Patti Smith by Robert Mapplethorpe
Patti Smith was, and is, pure experience… Her reign in the 70s as a street-hot rock & roll messiah seemed to exist from a void. No past, no future—”the future is here,” she’d sing. I’d hear tales of romance, the girl with the blackest hair hanging out at recording sessions writing poetry. But I didn’t know her. I could only embrace the identity I perceived. I was impressionable and she came on like an alien. The first time I met her was in 1975 in a magazine. It was two poems about three wishes: rock & roll, sex, and New York City. Her photo was stark—no disco color flash. It was anti-glam, nocturnal staring eyes, black leather trousers. She was skinny and smart. She posed as if she were the coolest boy in the city. And she was. I could only imagine her world through her poems: telling, truthful, dirty, hopeful. I wanted to meet her and take her to a movie, but she was so unobtainable and fantastic I could only entrust my faith to the future. The future would allow me to have a date with Patti Smith or at least hang out with her. And the future seems to have come. It seems to be happening, it’s happened. It’s here.Patti grew up in south Jersey in the ‘60s. As a teenager she became involved in a succession of religious experiences: “Catholic lust,” an intense relationship with the Jehovah Witnesses, and a full-on romance with Tibetan Buddhism. She completely immersed herself in the genius of Bob Dylan and Arthur Rimbaud. She loved (and loves) rock & roll with an unbounded passion. It instilled beauty and vision to a complex life of dreams.
Patti moved to New York City late in the decade. I’ve met people who knew her at this time and I’ll stare at them as if to somehow transport myself through their memory to see her. She was skinny and exotic. She had Keith Richard’s haircut. She was sexy and manic. She worked at book stores and wrote and read poetry and did art. She co-wrote and acted in Cowboy Mouth with Sam Shepard. She was muse and lover to Robert Mapplethorpe. They were writers, artists, and rock & rollers—they were young and had any which way to go. Years moved by.
She and Lenny Kaye jammed poetry and electric guitar at St. Mark’s Church. Patti would touch her chest and pronounce, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine…” Word was out that an amazing woman with a wild, intellectual positivism was tearing it up downtown. Local news programs and the Village Voice would begin to monitor her moves. She wrote amazing, celebratory record reviews for Rolling Stone, ??Rock Scene and Creem. Rock & roll was the sounding tool for modern prayer. She went to hear Television at CBGB and joined forces with Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell. They amplified the influence of Burroughs, Genet, Hendrix, Dylan, Stooges, Dolls and reggae.
Patti and Television spent 1975 at CBGB creating a forum for an excited and completely distinctive sensibility. “We created it, let’s take it over,” she’d shout and brought serious sounds to the people away from the arena-mind of the corporatized music/youth culture. Revolution was neccessary. The Ramones came in, Blondie came in, Talking Heads came in. Entrepreneurs hyped the Sex Pistols and a subculture was begun. Its current status as a valid mainstream format is just a commercial of its sublime expansion. By 1979 Patti split to Michigan with Fred “Sonic” Smith (legendary guitarist of Detroit’s high energy prophets the MC5) and got married. They had two kids and did a lot of fishing. She was out of the scene and out of sight. A second generation of artists and musicians had come to New York City and began to make noise in an explosion of punk rock inspired enterprise. The strongest and most original force in the music’s history had been a woman. And this fact alone exacted upon the “punk” culture a situation in which women were empowered and encouraged.
Patti reappeared in the late ‘80s with the affirming “People Have the Power.” The song’s video showed a distinguished, serious Patti at home in proclamation amongst images of spiritual leadership. She and Fred played at a celebration for Dylan and another for Jackson Pollock.
Fred passed away in 1995 as did Patti’s brother and close friend, Todd. Robert Mapplethorpe had also passed away.
Patti doesn’t drive. In 1977 she fell off the stage and her eyesight was damaged. Survival in Michigan is difficult and lonely without Fred. She wants to play. As soon as her 13-year-old ends the school year she plans on moving back to New York. She has no set design on a professional life but she loves performance. And teaching. I could only interview Patti in conversational mode. She speaks with humor and thoughtfulness, her words are at once searching and prosaic.
I flew to Boston to meet her and Lenny Kaye where we were to drive to Lowell, Massachusetts for a benefit for the Kerouac Foundation. She asked me to play guitar on three songs: one she had written, one by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, and one an improvisation to a poem by Kerouac. We did a show in Lowell and two in Boston, all three in these cool churches. We spent Saturday visiting the haunts of Kerouac’s Lowell. Patti took Polaroids of my hands for a Sunday exhibit at a friend’s gallery in Jamaica Plain. She’d frame the photos with broad white frames and write around them vignettes pertaining to the subject. I was friends with someone I had dreamed of being friends with for nearly 20 years.
This conversation was recorded late night in a hotel in Lowell, October 6, and the next day in the back seat of a car driving to Boston.
INTERVIEW
Via
(Thanx son#1!)
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