At last summer's Lollapalooza, Patti Smith made a surprise, unscheduled appearance at, of all places, the kids' pavilion. In front of an audience composed of half parents with children and half music critics, Smith chose to rail against Israel's then-raging bombing campaign in Lebanon. Poor judgment? Perhaps. But at 60, Smith remains every bit the firebrand she's always been, and as such she suffers no fools.
Yet all the same, her position as some high priestess of punk has long felt a little misplaced; she's more a punk by association than in practice. No musical radical, unlike many of her ready-to-raze peers, Smith's tastes were mostly classic rock and catholic. She may have hung with Tom Verlaine and Joey Ramone at CBGB's, but her musical heroes were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison. It was "Hey Joe" on the A-side of her first single, not "Piss Factory", and the lead track of her debut Horses, infamously, was a career-defining take on Van Morrison's "Gloria". (And when that song was released as a single, its B-side was a cover of the Who's "My Generation".)
Hendrix and the Doors make appearances on Twelve, Smith's shockingly conservative 11th studio album, which comprises 12 mostly predictable covers and seems suspiciously timed to take advantage of Smith's recent induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (after seven straight years of being nominated). Cover albums can be more than the last refuge of the creatively bankrupt, but that takes some work and ingenuity. Yet several of these obvious songs are so iconic one wonders why Smith even bothered.
Of course Smith loves "Gimme Shelter"-- who doesn't? But why would anyone reach for Smith's version over the Stones', especially when Smith brings nothing new to a song whose original performance still drips with danger, menace and mystery? The same could be said for Jefferson Airplane's creepy bad-trip signifier "White Rabbit" or Hendrix's mystical "Are You Experienced?" As for the Doors' funky "Soul Kitchen", Smith could have learned a few lessons from X's version, approaching the original as a point of departure instead of as a template for a mostly sluggish tribute. The less said about what Smith does to Stevie Wonder's "Pastime Paradise" the better.
Sadly, nothing on Twelve is as intriguing as Smith's mournful cover of Prince's "When Doves Cry" (included on her 2002 collection "Land"), though Twelve's sole concession to anything that's happened in the past two decades-- a take on Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit"-- at least reinvents the song as a neo-bluegrass dirge (featuring longtime friend Sam Shepard; Flea and Verlaine guest elsewhere). Alas, it also proves its hoariest boomer cliché, the kind of thing you'd expect Smith to earnestly perform at Kurt Cobain's own 2014 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction.
For that matter, only a pair of other songs even hail from the post-punk era, a head-scratching version of Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" (whose sweet, less-than-insistent rendition cancels the oft-overlooked seriousness of the lyrics) and Paul Simon's "The Boy in the Bubble" (a faithful shuffle, retaining the bounding Afro-pop groove of the original but little of the life, even if it features one of Smith's most playful and expressive vocals).
The problem with Twelve isn't the staid song selection so much as this dogged insistence on staying faithful to the originals. Thus "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" stays (another) pleasant shuffle, and Neil Young's "Helpless" sounds exactly like something Young himself might play at one of his gigs. Across the board the readings are relatively straight and the performances proficient to the point of plodding. You know where each song is going before it gets there.
The sole standout track that strays from the obvious comes, ironically, courtesy that most storied source of cover material, Bob Dylan. Yes, Dylan covers abound, but Smith at least chose the slightly more obscure mid-period "Changing of the Guards" from his Street Legal album. Her version strips away much of Dylan's late 70s cheese, even if the atmospheric rendition comes off like someone's been hitting the Neko Case pretty hard. Smith's "Within You Without You" similarly makes the most of one of the Beatles' more divisive songs, but the results are more interesting than actually compelling.
Smith's comeback has been one of the most welcome and impressive of the reunion-rife post-grunge era. Her albums still seize, spark, and scream like Smith did at any of her scattered peaks. Twelve, on the other hand, is nothing but a big comedown, a placeholder in a career that's long been about soldiering forward, not stumbling backward. It's not an album to get lost in. It's an album you listen to once, then lose. It makes you long for another comeback, the sooner the better to redeem this pointless misstep.
