Patti Smith made her debut with this 1974 single pairing an improvised version of Hey Joe with her autobiographical poem Piss Factory.

This is one of my prized possessions: an original copy of Patt Smith’s first single, released on Lenny Kaye’s own label, Mer Records.

It came out back in 1974, and I remember it best for its B-side, Piss Factory, in which Patti delivers a breathless monologue over Richard Sohl’s equally breathless piano, and plangent guitar from Tom Verlaine and Lenny Kaye.

Over the course of four minutes with barely a pause for breath she describes in vivid detail her real-life experience of working a dead-end minimum-wage job in a baby buggy factory – “Forty hours, thirty-six dollars a week, but it’s a paycheck, Jack” – and her fierce determination to break free; to be someone.

Which of course she did.

It’s an inspiring slice of dirty realism: social realism as poetry (or vice versa). And it’s utterly spellbinding. You’re hanging on every word, the tension exacerbated by that piano struggling to keep pace with Patti’s passionate stream of consciousness. 

I must admit I remembered this as being the A-side of the single, which preceded her landmark debut album Horses, but actually the A-side was her version of Hey Joe; very different from the versions by Hendrix and Love that I already knew.

Aptly retitled Hey Joe (Version), Patti introduces the song with a spoken-word spiel about Patty Hearst, the teenage American newspaper heiress who scandalised America when she was photographed committing armed robbery in combat uniform with an automatic weapon, after being kidnapped by a Marxist group called the Symbianese Liberation Army.

It’s brilliant. But for me Piss Factory is the perfect introduction to Patti’s poetry and her freestyling vocal improvisations.

I believe it’s the only single put out on Mer, coming in a sleeve with a black-and-white portrait of Patti in a beanie, with a challenging expression on her face.

I also have what I believe is the label’s first and last album, the starkly brilliant Man Ah Warrior by reggae toaster Tapper Zukie, with an equally striking monochrome cover.