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Hindustan Times
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Workout tunes: Sanjoy Narayan puts together a playlist to help you flex
I know this will sound sanctimonious, but the gym is my temple (there, I said it). It's a sacred space where sweat and steel forge resilience. For 28 years, I've leaned on the barbell. I'm a 65-year-old devotee still hitting the iron three to four days a week. This journey began in my late-30s, as a tentative flirtation with weights. It was, in part, a response to an early health warning, but the weights soon became a full-blown obsession. From the raw grit of 1970s classic rock to the cerebral pulse of modern jazz, I've scoured genres for the perfect sonic fuel to power my lifts. Here's how I went from punk rock deadlifts to squatting with Miles Davis — and why jazz became the ultimate soundtrack for strength-training. My lifting odyssey began at 37. In addition to my health warning, I was inspired by the musician Henry Rollins's visceral essays on weightlifting. ('The Iron never lies to you,' he writes in one. 'You can walk outside and listen to all kinds of talk, get told that you're a god or a total bastard. The Iron will always kick you the real deal.') His punk-rock ethos — raw, defiant, transformative — spoke to me as I navigated the chaos of midlife. I dove into punk, blasting the Black Flag album Damaged through my headphones as I tackled my first bench presses, Rise Above fuelling my fledgling grit. The Ramones' Rocket to Russia powered my early lightweight deadlifts, its relentless simplicity a match for my debutant's zeal. Punk was loud, unpolished and urgent; perfect for a beginner finding his footing in an intimidating Mumbai gym. As my commitment deepened in my 40s, so did my musical explorations. Punk's raw energy gave way to 1970s classic rock, the soundtrack of my teens. Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti became a staple, Kashmir driving my squats with its hypnotic cadence. Deep Purple's Machine Head pushed my bench sessions, Highway Star coaxing one more rep from weary muscles. These bands, with their towering riffs, turned workouts into epic clashes, making each set a tiny bit easier to tackle. For a while. I also dabbled in psychedelic rock, drawn to that genre's experimental edge. Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon lent a surreal calm to warm-ups, while Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow added a trippy vibe to accessory work. But psychedelia lacked the punch required for heavy lifts. Waylon Jennings's Honky Tonk Heroes had a rugged charm for kettlebell farmer's walks (that's one kettlebell in each hand), yet country felt too mellow. I tried folk, and found that Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks suited recovery sessions, but not the demands of a PR (personal record) attempt. In the 2010s, I began to expand my playlists to include late-'80s and early-'90s gangsta rap. NWA's Straight Outta Compton hit like a sledgehammer, the raw aggression perfect for psyching up before a set. Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back brought raging fervour to my squats, Chuck D's voice slicing through the clank of plates. Wu-Tang Clan's Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) fuelled tough pull-ups, its gritty beats and sharp lyrics egging me on. Rap's unapologetic edge mirrored the defiance I felt, pushing my body through middle-age. As I crossed into my 60s, though, my training crystallised. Compound exercises (a mix of squats, deadlifts, benches and overhead presses) became my mantra in my temple. They were frill-free exercises that build on decades of effort. With this clarity came a new soundtrack genre: jazz. I started with the masters. Miles Davis's Kind of Blue flowed through my warm-ups, its modal coolness setting a meditative tone. John Coltrane's A Love Supreme accompanied my squats, its spiritual depth echoing the focus of a heavy set. Charles Mingus's The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady brought frenetic energy to heavy deadlifts, while Ron Carter's bass lines on Speak No Evil anchored my dumbbell bench press. Jazz isn't just music; it's a conversation. Its improvisational flow syncs with my lifts, the changing notes mirroring the instinctual adjustments of a well-executed rep. A great lift, like a great solo, demands precision and freedom, discipline and daring. Modern jazz has deepened this connection. Kamasi Washington's The Epic brings cinematic grandeur to my sessions. Shabaka Hutchings's We Are Sent Here by History matches the fire of my heaviest days. Vijay Iyer's Break Stuff adds intellectual rigour to warm-ups, while André 3000's New Blue Sun offers meditative calm for cooldowns. The new British jazz scene — Nubya Garcia, Moses Boyd, Ezra Collective — infuses my workouts with vibrant, relentless grooves. Why jazz? Because it's not just about adrenaline (though jazz delivers that too). Lifting has its rhythm — inhale, brace, lift, exhale — and jazz, with its syncopated pulse and unpredictable turns, mirrors that perfectly. In my mid-60s, I'm not chasing the reckless intensity of my 40s. I'm pursuing zen and the quiet power that a body can achieve. Jazz is the soundtrack for that pursuit, complex and soulful; a reminder that strength, like music, evolves. (To write in with feedback, email
The Independent
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Patti Smith's Horses at 50: How a reluctant musician made a punk-rock classic
Patti Smith never planned to front a rock band. In 1971, when the music producer and manager Sandy Pearlman approached her about making music, she laughed and told him she had a perfectly good job in a bookstore. Pearlman had seen her performing her poems at St Mark's Church in New York's Bowery against a backdrop of feedback courtesy of guitarist Lenny Kaye. (Also in the audience that night: Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, Todd Rundgren, Sam Shepard and Smith's ex-boyfriend, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.) In Smith, Pearlman saw a rock star in the making, but it took four more years for Smith to warm to the idea. Finally, in 1975, her first LP, Horses, was born. This November, Horses will be 50, an anniversary that is being honoured first with a tribute concert this month at New York's Carnegie Hall featuring Michael Stipe, Kim Gordon, Karen O and more, and in the autumn by Smith herself in a string of concerts where she will perform the album in its entirety. Horses – which is included in the National Recording Registry in the US Library of Congress for being a record that's considered 'culturally, historically or aesthetically significant' – was not only one of the most explosive debuts of the 1970s: it lit the touchpaper for the New York punk rock scene. It arrived five months before the Ramones' self-titled debut, and two years ahead of Richard Hell's Blank Generation, Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols and Television's Marquee Moon. In her 2019 book Revenge of the She-Punks, the music journalist Vivien Goldman describes Smith as 'a new breed of autonomous, self-defined and uninhibited female rock star'. At the time, Smith didn't give much thought to being a woman in a male-dominated scene – at least, not until men started shouting 'Get back to the kitchen' at her during gigs. In the sleeve notes to Horses, she wrote of being 'beyond gender', later explaining that as an artist 'I can take any position, any voice, that I want'. Nowadays she is often called the godmother of punk, or punk's poet laureate, yet it is men who still dominate accounts of the scene. But it would be wrong to attribute that entirely to misogyny. Smith may have provided a template for a new generation of musicians, but musically she existed in a category of her own; you might call it 'punk adjacent'. Horses had a furious passion, and cared little for musical proficiency, but it didn't sound like the work of a snotty upstart reflexively railing against authority. Instead, it bridged the gap between punk rock and poetry, with vocals that shifted between singing and spoken word. Smith was loud in her appreciation of writers and poets such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Blake, Genet, Plath and her beat-writer friends William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. As she noted in her 2010 memoir Just Kids, when it came to making music, poetry was her 'guiding principle'. Horses was, for her, 'three-chord rock merged with the power of word'. Prior to releasing the album, Smith had taken her first steps as a recording artist with a cover of Jimi Hendrix's 'Hey Joe' in 1974, about a man on the run after killing his wife, but with the murderous protagonist replaced by the kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst. It was decent, but it was the B-side that gave a glimpse of what was to come. 'Piss Factory', a raw, incantatory track that started out as a poem, and that recalled her time working in a New Jersey factory aged 16, was Smith's cri de coeur against production-line drudgery. She had been mercilessly bullied by her colleagues, who were annoyed by her insistence on carrying a copy of Rimbaud's Illuminations in her back pocket and instructed her to leave it at home. When she refused, they dunked her head in a toilet bowl of urine to teach her a lesson. Smith's lyrics on Horses would prove similarly visceral, never more so than in the opener 'Gloria (In Excelsis Deo)', a reworking of a Them B-side that wove in excerpts from Smith's poem 'Oath' and began with the electrifying refrain: 'Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine'. More than just a rejection of religion, it was a perfect distillation of Smith's spirit: hypnotic, primal, uncompromising. Elsewhere on the album, there are tales of female suicide (in the reggae-inflected 'Redondo Beach', wrongly interpreted as a same-sex love song at the time), alien visitations ('Birdland') and a dream in which Jim Morrison of The Doors is bound like Prometheus on a marble slab, only to break free ('Break It Up'). In 'Free Money', the most straightforwardly propulsive rock song on the album, she dreams about winning the lottery, climbing out of poverty and 'buy[ing] you a jet plane, baby'. Horses was recorded at Electric Lady Studios, near Smith's New York apartment. Among the musicians were Kaye, Television's Tom Verlaine, Allen Lanier, Smith's then boyfriend from Blue Öyster Cult, drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, and Richard Sohl on keyboards. Together, they fashioned a spiky garage-rock sound partly honed during live performances at the soon-to-be punk mecca CBGB, and that would become the signature sound of the late 1970s scene. John Cale of the Velvet Underground, the producer, encouraged improvisation in the studio and avoided smoothing the band's rough edges. Even so, he and Smith clashed repeatedly during the five-week recording, with Smith saying it was 'like [Rimbaud's] A Season in Hell' for them both. Cale later recalled the experience of working with her as 'confrontational, and a lot like an immutable force meeting an immovable object'. Smith's transgressive spirit also inhabited the cover image, which reinforced her 'beyond gender' approach. Taken by Mapplethorpe and shot in black and white at a penthouse apartment owned by the art curator Sam Wagstaff, it showed an androgynous-looking Smith in white shirt and slacks, a jacket slung insouciantly over her shoulder as if she were the sixth member of the rat pack. When Smith's label, Arista, suggested the hair on Smith's upper lip be airbrushed out, they might as well have asked her to don heels and a sparkly dress. She instructed them to leave it be. When Horses came out on 10 November (the death date of her beloved Rimbaud), Smith had already published several poetry collections and was making money writing for music magazines including Creem and Rolling Stone. In her early years in New York with Mapplethorpe, the pair had lived in squalor and often couldn't afford to eat, but by now she was comparatively solvent. With her album finished, she imagined she would keep on writing and perhaps go back to working in the bookstore. As she told an interviewer in 2007, rock'n'roll was something she was 'just gonna do for a little while and then get back to work'. What she didn't bet on was the album's rapturous reception, which led to requests for her to perform all over the world and to record more music (one of the few dissenting voices was that of Greil Marcus, who snippily declared: 'If you're going to mess around with the kind of stuff Buñuel, Dali and Rimbaud were putting out, you have to come up with a lot more than an homage'). In the five years after Horses was released, Smith would make three more albums including 1978's Easter, her most commercially successful LP. Easter included the single 'Because the Night', an air-punching ode to love and hedonism that was co-written with Bruce Springsteen. It remains Smith's biggest hit. Fans accused her of selling out, but she was unrepentant. She told New York Magazine: 'I liked hearing myself on the radio. To me, those people didn't understand punk at all. Punk-rock is just another word for freedom.' To me, those people didn't understand punk at all. Punk-rock is just another word for freedom Patti Smith Smith was still on a commercial high when, in the late 1970s, she retreated from the limelight. By this time, she had met her husband, Fred 'Sonic' Smith of the Detroit band MC5, and was pregnant with their first child. For the next 15 years, she would concentrate on raising their two children; aside from 1988's Dream of Life, made with her spouse, there would be no new music. But then, in 1989, her former soulmate Mapplethorpe died from an Aids-related illness at 42. Five years later, her husband and her brother both died within a month of each other; both were in their forties. As the sole breadwinner, Smith had no choice but to go back to work. Now 78, Smith has outlived most of her New York contemporaries, bar Kaye, who still performs with her, and Cale, with whom she has long made up since those fraught Horses sessions. Her work transcends not just genres but mediums too. The last 15 years have seen her triumph as a memoirist: the award-winning Just Kids, a chronicle of her relationship with Mapplethorpe, is a bona fide masterpiece, a poetic account of youthful love, and a deliciously grimy portrait of the late 20th-century New York scene where music, art and literature collided and culture was remade. Her two subsequent memoirs, 2015's M Train and 2019's Year of the Monkey, provide portraits of the latter-day Smith: always writing, photographing, performing, tending to her cats and paying loving tribute to the artists, dead and alive, who paved the way. Not for nothing does she have the rare distinction of having been awarded an Ordre des Artes et des Lettres by France's ministry of culture for her poetry and, for her musical achievements, a place in America's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The influence of Smith on successive generations cannot be overstated: The Clash, Sonic Youth, Madonna, Courtney Love, Michael Stipe, PJ Harvey, Florence Welch, The Raincoats, Bikini Kill and The Waterboys' Mike Scott have all talked of their debt to her. Stipe said that when he heard Horses, it 'tore my limbs off and put them back in a whole new order'. Go to her concerts now, and you'll see old punks standing in rapturous communion alongside teenage and twentysomething fans all celebrating Smith: an accidental icon and rock's most remarkable renaissance woman. 'People Have the Power: A Celebration of Patti Smith' is at New York's Carnegie Hall on 26 March. Smith performs 'Horses' in full at the London Palladium on 12 and 13 October. Tickets here.
