Patti Smith Group Radio Ethiopia

With Radio Ethiopia, the follow-up to Patti Smith’s stunning 1975 debut album Horses, the singer was determined to continue to push the edges of the envelope of poetry and rock ’n’ roll—and to execute the clause in her record contract that said she had complete creative control. Both Smith and Lenny Kaye, her guitarist and otherwise major-domo, have said that Radio Ethiopia wasn’t an album of songs, that it was an album of fields—and that this was why critics and fans didn’t understand it. Everyone is wrong here. The main culprit on Radio Ethiopia—released in 1976, and credited to Patti Smith Group—is the album’s title track, a 10-minute stream-of-consciousness improv that then segues into a much shorter improv dubbed “Abyssinia”. So we’re talking no more than 12 minutes of free jazz, all of which took place at the end of the record—a challenge, for sure, but not the sole reason why some fans were turned off by Radio Ethiopia. What really frustrated listeners was the production. After the challenges of working with The Velvet Underground’s John Cale on Horses, it made sense that Smith would want to try working with a more commercial producer, which is what she got in Jack Douglas. But unlike Cale, Douglas had no idea who he was working with—or what they should sound like. The result was the kind of flattened, guitar-centric production—a sound that was all over FM radio in the mid-1970s, but that did the compositions on Radio Ethiopia a serious disservice. And, to be sure, there are great tunes here: The clanging riff that opens “Ask the Angels” is as stirring a battle cry as anyone would ever write. And “Ain’t It Strange” is one of the best songs in Smith’s repertoire, full of heat and tension and jump-cut imagery straight out of an art-house film. “Pissing in a River”, a riveting ballad sung with tangible anger and sadness, also has its place among Smith’s greatest hits. And “Distant Fingers”, co-written with Blue Öyster Cult’s Allen Lanier—Smith’s main squeeze at the time—is a snaky, hypnotic paean to extraterrestrial life. Musically and lyrically, Radio Ethiopia isn’t that different from Horses. But the production chokes the life out of all of it.