“Because The Night” by GARBAGE & SCREAMING FEMALES

In the spirit of Halloween: How a cover song, like our choice of costumes, can reveal something true in our nature.

Oct 28, 2021

Love is a ring, the telephone.

Patti Smith was waiting on a phone call. This was 1977, when a phone was the phone, a heavy device tethered to the wall by a cord. Long-distance calls were costly, especially for someone whose band hadn’t worked in several months while she recovered from a fractured skull and spinal injuries sustained when she fell from the stage in Tampa, FL. So while she and Fred “Sonic” Smith of the MC5 had fallen hard for each other, they were only able able to talk once a week. That call, scheduled for 7:30pm, was all they could afford. When 7:30pm came and went, Smith started to pace around her apartment. It was only then that she pulled the cassette tape with “Because The Night” written in Bruce Springsteen’s handwriting off her mantle.

Jimmy Iovine was waiting for Smith to listen to the song. He knew the song wasn’t quite working for Springsteen and wouldn’t make what became the Darkness on the Edge of Town record, which Bruce felt already had enough “love” songs. Iovine also knew that the album he was producing for Smith, Easter, would need a hit song, so he cajoled Springsteen to give the song with unfinished lyrics to Smith. Only she felt that doing someone else’s song, especially one with the potential to be popular, wouldn’t be fair to the band she wrote with. Lyrics were also a commitment — she wrote songs like poetry, laboring over the words for weeks. Anxiously waiting for the call, she finally played the Springsteen song, and then played it again and again. By the time Fred called at midnight, she had the lyrics for “Because The Night” completed.

There’s a 7 hour Halloween playlist lurking at the end of this newsletter

The song was the hit Iovine wanted for The Patti Smith Group, hitting #13 on the Billboard pop chart in 1978 and #5 in the UK. Easter was a top-20 album, despite the risible controversy of Smith’s underarm hair on the cover. Springsteen’s chorus, even on the dainty acoustic version by 10,000 Maniacs, which reached #11 in 1994, is a monster. Smith’s breathless extended bridge, with its awkward line breaks, makes it visceral and raw.

With love we sleep with doubt

The vicious circle turns and burns without

You I cannot live, forgive the yearning

Burning, I believe it's time, too real to feel

So touch me now

Touch me now

Smith’s lyrics are what jumped out to Shirley Manson when the Garbage singer played Easter on repeat growing up in Scotland. “To hear a woman talk about lust is so unusual,” she told Billboard1 on the song’s 40th anniversary, “[Smith] talks about it in such blatant terms. It's so thrilling. Or at least when I heard it… you could taste it and feel it.” On Garbage’s 2012 tour, Manson would pull Marissa Paternoster, the otherwise shy singer-guitarist for opening act Screaming Females, on stage to cover “Because the Night” to give the song the edginess that struck her years ago, the power of women expressing what had been the sole province of men.

Screaming Females came from the DIY punk scene of New Brunswick, NJ, a small city that’s home to Johnson & Johnson’s I.M. Pei-designed headquarters and the sprawling, disjointed campus of Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey. It’s had some kind of music scene dating back to when Looking Glass, famous for “Brandy,” was playing frat parties. A punk scene took root in the 1980s, and its basement shows have provided a habitat to bands from Bouncing Souls to Gaslight Anthem and Thursday. Screaming Females are another one, formed with Paternoster, the bassist from her high school band, “King Mike” Abbate, and drummer Jarrett Dougherty, whom she met at Rutgers art school. That’s Paternoster’s art on the cover of “Because The Night.”

The Screaming Females and Garbage, on the surface, make for an unlikely collaboration — a hard-touring, self-sufficient punk band and a multi-platinum alterna-pop band that was the brainchild of one of the grunge-era’s biggest record producers, Butch Vig. It was all the guy-fronted guitar-bass-drums bands aided and abetted by Vig’s work with bands like Nirvana (Nevermind) and Smashing Pumpkins (Siamese Dream) that led him to want to do something, anything different, like form a pop band with fellow studio rats Duke Erickson and Steve Marker and recruit a woman to be its singer. Manson was the early choice, and after her band Anglefish broke up, was suddenly available. Even though she described initial sessions as “a disaster,” she was invited to join the band they called Garbage.

By Jonathan Cook-Fisher - https://www.flickr.com/photos/jcookfisher/43272381160/

“Because The Night” was recorded at at Vig and Marker’s Smart Studios in Madison, WI, in 2013 for a special Record Store Day single. The cover begins with the same solo piano as the Patti Smith Group original; Manson takes the first verse, her phrasings hewing closely to Smith’s. The second verse is Paternoster’s — both voice and guitar. Her voice, deeper, growling, and with a sawtooth vibrato, is matched by her guitar’s snarl. At the close of the second verse, on the cusp of that Springsteen anthemic chorus, is the first sign that this cover is more than the sum of its parts.

Come on now try and understand

The way I feel when I'm in your hands

Take my hand come undercover

They can't hurt you now

Can't hurt you now

Manson joins in on the last line, and the oscillating effect of their voices together on the extended “n-o-w-w-w-w-w” is less like harmony than a beautiful collision. As the chorus crashes on the end of the verse like a wave over a Jersey Shore jetty, the sound of two combined bands playing is thick — every part is effectively doubled -- but the vocal duet cuts through. Paternoster gives each lyric an initial bite; Manson holds the notes a touch longer, giving “night” an extra, passionate gasp.

Their duet from there has no set pattern, which is a bit of genius. Sometimes Paternoster sings the lead; sometimes Manson; sometimes they’re together. Not knowing which voice you’ll hear sing lead brings new attention to familiar lyrics. Mason’s lead vocal on the fourth verse is a particular thrill; her voice sold 17 million records, and suddenly solo, it’s like hearing it for the first time. When Paternoster joins for “can’t touch you now,” you feel the words as if they were said directly to you.

Paternoster rips the first of two solos just before that aching extended bridge. Little compares to Smith’s feverish vocal, and there’s none of its vulnerability here. This version is more notable for how power builds within the bridge, as well as what it builds for. This by now a massive rock song -- if what we got after this part of the song is one more bruising chorus and a reprise of the opening piano solo, we’d have had our money’s worth. After that last chorus, however, comes something extraordinary. In The Screaming Females, Paternoster keeps her guitar solos in check, taking care that her parts first serve the song. Here, she’s set loose by the producers behind some of the biggest rock songs from the last time that rock was really big. Her second solo goes for a full 90 seconds. It’s searing; it’s melodic; and every bit of it is the passion this song is supposed to be about.

"I don't like it when people are taken aback by the fact that I'm female and I play guitar," Paternoster told NPR2. "I don't want to be turned into some kind of, like, freak show, you know? I'd like to be considered as a good musician, even though I don't consider myself a very good musician."

As the song says, “with love we sleep with doubt.”

9 Song Playlist

The Garbage & Screaming Females cover of “Because The Night,” plus Patti Smith and Springsteen versions and a few Garbage and Screamales tracks to round it out.