unpleasant date with a science-fiction writer likely seeking to take advantage of her destitution, and took her out in the East Village for an egg cream. Mapplethorpe was tripping on acid at the time, but told Patricia Morrisroe, who wrote a biography of him in 1995, that Smith seemed stranger. “She was on the edge of being psychotic in a schizophrenic way,” said Mapplethorpe. “She told me stories, and I didn’t know if they were fiction or nonfiction. If she hadn’t discovered art, she would have wound up in a mental institution. But she had a lot of magic in her.”

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Patti Smith

Because The Night

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LYRICS

Patti Smith

BecauseThe Night

Take me now baby here as I am
Pull me close, try and understand
Desire is hunger is the fire I breathe
Love is a banquet on which we feed

Come on now try and understand
The way I feel when I'm in your hands
Take my hand come undercover
They can't hurt you now,
Can't hurt you now, can't hurt you now
Because the night belongs to lovers
Because the night belongs to lust
Because the night belongs to lovers
Because the night belongs to us

Have I doubt when I'm alone
Love is a ring, the telephone
Love is an angel disguised as lust
Here in our bed until the morning comes
Come on now try and understand
The way I feel under your command
Take my hand as the sun descends
They can't touch you now,
Can't touch you now, can't touch you now
Because the night belongs to lovers ...

With love we sleep
With doubt the vicious circle
Turn and burns
Without you I cannot live
Forgive, the yearning burning
I believe it's time, too real to feel
So touch me now, touch me now, touch me now
Because the night belongs to lovers ...

Because tonight there are two lovers
If we believe in the night we trust
Because tonight there are two lovers ...

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KARAOKE

Patti Smith

'Because the Night'

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Bruce Springsteen

Live at Glastonbury

Because The Night

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