B is one of the three unquestionably great tracks on on of the finest album of this or any decade. And it is a song, too, unlike the similarly brilliant Piss Factory, which is an ecstatic poem over Tom Verlaine's finest guitar and Richard Sohl's most magical piano, or Land and Horses from the same album, which are suites/performance pieces. DNV does great here, too, but it's the vocal performance and the writing that make this. So Patti can't sing? [Yawn emoticon] Well she has as much of a technical voice as Bowie, to name but one who managed to build a career on a thin reedy warble, limited range and wobbly pitch, but where her greatness lies is in the declamation of ecstatic, shamanistic poetry that gets closer to the dark sexual heart of rock and roll than any other artist, certainly from this benighted decade, which this album illuminated with a prog-scouring flash and boom. No matter that she never bettered it. I've seen her live three times now (more than any other artist), and marveled at her astonishing charismatic ability to project such an onslaught, a tsunami, of emotional, spiritual and sexual joy, a tiny dark loose-limbed stick of energy entrancedly surfing on her sexuality: the only other performer that's come close in my admittedly limited experience is another who is regularly sneered at by the CoDs for being a screaming harridan, Janis Joplin. But the shadow, and indeed the Shadow, knows, and leads me to hold Patti close to my once dark, now effulgent, heart. And she can write some nifty prose, too.
Enthusiastic enough for you, John?
- 8.5 / 10
) while I don't think we've had Patti before now.
