Patti Smith sings “You Light Up My Life” on Kids Are People Too, 1979: An exploration of the mystery of creation, or something like that
This blog entry started off as a humble Twitter post linking to the video in question, but I decided it deserved a bit more bandwidth. I’m posting it, by the way, on December 30, Patti Smith’s 74th birthday; I’m not usually one to mark the birthdays of celebrities on social media, but seeing that 2020 is coming at long last to a most welcome end, it might be time to bend my self-imposed rules a bit.
The grainy video of Patti Smith singing You Light Up My Life on Kids Are People Too, a Sunday morning kids’ show that aired from 1978 to 1982, is one of those clips that hipsters occasionally repost on Facebook or Twitter with some remark along the lines of “Wow, have you seen this? Can’t believe she did that.” (I definitely missed it when it originally aired, being a good decade older than the show’s demographic, but they apparently had rock bands like KISS and Cheap Trick on occasionally.)
A grinning, cheerful Patti is greeted enthusiastically by the kids in the audience. “Everybody says Patti Smith, punk rock!” host Michael Young says by way of introduction.
“I see myself in about 50,000 ways, that’s one of the 50,000,” she answers in her distinctive South Jersey tones. “The whole thing of punk rock is..rock ’n’ roll’s gettin’ back in the hands of the people, it belongs to the kids again, not the big business guys.”
After answering some questions from the kids in the audience (“I always wanted to be something special, most of all”), Patti begins the song nearly four minutes into the video, accompanied on piano by the song’s composer, Joe Brooks.
For those too young to remember, Pat Boone’s daughter Debby Boone’s cover version of YLLML was Number One on Billboard’s Hot 100 for 10 full weeks in 1977, otherwise known as one of the greatest years for old-school punk rock. The ballad was, in fact, the best-selling single of the 1970s. (The song was originally recorded by Kasey Cisyk for the soundtrack of the forgotten movie of the same name, also in 1977.) You couldn’t find a song with less street cred at the time, but that didn’t bother Patti a bit. She couldn’t have cared less about categories, or whether the song was considered cool or uncool, hip or its complete opposite. (Asked by one girl in the audience about who her favorite singer was, she named Maria Callas and Mick Jagger.)
Patti couldn’t give a shit that YLLML had been a huge hit just two years before and that everyone in the audience knew it only too well, or that her core audience considered both the song and Debby Boone to be a huge joke. She heard and felt something in it that spoke to her, and transformed it into…a Patti Smith song, just as decades later she did the same favor for Smells Like Teen Spirit. Some strange music drew her in, made her come on like some heroine.
Rollin’ at sea, adrift on the water
Could it be finally I’m going for home
Finally, a chance to say, “Hey, I love you”
Never again to be all alone
1978 and ’79 were perhaps Patti’s most mainstream-pop years, with the release of the LPs Easter in ’78, including the hit Because the Night (co-written with Springsteen) and Wave in May ’79. Then in her early thirties, she was about to marry Fred “Sonic” Smith and spend most of the ’80s in Detroit, away from the music business (she was in fact already living there, as she mentioned during the question segment on the show).
Born at the end of 1946 — also the birth year of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Donald Trump, Cher, Lesley Gore, Dolly Parton, and Freddie Mercury — Patti Smith came of age in the ’60s but was not really of that decade. You wouldn’t be wrong to characterize her as a key link, maybe the key link, between almost naive, hippie idealism and the energy and DIY spirit of punk, except that Patti was never a nihilist, and ironic distance was never her thing.
Going inside-the-music on the shabby backstory of YLLML is a particularly disheartening experience that leaves you wanting to take a shower. Begin with Joe Brooks’s shabby treatment of Kasey Cisyk, who originally recorded the song (she ended up suing him over monies owed), then shift to his controlling and abusive attitude towards seemingly nearly every woman in his life, culminating in his 2009 arrest, at the age of 71, on 91 counts of rape, sexual abuse and assault, and other charges, and his suicide two years later before he could be brought to trial.
Most of this hadn’t happened on that day in 1979 when Brooks sat down at the piano to accompany Patti Smith on his biggest hit, and Patti was almost certainly unaware of any of it. Does the knowledge of the evil acts Brooks committed cast a retrospective shadow over the performance? You’d be well within your rights to say yes, and the ethics of judging a song, or any work of art, by the conduct of its creator is a topic we could be here all day discussing. Me, I’m just going to say that Patti saw something worthwhile in a popular song and thought the kids might appreciate it, and take it for what it’s worth.
Thanks for reading, and let us all be well, better, and happier in Twenty-One.
