But the rest of Easter stays true to the kind of anti-authoritarian critique that has made Smith a central figure in punk rock. Smith’s recording of “Because the Night,” which she co-wrote with her fellow New Jerseyan Bruce Springsteen, was a Top-20 hit. Which prompts a question: Why include them at all?Įaster is probably best remembered as the album that finally got Patti Smith on the radio. The bagpipes in “Easter” sound a lot like the pipes in The Animals’ “All is One” and, for that matter, like the uilleann pipes in Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Holland, 1945.” In these songs, bagpipes form but one part of a many-layered cacophony, and so are downplayed to the point of inconspicuousness. I listened to it for years before I even noticed the bagpipes, which appear amongst the din of the title track. The Patti Smith Group’s 1978 album Easter is one such record. The result is that people hear chaos in these recordings without really recognizing the bagpipes.
Most rock records, if they use bagpipes at all, tend to downplay the instrument. For decades, rock musicians have been using bagpipe noise to amplify political messages in their work. In “All Is One,” the final track on The Animals’ album The Twain Shall Meet, the bagpipes appear again, but this time as part of a discordant soundscape that also contains sitar (another instrument summoning histories of colonial oppression), electric bass, and drums. The song stands alone in permitting the bagpipes to function as an instrument, rather than simply as noise or backdrop. But so far as the use of bagpipes in rock music is concerned, “Sky Pilot” constitutes more of an exception than a rule. The Animals’ inclusion of the pipes on “Sky Pilot” speaks to the way the instrument has been historically used to critique colonialist enterprises, in spite of its contemporary ties to those very enterprises. The Jacobites were members of a Scottish rebel militia that rose against British forces in 1745, and historians commonly cite their resulting defeat as the end of the Scottish clan system and of traditional Gaelic culture in general. But the song the pipe band was playing was “All the Blue Bonnets Are Over the Border,” a tune linked with the Scottish Jacobite rebellion. In order to include pipes on “Sky Pilot,” Burdon covertly recorded a practice session of The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards pipe band-one of many groups that retains its links to British military units today.
The single was released in January of 1968, during a time that also marked the launch of the Tet Offensive and the escalation of the Vietnam War.
#BAGPIPE PLAYER FROM AUSTRAILA FULL#
Take, for example, Eric Burdon and The Animals’ 1968 hit “Sky Pilot,” which includes a full 60 seconds of Scottish bagpipes. Sometimes, this artistic choice works on two levels: First, there’s the visceral impact of the instrument’s unique sound, and second, there’s the bagpipes’ more subversive history of being associated with protest. In addition to being spectacularly anarchic-sounding, bagpipes have long been part of a tradition of protest-one that’s perfectly in line with the disruptive ethos rock was founded on.įor decades, rock musicians have been using bagpipe noise to amplify political messages in their work. AC/DC’s first big hit, “Long Way to the Top,” notably used bagpipes during the era of its frontman Bon Scott, whose birthday is still celebrated in Scotland every year (he would have turned 70 today). It’s also why they’ve historically worked so well with rock music. The bagpipes don’t simply request your attention-they hold it hostage, which is why they work for ceremonial events like weddings and funerals. Unlike with other instruments, this volume range is static, making the noisiness of the Scottish bagpipes both very public and impossible to ignore. Scottish bagpipes are the noisiest unamplified instrument on earth: A single set of pipes produces between 95 and 110 decibels of sound, putting them closer to a jackhammer (95 decibels) than to a piano (60 to 70 decibels). Dozens of kinds of bagpipes exist throughout the world, but it’s the loud Scottish variety that are prominent in popular culture and that many associate with an iconic kind of racket. With his casual remark, my friend inadvertently made a profound point about the instrument: The history of the bagpipes’ inclusion in rock music is, in many ways, a history of noise. Doctors Aren’t Sure How This Even Came Out of a Patient Haley Weiss
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