Them, Patti Smith – “Gloria”

November 14th, 2017

The song "Gloria" holds the rare distinction of entering the canon of essential rock songs on two separate occasions. The original version by Them is a stripped-to-the bones torrent of raw sexual passion that paved the way for punk rock, and Patti Smith's version adds layers of depth to the song while maintaining its raw, primal, power.

Like much of the punk music it would influence, Them's "Gloria" is built on three chords, intermixed with a couple of open strums (when the strings of the guitar are struck without any of the frets being pressed), and, like the music of the punk bands that would follow in its footsteps, the song is a showcase for the amount of expressive power that a simplistic chord structure can produce.

There are no introductory elements, slow build-ups, or any delayed additions of instrumentation in the opening of Them's "Gloria", save the introduction of a barely audible two note organ part in the back of the mix on the song's fourth bar. Throughout the song the band really push the limits of what can be done with very minor modifications in song structure. Instead of something like an introduction to get listeners acclimated to the song, they hit the ground running. Them open “Gloria” with the whole band vamping the main riff at full force. There are two guitars present in a good chunk of the recording, and while you could technically call one a lead guitar and the other rhythm, since one is playing a melodic line and the other a progression of chords, for all practical purposes the chords are the dominant element, and the melody (which is nearly identical save a few flourishes) serves only to provide a little bit of ornamentation. The melodic accompaniment is only slightly different from the chords and bass, so I am not going to spend too much time with it compared with the other elements.

Before I go any further I'm going to have to explain a couple of key concepts. If you know a bit about music theory you can skip the next twelve paragraphs. If you don't, then learning the stuff I discuss in the next section, while a bit tricky, will pay dividends if you are interested in music, even if you don't play an instrument.

The first and most basic concept is consonance and dissonance. Consonance refers to notes that sound pleasing to the ear. Dissonance refers to notes that are unpleasing to the ear. You can remember this by looking at the prefixes, the “con” prefix essentially means unity, and it is used in congress, concord, conspire, conclave, etc. The prefix is used because it refers to a combination or series of notes that sound good with each other. The “dis” prefix is used for separation. Think disarray, dissect, disunity, discord, disjointed, etc. This prefix is used to refer to a combination or series of notes that sound bad together.

Now, there are different levels of consonance in music. In other words, you can imagine all the notes (A, A#, B, C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, and G#) as being arranged in a pyramid, where, at the top of the pyramid, the notes sound nicest (most consonant), and at the bottom they sound the harshest (most dissonant). Now, if you exclude the avant-garde, every passage of music has whats called a key. The key is the note that all the other notes are oriented around. The key can be any note, and each note has its own set of notes that work well with it. These notes are referred to as being “in key” with the key itself, which is also called the tonic.

So that is the biggest distinction on the pyramid. The bottom level are notes that are not in key and the next level up is notes that are, but you can keep going. To understand the next level up, you have to know that each of the notes in a key have a number in relation to the key itself, and that these numbers are called intervals. In the key of C major, the notes are C, D, E, F, G, A, and B (so no sharps). This means that C is the 1st, (again, usually called the tonic), D is the 2nd (also called a major 2nd), E is the 3rd (also called a major 3rd), the F is the 4th (aka the perfect 4th), G is the 5th (aka the perfect 5th), A is the 6th (aka the major 6th), and B is the 7th (aka the major 7th).

The reason those major/perfect titles are important is due to situations where a note that is not in key is used. For instance, if a song written in the key of C major has a C# in it, since D is the major 2nd, the C# would be called the minor 2nd. Now for those who are confused about why you only see sharps (#) when there are also flats (b), all of the sharpened notes can also be written as flattened notes, e.g. C# and Db are identical to each other. When and where you use sharp vs flat is not super important if you are not a musician, so I just used the sharps to keep things easier, since they are what we will use looking this song for the most part.

The other thing that needs to be understood is fairly simple, and that is the concept of chord. A chord is a group of different notes played at the same time. There are different kinds of chords, but the most common are major and minor (I know I already used the term major to refer to the key, but you just have to remember there are two circumstances where the terms major/minor are used.). The major chord is made up of the tonic (1st), the major 3rd, and the 5th. The minor chord is made up of the tonic, the minor 3rd, and the 5th. The reason you see the 5th and some variety of a 3rd is that certain intervals sound more consonant than others do. The 5th is by far the most pleasing, and both major and minor 3rds are ranked pretty high as well (behind the perfect 4th and major 6th in Paul Hindemith's ranking). The chords in “”Gloria” are all major.

Now, the vast majority of music in the Western tradition contains what is called a chord progression. This is a series of chords that are repeated throughout the course of a song or section. Even songs that do not have an explicit chord progression (i.e. they just have something like a guitar riff with no rhythm underneath it) usually have an implied one.

The chord progression in Them's “Gloria” (start to finish) is E major, D major, then A major. The E major chord is E, G#, and B. The D major chord is D, F#, and A. The A major chord is A, C#, and E. A quick note. While the words minor and major are used with both keys and chords, the term tonic is not. So when you are talking about the key you use the word tonic, and when you talk about chords you use the word root.

Now I want you to look at the notes of the A major scale. They are A, B, C#, D, E, F#, and G#. Notice how all the notes of the chords are part of the key. Thus the chords are the next level of the pyramid. In other words, if you have a song written in A major, but the chord progression has an E major chord in it, and while the rhythm guitar was playing said E chord, the lead guitar played a B, it would be in line with both the key and the chord, and thus at the highest level of the pyramid we have discussed thus far. However, if the guitarist played a C#, it would line up only with the key, and would thus sit one level below. If the guitarist played a D#, it would not even be part of the key, and would fall into the lowest level.

The highest level of the pyramid is just the root notes of the chords and the tonic of the key, and does not require further attention. There is, however, one final detail that needs to be explained before I can delve into the song itself, and that is modes.

Alright, so I wrote the last three paragraphs as if the song was in the key of A major to make things easier. It is true that all of the notes that are part of the key of A major are the same notes as the song's key, however, A is not the tonic. To try and keep things as simple as possible, you can think of each of the notes of A major as each potentially being the tonic, (i.e. the central note of the song) and when thhis happens it is referred to as being a mode. So, anytime the major 6th of a major scale is the tonic, it is called the minor mode. In other words, a song in the key of F# minor uses the exact same notes as one written in A major, it is just that the tonic is different. The tonic for “Gloria”, however is E, which is the 5th. When the 5th of a major scale is the tonic, the overly long word Mixolydian is used to describe it. So “Gloria” is in the key of E Mixolydian, or, as it is more commonly called, the mode of E Mixolydian.

The sound of the Mixolydian mode is closer to the major scale than the minor, but it is not quite as pleasant, and possesses a harder edge, and because of this it has been used in a lot of blues music. You can also see it in popular music that seeks to produce a more emotionally complex than the straight pleasure of a major key or the often maudlin sadness of a minor key, like The Beatles “Norwegian Wood”, Bruce Springsteen's “10th Avenue Freeze Out”, Bob Dylan's “Lay Lady Lay”, or Television's “Marquee Moon”. It is also used by metal bands who are searching for more mainstream appeal than can be found in songs using harmonic minor, melodic minor, or chromatic scales. Signals Music Studio put out a good video on AC/DC's use the Mixolydian mode that can be found here.

So with that out of the way lets go back to the notes in the key of E Mixolydian. There are essentially seven chords that fit really well with the key, and they correspond to the seven notes that make up the E Mixolydian scale (a term that, for our purposes, is basically synonymous with the E Mixolydian mode), E, F#, G#, A, B, C#, and D. The third of the seven notes doesn't concern us here, but each of the other six can be given a chord type (major or minor) and a roman numeral. The E major chord is I (also known as the tonic), F# minor is ii, A major is IV, B major is V, and C# minor is vi, and D major is the VII. The advantage of use these roman numerals instead of the chord names is that, regardless of the key, the numbers will stay the same. For instance, in the key of C, which is made up of C, D, E, F, G, A, and B, the E note comes third, so the E minor chord is the iii, (note that the iii is always minor).

So “Gloria” features a sequence of chords (called a chord progression) that goes E, D, A. Using the roman numerals this is called a I, VII, IV progression. Note that you will sometimes see this progression noted as I, bVII, IV, but I am trying to keep this simple so I won't go into detail about why that is. Regardless of how your write it, this is a fairly common progression in rock music, and can be seen in The Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil", Boston's "More than a Feeling", and Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London".

The main guitar riff (i.e. the one that is a series of chords), played by Billy Harrison, is a simple, mean, beast that embodies of the explosive-energy-compressed-into-bare-bones-repetition approach that inspired later groups like The Stooges and The Ramones. Each of the chords are major, meaning they are composed of the root note (E for the E chord, etc), the major third (G# for the E chord. If you don't know/aren't interested in music theory don't worry about why the G is sharp, just remember 1st = E, 2nd = F, 3rd = G, 4th = A, etc), and the fifth (B for the E chord). I will use the O to indicate an open strum, which means the sound you get if you run your hand down all the guitar strings without touching the neck at all.

The riff goes as follows “E – E – E – E – D – O – A – O -” , where each of the chords is evenly spaced and lined up with the drumbeat. This means that unlike most riffs, which offer some kind of rhythmic variety (i.e. one note/chord will take up two beats and another one only half a beat), each note of "Gloria"'s guitar riff is spaced equally from the note before and after it*. If you are having trouble following any of this I would suggest looking at the Songsterr tab, counting out the drum beats (1 – and – 2 – and – 3 – and – 4 – and - ) and noting how each chord falls exactly on those beats.

Such an simplistic approach was regarded as taboo prior to the rock revolution, because it was thought that playing the melody in a constantly steady rhythm will bore the listener through its repetitiveness. What rock and roll music proved, and what punk sought to refine, was the idea that if you strip down all the melodic elements to their bare essentials and place them overtop a dense yet simple beat, the end result is music that is just as emotionally evocative as any of the high watermarks of western civilization. Bach's fugue's can evoke a sense of connection with the divine, Ayler's improvisation can leave one stunned at the way his very soul seems bonded to such a unique form of melodic expression, but none of that can stimulate the animal base of the human mind like rock and roll. "Gloria" strips away more than any rock music had previously, making Chuck Berry's fretboard runs remind you of the very Beethoven and Tchaikovsky pieces he so memorably disparaged.

Ol' Chuck came onto the scene asking the world why we should bother with themes, variations, motifs, and codas when verses and choruses with the occasional bridge worked just fine. Them asked why we needed to bother with sixteenth notes, bends, and melodies that stretched past the beat. The Ramones came and asked why we should bother with adding and removing instruments. Finally Sonic Youth came around and asked, on "Kill Yr. Idols" why we should bother with any rules at all save the all-powerful steady rhythm. Then they realized they had backed themselves into a corner and moved on.

The transition from this song's verse to it's chorus could (and should) be taught in music theory textbooks as an example of how little you can change structurally while still creating one of the most dramatic transitions in the world of early rock. The tempo speeds up very slightly along with minor modifications to the drum patter, the bass riff changes very slightly, the vocals do most of the transitional legwork, and Billy's guitar really doesn't do much at all, There is a very minor little hiccup right as the verse jumps over, an increase in the volume, and very slight changes in the technique, but at the end of the day it is still the same “beat, offbeat, and nothing else” riff as he was playing during the verse. Yet the total effect is shattering.

After the chorus there is a two part bridge where we do see some changes in Harrison's guitar. During the first part he plays the second riff of the song, which changes up the melody and the way the notes are timed. In terms of the timing, he essentially pulls out the first and third offbeat note, so instead of playing on "1 - and - 2 - and - 3 - and - 4 – and - ", he plays the notes on the "1 - _ - 2 - and - 3 - _ - 4 - and - ", where "_" means he isn't playing anything**. In terms of the notes he is playing, rather than chords built from the tonic, major 3rd, and 5th, he plays only two notes at once (whether you consider this a chord or not depends on who you learned music theory from), split into two separate parts.

The first part, which covers beats 1 and 2, is made up of a B note and an E note, which are played on the two highest strings of the guitar. If you remember B is the 5th of the E chord, which is the note that has the most consonance with the tonic***. The first part provides a nice anchor point when compared to the second , though like the rest of the song, the music here is damn near bolted to the ground of consonant tonality, with the second part containing the only foray into dissonance.

The second part, which corresponds to the portion of the riff with the D and A chords, both starts and ends with just the D and A notes on the two highest strings. Since A is the 5th of D, and since the bass is essentially playing the root notes of the main guitar part (E, D, and A, remember root is the main note of a chord and tonic is the main note of a key) the total effect of these bookend notes is that the consonance is further welded down. However, in between those two notes there is a two note chord of D and G#. The relationship between these two notes is known as the tritone, and back in the days when more than a handful of people spoke Latin it was called the "diabolus in musica", or "devil in music", the least consonant pair of notes in the Western music system.

So essentially for the first part of the bridge we have a long string of super consonant two note chords, followed by the most dissonant of all possible two note chords, and then a final super consonant chord. The further you move away from consonance, the greater the tension, and the greater the tension, the greater the release when said tension is resolved. Since the entire song up to the point of that D/G# is damn near literally as consonant as you can get, the effect of jumping to the opposite end of the spectrum for a brief moment, like a Swedish hot tubber jumping into the snow before hopping back into the warm water, is rather dramatic.

The second part of the bridge features a another change in the guitar. This time, unlike every other part of the song, there is some variation between his repetitions. There is enough variation that the tabs and sheet music have quite a bit of disagreement in their rendering. Given that their are three slight modifications over the course of four renditions, and that none of the tabs I found (which all contain a single variant at best) play any of these renditions with complete accuracy (rather they are all attempts at summarizing the whole), I'm unfortunately back in the position of having to rely on my own ear for transcription, and I would be remiss if I didn't note that I have made mistakes doing this in the past.

While like I just said, there is a good deal of variance in this part, but it is limited to four notes/chords which are all placed in the same place on the beat, but vary in terms of the actual notes/chords that are being played. Be warned that using the essay format to break down this many separate elements can be a bit confusing. But I thought the best way to do this would be to break the riff up into smaller components and analyze them piece by piece.

Since the notes/chords I mentioned change, I will not be able to refer to them by their note letter, so I will have to use the variables "W", "X", "Y", and "Z". The pattern that they are arranged in when lined up to the beat is "W – and – 2 – X – 3 – and – Y – Z - ". To make this analysis a bit easier I am further going to break the bar into two even parts, i.e. "W – and – 2 – X –" and "3 – and – Y – Z - " and treat each individually.

The first part features a buildup over the first two repetitions that leads to the way the chords are played on the third and fourth. Because of this I am going to start with the third and fourth run and then show how the first and second lead up to it.

Now for both W and X on parts three and four Harrison plays three note major chords on the three highest strings on the guitar. In other words he is playing the same combination of tonic, major 3rd, and 5th that we have been working with from the start. The difference here is that he is using a technique that is most commonly seen in reggae and delta blues, where a sequence of high pitched chords are played that do not have the tonic note as their base. In all the chords I have discussed up to this point the lowest of the notes is the tonic. Since the guitar has six strings, the tonic will typically be reinforced by playing it on more than one string, and a standard chord almost always has the tonic at the foundation. This adds to the overall sense of stability that is typically sought after when one is using major chords. In contrast, here we see the fifth acting as the bass note. Since the fifth is very consonant with the tonic this does not have a tremendously off-putting effect, but rather adds a bit of variation and spices things up a bit.

One other thing to notice here is that W and X are E Major and D Major chords respectively (Now you see why I used WXYZ instead of ABCD). If you remember the main riff, an E Major chord is played four times over the first two beats, while D Major and A Major are played on beats three and four. One of the reasons I divided this bar in half for my analysis was to show how, rather than coming in on the "3" beat, the D chord come in on the offbeat after the "2". In other words he plays the chord half a beat earlier. Given that the pattern of "2 beats E major 1 beat D Major 1 beat A Major" has been drilled into the listeners head for the verse, chorus, and (to a lesser extent) the first half of the bridge, the effect is far more dramatic than it may seem. We once again see an example of how much can be done with a fairly minor change.

The first two repetitions of W and X essential build up to the chords of the third and fourth. Since I am already leaning way further towards the overly-thorough end of the spectrum, I will simplify this a bit (and certainly not because of any weakness in my transcription abilities). He is essentially just playing the tonic of the chords I described in the last two paragraphs. This gives the second part of the bridge a "revving up" effect, which contrasts rather nicely to the "pedal to the floor" way the song starts.

For the second part of the second part of the bridge (I know, I know. I'm fucking sorry, but I really think that this is the clearest way to explain things), i.e. the "3 – and – Y – Z - ", we see a simpler approach. Y and Z are each essentially two notes. Unlike the first part, this portion becomes less complex between the first and last two repetitions, but due to a small little puzzle that I can't quite work out****, I am going to treat all four repetitions as being identical. Y is a B note and Z is an A note.

The change from chords to notes gives an overall sense of simplification. More interesting however, is how the B and A relate to the normal chord progression. In the normal riff, an open chord is struck where the Y is placed, and the open chord includes a B note. Likewise on the main riff we see an A chord where the A note is. This means we don't have the rhythmic differences present in the first part. However, since the open chord is not really a chord of any particular variety (rather it is just a haphazard assortment of notes) the B note, while present, does not relate to the whole in any way. That means that it can really only be considered in light of its relation to the A Major chord and A note that immediately proceed it. In both cases it is the Major 2nd, which, while still considered consonant, is significantly less consonant than the 3rd or 5th. This adds to the overall vibe of "very mild and certainly not earth shattering change" that is present throughout the bridge, and the "look how much we can accomplish with so little" vibe throughout the entire song.

Now that the path of the song has gone over the bridge, we find the guitar absent on the other shore. For the second verse we see Them paring things down to just the bass, the drums, an organ riff for melody, and the vocals. The entire second verse proceeds without the guitar, and then, when the second chorus hits, the jump from the laid back and minimalistic verse to the charging, aggressive, and not quite as minimalistic chorus is one of those moments that can get your attention when the song is playing out of shitty PA speakers at the opposite corner of a bar while you are in the middle of a conversation. The chorus is played near identically to how it was done the first time around, but the change in context from the build-up seen in the first iteration to the sudden burst seen here makes it feel completely different.

After the second chorus is completed we get another run through of the first part of the bridge and then things end nice and neat on the tonic. Just like at the start of the song, there are no fancy outro parts or a big slowdown, they just run through the bridge, slam the brakes, and hit stop on the recording deck.

Alan Henderson's bass part, like the guitars, does not seek to break any new ground, save perhaps by having a firmer commitment to the fundamentals than his peers. Henderson's goal is simply to keep the melody of the guitar, organ, and vocals bonded to the chord progression and rhythm. As with most bass parts, Henderson does not play the chords themselves, or even any related combination of notes, but sticks to a single note at a time. Since the chord progression is E, D, and A, the bass parts of the song stick to the notes E, D, and A. Bass parts are always a little bit trickier to pull out than guitar parts, but I did my best to go through the whole song and I am pretty sure that he does not play a single note besides the three I just mentioned. Furthermore, I don't think he even shifts the octave on the three notes, meaning that from the start to the finish he uses three points along the fretboard to create music.

While he does play entirely within the range of three notes, and those three notes entirely correspond to chords that are being played on the guitar and notes that are being played on the keyboards, there is some variance in the patterns he plays. What is interesting about this is that the variance is not tied directly to the changes in the song structure, or to the changes in the other instruments. While none of these changes are massive, they add a slight bit of variety, and even if they are not something consciously picked up on, the subtle changes keep the forward momentum of the song going without the Wagnerian bombast of a chorus that is structurally different from the verse or chord changes that don't fall on the beat in a steady pattern.

Just to remind you, the song follows an "E – E – E – E – D – and – A – and - " pattern, where “and”s and numbers indicate that no new chord/note is being played. I am not going to note whether he is holding the note down during those gaps or muting the string (i.e. letting the note ring out vs. producing no sound from his instrument vs. creating a deliberately muddy effect by applying partial pressure), because that would require a more complex system of notation, and I'm already worried about overburdening the less theory-inclined as it is, though there are a few times where Henderson utilizes these elements.

So Henderson starts out playing a reproduction of the chord pattern, "E – E – E – E – D – and – A – and - ", so that the only beats he is not playing a note on are the ones where the guitar is playing an open chord. He does this for the first four bars of the song. While I said at the beginning that this song does not have any introduction, there is a very slight change that occurs around the fourth bar. Van's vocals come in at the end of the third, but he is essentially just leaning into the fourth, which is structurally when the sung part of the verse begins. This is a very common technique, if you haven't heard anyone do it before, pay attention the next time you are listening to music and you will see that it is done across nearly every genre, especially at the beginning of songs. The fourth bar is also where the barely audible two note organ part enters. Since the organ does not start until the third beat, what you have is Van's voice coming in just before the start of the fourth bar, the organ coming in at the end of the fourth bar, and the bass undergoing a minor modulation in between. Like I said it is not anything major, it goes from "E – E – E – E – D – and – A – and - " to "E – and – E – E – D – and – A – and - ", so one less E note on the first offbeat. The effect of this, beyond the simple fact that there is a change, is that it makes things slightly more punchy, since he comes to a full stop after the first E note. Next, the drummer stops doing the little marching band drum-roll he did on the fourth beat of bars two and four. However, since he only did this every other bar you don't notice the absence until the end of the fifth (if you notice it at all). Whether you consider the sum total of these minor changes to constitute a separate introduction or consider it the first phase of the verse is a pedantic distinction, but I think it makes more sense to consider it the first phase of the verse.

After the change, you get a long stretch where the riff alternates back and forth between "E – and – E – E – D – and – A – and - " and "E – and – E – E – D – and – A – A - ". In essence he switches between having an extra A note on the final offbeat or else just holding the note he plays on the 4 until the end of the bar. At the start of the second stanza (“she comes around here”), Henderson once again shifts to a slightly different pattern, this time "E – E – 2 – E – D – and – A – and - ". There is not much to say about this. You wouldn't notice unless you were paying attention for it, all it does is add the little bit of variance necessary to keep the aggressive advance of the song from getting bogged down in the mud.

He keeps this pattern going through the “G....L....etc” pre-chorus. Because the patterns vary so slightly and because the chorus has all the instruments really going at it (and because my speakers aren't that great), I can't say for certain that he starts his next change when the song itself switches over, but at some point during the chorus he goes back to the full "E – E – E – E – D – and – A – and - " seen at the beginning, and I do not think it would be unreasonable to assume this happens at the start.

As with the song itself, Henderson strips things down a bit for the bridge, playing a "E – and – 2 – E – D – and – A – and - " without holding the notes during the gaps for the first section. Now, if you remember from before, during the second part of the bridge we get the only point in the song where the guitar breaks from the “E on beats 1 and 2, D on beat 3, and A on beat 4” pattern. Also recall that the first half of the guitar part was composed of chords, while the second half was composed of notes. I am going to lay my diagram of the guitar part over my diagram of the bass riff so you can see how they interact with other, the (c) indicates a chord while the (n) indicates a note, as always the bass part is composed entirely of notes:

"E(c) – and – 2 – D(c) – 3 – and – B(n) – A(n) - "

"E   – and – 2 – and –   E – D   – and   – A - "

You can see that besides the fact that both parts start with an E, they really don't have much in common. If you remember from before, these chords are not the well-rooted major chords you normally hear, but instead little three string constructs that have the 5th as the bass note instead of the root. Since the lowest note on the guitar guitar chord is the most stabilizing, you shouldn't be surprised to find out that the bass E note (which is an octave lower) provides quite a bit of stability on this first beat.

However, that stability is thrown off kilter immediately afterwards. The next beat and offbeat are empty for both parts, then you get something interesting. The guitar comes in for its D chord (with A as the bass note), then on the next beat the bass comes in with an E. This is a full blown switch from the rest of the song, where the D comes in on the 3rd beat and prior to that beat it is all E notes. The bass essentially pushes the E note it was playing on the offbeat after the 2 up to the 3 beat, shoving the D that usually goes on the three forward to the next offbeat, and, taken in total with the guitar part, creating a back-and-forth between the D and the E.

On the 4 beat the bass does nothing while the guitar plays the B note, then both bass and guitar play A notes. The effect of this is to have stable bookends on an stack of notes that would topple over without them.

Taken in total, the second part of the bridge is even more dissonant than you would know just looking at the guitar part. It's not Sister Ray, but within the context of the rest of the song, where everything else is bolted to the “E-E-E-E-D-x-A-x” pattern, a change that would be mundane in other contexts is a powerful destabilization.

Befitting the general minimalism of the second verse, the bass is stripped down to its barest essentials, playing "E – and – E – and – D – and – A – and - " on the beats and nothing on the offbeats. It holds this pattern until the song gets to the second chorus, when it goes back to the "E – E – E – E – D – D – A – A - " that it played the last time around. You can see that since the bass part of the second verse was stripped down to the bare minimum needed to retain the skeleton of the chord progression (which the bass had to do, since the guitar is absent) when it doubles each of the notes in the chorus, it goes from the minimum to the maximum number of notes that keep be played while sticking the chord pattern and only playing on beats and offbeats.

The effect of this is two-fold. First, like other places in the song, it allows the band to make a large jump in intensity. Second, while allowing said jump to occur, the consistent adherence to the pattern gives both the verse and chorus a firm sense of rhythm.

When I listen to keyboardist Peter Barden's performance on this song, the first thing that enters my mind is Neil Young's quote: “I like to play with people who can play simple and are not threatened by other musicians thinking they can't play. And that eliminates 99 percent of the musicians.” ***** Bardens, who would go on to help found Camel and perform on their best albums (the s/t through Breathless), is no slouch on the piano. If you don't believe me just search YouTube for “Camel live 197x” where x is a number between 3 and 8, and you can see for yourself. I would not count him among my five or so favorite rock keyboardists, but if someone I was talking to did, I would not consider that a mark against their taste by any means. Here we see the man who would soon find himself feeling a bit naked if not behind at least five different keyboards/organs/synthesizers while on stage playing some of the simplest riffs in the history of professionally released music.

Seriously, I know it is a cliche to say that a particular song is so easy it can be played by someone who has never touched an instrument before, and that the reality is, unless you are particularly talented, even the simplest of guitar parts is going to require a few days of getting the feel for where the strings are in comparison to each other and getting to know how you pluck the strings properly before you can produce anything but perhaps a song or two from the first Godz album.

In contrast, about two minutes ago I decided that if I was going to write about this organ part I should at the very least know what he is playing. I sat down at my shitty Casio and thought to myself “given what I know about this recording, what notes would he likely be playing?” If you answered E, D, and A then congratulations, your catching on. Then I simply put the song on, listened to where on the beat the individual notes came in at, and played the note that corresponded to what the guitar and bass played on the main riff. With the exception of that little flourish he does on the second verse, I was able to transcribe the entirety of “Gloria”s organ part in less than half the length of the song itself, and assuming you have a keyboard, at least one functioning limb of some variety, and the basic sense of rhythm that is innate to human beings (I'm talking about some fancy percussive sensitivity here, I mean the thing that allows you to walk down the hall at evenly spaced steps) I am reasonably confident you can do so as well.

Bardens plays two separate phrases in the course of the song. The first one is the A note followed by the E note (or the E note followed by a long gap, followed by the A note if you want to be pedantic). The second is the E note, a brief little oscillation, the D note, and the A note.

The first part comes in at the end of the fifth bar of the song. Just so you don't have to go backtracking, the basic riff of “Gloria” goes “E – E – E – E – D – and – A – and -”. On the fourth beat of the bar he comes in with a matching A note, which is then followed by an E note on the first beat of the sixth bar, so that he is essentially playing two notes that are one beat apart, but what he is acually playing is spread out between two bars with three and a half beats separating them. Like I mentioned before, this organ part is barely audible within the mix, and it is only used to add the slightest hint of flavor to the song. It continues into the chorus and then cuts out on the bridge.

The second riff Bardens plays occurs during the second verse. Since the guitar is now absent, his role here is much more prominant then it was before, and this is evident in his more dominant position in the mix. Here his riff starts at the beginning of the bar and ends at its conclusion. He plays an E at the first beat, a little back-and-forth pattern on the offbeat of the second beat, a D on the third, and an A on the fourth. Again he is essentially just playing the tonic of each chord at the point when that chord is first introduced on the bass (and would have been introduced on the guitar had it been present). The little flourish is the only ornamentation here, and it is also the only part of the song that an absolute beginner might not be able to nail without any practice. That being said it is far from a Bill Evans phrase. All he is doing is hitting the D and C notes one after the other really fast. While I am not certain whether someone with zero prior experience could play it in time with the rest of the song, I am not certain that they couldn't either.

While relatively insignificant in the relation to the other parts of “Gloria”, I think we can see in Bardens' organ part the reason why Camel is so much better than the vast majority of prog groups. Despite the fact that I very much enjoy their music, and good rock keyboards in general, I did not realize that the man on this recording was the same one who recorded “Dunkirk” until, inspired by the vaguest of recollections, I decided to click his very blue name on the Wikipedia personel page for “Angry Young Them”. Part my failure to recognize Barden's name can be ascribed to the fact that the difference in style between this recording and the his later work caused it to be pretty far back on my mind's list of people who I know that might have worked on this song, but of part of it is that, unlike say Rick Wakeman, Bardens does not feel compelled to place himself at the top of every marquee. I decided to look into some of his solo stuff in researching this essay, and even when he plays live with a band that bears his name, he positions himself fairly far to the back of the stage, while the guitars are treated to frontal positioning. Again this is his own solo project we are talking about here. Compare that with Wakeman, who seems to think that the the front-center and front-right of the stage are the only places where he can make himself heard. I do not believe this is a mere difference in layout preference. Throughout Camel's lifespan they did an excellent job of placing the music first. While everyone in the group is extremely talented, you do not see any of the jockeying for who gets the longest solo, or competitions to see who in the band can blow through a series of scales the fastest. I always got the sense that everyone involved with the band cared much more about the sum total of the music than their individual performances, something that is often an issue with prog bands. That belief has been confirmed by the realization that Bardens is the organ player on Them's “Gloria”, where he is more than happy to have his contribution set to the very back of the mix and feels no compulsion to show off by shoving in an obnoxious solo.

Drummer John McAuley's work matches the simplistic yet energetic performance by the rest of the band. Throughout the song, he typically confines himself to playing on all the beats and offbeats and nowhere else. The exception to this are the points where he augments the pattern with a little drum roll on the fourth beat, which is his main device for adding variety to his performance.

His drums come in on the second beat of the first measure of the song, giving an effect almost like someone putting the pedal to the floor of a car with a misfiring engine, in that you get an initial sense of some motion and energy, but then a moment later you are shot forward at full speed. During the phase of the verse where Morrison has yet to enter, he performs a fourth beat marching band drum roll every other bar. Again this provides a strong initial momentum to the song. After the vocals start, and going all the way to the start of the chorus, he confines himself to a roll every four bars. This lessons the tension ever so slightly and gives the effect of a settling in.

McAuley and Morrison are the two reasons why the “G...L...O...R...I-I-I” pre-chorus has such a tremendous amount of stored energy. Van jumps in before the bar starts with “and her name is”, and then as soon as the bar kicks over McAuley does a partial version of the drum roll on the first beat and then immediately kicks the tempo up. He continues to increase the speed while the guitar and bass play on as usual, until a drum roll that would sound far more at home on a football field than in a rock song announces the chorus.

Now may be a good time to point out that of the various instruments employed in this song, the drums are the only ones that I lack even a rudimentary experience in. This is worth bringing to your attention because while McAuley continues to play just on the beats and offbeats (if you exclude the drum rolls) there is a change in the actual drums he is using when the song shifts into the chorus. This change has a big effect on the overall sound and for an assessment of this level of depth to simply not acknowledge that would be negligent on my part. However I lack the experience to shine any light on the exact nature of why the particular drums he is plays on the verse vs the chorus has the effect that it does, so a brief acknowledgment is all I can really give.

In regards to the drum rolls, McAuley takes a much looser approach during the chorus. Where before he performed them in a steady, predictable pattern, on the chorus he is deliberately more erratic. You get opening roll on the 1st beat, and then he does it again a little later on the 4th. Later still he devotes an entire bar to it, and then he once again goes back to the four when the chorus is about to end. All of these drum rolls are done in the more aggressive style I brought up earlier. The change in consistency matches the fact that the chorus is an eruption of passion and energy. Throughout the verse and bridge phases of the song there is a deliberate balance struck between maintaining a high energy and yet giving a sense of restraint which can be torn down for the chorus. Patti Smith's version of the song really runs with this, but it is still present here, and the drums are the primary vehicle of it's realization.

In keeping with this spirit, McAuley pulls things back a bit during the verse and bridge. He continues to play a similar drum pattern to what he played on the chorus, but slows things down again. A single drum roll on the fifth bar of the first part of the bridge strikes a middle ground between the madness of the chorus and the energetic restraint of the rest of the song. On the second part of the bridge he transitions to a pattern similar to what he played in the first verse, only with the marching band style drum rolls at the end of each bar. This is important because the missing guitar leaves a void that needs to be filled. By expanding the organ part and keeping a bit more energy in the drums (though an energy that has been restored to a predictable pattern) the band manage to fill some of the empty space will achieving an even greater gap between the verse and chorus' intensity the second time around.

Near the end of the chorus the drums transition to a choppier pattern that if anything has even more in common with a marching band than the previous pattern. This both adds a sense of variety and pulls things even further back so that the final chorus is all the more intense. The second run of the chorus is essentially the same as the first as far as the drums go, save the lack of the “building up” pre-chorus, so I won't repeat myself describing it, but at the end of the chorus McAuley closes out the song with a intense pattern that borrows some elements from Caribbean music. This bookends the intensity with which the song begins, so that the listener does not feel as though he has listened to something get born, mature, and then wither but instead that he has witnessed a supernova that burst into existence in radiant light and then instantly faded into nothingness.

Van Morrison is one of rock music's greatest vocalists and songwriters. Here we see the rare distinction of an artist who, in his very first recording session as a bandleader (though it was released on his second single), walked out of the studio having cut one of the greatest rock and roll songs of all time. While both his vocal and writing abilities reached their apex four years later with “Astral Weeks”, “Gloria” is not a stepping stone on his way to greater achievements, but the demonstration of his mastery of rock's fundamentals before he moves into the realm of experimentation.

As I have mentioned a number of times already, Morrison jumps in midway through the fourth bar of the song. His opening line are:

“Like to tell ya about my baby

You know she comes around

She about five feet four

A from her head to the ground”

Like the rest of the song, Morrison is at his most restrained during the verses, though he still possessions a very real force. The lyrics here serve to establish what the song is for, i.e. talking about his baby, and providing a brief description of said woman. To me Van's voice these first few lines is reminiscent of Mick Jagger's sexually suggestive drawl, but at the time of the single's recording (April of 1964) the only songs that the Stones had released were “Come on”, “I Wanna Be Your Man”, and “Not Fade Away”, none of which feature Jagger's more developed singing style, which means they cannot be counted as in influence. For that we would have to turn to The Kingsmen's “Louie Louie”, and to a lesser extent Elvis (who while suggestive, never quite attained the same casual suggestiveness we see here).

“You know she comes around here

At just about midnight

She make ya feel so good, Lord

She make you feel alright”

The second stanza sees Van starting to get a fire in his belly. This, as far as early rock music goes, is one of the most sexual suggestive lyrics to find it's way into a recording booth, and Morrison really goes the extra mile to make sure his audience has no misconceptions about just what goes on when this woman comes over at midnight that makes him feel so good. I know it is cliché to even bring this up, but limitations are often a blessing in disguise, and the restrictive cultural mores of 50's and early 60's led to a need to push vocals into new expressive terrain. The blueprint for these changes came from Blues, especially Chicago Blues, but there were unique challenges in creating a similar suggestiveness in music whose target audience included young white women. As long as he didn't use any explicit obscenity or direct references to the sex, Howlin' Wolf wasn't going to get investigated by the FBI for talking about how the little girls understand what he means by sneaking out the back door. Rock bands did not have that same luxury, as the incident with The Kingsmen proved.

Thus we have Morrison emphasizing the time of encounter and how it makes him feel by employing the soon to be unavoidable art of cutting from the regular vocal line into a pseudo-coital wail.

An interesting thing about these flourishes is their range in comparison to the rest of the melody. In his books on songwriting, which I highly recommend even if you are only interested in understanding song structure and not creating it, Rikky Rooksby, who I swear, despite his name, is not a washed up guitarist from an 80s hair metal band, uses the terms horizontal and vertical melody. I tried looking them up on Google but they are only used in the context of comparing melody to harmony, which is not what I am talking about. Rather, I am referring to the range of notes employed in the melodic line, which can be either large, aka vertical, as seen in the melodies Aretha Franklin uses, or small, aka horizontal, as in the vocal (and not the guitar) melodies of Jimi Hendrix songs. While this is not a common term, I believe it is a useful one, so I am going to stick with it.

Now, as with the majority of these mid-60s garage rock groups, Them's melodies are almost all horizontal. However, if we look at Van Morrison's later work, his vocal lines are as vertical as a wall. During these little passion howls, Morrison employs vocal jumps that are suggestive of his later work. When compared with the otherwise flat melody of “Gloria”, however, the effect of these leaps is far more dramatic.

This infusion of rock singing with sexual howls is then pushed even further in the pre-chorus, where the melody can be said to be outright vertical:

“And her name is G L O R I I I

G L O R I A (Gloria)

G L O R I A (Gloria)”

This is where things start to really cross into the extraordinarily sexual. Rather than simply suggesting intercourse through the vocal pitch and intonation, Morrison uses the increased tempo, intensified guitars, the lyrical subject (a woman's name), along with all the previously mentioned vocal devices to simulate the actual act of coming to a climax. The build-up of speed in the tempo is matched to the increased intensity of the vocals, as the individual letters of the name take on the character of the monosyllabic screams that indicate his approach. Even the name that is being spelled out suggests sexual release, gloria being the Latin term for glory, a delightfully blasphemous touch that Van may or may not have been aware of.

If the pre-chorus is the build-up to an orgasm, I'm sure you can guess what the chorus itself is. It's not as though the band is keeping it a secret. Instead we get Van screaming out the name of the titular woman (as well as asserting that he is going to shout it every night) as the band put the pedal down on everything and the song reaches it's crescendo.

One of the interesting things about the chorus is the way the band echo Morrison's vocals. Rock music has a long history of employing call and response, which first entered American music via the African-American Spirituals sung by slaves on the plantation fields. Through a genesis that is too complex to treat here (and beyond my expertise) it entered blues and folk music, where it was eagerly picked up by numerous rock acts. Patti Smith makes much more intricate use of the call and response in her version, but it is important to note that it is a crucial component of the key moment of Them's “Gloria”.

Next you have the winding down of the bridge and the pulling back of the guitar into a significantly less intense segment. However, since there are no vocals present I will move on, stopping only to point out the connection between the sexual climax of Morrison's choral performance and the sudden calm that comes over the music.

Van Morrison starts the second verse in a very restrained manner of singing, but quickly changes back into a style very similar to what I described in the first verse, though perhaps a bit more restrained. Again, this is to make the lunge into the final chorus all the more intense.

There is an expression seen in the fields of history, literature, and religion that refers to a particular event as the seal of it's category. The followers of Islam refer to Muhammad as the seal of the prophets, in that he is both the culmination of all the prophets who came before him and the most significant figure of the prophetic lineage. I've heard it said that Dante is the seal of the literature of the Middle Ages, since he brought all of the literary devices and approaches of that epoch to their highest point, which in turn paved the way for Petrarch to bring the Renaissance into the written word. In a similar fashion, I think it can be said that Them's “Gloria” is the seal of early rock and roll. It brings to completion the passionate, primal intensity of Jerry Lee Lewis, the defiant simplicity of Chuck Berry, and the sexual swagger of Elvis. From here, rock music will begin to shift into more experimental terrain.

Within a little over a year of this song's release the Beatles would release “Rubber Soul” and Dylan would bridge folk music and his own brand of experimentation with the rock scene, setting in motion the changes that the genre underwent in the mid to late sixties. I am not saying that Lennon and McCartney were sitting there listening to “Gloria” one day and said to each other that it was time to move things along, what I'm saying is that the world's cultural trends have a tendency to move in certain directions, and then when that direction cannot be taken any further, those who are looking to create something unique instinctively turn around and take things somewhere else. I believe that “Gloria” can be seen as the point at which the aesthetics of early 60's rock could not be taken any further. In Patti Smith's cover of the song we see what a musician born into the changes that occurred to the genre after this song came out could do with its core elements.

Nowadays a cover usually means a facsimile. Someone trying to map to different genres and instrumentation on an exact replica of an earlier recording. Even back then, outside the realm of jazz, the level of disparity between the original “Gloria” and Smith's modified rendition was rare. However, while on first listen their may seem to be very little in common between the two versions of the song, close analysis reveals just how much they share beneath the surface.

Unlike Them's version, Patti Smith's take on the song features a slow buildup that slowly rises in intensity rather than punching the listener in the face as the song opens. At the start of the song, the only instrument that is present if the piano. Now for those unfamiliar with the instrument, the traditional way to play the piano in jazz, blues, and rock music is to have the left hand play out a progression of chords while the right hand plays a melodic line. At the start of the song this is exactly what the piano does. The left hand plays an E chord on the first beat and a D chord on the second. Meanwhile, the right hand is playing an E note on the first beat, a D on the third, and an A on the fourth. I'll do another little diagram of this to give you a clearer indication, with the chords on top and the notes on the bottom, hopefully it will look familiar by this point:

E                           D

1 – and – 2 – and – 3 – and – 4 – and -

E                           D             A

So far we have something that is nearly identical in terms of song structure and vastly different in terms of tone, harmony, instrumentation, and energy. Then Patti jumps into the mix with:

“Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine.”

Now you may not have picked up on this at first, but these lyrics are entirely new. In fact, if you go back through the lyrics of Them's original, you will not find anyone mentioning the question of the soteriological value of Christ's passion at all. This line, when coupled with the aforementioned structural elements, should give you an idea of where Patti Smith is going to go with this. This is not going to be a rollicking, high energy keg party song, but is instead going to build something entirely new from the musical building blocks (and some of the lyrics) of the Them original. Another thing that it would be beneficial to keep in mind in this early stage is that Gloria is song not only written about a woman, but one that is written about a woman in such a way that it could not be easily sex-changed (her name is the chorus). Also remember that this song was released in 1975 (and first performed much earlier).

As the opening verse progresses, the piano gets looser with its rhythm and voicing. For those unfamiliar with the concept of voicing, the gist of it is that any chord will have the root, third, and fifth in a number of different octaves. Voicing refers to which notes of the chord are the played in relationship of highest to lowest (typically the root is lowest, followed by the third and then the fifth). We also see the introduction of bassist Ivan Kral, or perhaps even guitarist Lenny Kaye, who is credited with some of the bass parts though from this point on I will refer to all the bass parts as coming from Kral. Here we see whoever is playing bending the absolute shit out of the strings, to such an extent that it barely feels like you are listening to a bass.

While I had some difficulty in whether I should describe the opening bars of Them's “Gloria” as introduction, the way Patti Smith's version is structured makes such precise demarcations all but impossible. I am just going to say that the portion of the lyrics that discuss her defiant opposition to the salvific are the introduction while the transition to words that are at least somewhere in the orbit of Morrison's originals marks the beginning of the verse. In any case, at this stage you get a great picture of what Pound called phanopoeia, which he defined as the "casting of images upon the visual imagination":

“Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine.

Meltin' in a pot of thieves

Wild card up my sleeve

Thick heart of stone

My sins my own

They belong to me, me”

These lines and some of the ones that follow are adapted from “Oath”, a poem that she wrote and performed at poetry readings prior to recording this song. While there are no shortage of rock musicians who have tried their hand at poetry, Patti Smith and Leonard Cohen are the only two who had a gift for it, at least as far as names that would be familiar to most music fans go. Of the two my personal preference goes to Smith, though this has more to do with our shared adoration of dearest Ginsberg than any objective criterion. As a side note, if you are interested in seeing some of the poetry of all three of the names I just mentioned, as well as finding out for yourself whether other rock star's attempts at the medium are worth anything, the Alan Kaufman edited “Outlaw Bible of American Poetry” provides an excellent overview to this as well as the rest of the American counter-cultural poetic tradition.

While it can be debated whether Smith or Cohen is the greatest poet from the rock tradition, what cannot be argued (at least very well) is that Smith made the furthest strides in incorporating the poetic forms of the twentieth century into rock music. There is some confusion about the overlap between poetry and musical lyrics. The reality is that there are certain limitations in how you can poetically express yourself over a steady beat. At the same time there are also limitations to the forms used by most poetry prior to Whitman. As it turns out these limitations are rather similar, though not quite identical. If you can find it, Leonard Bernstein hosted and wrote an excellent episode of the 1950's documentary show Omnibus called “The World of Jazz” where he shows the similarities between iambic pentameter and the blues song, culminating with a performance of a Shakespeare sonnet over a standard twelve bar progression.

There is however, a large difference between the constrained verse of earlier poetry and free verse (as well as its variations). The entire purpose of free verse is to have the rhythm of the poem loosed from the constraints of repetition, so that the poem's rhythm has more in common with Hindustani Classical Music or the traditional forms of Japan. To once again refer to Ezra Pound, it is composed “in the sequence of a musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.”

This of course means that it is incredibly difficult to get free verse to “stick” on top of any steady beat, and the problem is amplified ten fold when your beat is the hard, steady pounding of rock music. Yet Smith was able to do what few people could in incorporating free verse poetry and rock music in a way that does not dull either. Elsewhere on “Horses”, the album that features “Gloria”, most notably on “Free Money”, she crosses the line into lyrics that are completely free, but here she strikes a middle ground. In these opening lines you can see her avoiding any consistent, repeatable pattern in her phrasing, yet at the same time giving due deference to the steady turning of the bars. I think the best way to illustrate what I mean is to actually look at the first few lines, starting with the syllable counts of each one in comparison with the Them original:

Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine: 11 syllables

Meltin' in a pot of thieves: 7 syllables

Wild card up my sleeve: 6 syllables (she pronounces wild in two pieces /waɪ:ʊld/)

Thick heart of stone: 4 syllables

My sins my own: 4 syllables

They belong to me: 5 syllables

vs

Like to tell ya about my baby: 9 syllables

You know she comes around: 6 syllables

She about five feet four: 6 syllables

A from her head to the ground: 7 syllables

You know she comes around here: 7 syllables

At just about midnight: 6 syllables

She make ya feel so good, Lord: 7 syllables

She make you feel alright: 6 syllables

You can see that, while Morrison does add a bit extra to the opening line, he, like nearly all other musicians, confines his words to a steady pattern that is aligned with the pattern of the bars itself. While it is not rigid enough to be called a form a la iambic pentameter, it still firmly adheres to the rhythm of the music.

If you look at the range of syllables, you will see that the lowest amount in a given line is six, and the highest is nine, and there is only one nine syllable line: the first one, whose higher density helps add to the initial punch of the song I described earlier. That gives a range of four syllables, and a range of two syllable if you don't count the first line.

Patti Smith's opening lines are very different. I will not include that final one syllable line in this because it is used more as a link between the introductory lyrics and the first verse rather than a line in itself. You still have a range of eight syllables (from four to eleven), which is double the range of Morrison's version (or quadruple if you don't count the first line).

When you compare how she arrays her lines over the beat, you get an even greater sense of the difference between the two. Remember that in Them's version Morrison starts that lines a little before the bar turns over but otherwise keeps to a one line per bar pattern. Brackets denote the start and end of a line, dashes at the start and end of a syllable note that they are the same word but enunciated on separate beats, while a steady dotted line (I know that's an oxymoron) indicates she is holding the note.

The best place to start is probable the spacing of the lines. Rather than using the start and end of a bar (or a little before the start and end of the bar) as the device that marks out each line, Smith spreads her lines over the bars in a way that doesn't seem to be thought out at first, but, like the work of Pollack, uses the impression of disarray for a deliberate effect.

Four lines start on the first beat of the bar, one line starts on the second, one on the third, and one on the offbeat after the fourth. Regarding the last syllable of the lines, one ends on the offbeat after the second, while six come in at the first beat of the bar. Right away this establishes that while the turn of the bar is not going to be a tomb for Patti to bury a perfectly good poem by trying to shove it into a rigid rhythm, it is going to be recognized for what it is, a series of points that have greater and lesser significance within the steady repetition of the beat.

The next thing to look at is both how she packs the varied syllable lengths of each line into differing numbers of beats, e.g. the first line has eleven syllables and the words of the line are sung over ten beats of music. It is also important to note the length of the gap between each line, e.g. there are five and a half beats separating the end of the first line from the start of the second line. To help visualize this I laid out all three criteria side by side, along with the total number of beats of the combined line and gap.

“Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine”

11 syllables   10 beats long   5.5 beat gap   15.5 total beats

“Meltin' in a pot of thieves”

7 syllables   5 beats long   3.5 beat gap   8.5 total beats

“Wild card up my sleeve”

7 syllables   4.5 beats long   3.5 beat gap   8 total beats

“Thick heart of stone”

4 syllables   4.5 beats long   1.5 beat gap   6 total beats

“My sins my own”

4 syllables   2.5 beats long   .5 beat gap   3 total beats

“They belong to me”

5 syllables   3.5 beats long   3.5 beat gap   7 total beats

Now I'll get into the reasoning for having some lines tighter packed than others a little later, for now the big takeaway is how broad the differences are between not just each lines syllable count, but also on how much time she spends on each one and how much of a gap lies between them.

The first line lasts two and a half bars, going from the first beat of this portion of the song to the midway point of the third bar. It is then followed by a five and a half beat gap, so that the first word of the second line falls on the final offbeat of the fourth bar. This is followed by three lines that are roughly five beats long each, which have three and a half beats in the gaps between them. There are two things that are crucial about the lyrics up to this point. The first is that there is a loose pattern in play here, where a number of syllables, which vary from line to line but are always fairly close ratio of beats to syllables, which are followed by a gap a little more than half the number of beats it took to sing the line itself. The second is that these are only rough approximations; vague outlines that tend to start fairly close to the first beat of the bar and finish somewhere near the end of a bar (typically a little afterwards).

And therein lies the crucial difference between Patti's approach to combining words and music in “Gloria” and that of almost everyone else. This is not like the poetry sections of “Free Money”, “Kimberly”, or “”Land: Horses/Land of a Thousand Dances“ where she lets loose a barrage of poetry while intentionally ignoring where each line starts and ends in comparison to the rhythm of the song. Nor is it like Them's version (and again pretty much every other rock/pop song) where the steady beat is the be all and end all of what defines a line, and if the words the lyricist wrote don't fit nicely then they'll just have to be changed. Here Patti gives due respect to the beat but does not prostrate herself before it. She had written versions of these words prior to recording it in Gloria, and the words and meter are slightly different, but while she did make some changes she did not take a hammer and pound a dearth or excess of words into the bar. Instead she takes each line and lays it overtop of the beat in such a way that it provides emphasis to her lyrics.

To illustrate my point let's look at the words of this verse that fall upon the beats themselves (verses the offbeats). “Jesus”, “died”, “somebodies”, “sins”, “but”, “mine”, “melting”, “a”, “pot”, “thieves”, “wild”, “card”, “my”, “sleeve”, “thick”, “heart”, “stone”, “my”, “my”, and “me” all come in on a beat, while “for”, “not”, “in”, “of”, “of”, and “sins” come in on offbeats.

Now, if you were to make a list of which words are most important and which words are least important in terms of the poetry itself (and not grammatical linkage), it would not look too different from this list. If it were me I might switch out the “but” and “a” from the first list for “not” and “sins” from the second, but besides that I would keep it as is. If you take into account the fact that the words come in a sequence and that any time you put two neighboring words on beats you have to leave a long gap between them, then you will see how much artistry went into this section.

On the subject of spacing, in the second part of this verse we get some very interesting stuff in terms of how packed the syllables are. Whereas all the previous lines had syllable counts slightly higher than the number of beats and a gap between the lines that was less than the length of time it took to sing the line itself, the “Thick heart of stone” line is four syllables long, spread out over four and a half beats, and is followed by a one and half beat gap.

One of the crucial advantages of free verse over both traditional poetic forms as well as song lyrics is that the variety in line length allows for a the poet a far greater control over what is emphasized. There are a countless ways that the variations in line length can be employed for poetic effect, but I am going to focus on two of them.

An example of when a shortened line is employed to mark the contents as significant can be seen in Keats' “Ode to a Nightingale”, where the iambic pentameter gives the lines rhythmic consistency through it's soft-hard pattern. The downside to such a regular meter is that each line has an equal weight, so the only thing that can provide emphasis are the words themselves. However, since “Ode to a Nightingale” is not strict iambic pentameter, but has a single line of iambic trimeter in each stanza (three feet instead of five), that shorter line naturally comes on stronger than the others, almost like when an interlocutor in a conversation suddenly makes a firm demand, or like the direct, tight quality of an advertising slogan.

The other side of this can be seen in Randall Jarrell's “Death of a Ball Turret Gunner”, where the first four lines come in unsteady groups of between ten and twelve syllables, so that when he hits that last line, which is fourteen syllables, the tone comes off as almost conversational, like it is just a random aside someone happened to slip in before they walked off, which is obviously in contrast to it's vivid subject matter:

“From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,

And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,

I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.”

The addition of the underlying percussion of rock music adds an extra layer to this. The opening line of the song is eleven syllables while the following two are seven. In this context (i.e. a confrontational statement followed by two images) such a disparity helps define the first line's differences in comparison to the other two, and gives it the effect of a statement of purpose. But the beat is also in play, and as I said before all three of the first line have a fairly similar ratio of syllable count to number of beats to length of gap, whereas the fourth line is spread out over more beats than there are syllables, and it is followed by a gap that is one third the time it took to sing the line. So you have a sudden shift into a more spacious delivery of the line itself with a tightening of the space between each line. The effect of this is similar to what I described with “Ode to a Nightingale”, where the listeners intuitively perceives a greater significance to the more spacious line than the others.

This fourth line establishes a new rhythmic approach that is taken even further with the following line. “My sins my own” has four syllables two and a half beats long and a half beat gap. It stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from the opening line in terms of its syllable count, how tightly the syllables are packed, and the length of the gap, yet they both employ these divergent approaches as a means of marking themselves as significant. Of course it is not a coincidence that “My sins my own” is the response to the first line provocation, while the lines in between are designed to produce an image in the listeners mind that enhances the effect of the transgressive theology.

The shortening of the gaps lets the lines bunch tighter and tighter together, so that, where the opening lines of the song come off at a leisurely pace, by the time we get to the end of everything is rushing out. After the half beat gap that follows “My sins my own” we get a line that is five syllables long and spread over three and a half beats. The line, “They belong to me”, comes off in a manner similar to the final line of “Death of a Ball Turret Gunner” in that by taking a powerful statement and expanding the syllable count and how quickly it is sung, and presents it in a deliberately conversational, matter of fact way.

Now that I've gone over the rhythm and meter, I'd like to look at the words themselves. As I said before the six opening lines can be thematically divided into two parts. The first and final two lines deal with expression a theological idea, while the second and third lines present images that contextualize the aforementioned idea, and the fourth is halfway between the two and performs a bridging function.

I hate to keep using the word theological to describe the first group, but I cannot think of a better choice. On the one hand, it uses an idea vital to the salvific doctrine of nearly all surviving Christian sects and presents an radically differing interpretation. On the other, it does not aim for any broader application outside the wholly personal, and in fact deliberately avoids the sort of all-encompassing interpretations you would see in Augustine or Aquinas.

The choice to say that “Jesus died for somebody's sins”, if taken directly, could be interpreted as a tacit acceptance of the position that Christ's death on the cross was responsible for the redemption of humanity, but that would be missing the point. The key word in the first line is “somebody's”. If you were to replace that word with “humanity's” or “the world's”, then you would be looking at something that could be regarded as straight theology, or at the very least something in the realm of William Blake or Camus. However, instead Smith chooses the word “somebody's”, a word so vague and casual that it stands against the Sunday school vocabulary of the rest of the line like Kareem Abdul Jabbar in Munchkin Land.

The word choice is deliberately impertinent, and by choosing such a commonplace term Smith is essentially confirming the irrelevance of broader religious ideas and the centrality of the personal, and that the broader ideas used to present herself in the way she does only matter insofar as they can be used to express what she wishes to express.

And what is the personal statement she wishes to express. Well I can't say it any better than she can. Her sins are her own. They belong to her. It is a statement of radical accountability and defiant will. A doctrine that asserts the powerlessness of humanity against sin's that they had no personal control over and a redemption they played no part in is used to contrast the total responsibility she takes for her actions, including the actions she is going to describe later in this song.

Next we get to two lines which provide a graphic depiction of hell. Rather than advance any kind of linear narrative progression, these lines enhance the conviction behind what she has said previously. They amplify the defiance I mentioned above by following the salvific doctrine she espouses to it's limits and then refusing to flinch away from them. Rather than having narrative value, their value is phanopoetic, presenting vivid images which contextualize the other lyrics.

The first line describes the specifics of the torture that, if one accepts the doctrines of mainstream Christianity, one will endure if one adopts Smith's attitude. The second provides a description of how Patti will be attired as she undergoes this torment. To grasp the significance of this put your mind in the perspective of someone in the early 70s (and the cultural touchstones that would be recent to such a person) and pull up the first names that come to mind when you read the words “outlaw figure”. More likely the names and images that popped into your head came from a tradition of figures that started with Brando in “The Wild One” and progressed through the Hell's Angel's and Easy Rider to the Ramones, a tradition which is famous for a very particular style of dress that includes leather jackets, denim or leather pants, and a number of accessories, including the stowage of an item of particular significance, typically cigarettes or playing cards, in the rolled up shirtsleeve. So again, we get an image that reinforces the atmosphere of defiance, and by choosing just a wild card (instead of the whole deck), she brings to mind all the obvious connotations that come with the word wild. Why else do you think she would use the shittiest, most useless part of a deck of cards besides maybe the thing that explains the rules is name dropped so often in rock songs.

The choice to use thieves as the sin she is being punished for is significant. The obvious choice for this particular song would be lust, but Patti is chooses to take a more suggestive route. Again it might be helpful to take a trip into the counter-cultural tradition that Patti was active in to get a feel for why the choice of the thief is so important. Beginning with the Beat generation, we see both Kerouac and Ginsberg romanticizing Neal Cassady's numerous arrests for stealing cars as an act of a person who is taking all the joy that he can by force from a dry and sterile world. The pavement on the interstate highways was still fresh and the car was still a symbol of American prosperity, so in their eyes Cassady's actions were that of a man who was hell-bent on experiencing the vast expanses of the world around him at the expense of any other concern. A little later on the thief enters the consciousness of the 1960's counter-culture. The best example of this can be seen in Dylan's and “All Along the Watchtower”, where he describes a joker, i.e. one who draws the laughter of others, and a thief, i.e. one who takes what does not belong to him, approaching a watchtower filled with people from every station of life, who “don't know what any of it is worth” prepared for a great confrontation. So, in the context of “Gloria” we can see the Patti's decision to cast herself with the thieves instead of the lustful as an assertion that by acting on the desires expressed in this song, she is taking joy and pleasure from a world that has condemned the particular manifestation of joy described in the song.

The line “Thick heart of stone” serves to indicate that, even suffering eternal damnation for her actions, Smith does not feel any remorse for them. It is followed by the recapitulation of the ideas brought up in the first paragraph that I dealt with previously. Then we get to the final line of this introduction, which is simply the word “me”. As she says this, the song transitions to the verse, making the “me” the hinge of the changeover. This is effective because the previous lines have all dealt with the idea of personally taking charge of one's actions and their consequence, so inserting a dramatic shift on the word “me” emphasizes the personal importance.

Now, if I had to guess, the question that is burning in the minds of most of the people (if any) who made it this far is “What the hell does any of this stuff have to do with the frathouse anthem you spent the first half of this article discussing?” While I cannot give a complete response yet, I promise that this question will not go unanswered. It may be helpful to divide the song into three parts: the intro and false-stop outro, the verse, and the chorus. Of these, the first group is the furthest from Them's “Gloria”, while the latter is closest, with the verse falling somewhere in between the two. So now that we've arrived at the verse, let's look at the place where it bears the most in common with the original, the music.

So, as the song changes into the verse we get two E chords on the guitar, both timed to the “me” and both on the first beat of consecutive bars. This iis a forceful way of announcing the presence of the guitar into the mix. In fact, it announces the presence of two guitars, one doing rhythm and one doing a riff. Unfortunately, while Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye are credited with playing guitar on the album, it is not made clear which is performing which part. To further complicate things, bassist Ivan Kral played guitar on some of the songs, but the liner notes do not specify which. If I had to guess Kaye did the leads and Smith did rhythm, but there is no way of knowing for sure so I will just refer to the two guitars by their roles.

Before I get into the specifics of the each instrument's part, now is a good time to look at the bigger picture. Them's “Gloria” kicks off in sixth gear, with all the instruments more or less being there right from the start. But by the time we reach the start of the verse we can already see how different Smith's version is, opening with an introduction featuring nothing but a piano and those weird bass stretches. One of the best things about her version is the way her band manage the slow buildup in intensity that takes up a good chunk of the song.

So anyway, we got those two E chords at the start of the bars, and then it moves right into a more regular rhythm guitar playing a progression of two chords, each played dead on beat. There are two E chords followed by two D chords. This means that for the first or second time so far we get a change in the chord progression (I'm kinda on the fence about whether that B in the Them's bridge constitutes a change in the progression). However, remember that the D chord has an A as the fifth (i.e. it is composed of D, F#, and A). This alone would not justify the similarity, but when combined with the riff the lead guitar is playing, the total effect bears quite a bit in common with Them's E, E, D, A pattern.

This is an interesting choice on Smith's part. Because she is using a long rise in intensity as an important structural element of the song, where the speed, instrumental complexity, and consonance all rise in plateaus over the course of the verse. The introduction of the guitar is a big jump, so she is able to take the Them chord progression and modify it so that the final chord is only implied and still keep the sense that things are warming up. Then, later in the verse, she will use the keyboard to bring the A chord back and this will act as another step up.

Now, unfortunately, since nobody has bothered to either put up a tab of the leads or play an accurate cover on YouTube, you're going to have to rely on the author's, once again admittedly terrible, transcription skills. While I have no confidence in my ability to give an accurate rendering of any of those fills the lead guitarist plays on top of the riff, I'm pretty sure I got the main melody.

It's essentially broken into two parts, both of which follow an identical pattern but starting on a different note. Now this whole riff takes place over a single bar, but because I have chosen an overly simple method of represent music that hopefully allows people unfamiliar with music theory to follow along, I am going to break it up into two bars for the purposes of the visual. Since this riff uses the same notes in different octaves, I will use E-h/A-h/etc for the higher octave version and E-l/A-l/etc for the lower octave.

The important thing to note here is that Patti has now gotten rid of the A chord, which technically changes the progression from I-VII-IV to just I-VII. However, since the song began with an A chord just like the Them version, so long as the A's presence is suggested, it doesn't really feel like a change in the progression.

So remember that the first bar is an E chords, while the riff has the presence of a D note in addition to the E notes. Since the D is a consonant note, the first bar is does not have a whole lot to discuss. However, in the second bar, the odd note (the G) does not fit very well with the E Mixolydian key (which has a G#), but does fit with the D major chord. The presence of the A notes, are also one of the elements that make the disappearance of the chord less striking.

Underneath all of this is the bass, which is working to glue everything to the key. It plays a very simple riff that keeps the E, D, A structure of the Them song framed in the listener's mind even though the guitar is only playing two chords. You can see that on the A notes, the bass and lead guitar echo each other or play their notes one after another, which helps to imply the chord. The B note that it plays on the first note is the fifth of E major, meaning that it is fits within the key. On the 2 it plays an E note which helps cement the E major chord. Finally there is the fourth beat, where it plays an E note which, like the G, is consonant with D major. However, immediately after this it plays and A, which suggests the missing chord.

The bass proceeds more or less in this fashion throughout the multi-stage first verse, the only variation is that it will add extra notes into one of the four beats. In other words during one of the beats that is playing an A note, Kral might add in extra A to the offbeat. This is done to mark changes in the song structure without altering the shape of the riff, and to add little flourishes.

Throughout the song, and especially during the crucial first verse, the drum takes the lead role among the instruments in realizing the Patti's unique structural vision. More than any of the other instruments, its changes in speed and temp mark out the various stages. Because of this, it is one of the most interesting elements. At the onset of the verse, however, it is doing the bare minimum required of rock drumming, playing solely on each beat, except for the occasional extra stroke on the offbeat of the 4.

Lets get back to the words. During the main part of the verse, the lyrics switch from poetic musings to a narrative. While this is still far from what Morrison was singing, unlike the introduction, the lyrics are now at least somewhat related to the subject of the original “Gloria”. The first stage of the verse, however, acts as a bridge between the two.

“People say 'beware!'

But I don't care

The words are just

Rules and regulations to me, me”

Given that what has come before is a metaphysical speculation on the value of radical freedom, and what is to come is a fairly straightforward narrative, these lines can be seen as a mechanism for showing that the statements made in the introduction are the protagonist's.

I say protagonist rather than Patti because the lyrics of her “Gloria” blur the line between the story/POV song and the confessional. It's worth remembering that ten years before this song was written, as far as popular music was concerned, the singer-songwriter wasn't a thing. In 1955, when Johnny Cash sang “Folsom Prison Blues”, not only would nobody have thought to even consider that the lyrics might be from the singer's perspective, but few would have even gone so far as to think that the idea of singing about a killer stuck in jail might, even on a metaphorical level, contain some relevance to the singers life.

This changed a bit in the early-mid 60's with Dylan. He was not the first person to add the strongly personal elements typically found in poetry to song, but he was the first to make a significant impact on the popular cultural landscape doing so. After this point, all the way until today, any rock lyricist with a decent reputation, for better or worse, will have the words they write be seen as at least potentially being a metaphor for the personal. This does not mean even the most blundering of interpreters automatically regard every song as a autobiographical statement, even for the champions of this style of writing, but more often than not it will be seen that way by at least some people. An example of this distinction can be seen in the old master himself. “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” is a story song that was and still is recognized as a reflection on the suffering of subsistence farmers. However, “Outlaw Blues”, released just a year later, was on the surface no more about Dylan than “Hollis Brown” was, yet you would be hard pressed to find more than a paragraph written about the song that does not mention the difficulties and isolation Dylan felt during his transition from a solo acoustic folk act to a rock act with a full band.

So context is and was key for making the distinction. Now looking at the context for Gloria, we can see the Them original is a standard romance number (if lewd for its time and place), which, save when they are written by someone like Dylan, would not be regarded as a personal statement. However, Patti does not stick with the source material, and the introductory lyrics were taken from a poem she had written that was obviously at least somewhat personal in nature. Then we have the previously quoted stanza, which links the intro to the narrative portion of the verse. So what we have here is a deliberate blurring of the lines between the narrative song and the confessional. Smith employs techniques that lead the listener to conclude that it is either one or the other, but then at other points will push in the opposite direction, not allowing the song to slide easily into either the “story song with a protagonist” or the “personal statement” camp. This liminal position both allows Smith to go beyond her own personal experience, and at the same time evoke the heightened listener empathy and individualistic force of the confessional.

I'll take a brief moment here to draw a little attention to Patti's vocals. During the introduction, she delivers her lines, fittingly, in a style reminiscent of a poetry reading. The first line is sung, but then afterwards, until you get to the final “me”s, she more or less speaks her lines, though with a bit of sing-talking and some deliberate usage of extended drawls that bridge the two worlds a bit. During the verse, she delivers the the first two lines in a singing voice, and then she takes things back to a speak-singing style that is a little more pronounced than in the intro. The way this song slowly evolves itself over time is one of the most notable things about it, and even at this early stage we can see how it is slowly but steadily reshaping itself.

On the subject of the song's transitions, the next thing we get is another pair of “me”s, during which the song stops save the E major chords that occur at the same time as her vocals. These percussive jolts introduce the next stage of the verse. Now we see a pattern being formed. Smith will not use this specific interlude anymore (the repeated “me”s), but she does further divide the verse into a number of different phases that have variations in the music and instrumentation, each faster than the last, and they are all separated by little interludes similar to this one.

So like I said, this next phase of the verse is noticeably faster than the previous one. It also has both the rhythm and bass guitars adding more notes and chords to each bar, though the progression is kept intact. Whereas before, the little guitar fills that come in over the leads occurred every other bar with a very laid back character, they are now more erratic and have a greater intensity. Also, unlike earlier in the song, where the changes in speed happened during the interludes, this stage of the verse gets progressively faster throughout it's entire duration

“I walk in a room, you know I look so proud

I'm movin' in this here atmosphere, well, anything's allowed

And I go to this here party and I just get bored

Until I look out the window, see a sweet young thing

Humpin' on the parking meter, leanin' on the parking meter”

Now we see the lyrics transition over fully to a narrative. The fact that the previous lines all relate to the current protagonist can be seen by her depiction as “proud” and “bored”. While I know that I just went off on a whole thing about how this song deliberately blurs the lines between singer and protagonist, and it was perfectly common for earlier singers, more often women than men, to sing songs written from a male POV while keeping the assumption that their subject is a man, I feel that the “her” pronoun is justified.

Obviously, the title character of this song is a woman. Rather than either flat out making it clear that the protagonist is male or that the lyrics are a personal statement, Patti uses the middle path between the two that I talked about earlier to prod at the rigid homophobia of this song's time and place. This song was written about a decade and a half after Ferlinghetti got arrested for publishing Ginsberg lines about getting “fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists”, so there is an obvious practical benefit to keeping things vague, but I think there is more to it than just that.

Throughout the entirety of “Horses”, Patti takes a transgressive stance towards the gender norms of the early 70s. “Redondo Beach” is a narrative song that explicitly refers to two lesbians, while “Free Money” subverts the notion of men as the material provider for woman. Even the album's cover shows this tendency. I am the last person anybody should be turning to for fashion commentary, but I am pretty sure that she is rocking a man's suit in that image, and she is clearly taking a stereotypical “I'm a serious businessman and I both work and play hard” jacket draped over the shoulder pose. Thus, by choosing to cover a song that is just dripping with heterosexual machismo and then defiantly keeping the name, Smith maintains the sexual energy of the source material while attacking the idea that a love song has to be between a man and a woman that pins it up. She takes a exceedingly powerful but nevertheless also reasonably safe song (in the same way it is a safe move for a rapper in 2017 to sing about shooting people) and redirects its energy into a sociopolitical attack that doesn't damper down the original's sexual power but in fact enhances it.

In fact, the last two lines of this phase of the verse, where she refers to the titular woman “humpin on a parkin meter” take the sexualization to a poetically overexaggerated extreme. Obviously I don't think too many of us would be particularly aroused if we were at a party and happened to glance out the window to see a woman trying to fuck a parking meter, but you have to look at this line as a poetic image rather than a literal one. It is a piece of characterization, indicating that Gloria is bursting forth with sexual energy. The parking meter's phallic character shouldn't require any explanation, and the sudden addition of a masculine image further keeps this song from explicitly going one way or the other with regards to the lesbianism. For it's time, the wild mania of Van Morrison's “Gloria” chorus was regarded as about as a pinnacle for obvious sexuality, but, without ever specifically mentioning the sex act itself, Patti Smith pushes things into a comically overcharged realm, at once capitalizing on and poking a little bit of fun at the original song's libido.

“Oh, she looks so good,

Oh, she looks so fine

And I got this crazy feeling and then I'm gonna ah-ah make her mine”

The next transition bears a number of similarities to the previous two and a number of differences. There are still the two chord-punctuated single syllable utterances, but she has replaced “me” with “uh” and sings them at a much quicker interval, thus adding to the overall buildup of intensity. In addition there are now two lines that precede the monosyllabic utterance, which feature an increase in the song's tempo as they are played******. This buildup is much slower than the sudden leap after she makes the utterances, so you end up with this two-stage effect, sort of like someone shifting gears in a car until they hit sixth, at which point they lay down their foot on the gas pedal.

If you hadn't noticed yet, there has not been a single chorus despite having two parts that are both long enough to qualify as verses of their own. That chorus won't come for a while, but in the meantime, those “Oh she looks so...” lines function as a sort of mini-chorus. Patti's singing is much more melodic (vs spoken) is these lines, and they function as a sort of pleasant interlude. The big difference between this and most choruses is that almost all songs tend to alternate in intensity between the different parts, but here things just keep getting bigger and faster.

Alright so now where at the next stage of the verse. Here we get a change in the bass riff. This, like most of the changes in both versions of the song, is nothing monolithic. Patti Smith had an excellent understanding of how the original was able to accomplish so much with only minor variations, so when she sought to step things up, it was not through any ornate patterns or complex layers of studio accompaniment, but by taking the structural devices of the original and adding a number of new stages similar small changes. When I was younger, I had a difficult time understanding how Smith could be classed with bands like The Ramones, Sex Pistols, and Television as a founding father of the punk genre. Part of this was because I was more familiar with her later work, but part of it was because I couldn't see how any of her music fit with the primitive simplicity of the aforementioned bands. Of course applying labels and stylistic devices of the later punk scenes that emerged in England, California, Washington, and New York to the early CBGB's scene is a bit anachronistic, but I hope these endless pages of analysis have imparted to you how Patti was able to create a truly unique work by adding incredible poetic complexity and artfully modified structural changes to the primitive approach of early rock and roll. It might not have been particularly influential to those early British bands (Crass for one were not fond of her erudition) but it played a pivotal role in the proceeding generation of post-punk bands who sought to strike a similar balance.

So anyway, back to that bass riff. Here is a side by side comparison of the original riff and the new one:

So there isn't that much of a difference, but the few changes that have been made are noteworthy. In the first bar, where the rhythm guitar has that E chord locked in place, the extra B on the offbeat makes the melody feel a little bit more intricate. In the second bar, where the rhythm is playing D chords, the extra A note helps drive things further toward the missing chord. Both effects add to the sense of increased propulsion that comes with each of these new stages.

The more significant change that occurs during this portion of the song is between the guitars and the piano. The guitars are heavily pulled back, so that there is now, besides the occasional fill, only one guitar playing an E note on the 2 and a D note on the 4. Meanwhile the piano is playing a series of chords that looks something like this:

The two chords that overlap with the guitar are a bit hard to make out, but I tried this pattern on my piano and it seemed right. The big thing to note here is that we have now returned to having the A chord at the end of the progression being explicitly stated. This gives this stage of the song an increased sense of consonance and finality compared to the earlier stages.

Alright so back to the lyrics:

“Ooh I'll put my spell on her

Here she comes

Walkin' down the street

Here she comes

Comin' through my door

Here she comes

Crawlin' up my stair

Here she comes

Waltzin' through the hall

In a pretty red dress”

You'll notice that this is the point where Patti Smith introduces the call and response elements I mentioned earlier. Where Them use the technique only as a means of adding to the energy of the chorus, Smith uses it to provide a change of pace from the other verse stages. She will also go on to use call and response during the chorus, but because she has already pulled the concept from her toolkit, the effect is different then it is in the Them version. By establishing the use of the technique ahead of time she has plants it in the listeners mind. Thus when she returns to it in the chorus it comes off as a heightened modulation rather than a new concept like in the Them version.

Of the lines that function as “calls”, the first serve primarily to advance the narrative, indicating that we are now progressing from the boring party to the narrator's bedroom, and the the title character is mutually attracted to the speaker. The fourth and fifth calls provide more poetic images rather than literal narrative additions. The use of the verb crawling suggests that Gloria too is desperate for the act which is to come, while the verb waltzing suggests her elegance and beauty, and then the final line gives more details about one of the reasons she is so attractive.

The last two lines of this verse function as a sort of transition into a transition. The music does not change at all but we see the call and response end. Immediately after the final line of the verse we move to another “Oh she looks so good” transition. The biggest difference between this transition and the verse is that the piano has stopped playing the progression that I described previously and has switched to a more complicated riff that I won't even bother embarrassing myself trying to transcribe.

The next stage of the verse sees the song once again moving at a higher speed. While at the most basic structural level this song is indeed follows the verse chorus sometimes bridge technique of all pop songwriting*******, the first 2/3rds of the song employ a very particular kind of verse-chorus songwriting seen in such songs as “Sympathy for the Devil”, where, rather than having the shift from verse to chorus act as a means of changing the momentum, these structural components are used as a point in which speed buildups and greater instrumentation can be added, but nothing is ever pulled back. We'll see a little bit later how Smith returns to a structure more akin to the Them song after the chorus, but the fact that it was preceded by this massive buildup changes the total effect so much that it is now completely different different.

Anyway, besides the increase in speed, the biggest thing to note during the stage is that the guitar switches to these little punctuational notes while the piano changes to two new riffs. Since this stage of the song is beyond my powers of reproduction (trying to transcribe chords is significantly more challenging than melodies, especially on the piano when there are so many different possibilities for voicing), I will only point out how well the first of these riff coincides with the song's lyrics:

“And then I hear this knock on my door

Hear this knockin' on my door”

Notice how the portion of the riff that is played when the lyrics get to the word “knockin” bears quite a bit in common with the pattern someone might use to knock on a persons door.

After these two lines the piano switches to a more restrained pattern while the chord notes that the guitar is playing on the 2, 4, and the offbeat after the 3 are brought up in the mix.

All this may seem like the song has taken a mellower turn, but that is only because I haven't gotten to the lyrics. Compare the syllable count on these lines with the earlier verse:

“And I look up into the big tower clock   (11 syllables)

And say, 'oh my God here's midnight!'   (8 syllables)

And my baby is walkin' through the door   (10 syllables)

Leanin' on my couch she whispers to me   (10 syllables)

and I take the big plunge”   (6 syllables, half-line)

The previous two lines are 9 and 7 syllables, while the previous verse alternated between 5 and 3 depending on whether it the line was call or response. The verse before that has a similar syllable count, slightly higher, but that is because those lines were spread over three to four bars each while these are spread over two. When one adds in the increased speed, these jam-packed lines give the effect of heightened intensity and a sense that the tension that has been building up is about to burst. Very few songs manage to push things even this far, but Patti still has one more interlude and verse stage, with their corresponding increases in intensity, before the chorus finally hits.

This verse is hopefully has enough gender ambiguity to convince anyone who is still in doubt about whether Patti is deliberately being vague with the protagonists couch. On the one hand practically every line in the song contians either the word “I” or “mine”, which is just hammering home that these lyrics are intended to be somewhat personal. On the other hand the images of the “big tower clock” and taking “the big plunge” are some of the most obviously phallic in all rock music. Again the point here is to deliberately blur these lines to push against the idea that the man has to be the dominant sexual force while a woman has to be passive and receptive.

So now we reach the final of the three:

“And oh, she was so good and oh, she was so fine

And I'm gonna tell the world that I just ah-ah made her mine”

Like I said before, the increase in speed and tension here is starting to push things to the breaking point. On a musical level there is not much added but everything is played with so much wild heat that you would think something was. I had mentioned before that these interludes functioned as mini-choruses, but that is only partially true, because, unlike a true chorus, these passages do not give one the sense of relief or resolution, only a brief change and a sense that more is to come.

The verse is finally over, and now we get to the pre-chorus. If the introduction had (at first glance) nothing to do with the Them song, and the verse riffed on some of the thematic ideas but did not explicitly reproduce any of the lines, then the pre-chorus is the link between the verse's loose interpretations of the lyrics and their reproduction in the chorus. The first couple of lines are not directly present in the Them song, but they are the sort of lines that one could imagine being in there (unlike anything prior to this):

“And I said darling, tell me your name, she told me her name

She whispered to me, she told me her name

And her name is, and her name is, and her name is, and her name is”

Again we have the repetition of “I” and “me” in the first two lines to reinforce the personal element of the song. This also allows things to pivot very easily to the third line, which has a frantic quality that is even more extreme than what we saw in the previous verse. It also allows a fluid transition into the part where she spells out the title character's name. As I'm sure you already guessed, this stage of the pre-chorus has an increase in tempo as well.

In addition to the aforementioned increase, we also get one final push in speed during the part of the pre-chorus where she spells out the name. The guitar and bass also switch to this chugging pattern reminiscent of metal bands that would hit the scene in a few years time (save Priest and Motorhead) while the drum switches to a more intricate, syncopated pattern. All of this is the final stop before we get to the moment that the song has been building towards with incredible patience.

The lovely little high pitched vocal flourish that occurs when she says “name” is as good an occasion as any to give a little nod to the expressive capacity of Patti Smith's voice. If a strong command of things like vocal range and melodic clarity are your metrics for what makes a great rock vocalist, then she is certainly not among the upper echelons, but as with much of the punk revolution, one of the big points is that these technical gifts quite often get in the way of being truly expressive. Though unlike the raw, primal guitar work seen in The Ramones and The Modern Lovers, this was never developed with quite the same degree of success as punk rock evolved. If you listen to “Horses”,any of the Velvet Underground albums, the Modern Lovers self-titled, Peter Laughner's demos or Pere Ubu's corpus you will be treated to a wide gamut of expressive accouterments. Things like the lovely little spike in pitch seen here, or brief soliloquy-esque asides to the listener, and a whole host of other interesting ideas for what can be done with the human voice outside just trying to ring high and low pitches from it. As punk moved on it, it progressed towards a more uniform hostility in vocal delivery, so the broad breadth of singing/speaking/speak-singing techniques scene in the proto-punk movement remains a unique treasure.

If the orgasmic release I described in the chorus of Them's “Gloria” is a one night stand, then the release that comes when Patti Smith's version hits can be compared to that of tantric sex. All the tension that has just been piled on for layer after layer of that verse is just let off the valves in a single burst. Here, while there are some differences in what the instruments are playing, the single word (plus letters) of the chorus' lyrics is identical to Morrison's version. Like the Them, song, the actual “Gloria” is sung by the backing band, while Smith takes care of spelling out the letters in a string of orgasmic squeals. I had mentioned during the my write-up of Them's version the potential connection between the Latin word gloria and the English name. While I am uncertain whether or not Van Morrison was aware of this connection (Allmusic's Bill Janovitz insists that he does********) there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Patti understands it. This is one of the reasons why the seemingly disparate introductory passages actually fit quite well. Since the Latin “Gloria” is a staple phrase of Catholic church services and Morrison uses it in a hymn of sexual relief, the lines that show the irreligious detachment of the protagonist to traditional religious practices, and the application of those same desires to the sexual act.

Back to the music. The chorus, like the lyrics, take a classic rock and roll approach, with Daugherty really going nuts on the drums as the piano is cut from the mix. In a similar send-up to early rock, the guitar and bass all play three chords in a style that is reminiscent of twelve bar blues. The chorus provides the revelation as to why so much work was taken during the verse to make the A chord as nebulous as possible. By spending all that effort to conceal it, the reveal is that much stronger. It's worth remembering that “Gloria” is one of those songs where the chord progression does not change from verse to chorus, but listening to Patti Smith's version you do not get that impression.

Like I just mentioned, the bass and guitar parts are set up in homage to a particular style of twelve bar blues. Now, in a traditional twelve bar blues song, a I – IV – V progression, which I will represent with the C, F, and G (If we were to use the key of A it would be A, D, and E in that order. In E Mixolydian, it would be E major, A major, and B minor), there are four bars of the C chord, two bars of the F chord, two more C chords, then either two bars of a G chord or one bar of G and one of F, followed by two more bars of C. While this can be done with major chords, or even seventh chords, one of the most common ways of doing it is to have the guitar play a series of two note chords while the bass plays just the chord notes. If played in the key of A, said arrangement would look something like this (Remember that the roman numerals stay the same regardless of key, so it is still a I-IV-V progression):

The end result sounds something like this. The important thing to notice here is the pattern of playing the chord note with the fifth together is interrupted twice in each bar by the chord note and the sixth. While this is happening, the bass is typically just playing the root of the chord itself (so the A in bar 1). Now one of the reasons why this pattern is so impressed on our cultural memory is how well the notes go together with each of the chords, as well as the key.

For most of this riff you have the root note and the fifth played together. In the A major chord the fifth is E, which is the root of E major and part of the key of D. In the D major chord the fifth is A, which is the root and tonic of A major (remember the root is the main note of a chord and the tonic is the main note of a key) and part of the key of E. In the E major chord the fifth is B, which is part of the key of both A and D major.

The other component of this riff is the part where they play the root and the sixth together. In the A major chord the sixth is an F#, which is part of the key of E and the third in the D major chord. In the D major chord the sixth is B, which is part of A major's key and the fifth of the E major chord. In the E major chord, the sixth is C#, which is part of the key of D major and the third of the A major chord. So every single note that is played matches at least a little bit with the other chords, giving the whole riff a sense of unity.

Compare that above pattern with what the bass and guitar play in the “Gloria” chorus:

Now, remember that while the E Mixolydian and A Major key's have different tonics, the component notes are identical, so the harmonic stuff I described above is still true. The other big thing to note is that she condenses a more extensive twelve bar pattern into a two bar repetition that fits the shape of the chord progression. The interlocking, mutually aligned notes are closesly related to both the key and at the other chords. This gives the chorus an incredible sense of stability after the deliberate wobbliness of the verse.

As with Them's “Gloria”, once the chorus of Patti Smith's version is complete, we get a come-down that is deliberately designed to match the moments the follow the orgasm. The drums keep the same tempo, but begin to lightly tap the symbols instead of pounding on the kicks and toms. The bass plays a riff very similar to what it was playing in the chorus, but without the D and A notes on the offbeat. More significant than any other change is that of the guitar which is drastically cut back from the previous rollicking blues riff. At first it simply plays some light fills fairly low in the mix, but then once the verse picks up speed it switches back to punctuating chords on the beat. At first they only occur on the D and A, which indicates that from this point forward the band are not going to be as vague about the tonic chord. Once the actual verse itself starts it also adds in chords on the E beats. The only time we see the piano between now and the outro is during the first of the two interludes, when it adds a sound-effect-esque flourish similar to what I described with the door knocking.

“I was at the stadium

There were twenty thousand girls called their names out to me

Marie and Ruth but to tell you the truth

I didn't hear them I didn't see

I let my eyes rise to the big tower clock

And I heard those bells chimin' in my heart”

Here we see Patti once again blurring the lines between confessional and narrative lyrics. On first glance, lyrics about performing in a concert suggest that it is the personal world of the vocalist that is being described. But if there was a point in Patti Smith's career when she could headline a 20,000 seat venue, it was not when she was writing her version of “Gloria”, which would have been the period when she was a mainstay at New York's CBGBs, which had a maximum capacity of 350. In fact, these lines actually seem to have more in common with the masculine hypersexual fucking-five-groupies-at-a-single-venue attitude that the Rolling Stones had by this point already set up as a rock institution for but Led Zeppelin and their Mud Sharks had yet to take into the realm of the truly ridiculous.

The second part sees the image of the clock-tower being brought back, but this time, rather than focusing on the phallic visual appearance of the actual building, the focus is on the repetitive nature of the tower's bells, which ring out every hour regardless of the circumstance. Hence even when performing at a concert surrounded by other women, the protagonist still hears Gloria's call. This ability to take poetic images and employ different elements in varied metaphors as the work unfolds is one of those things that usually sits at the other end of the gulf between poetry and song lyrics, so this can be chalked up as one more reason Patti Smith stands at the apex of rock lyricists.

Musically, the rest of the second verse plays out very similarly to the first, only without as many stages. You get a repeat of the “oh she was so” lines followed by the “make her mine” part, which is in turn followed by the chorus. The biggest difference is that the blues-style riff enters the song while it is still in the verse phase, softening the impact of the chorus the second time around while giving the lead-up a stronger punch. As for the chorus itself, it is all but identical to the one I just discussed, so I will just skip ahead to the outro.

The chorus abruptly slows down into a series of chords that are very similar to the blues riff, but this time instead of two note combinations they are full open chords, so it goes E major, C#major, E major, C# major, D major, D major, A major, A major in even intervals over two very slow bars. Meanwhile the bass simply echoes the chord notes and the drums come down exclusively in time with the guitar. Lyrically, we get a nice little stanza that ties some of the previous elements of the song together:

“And the tower bells chime, 'ding dong' they chime

They're singing, 'Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine.”

Once again Patti adapts the image of the clock-tower to a new situation, this time letting its constant reminder be not (just) Gloria herself, but the very idea of radical personal freedom introduced in the earlier lyrics which allows the encounter to take place.

There is every indication that things are winding to a halt, with the rhythm getting slower and slower and the opening lines being recapitulated, but all of a sudden Daughterty starts wailing in his kit and the chorus jumps right back in at full force. While Patti and co. had enough in them for one final burst, I am afraid that I have reached the limits of what I have to say about these two songs. If anyone ever manages to make their way through this novella length exegesis on two songs from over forty years ago, I hope you gained enough insight into not just the songs themselves but the full scope of what is involved in popular songwriting to justify the spent time.

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* The only exception to this is that they occasionally drop out the last open chord (on the final and of the 1 – and – 2 – and – 3 and – 4 – AND - )

** The "_" is a rest, so he is not holding the first note extra long, but letting the silence ring out.

*** I know that since the bass note is B this is not technically an E chord, but to my knowledge, given that we can't even decide if two notes counts as a chord or not, there has never been any decent means of noting two note chords that have attained broad acceptance. Even if there was, since I am trying to write in such a way that someone without a background in music theory can still gain a greater appreciation of the song, it would be counterproductive to delve in obscurantism. This also goes for the slashchords in the second part of the bridge.

**** The puzzle is this: during the first two repetitions, I am pretty sure he is doing a hammer on for the B note. However, given that the sensible position for a B note of that octave (given the position of his hands for part X) is the open 2nd string. Since you can't do hammer-ons of an open note, it means he is actually doing a pull-off, or he is playing the same octave B but on a different string. However I played around with both possibilities and I could not find anything that sounded right.

*****Mark Rowland, “Young Buck!” Musician (April 1993): 42-53

******The speed up actually starts two line from the end of the last part, but it keeps getting faster during this stage and it is a real pain in the ass to try and divide this song into neat little pieces so sometimes I have to draw the lines a little off from where they actually are.

*******I normally prefer to take the safe route and preface these kinds of assertions with an “almost” or “nearly” to take any exceptions into account, but I really feel that any song that is not built around that classic structure of verses and choruses, plus or minus bridges, intros, outros, pre-choruses, etc, falls into the realm of either classical music, non-Western music, jazz, or the avant-garde, and thus by the mere fact that it does not employ these structural devices cannot be called pop music.

********Bill Janovitz, “Gloria” Allmusic.com. https://www.allmusic.com/song/gloria-mt0010867829