Patti Smith's Advocation of Lautréamont & the Origins of the Phrase 'Career of Evil'

Howard A. Rodman's new essay at the Los Angeles Review of Books explores the phrase "career of evil," through the work of "Lautréamont, J. K. Rowling, with Stops at Patti Smith and the Blue Öyster Cult." Lautréamont, born Isidore Ducasse, "was discovered, rediscovered, re-rediscovered — by the Surrealists, by the Situationists, by other poets (John Ashbery entitled one of his later collections Hotel Lautréamont) — it was Patti Smith who proved, in the 1970s, to be the Comte’s fiercest advocate." More:

Smith famously idolized Rimbaud (c.f., the “go Rimbaud!” chorus of “Land”), but was equally evangelistic about Lautréamont. As Jonathan Cott wrote in The New York Times in 1978, “[Smith’s] sensibility is one that borrows and embraces […] ideas and feelings that have appeared in […] Baudelaire, the illuminations of Rimbaud, the menacing sexual fantasies of Lautreamont, Bataille and Genet.”

But before Patti Smith was Patti Smith™ — before she was a performer in her own right — she was a fan. And among her passions was the rock group Blue Öyster Cult, part early ’70s Long Island boogie-band, part surrealist storm troopers. The music was, for the most part, straight-ahead rock (with the requisite slow numbers interspersed); the lyrics were anything but. Drawing from the “Imaginos” world built by Cult manager Sandy Pearlman, and tapping on the lyrical skills of poet/rock critic Richard Meltzer (songs like “Mistress of the Salmon Salt” and “She’s as Beautiful as a Foot”), the Cult were able to span the dead years between metal and punk. (And they could, I would submit, rock a hall harder than anyone this side of the Who.) The late Allen Lanier, the band’s keyboard player, was also for a while Smith’s lover.

For the third BÖC album, 1974’s Secret Treaties, Smith was invited to contribute lyrics (though interestingly, not on one of Lanier’s composition). She resurfaced the Lautréamont phrase, not noticeably in use between the 1860s and the 1970s, and, working from music by the Cult’s drummer Albert Bouchard, wrote “Career of Evil”...

Find it all at LARB.