Patti Smith – Because The Night

Springsteen wrote the chorus and gave up on the rest — the cassette sat untouched on her mantel until one sleepless night by the phone finished the song.

The cassette sat on Patti Smith’s mantel for days, ignored. Bruce Springsteen’s handwriting was on it — the title scrawled across the label — but Smith had no interest in singing someone else’s song, and there it stayed while she got on with her own record. What she didn’t know was that the tape held a great chorus and almost nothing else: Springsteen had written the hook, recorded a version mumbling placeholder words where the verses should be, wrestled with it for four months, and finally given up. It took a sleepless night, a silent telephone, and a woman waiting on a call from the man she loved to turn that abandoned fragment into the biggest hit either of them would have that year.

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The song began in Springsteen’s world. He recorded an early take at Atlantic Studios in New York on June 1, 1977 — the first day of the sessions for Darkness on the Edge of Town — with only the chorus in place. He kept at it for months and couldn’t crack it, and the truth was it didn’t belong on that album anyway. Darkness was a record about dread and endurance, and this was a straight love song, the kind Springsteen said he wasn’t comfortable writing head-on at the time. So it drifted. Jimmy Iovine, a scrappy engineer in his mid-twenties working on Darkness while also producing Smith’s Easter nearby, saw what his two clients couldn’t: the song needed her. He talked Springsteen into letting the tape go, then spent days badgering Smith — did you listen to it yet, did you listen to it yet — while the cassette gathered dust on her mantel.

The night the phone didn’t ring

She finally played it while waiting for a long-distance call from Fred “Sonic” Smith, the former MC5 guitarist she was falling in love with in Detroit while she sat in New York. The melody dismantled her resistance on the first loop. She let it play over and over, and as she paced by the phone, the waiting itself became the words — a lyric about desire, about a love that belongs to the dark hours, written in real time to the man she was aching to hear from. She finished before he called; by the time the phone finally rang, she said, she had co-written a hit record. She and Iovine cut it in roughly two days. Smith has always been precise about the credit: she called it a song she could never have written alone, and the chorus one she’d never have come up with in a hundred years.

Released in March 1978 as the first single from Easter, Because the Night became the improbable crossover of Smith’s career — the punk poet of Horses, the self-styled godmother of the New York scene, suddenly on pop radio. It climbed to No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 5 in the United Kingdom, remaining, remarkably, the only Top 40 hit of her entire catalog. It made Iovine’s name — his first hit as a producer, the launch of a career that would run through Interscope and Beats — and it pushed Easter into the mainstream. Smith, characteristically, spent some of the money on her father, buying him a 1978 Chrysler Cordoba.

A whole life in one song

For a track its co-writer nearly threw away, it has proven astonishingly durable. Springsteen’s own versions stayed in the vault for years, surfacing officially only on his 1986 live box set and the 2010 collection The Promise. In 1993, 10,000 Maniacs cut an acoustic version for MTV Unplugged that reached No. 11 — technically outcharting the original. Bono called it the song everyone wishes they’d written. When Smith was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, she and Springsteen performed it together, and he insisted they sing her words, not his. Fred Smith, the man on the other end of that phone line, married her in 1980 and died in 1994; the song she wrote waiting for his call outlived him and keeps outliving everyone, one of the great accidents in rock history — a chorus in search of a verse, and a woman with the exact right verse in her heart.