10 Songs That Were Painful To Make

In the grand scheme of the primal side of rock and roll, Patti Smith seems to get lost in the shuffle far too often.

Being more of a poet than a singer, Smith's rise in the New York rock and roll scene was a blueprint for the protopunk that was to come, having more emphasis on attitude than actual musical competence. Though the basics of rock and roll were all there, the very act of getting into the band proved to be a struggle unto itself.

During the first few jam sessions Patti went through, her backing group normally tried to play through standards of rock and roll like Johnny B Goode and the hit Them song Gloria. The only caveat was, there was no real ending to these songs. Throughout each rehearsal, the criteria for band admittance was to play as much as possible until you physically couldn't anymore, which made three-minute songs balloon into 20-minute exercises.

These became the foundation of a song like Land, which took on massive spoken word passages and pieces of poetry by Patti, all while containing the signature Gloria lick being interspersed amongst the madness.

Despite the playing being fairly rudimentary, there's no mistaking the amount of heart that's coming out of every pore of this music.