Patti Smith grew up in a semi-rural, working-class neighborhood in southern New Jersey, across the Delaware River from Philadelphia. Her mother was a waitress and her father worked the swing shift at a Honeywell plant, assembling thermostats. Philadelphia was a thirty-minute bus ride from her home. When she was a child, in the fifties, Smith took trips to bookstores there with her mother, and later, when she was a teen-ager, she would go by herself. One afternoon last spring, when Smith and her band were booked into a rock club in Philadelphia, I went with her on a walk from the band’s hotel, near Rittenhouse Square, to Independence Hall. We passed the jazz club on Broad Street where she had heard John Coltrane play for fifteen minutes, before being thrown out because she was underage. “You could go to Market Street and see four or five movies for fifty cents,” she recalled. “One time they had ‘La Dolce Vita.’ I didn’t know about foreign films. And ‘Wild Strawberries.’ That changed my life.” She found a copy of Arthur Rimbaud’s “Illuminations” in a bargain book bin in the bus terminal, along with old copies of the Evergreen Review, a journal that in the early and mid-sixties was publishing Jean Genet and William Burroughs, and that had advertisements for bookstores and art galleries in New York.
Oliver Ray, Smith’s companion and a guitarist in her band, and Steven Sebring, a photographer who is working on a documentary of her life, had come along on the walk. When we got to Independence Hall, the four of us slipped in behind the last crowd of tourists for the day. Steven Sebring is a big guy, six feet three, with long blond hair and, at the time, a beard. He was wearing denim overalls and a cotton fishing hat with the sides pinned up. Oliver Ray, who also had a beard and a straggly mustache, wore faded jeans and a grubby T-shirt and a brown felt Worth & Worth fedora that his father gave him. It had long ago lost its shape and its band, and moths had eaten a pattern on the edge of the brim. Smith wore blue-tinted sunglasses, Helmut Lang jeans that grazed the tops of scuffed black motorcycle boots, and a black wool jacket made for her by the Belgian designer Ann Demeulemeester. The right pocket was torn from having books and eyeglasses jammed into it.
Smith is a Declaration of Independence buff. When she was a child, she had a fake-parchment reproduction of it and spent hours copying the words and the signatures. She got the idea for her last album, Gung Ho, which was released in 2000, when she saw a television documentary about Ho Chi Minh and discovered that he was also a student of the American Declaration of Independence. (“Patti gets these concepts and really works them over,” Oliver Ray says.) A National Parks ranger was talking to a group of people in the Assembly Room, describing the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and Smith nodded appreciatively at the points he was making. The ranger, whose name was George, was a fan. He let us stay after closing time and showed us Jefferson’s walking stick. Smith stood in the stairwell where the Liberty Bell used to hang. She said she imagined Thomas Jefferson and the other framers standing there, talking about how they were going to carry off the plan for the new union. Oliver Ray took down George’s name for the V.I.P. list at their show that night at the Theatre of the Living Arts on South Street.
Smith’s mother, Beverly, and her sister Linda had driven over from New Jersey for the occasion. Beverly is eighty-one and walks with some difficulty, but she comes to see Patti’s shows as often as she can. They sat with friends in a taped-off section of the balcony, next to the band’s video equipment. Patti sang “Kimberly,” a pop-rock song from her first album, Horses, about when she “was young and so crazy” and having apocalyptic visions of burning barns and shifting planets. Kimberly is the youngest of Beverly’s three daughters, a musician who played the mandolin on two of Patti’s albums. Midway through the set, after she had played a clarinet solo, Patti waved at her mother. Beverly stood up and waved back. “That’s why I’m on such good behavior tonight,” Patti said to the crowd. Then the drummer, Jay Dee Daugherty, played the opening of “Don’t Say Nothing,” a song they wrote together. Smith was dancing, her arms stretched out to the audience, her fingers moving. Her voice is a muscular contralto that she uses the way a jazz singer does, creating hypnotic musical lines. Somewhere in the middle of the song, she spat on the floor next to her microphone stand and began to improvise on the theme of the destruction of the environment—“our water, our air.” The song is about the importance of taking a stand, and when it ended she went on a tirade about pollution and the perils of cell phones and disposable diapers. “The reason they are doing this stuff to the environment,” she cried, “is that they want you to buy all this crap they are making. You don’t need it.” An hour or so later, when the crowd was going nuts, swaying and jabbing their arms in the air and singing along with the band, Smith ended the night with Beverly’s favorite song, “Rock n Roll Nigger,” which is based on the Rimbaudian notion of the artist as outsider—un nègre. “Jimi Hendrix was a nigger,” she screamed. “Jackson Pollock was a nigger. Jesus Christ was a nigger. Jesus was a true revolutionary. He was crucified in a nest of thieves. He was a man of the people. He prayed until the blood poured from his pores like sweat.” And she ripped the strings from her electric guitar.
Patti Smith is fifty-five, but she doesn’t look much different than she did in 1975, when her friend Robert Mapplethorpe photographed her for the cover of Horses. The Mapplethorpe photograph, which was shot in black-and-white—unusual for the time—is one of the most recognizable images in the iconography of rock and roll. Smith is standing against a white wall. Her dark hair, which grazes the base of her neck, is thick and wild, and she stares insolently at the camera. She wears a white shirt and has tossed a black jacket over her left shoulder in an homage to Frank Sinatra’s boulevardier poses. She looks arrogant, androgynous, and fragile. Smith’s hair is longer today, and lighter, because of the gray strands in it, but she is as thin as she was then, and her face is smooth and unlined.
It is likely that Horses has sold around three hundred and fifty thousand copies, although music-industry reports weren’t particularly thorough in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, and it is difficult to know for sure. It now sells two hundred copies a week, which is a respectable backlist figure, but the modest numbers don’t reflect the album’s influence. Horses is on most lists of the greatest rock albums of all time. Its critical success is one of the reasons that the phrase most frequently used to describe Smith, especially by headline writers, is “the godmother of punk.” She was the first performer from the mid-seventies downtown New York music scene to get a major recording contract. In the spring of 1974, she recorded a version of “Hey Joe” for a small private label. “Hey Joe” had been the first single put out by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, in 1966. Smith’s version was prefaced with comments addressed to Patty Hearst, who had recently robbed a bank with the Symbionese Liberation Army: “I was wondering, were you getting it every night from a black revolutionary man and his women or were you really dead?” An autobiographical prose poem, “Piss Factory,” was on the B side. Several months later, the incipient Patti Smith Group—Smith, two guitarists, and a piano player—appeared at CBGBs, the small club on the Bowery that was spawning the early American punk bands, including Television, Blondie, and the Ramones. Soon after that, they recorded Horses. But it is misleading to imply that Patti Smith is the godmother of the Sex Pistols or the other nihilistic British bands that defined the punk movement in the nineteen-seventies. Smith’s band was grounded in a rock tradition that the British punks attempted to deny, and she was self-consciously literary.
“Piss Factory” is the earliest selection on Land: 1975-2002, a retrospective compilation of Smith’s work that is being released this month by Arista, her first and only record company. There are two CDs in the package: a selection of favorites from her eight albums, chosen largely by fans, and what Smith calls “flotsam and jetsam from different times—live performances and studio tracks and demos.” The apotheosis of a bootleg. “Land” is the title of the central song suite on Horses. It opens with a poem-chant about a boy named Johnny who is in a hallway drinking tea and who is apparently raped by another boy, although the narrative is not completely clear. “I had nine different ideas when we did ‘Land,’ ” Smith says. “There were nine vocal tracks, and it was a nightmare to mix.” Johnny has a vision of horses, “white shining silver studs with their nose in flames,” and then the song shifts into the “Land of a Thousand Dances” section and Johnny either kills himself or takes drugs, to the chorus “Go Rimbaud, go Rimbaud.” In the long final segment of the song, Smith’s voice is overdubbed, and all the themes merge into a reverie about “the sea of possibilities” and a man lying in sheets. “There are three components,” Smith says. “The Rimbaudian component, which has to do with language and youth. And the Wild Boy component”—she had recently read William Burroughs’s homoerotic/sci-fi novel “The Wild Boys”—“and the Jimi Hendrix component.” Horses was recorded at Electric Lady Studios on Eighth Street, which Hendrix had set up before he died, in 1970. “All of ‘Land’ is a dream of Jimi Hendrix as he’s dying,” Smith says. “Jimi Hendrix is dreaming a simple rock-and-roll song, and it takes him into all these other realms. ‘Land’ speaks of the possibilities of rock and roll. Where it can take you.”
Smith lived in New York in the seventies, and then in a suburb of Detroit after she married the musician Fred (Sonic) Smith, in 1980. Her husband died in November, 1994. Two years later, she moved back to New York. She and Oliver Ray live in a small mid-nineteenth-century Greek Revival town house at the edge of Greenwich Village. The plum-colored paint on the front door is chipped and cracked, and the interior of the house has a pleasantly beat-up feeling. Guitars and guitar cases are usually propped along the bannister of the stairs to the second floor and on the furniture. Oliver Ray’s two-hundred-watt Marshall amplifier, vintage 1968, stands against one wall, with a Cecil Beaton photograph of Jean Cocteau on top of it. The amp is next to a piano that Jesse, Smith’s fourteen-year-old daughter, practices on. Two black bikes lean against a large rack filled with votive candles. A gray cat named Lua, a gift to Jesse from Ray, has the run of the place.
On the second floor, books—among them Hermann Hesse’s “The Glass Bead Game,” “Nabokov’s Butterflies,” a signed copy of Jean Genet’s “Notre Dame des Fleurs,” a catalogue for a Brancusi show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and “The Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine”—are stacked next to a television set and shelves full of videotapes and DVDs. Smith’s assistant, Andi Ostrowe, works at a laptop on a table along one wall. Ostrowe began working with Smith in 1976, during the recording sessions for her second album, Radio Ethiopia. Ostrowe had just come back from a stint in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia, and she sent Smith a fan letter. Smith doesn’t have a manager. “I’m pretty much unmanageable at this point,” she says.
Smith and Ray’s house is on a small street that used to have one of those startlingly direct SoHo views of the World Trade Center that made the towers seem much closer than they were. Early on the clear, sunny morning of September 11th, Smith sent Jesse off to school and sat on her stoop looking at the towers for a while before she went back to bed. Since then, one corner of the second-floor workroom has been taken up by an easel and sheets of drawing paper on which the outline of the shard of the north tower, with the eerie V shape at the top, is silk-screened. Smith worked for weeks on a series of drawings of the tower.
Smith was an artist before she was a poet or a rock star. Her first poems evolved from words that were embedded in drawings. The early drawings contain erotic and religious elements, rendered with a fine line and delicate coloring; the later work is often primarily a mass of words that form abstract shapes. Her drawings are in the collections of several museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the World Trade Center drawings, which will be part of a retrospective exhibition of her work at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh next year, dense calligraphic lines of poems and phrases wind along the silk-screened ribs of the wrecked tower. The largest drawing (forty-eight inches by thirty inches) is made up of words from the Gospel of Peace of the Essenes, an austere Jewish sect that lived near the Dead Sea during the early Christian era. A smaller drawing has a line from the Koran.
“Building the whole Babel-like remains from handwriting,” Smith says, is an idea that came partly from her study of the work of William Blake. One of her first books as a child was Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience.” The Tate Gallery in London asked her to perform during their big Blake exhibition in December, 2000, and she prepared an evening of readings, songs, and reminiscences that took place at St. James’s Church, where Blake was baptized. Last summer, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened a smaller Blake exhibition in New York, she and Oliver Ray presented a version of the London show. “Blake gave me an aesthetic context,” she said then, “a sense of exaltation.” She sang “Over the Rainbow” and chanted “The Tyger” and gave a short commentary on hoof-and-mouth disease—which had recently precipitated a draconian slaughter of livestock in Britain—and somehow it all worked.
The Blake evenings can be viewed as analogous to chamber music performed by a few members of a large orchestra. The orchestra consists of Smith; Lenny Kaye, the guitarist who began playing with her in 1971; Jay Dee Daugherty, the only regular drummer she has ever had; Tony Shanahan, the bass guitarist, who has been with them since 1995; and Oliver Ray, who joined the band in 1996. The band plays about seventy-five concerts a year, and Smith and Ray give maybe twenty-five song-and-poetry performances. Their schedule depends to a large degree on Jesse’s school schedule, with summer being the busiest time for them. Last spring, they warmed up for a European tour by going on the road in the southeastern United States. It was a fairly low-budget operation. They drove from town to town, Smith and Ray and Lenny Kaye in Ray’s white Land Rover Discovery, Daugherty and Shanahan in a rented S.U.V. Dan Lilienfeld, the visuals guy, and Martin Le Maire, the sound guy, shared a rented sedan, and the two road managers drove a Penske truck loaded with equipment.
Most of the band’s appearances were in small rock clubs, but in Atlanta they opened for Bob Dylan at the Music Midtown festival, on an outdoor stage, with an audience of five thousand people. At three o’clock the next afternoon, when Oliver Ray parked the Land Rover in front of the Music Zone, a club in Asheville, North Carolina, where the crew was setting up the band’s equipment, a dozen fans were waiting in the entryway. Several dedicated fans follow Smith from show to show, making sure that they are first in line so that they can secure a position in front of the stage. Asheville is a fairly quiet town, and the Music Zone wasn’t sold out; it seemed unnecessary to hang around for five hours waiting for a spot in a club so small that even people at the back would be reasonably close to the band, but apparently that wasn’t the point. Dan Lilienfeld, who has been doing special visual effects for Smith for two years, used to be a committed Deadhead. He sold T-shirts in parking lots to pay for gas and food during Grateful Dead tours. Lilienfeld knows about fandom. Nevertheless, he says that he was “dumbfounded at the fans who follow Patti,” at the level of their obsession. When Smith walked into the Music Zone, the fans didn’t try to touch her or even to speak to her. They were respectful, and responded politely when she said hello. But they looked at her with awe. It is hard to spend much time with Smith and not encounter that look. At dinner in Atlanta, in a small Italian restaurant, a middle-aged woman came up to her and said, “You changed my life.” That or “You inspired me” is what they usually say. Danny Fields, who has been in the music business since the mid-sixties, and who was the manager of the Ramones, said to me, “If you could quantify the intensity of the fans’ love for Patti, she would be more popular than Alanis Morissette.”
In the meantime, however, Smith was playing in a former dry cleaner’s in Asheville, a town of seventy thousand in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Music Zone is half a block from the entrance to Interstate 240, down the street from the Mellow Mushroom café and stores selling tie-dyed T-shirts, used books, and antiques. I sat at the bar before the show, chatting with a couple who had grown up in Asheville and who were concerned about the changes that had taken place there. A movie star—Andie MacDowell—and other wealthy sophisticates had recently moved in. The female member of the couple, a ruddy, heavyset young woman, thought the new glamour was a bad thing. She was in favor of malls and industrial parks that would bring jobs. The crowd in the club, maybe four hundred people, was a mix of the young and the lumpen and the middle class. A trio of very fat girls had settled down in overstuffed chairs on an elevated area to the left of the small stage. There were several overtly lesbian pairs. A man and a woman in their late forties stood holding their beers with napkins wrapped primly around the bottles. He had a beeper on his belt and she had a cell phone on hers. They were necking. Shortly before the show was to start, a young man with a ponytail took an eyedropper out of his bag and squirted something in his mouth.
Andrew Burns, one of the road managers, had placed candles and vases of flowers around the stage. A leather-bound edition of Blake’s “Songs of Innocence” was on top of Smith’s amplifier, next to her reading glasses and a bowl of flower petals. Burns came in with copies of the set list and taped them to the equipment, and the lights went out and Smith and the band ran onstage. She grinned and said “Hi, everybody” in a little-girl voice, and they opened with “Glitter in Their Eyes,” a hard-rocking song from Gung Ho. Dan Lilienfeld had hung a white cloth across the back of the stage. He sat at a control center behind the fat girls, projecting psychedelic images and snippets of videos and films onto the cloth. For the next two and a half hours, Smith and the band put on one of the best rock shows I’ve ever seen. Except for the moments when she stopped to read Blake or tell a dumb joke, or when she went off on a riff about the consequences of Arctic drilling (about which there had been an article in a local paper that day), the crowd was dancing and sometimes singing with her, punching their fists in the air during the anthems and swaying with her during the sexier parts. She played the guitar and the clarinet, and more than once during a climactic moment she climbed on top of the equipment and had to be rescued by Burns. She scattered flower petals over the front row and sang “Be My Baby” in honor of Ronnie Spector and “Sea of Love” in honor of the environment. The guy with the ponytail and the eyedropper didn’t move from his spot on the stairs directly in front of her. Occasionally he put his hands together, as if in a Buddhist benediction.
The next day, I drove to Philadelphia with Steven Sebring, who began filming Smith seven years ago, after Spin sent him to Detroit to take her portrait. Sebring makes a living doing ad campaigns for Coach and fashion spreads and portraits for various magazines, work that subsidizes the documentary. “I’m interested in doing a really cool film that’s not a typical VH1 piece of bullshit,” he said. “I sometimes think, How many more Patti Smith concerts can I possibly go to and get something different? And every time I get something completely different. Every ‘Rock n Roll Nigger’ I’ve ever seen has been different. The one in the film is completely out of control. I filmed her in Atlanta a few years ago. It was chaos. It looks like people possessed.”
Smith changes the lyrics to songs, changes inflections, adds narratives, makes things up on the spur of the moment. The group improvises the way a jazz band does, with her voice as the lead instrument. They follow the set list established shortly before a performance, which reflects Smith’s mood and the place they are in and maybe what was on TV that day, but anything can happen within the framework of some songs, and the audience is not a small factor in the equation. “I demand certain things from them,” Smith says. “Sometimes people don’t understand why I seem frustrated or aggressive or make the night longer than it should be. Sometimes it’s because I haven’t made a connection, and I’m seeking it, banging my head against the wall.”
Shortly before William Burroughs died, in 1997, he provided an epigraph to a book of photographs that Michael Stipe—the lead singer of R.E.M., and Smith’s friend—put together during one of her tours. Burroughs used the word “shaman” to describe Smith—“someone in touch with other levels of reality.” She comes up with unexpected stories and images. “I use my imagination, things that I’ve read,” she says, “but I also seem to have some kind of affinity or sensitivity for drawing from the people or places where we are. I like to smoke a little pot, but these are not drug-induced things. They are performance- and adrenaline-induced. For instance, once when we were in Salzburg we were going to do ‘About a Boy,’ which was written with Kurt Cobain in mind. But I was thinking about Mozart and I thought the song would be about Mozart that night. We were outside, and this huge electrical storm was heading toward us. I felt such rage, and I thought, Whoooa, where is this coming from? And I started ranting in the voice of Mozart’s father, who was weeping in frustration about his son’s ingratitude. When we recorded ‘Strange Messengers,’ I went into the studio to do a little song about slavery and the abolitionist movement. I had read a lot of books. But then during the recording I felt like this big woman was in my body and I began talking about crack being the new slavery. She was talking to a young man, telling him that his ancestors had gone through all this shit, and now he’s enslaving himself to crack. Which is not what I intended to say at all. It was so intense that I had to go home. I was sick with a migraine for two days. You don’t want to go too far with this stuff. You don’t want to O.D. on an improvisation.”
The foundation of Smith’s performing style was established early on. “When I lived in South Jersey, a lot of my friends were black,” she says, “and I learned about jazz from them. We listened to Coltrane, and to Oscar Brown, Jr., who did long rap poems. I would also go to church with them and see the shout Baptists. But my idea of how to relate to an audience really goes back to watching Johnny Carson with my dad when I was a teen-ager. My dad loved Johnny Carson. He would come out and do his monologue, which was a new thing in those days, and you would feel that this was a guy who was actually conscious that there were people out there. In the beginning, Johnny was an irreverent, interesting guy. He didn’t just do stuff that people had written for him. And I learned from him. I wanted to be Johnny Carson’s successor—that’s what I dreamed of. Not of being the next Jim Morrison.”
Smith’s father died two and a half years ago, and her mother, Beverly, moved in with Patti’s sister Linda and her husband. They live in a two-story white frame house with a big back yard in Mantua, New Jersey, not far from where Patti grew up. Linda fixed lunch for me there one afternoon, and Beverly showed me mementos and photographs of the family. Beverly has monitored Patti’s fan mail since 1975. She is a well-known figure on the fans’ Web site. After Michael Stipe and Patti became friends, in the mid-nineties, he told Beverly that when he was a teen-ager he wrote Patti a fan letter and Beverly wrote him back.
Beverly and Linda are Jehovah’s Witnesses. Patti herself was what she describes as “a very serious, active Jehovah’s Witness” until she was thirteen. Witnesses are known mostly for not receiving blood transfusions, not saluting the flag, and not serving in the military. They believe in the Bible as an inspired and historically accurate text and in an imminent Apocalypse. Their most visible public activity is “going out on the ministry,” as Beverly described it—that is, going from door to door with copies of the church magazines, Awake! and The Watchtower. Linda still spends a lot of time doing that. Patti gave it up when, as she recalls, “the elders in the church told me that art was a material thing that was not needed in Christ’s world.” She had read Anne Frank’s diary, and she decided to become a Jew, but was discouraged by a rabbi in Philadelphia.
The Smiths lived in veterans’ housing in the Germantown section of Philadelphia until Patti was eight, when they moved to a development in Deptford, New Jersey. So Patti was a city kid, transplanted to what was then the country. “There were thousands of fireflies outside my window,” she says. “And a pig farm was nearby. There were six-foot black snakes coming into our yard from the swamps. There was the smell of skunk cabbage. My father grew huge hedges around the house—Edward Scissorhands hedges. There was a black barn across the street filled with bats and owls. There were deer.” In 1992, Patti wrote a short memoir, “Woolgathering,” in a series published by Hanuman Books. She describes sitting at a window in her room at night while her sister Linda and her brother, Todd, who was two and a half years younger than Patti, were asleep. She believed that she could see a community of people, a community that spoke a strange language, moving around in Thomas’s Field, the land across from her house. “It was an eidetic vision, much like those that Blake had as a child,” Patti says. “I believed that those people lived there, gathering light. And I believed that God inhabited that place.”
Linda drove me to their old house. It seemed impossibly small for a family of six. Their father’s hedges had been cut down and sheets of plywood had been nailed over the windows. Across the street, Thomas’s Field was still a wild place. The old barn had burned down long ago, as Patti wrote in “Kimberly,” but Hoedown Hall, the square-dance hall that she and her siblings frequented, was still standing. A vulture was perched on the roof. Patti bought the land a few years ago and intended to keep it in its natural state, but not long after my visit local politicians exercised the right of eminent domain and appropriated it for soccer fields.
Smith had both visions and hallucinations as a child. “I didn’t know the difference then,” she says, “except that hallucinations were scary and visions weren’t.” The hallucinations were triggered by illnesses. “I had every single childhood illness—measles, chicken pox, mumps, Asiatic flu, mononucleosis. I was in bed for months with scarlet fever, reading and listening to music.” She also had a serious problem with her eyes that caused her to write in mirror image and upside down. One eye “wandered.” She was given an eyepatch and therapy, but her family couldn’t afford surgery. She often saw double, which caused her to bump into things. “I’d walk into a tree and get yelled at for daydreaming, but I wasn’t.” She was a tall, skinny girl with thick lenses and an eyepatch.
When Smith was sick, her mother would bring her records. “I’d seen opera on television. Nobody else in the family liked it, but my mother gave me a boxed set of ‘Madame Butterfly’ once when I was so sick I couldn’t even listen to it at first. I just lay there with my hand on it. And then I discovered Verdi. My dad liked classical music and Duke Ellington. He hated rock and roll, but since both my parents worked at night, we’d put rock and roll on after they left. I heard Little Richard when I was about seven, and that really spoke to me. My mother liked Artie Shaw and Judy Garland and high-energy things.” Patti listened to jazz, “and Joan Baez, who was my generation’s girl role model. Joan Baez and Tina Turner—two great gals.” Then one day her mother brought her “Another Side of Bob Dylan,” the album with the moody black-and-white photograph on the cover, where Dylan looks like Rimbaud. “That was the big thing for me,” Smith says.
A grim version of Patti Smith’s life in Deptford appears on “Piss Factory,” the prose poem she recorded in 1974. She is backed by a pianist, Richard Sohl, and Lenny Kaye on guitar. The urgent, girlish voice on the record seems thin and unnuanced now, and she hadn’t yet learned how to collaborate with musicians. The narrative is based on her experience working in a local factory. In “Piss Factory” she is inspecting pipe with a group of women who “are just too lame to understand, too goddamn grateful to get this job to know they’re getting screwed up the ass.” The floor boss berates her for working too fast and “screwin’ up the quota.” She is persecuted by the other workers, who have “nothin’ to hide and I got something to hide here called desire. And I will get out of here. . . . I’m gonna get on that train and go to New York City and I’m gonna be somebody.”
Smith got out of town early in 1967, after attending Glassboro State College for nearly three years. Glassboro, which is now called Rowan University, was five miles from Smith’s house, and she commuted because she didn’t have enough money to live in a dormitory. Patti was sexually inexperienced, the kind of girl, she says, who did boys’ homework for them rather than go out on dates. “Premarital sex was looked down on. We were remnants of the ’Splendor in the Grass’ generation_._” But at Glassboro she became pregnant. She had the baby and gave it up for adoption.
Among the mementos Beverly Smith showed me was a watercolor that Patti had given her when she was sixteen. A woman with a Modigliani-style head stands next to a sign marked “Bus Stop.” She is wearing sunglasses and a sleeveless shift, and she holds two suitcases. The one in her right hand says “One Way,” and the other is marked “N.Y.” Patti told her mother that if her money ran out when she got to New York or if there was trouble she would come right back home, but as it happened she ended up sleeping in subways and even in a graveyard in Flushing. She met Robert Mapplethorpe at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he was studying art, and he invited her to move into an apartment he was sharing.
Beverly Smith says that Patti brought Mapplethorpe home every Christmas for years and that he was “the nicest gentleman you would ever want to meet.“ He told his parents that he and Patti were married. She had a job at the Scribner’s bookstore on Fifth Avenue and Forty-eighth Street, and she supported him while he made mixed-media collages and designed jewelry. He didn’t own a camera yet. In 1969, they moved into the Chelsea Hotel, the Victorian Gothic building on West Twenty-third Street that has been home to artists since the late nineteenth century. By the time Smith and Mapplethorpe moved in, the guests included several members of Andy Warhol’s entourage and various rock musicians. Janis Joplin, Dylan, and Jimi Hendrix stayed there on and off, and William Burroughs spent a good deal of time at the bar in the El Quijote, the restaurant next door. Gregory Corso, the youngest of the major poets of the Beat generation, lived in the Chelsea, and he began taking Smith to poetry readings. Corso, who was more often than not drunk, yelled at the poets he thought were boring, which was most of them. “Happily, Gregory was a bad influence on me,” Smith says.
Early in 1970, Sandy Daley, a filmmaker who also lived in the Chelsea, made a documentary, “Robert Having His Nipple Pierced.” The Museum of Modern Art has a print of the film, and I looked at it recently, although I didn’t actually look at all of it, since it’s about what the title indicates. But I listened to the voice-over, which is an interview with Smith that was taped after the film was made. In it she says that she couldn’t look at the film, either. I thought that she might be jealous. Mapplethorpe is in the arms of a shirtless young man in black leather pants during the procedure, but she says that doesn’t bother her—“as you can see, we’re not boyfriend and girlfriend no more.” She just doesn’t like to watch men together, and she explains rather explicitly why, one of the reasons being that “they have secrets.” The film is a little more than half an hour long, and Smith doesn’t stop talking. Occasionally someone asks her a question, but for the most part she tells hilarious, unprompted stories. She explains why she shaved her eyebrows and why she chopped off her hair so that it would look like Keith Richards’s, and she talks at length about Blaise Cendrars, the French poet and novelist whose work influenced Apollinaire. Cendrars is as alive to her as the real boyfriends she and the interviewer giggle over. “I would have fucked him,” she says.
Smith had begun writing poetry, and Mapplethorpe arranged for her to appear with Gerard Malanga as part of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in the East Village. “I had a couple of months to prepare,” Smith says. “And I wanted to make it special.” She asked Lenny Kaye to collaborate with her. Smith had been writing pieces for Creem and other music magazines, and had read an article written by Kaye in Jazz & Pop about a-cappella singing—“doo-wop music without instrumental backing,” as Kaye explained it to me. “Patti had grown up listening to similar music in South Jersey, and she called up and said she had enjoyed the article. I was a Velvet Underground fan, and I gravitated toward Max’s”—Max’s Kansas City, the club near Union Square run by Mickey Ruskin, where musicians and artists and members of Warhol’s nearby Factory congregated—“and I had seen her there, from afar. She was a very striking figure. After we met, she would come into Village Oldies, the record store I worked in on Bleecker Street, and we’d drink a little beer on Saturday nights and pull records from the stacks and dance to them and hang out.”
The St. Mark’s reading with Lenny Kaye, on February 10, 1971, established Smith as a public figure. “I got a chance to see what I was made of in terms of performance,” she says. She dedicated the evening to crime. “I read the poem that begins ‘Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine,’ and we did a couple of Brecht songs, but our big song was ‘Ballad of a Bad Boy,’ a Rimbaudian-type poem about a young fella who was revolting against his cruel and possessive mother by crashing in a stock car. The electric guitar interpreted the crash. That was unique at the time.” Nevertheless, Smith thinks that the event has been overrated. “Some of it is who happened to be there. The Warhol people were there. Lou Reed was there. Robert brought his friends from the fashion world. I had met Sam Shepard by then, and he was there. It was a full moon. It was Bertolt Brecht’s birthday. Lenny had an electric guitar. And I was in my beyond-gender mode. Maybe that had something to do with it.”
Sam Shepard was well known as a playwright by 1971, but he was also the drummer for the Holy Modal Rounders, which is how Smith met him. They lived together in the Chelsea for a time, and wrote a play together, “Cowboy Mouth.” It opened in New York on April 29, 1971, at the American Place Theatre. Sam Shepard and Patti Smith played the two lead characters, who appeared to be modelled closely on the authors. After the second performance, Shepard left town and soon went back to his wife. The following year, he wrote “The Tooth of Crime,” a linguistically inventive play with a character who, although male, is by most accounts based on Smith. He looks like Keith Richards and “exudes violent arrogance.”
After the St. Mark’s reading, Smith published three collections of poems, including “W|tt,” which Andreas Brown, the owner of the Gotham Book Mart, brought out in a small edition. Brown also arranged a show of Smith’s drawings. She had been spending her lunch hours at the Gotham since 1968, when she began working at Scribner’s, which was around the corner. She managed the games and humor section, and when Edward Gorey brought some of his early books by she stocked them. Gorey hung out at the Gotham, too. “I’d tell him stories of my childhood and say that he could use them,” Smith said. “I had a Gorey childhood.” Andreas Brown recalls that in her early poetry readings Smith had a “sweet, sad quality, and the minute she got up to read, another person would get interested in her.” Smith says that people assumed she was influenced by Allen Ginsberg but in fact she had not yet read him. “I liked Walt Whitman and Bob Dylan. And Whitman was the father of Ginsberg.” The incantatory language of Rimbaud’s prose poems, which shaped Smith’s sense of what poetry could be, had also influenced the Beats and Dylan, who began reading the French Symbolists in the early sixties.
In 1973, Smith was taken up by Jane Friedman, who had a publicity firm and booked acts into the Mercer Arts Center, where the New York Dolls, an early glam-rock group, were the house band. Smith opened for the Dolls, reading her poems and ad-libbing. She was a regular there until late that summer, when the building collapsed. That fall, she asked Lenny Kaye to play with her again, at an event at Les Jardins, a club at the top of the Hotel Diplomat on West Forty-third Street. She called it Rock n Rimbaud. “I got the desire to sing—little blues songs, Billie Holiday songs. And we decided that we needed a piano player. Danny Fields sent Richard Sohl to us. He was this laconic kid with long curly hair, and he was classically trained. And he had no prejudice about what he played.”
“Our act was cabaret-oriented at first,” Kaye says. “It was a cocktail trio with Patti out in front. She would do some poems and then we would play a few standards—‘Speak Low,’ things like that. It was a cool art project.” Not something that lent itself to many bookings. “We were offbeat,” Smith says. “I didn’t have a point of view. I just did what I liked. So our set list would include a couple of Lotte Lenya songs, and a couple of old R. & B. songs, and ‘Piss Factory.’ I’d get jobs opening up for some gay piano player or something. But people started coming, and Mickey Ruskin gave me some weird jobs, like opening for Phil Ochs. And I got a headline job at Max’s. Then around Easter of 1974 I went to CBGBs to see Television”—a group which at that time included a manic poet who called himself Richard Hell and a guitarist named Tom Verlaine, who was inspired by free-form jazz and the Rolling Stones. “There were only about fourteen people there, but I saw what I was looking for. People who were intelligent, who were revolutionary, who were merging poetry and rock and roll. Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell were my kind of people. Television had taken what we were doing another step. That was a great period.” CBGBs had opened a few months earlier, and the Television appearances there in the spring of 1974 inaugurated the post-glam, early-punk period in New York music.
In June, Robert Mapplethorpe, who had found a patron, the art collector and curator Sam Wagstaff, gave Smith and Lenny Kaye the money to record “Piss Factory.” They wanted to see, Kaye says, “if the intensity that we created live could be captured on tape.” A few months later, Smith and Lenny Kaye hired another guitarist, Ivan Kral. In the spring of 1975, the band performed with Television at CBGBs for seven weeks, and they also auditioned for Clive Davis, who had just started Arista. He signed them up. Soon after that, Jay Dee Daugherty, who had been working with Lance Loud’s band, joined the group. They had a drummer. “That was our last rock component,” Lenny Kaye says. “We had our personality. In retrospect, we had been moving closer to rock all along. Given my influences and Patti’s, there’s no way we wouldn’t have arrived at that.”
Smith looks at it another way. “That a snob like me ended up with a rock-and-roll band just goes to show, like Whitman says, we ‘contain multitudes.’ ”
When Horses was released, in the fall of 1975, the band played several sold-out shows at the Bottom Line, in New York, and then went on tour for three months. “I said all the things I had to say on Horses,” Smith says. “It had been developing for years. But we had to do another record, and I started thinking about nonverbal language, like Jimi Hendrix. I decided to express myself through feedback, and I got a 1957 Fender Duo-Sonic, which is a simple guitar. It had a maple neck like a tree, and I put really heavy strings on it. I souped up an amp to get a lot of reverb, and I worked on guitar sounds. We recorded the next album, Radio Ethiopia, on August 9, 1976. There was a hurricane and a blackout, and we improvised. Lenny introduced some strong rock chords, but what happened then was up to us. I talked about Brancusi, and my guitar, and the death of Rimbaud. Then we went into Rimbaud’s last letter. He wanted someone to help him go back to Abyssinia. And we ended with that. I loved it, but it was our most hated record for a while, although it had some of our most popular songs on it—‘Pissing in a River,’ ‘Ask the Angels,’ ‘Ain’t It Strange.’ ”
At the crescendo of “Ain’t It Strange” Smith sings that “when he beckons his finger to me well I move in another direction,” and she chants “Hand of God I feel the finger” and “God make a move,” as if she were taunting God. She would whirl around in a frenzy when she performed that section, and on January 23, 1977, at a sports arena in Tampa, Florida, at the most intense place in the song, she fell off the stage. It was a fourteen-foot drop. An ambulance took her to Tampa General Hospital. “It was a full-body trauma,” Smith says. She had fractured several vertebrae and was immobilized. She didn’t have insurance, but Sam Wagstaff, Robert Mapplethorpe’s friend, paid for CAT scans and rehabilitation, which included months in bed and a sports-medicine exercise program.
“It was an accident,” Smith says. “I wasn’t drunk or fucked up, no matter what anyone says. We were opening for Bob Seger, who had a huge operation, and we had to play in front of his equipment. So we didn’t have much space. My monitor was hanging half off the stage. When I put my foot on it, which is something I often do during a performance, I just went over. It was an accident on a practical level, but on a spiritual level it was time for me to assess what I was doing and where I was going. Which I did. I was laid up for four or five months.”
Easter, Smith’s third album, came out a little over a year after the accident. It includes “Because the Night,” which was co-written with Bruce Springsteen and which reached No. 13 in the Top Forty and made Easter Smith’s best-selling album. (It has sold around half a million copies by now.) The album contains a raucous live version of “Babelogue,” the poem that begins “i haven’t fucked much with the past, but i’ve fucked plenty with the future” and ends with “i have not sold myself to god.” The audience shouts and stomps throughout the reading. “Easter was my most controversial record,” Smith says. “I had my armpit hair hanging out on the cover. And it had ‘Rock n Roll Nigger’ on it.”
Wave, the album that was released in the spring of 1979, reflected what Smith had learned from the fall from the stage in Tampa. “Seven Ways of Going,” an ominous-sounding free-form improvisation by the band, with Smith on clarinet, implies that God has finally won the battle with Patti: “Thou hast lifted me / Woke me up and shook me out of mine iniquity / For I was undulating in the lewd impostered night.” Around this time she started changing the introduction to her cover of “Gloria,” the Van Morrison song that was the first track on Horses and had become a signature piece for Smith in concerts. She had always prefaced the song with an early poem, “Oath”—the one that begins “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” Now she was saying, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, why not mine?” How often she did this and when she switched back was the subject of a lively exchange on the fans’ Web site recently. She sang the born-again version at a concert in a soccer stadium in Florence on September 10, 1979. Smith says that when she arrived at the airport “there were tons of paparazzi and I thought that maybe Anna Magnani was there. Or the Pope. I thought somebody really cool must be there. I had no idea that they were there for me. There were thousands of people camping all over the streets.” The band played for seventy thousand people, and at the end the audience stormed the stage. “It was anarchistic, but it wasn’t destructive,” Smith says. “We gave them our instruments. They yelled in the microphones.” It was the Patti Smith Group’s last performance.
“I felt that I didn’t know where my work was going,” Smith says. “I was in Italy and people were expecting me to help them with their charities, with their revolutions. I thought, If I’m going to be a leader, where am I leading people to?”
Patti had been living in Detroit with Fred (Sonic) Smith since the fall of 1978, and they were married there on March 1, 1980. Patti’s mother showed me the wedding pictures. Patti was wearing a long white antique dress.
Patti’s marriage and the dissolution of the band and what appeared to be her retirement seemed incomprehensible to most fans. It was a disappointment and a betrayal. One of the reasons that women come up to her and say she changed their lives is that she seemed so naturally, unambiguously, and joyously free of conventional constraints like marriage. She was a heroine and now she was going to be a housewife. People who knew her personally were as surprised as her fans were. “Why would she give up the poets and the sensitive, swan-necked lovers?” Danny Fields says. “None of her friends understood it.” But Patti was in love. She had dedicated Wave to Fred. The first cut on the album was a simple, three-chord song with a dance beat that she had composed for him. She later told a journalist that she had written the words to “Because the Night” for him, too.
Patti says that settling into marriage was not anomalous. “I had brief periods of youthful experimentation and frivolity and promiscuity. But I wasn’t a sixties person. I didn’t want free love and free drugs. In my work, I’ve raped, murdered, ingested drugs that never existed. But in my life I’ve been pretty straitlaced on the whole. I’ve always tried to explain that, but people don’t want to believe it.”
She had met Fred early in 1976, at a record-company party in Detroit. Lenny Kaye introduced them. “Fred was one of my guitar heroes,” Kaye says. He was an original member of the MC5—as in Motor City Five—a mid-sixties to early-seventies Detroit band that played rock music in an improvisational, free-jazz style. “Fred was the feedback king,” Patti says. “I couldn’t believe what he could do. He could make the amps sound like a violin and like the H-bomb seamlessly.” The MC5 had been managed by John Sinclair, who founded the White Panther Party and ran an organization he called Trans-Love Energies. The band had lived in a Trans-Love Energies commune. In 1968, Danny Fields, who then worked for Elektra records, signed the MC5, and they recorded a live album, Kick Out the Jams, that stores wouldn’t stock because the liner notes talked about “fucking in the streets.” Histories of punk rock always cite the MC5 as forefathers. “It was a tragic band,” Fields says. “They should have been an enormously popular stadium band, a tough, working-class-heroes band.” Fields says that they were unsuccessful because of their naïve association with radical politics. “Promoters boycotted them. They were in way over their heads.” John Sinclair went to prison on a marijuana charge in 1969, and the MC5 disbanded shortly after he was released, a little more than two years later. Fred started Sonic’s Rendezvous Band, which lasted through the seventies.
The dedication to Fred on Wave is “to my clarinet teacher.” Patti had taken up the clarinet at Fred’s suggestion after the fall in Tampa. He bought her a mouthpiece and helped her get sound out of the instrument. “I started jamming with the band on ‘Seven Ways of Going,’ but I developed my technique in the early eighties, when Fred and I were staying in a hotel in Michigan. I would practice while I was watching ‘The Incredible Hulk.’ It’s a really square show, but the background music seemed to be in the key of my clarinet, and I would play a meandering melody until Bill Bixby had his transformation. Then I would play in my Albert Ayler style. I have this superhero-transformation thing going on in my mind when I play the clarinet.”
Patti says that Fred taught her a lot about music in the eighties. “We listened to music all the time—opera, Beethoven, Chris Connor, Billie Holiday. And he showed me how to play little songs on the guitar.” She says that during the time she was married she wrote fiction, poems, and journal entries, and that in many ways it was the most productive period of her life. Their son, Jackson, was born in 1982, and they bought a house in a working-class neighborhood north of Detroit, on Lake St. Clair. This isolated Patti still further, since she can’t drive (because of a slight dyslexic condition). Their house was built in the twenties by bootleggers. It is made of stone and has a turret and climbing roses and ivy in a big overgrown yard. “The house has a Gothic feeling,” Steven Sebring says. Jackson, who is nineteen and a guitarist, like his father, lives there now.
In the spring of 1987, Robert Mapplethorpe, who was by then very ill because of AIDS, photographed Patti for the cover of Dream of Life, her first album since 1979. Fred and Patti wrote all of the songs, including “People Have the Power,” which would later become an anthem for her. “That was the kind of song Fred liked,” Patti says. “High-spirited rock-and-roll songs. He had concepts for the songs on the album. I was given tasks.” Lenny Kaye was not involved. “I knew that the intimacy of their collaboration didn’t have a place for me,” he says. “I accepted that.” Jesse was barely a year old when the album was released, in 1988, and Fred and Patti didn’t tour. The record sold badly.
Robert Mapplethorpe died on March 9, 1989. A little over a year later, Richard Sohl, who had been Patti’s piano player since 1974 and who had come to Michigan to work with her and Fred on Dream of Life, died suddenly from a heart ailment. He was thirty-seven.
On the evening of July 8, 1993, Smith appeared in Central Park as part of the SummerStage program. I was there, among maybe two thousand people who sat pressed together on the grass in the heat. Smith stood alone at the microphone and read poems and sang, forgetting the words sometimes and losing her place. The crowd was affectionate and seemed pleased to see her after such a long time. People would call out cues to remind her of her lines. She apologized for being unaccustomed to performing, and turned frequently to her right, where a man was standing, nodding encouragement. She chanted “Piss Factory,” with its colorful, tough-girl language, but the evening was mostly a sweet and sentimental affair. Patti gave some motherly advice to parents in the audience, telling them to make sure that their kids drank plenty of water.
Patti doesn’t talk in any detail about the years she lived with Fred in Michigan. People who knew him say that he had a drinking problem, but Patti won’t comment on that. “Fred was a very discreet, deliberative, private person,” she says. “He was modest and dignified. Rebellious but also fragile. Very gifted. I really loved him, and he loved his kids. I don’t talk about that period out of respect for Fred. There were beautiful things about it and painful aspects.
“Fred was sick for a long time at home. He had liver and kidney problems. It seemed for a while that he was getting better, and then he relapsed. He was part Indian, and he wasn’t born in a hospital. He told me long ago that if he ever went into a hospital he would never get out. But then he had to be hospitalized on an emergency basis. He was there for a week. I thought he would pull through, but he didn’t make it.” Fred died on November 4, 1994.
Patti and the children went to her parents’ house in New Jersey for Thanksgiving, and her brother Todd assured her that he would take care of her. Todd and Patti were very close. He had been the manager of her crew in the seventies. He was now divorced, with a young daughter, and lived in Virginia, where he was an accountant. Todd said that he knew Patti could have a career again, and they talked about living and working together. She and the children went back to Detroit, and Todd went home to Virginia. He had had high blood pressure for years and, according to his mother, was negligent about taking the medication prescribed for it. A week after Thanksgiving, he died suddenly of a stroke. He was forty-five.
Smith was living in a house in the suburbs of Detroit with two children, and she couldn’t drive. She had very little money. “I was in a bad way, emotionally and physically,” she says. “I needed help. And two of my brother’s friends, Patti Hudson and Jessie Zoldak, women who didn’t know me, drove to Michigan and moved in and helped me get back on my feet.”
Other people heard of her dilemma, and she began getting calls. Somebody gave Michael Stipe her number. Danny Goldberg, a music-business executive whom she hadn’t been in touch with for years and who had recently been named the head of Warner Bros. Records, asked if she needed a lawyer, which she did. His wife, Rosemary Carroll, was a music lawyer and a fan of Smith’s. They offered her their town house in Greenwich Village for the holidays, since they were going to be away. Now, Smith says, Rosemary Carroll “takes care of all of my stuff and protects me.”
On New Year’s Day, 1995, Smith and Lenny Kaye appeared at the annual poetry-reading marathon at St. Mark’s Church, where they had first performed together in 1971. “I was a little frightened,” Smith says. “I hadn’t been in front of people for a long time, but I thought it would be good for me.” They played “Ghost Dance,” a song they had written together for Easter. It alluded to an American Indian ritual for communing with the dead. “Somewhere around the second or third verse she lost her way in the song,” Kaye says, “and she turned to me and I gave her the chord at the top of the verse to ease her in. She took it, and at that moment I knew that we had made it to the other side.”
In February, Allen Ginsberg invited Smith to give a reading in Ann Arbor to benefit a Tibetan Buddhist group. That’s where she met Oliver Ray, who had driven to Michigan with a friend of Ginsberg’s. She saw Ray a few weeks later in New York, and they began playing the guitar together and writing songs. “He was unjudgmental, and he encouraged me to write about what had happened,” Smith says. “I wanted to write some songs for Fred. And I needed to record to support the kids. Fred and I had planned on recording anyway, and I had some things to say, but I didn’t think about starting a band again. And then Bob Dylan asked us to tour with him. That was important to me.” A version of what would become the new band appeared with her on a tour with Dylan that December, and the following summer she put out an album, Gone Again, with songs about Fred. And two songs about Oliver Ray.
When Oliver Ray met Smith, he was recovering from an accident that had nearly killed him. “I had abandoned life and was bumming around Guatemala,” he says, “being exposed to a lot of gory Mesoamerican Catholicism and Indianness. I was getting pretty far out. Then I fell off a cliff and had a compound fracture of my femur. I crawled through a jungle for twelve hours.” That experience is in one of the songs, “Beneath the Southern Cross,” on Gone Again. “Falling off the cliff was the greatest thing that ever happened to me,” he says. “I felt like God slammed me.”
Ray was twenty-two, the son of an investment banker. He had worked for Hanuman Books, the company that published Smith’s little memoir, “Woolgathering.” During his recovery from the fall off the cliff, he stayed at his parents’ house in Manhattan, and began studying the guitar. By the summer of 1996, after Gone Again had been released and Smith’s band was touring Europe, he was playing with them. “I was aware of the limitations of my skills and my abilities, but that didn’t stop me from getting onstage with people who were way better than me,” he says. “Tom Verlaine was on that tour, and I complained about not playing on all of the songs.” The fans on the Web were comparing Ray to Yoko Ono, but nobody else seemed to notice. “Newspaper critics didn’t say anything. That was probably because the guy at the soundboard would mix me down. Patti denies that she told them to turn me down, but sound guys are sound guys, and if they don’t like what they’re hearing out there they will fix it. What is coming out of the P.A. is a translation.”
When he started playing with the band, Ray says, “I was just expressing myself. I wasn’t paying attention to what the moves were. But then I began to understand about how a certain kind of rock and roll works. It’s more tricky than it seems. It’s about playing rhythm in a certain way. I learned onstage, over many humiliating nights.” The band works improvisationally, but “there are landmarks,” Ray says. “You know what Points A and B are. At first, I thought it was total improvisation, but it’s not. It took me a while to learn that. I can’t always hear what Patti is saying when I’m onstage, but I respond to what’s going on around me. The thing about our band is that we have a drummer and a bass player who can come back after being way out in the middle of nowhere in these walls of sound. They can just suddenly bring it back into the groove.”
Oliver Ray now writes the music for many of the band’s songs. On New Year’s Eve, at the Bowery Ballroom, they played “Climbing Boy,” an unfinished ballad based on Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper.” Ray says that it “came from sitting with Patti and listening to her play clarinet and trying to find chords that went with the melody she was playing.” The Land package that comes out this month includes “Wander as I Go,” an outtake from Gone Again that Jeff Buckley and Tom Verlaine play on. “It’s a little song that Patti and I wrote while she was folding laundry and singing,” Ray says. “It came together like that.”
Oliver Ray and Smith performed together in Austin, Texas, late in January, at a “People Have the Power” rally for Ralph Nader that drew five thousand people. Smith campaigned for Nader for President, and since the election she and Ray and sometimes the whole band have performed at Nader events. “He’s an honest man,” she says. “He has a code and he lives by it. He’s committed to justice for the common man. He’s as committed to his work as Blake or Genet were to theirs.”
One day late last spring, I went with Smith to a fund-raiser for the Green Party at the Angel Orensanz community center on the Lower East Side. Nader was the featured speaker. Oliver Ray didn’t accompany her this time, and she brought the old Gibson guitar that Sam Shepard had given her years ago. It doesn’t have a case, and she had wrapped an orange shirt around it for protection. She carried it carefully, because Ray had tuned it before she left the house and she didn’t know how to get it back in tune if something went wrong.
The community center is in a run-down synagogue. The walls have been scraped but not repainted, and a gray film covers the flowery decorations on the windows. There was a crowd of maybe three hundred people upstairs, drinking Coke or wine out of plastic cups at small tables with white plastic covers and listening to a speaker discussing something I didn’t catch. A more élite crowd, sixty or so of the larger contributors, were downstairs, having a preshow chat with Nader himself. Phil Donahue, an eminent Nader supporter, kissed Smith on the forehead. Nader was explaining why the construction of a new New York Stock Exchange was a bad thing. We needed more habitable jails instead. When he saw Smith, they embraced. “Anything I can do to help, Ralph, I’m ready,” she said.
Everybody went upstairs, and Donahue gave a speech. Smith sat on a folding chair at the side of the room, her guitar between her knees. Nader got up and talked about the relentless decline of our democracy and the “billion-dollar boondoggle to build the new stock exchange in the bastion of global capitalism.” Somebody introduced Smith as a rock-and-roll icon, and she went to the podium. “People say to me, ‘Aren’t you sorry for what you did?’ ”—i.e., campaign for Nader for President. “Well, I have never been prouder,” she said. “Voting for Mr. Nader gave me a sense of dignity.” Then she sang “Grateful,” a song for which she had written both the words and the music. She made a joke—“My guitar playing is kind of like the Green Party. It’s getting there.” But actually her playing was just fine. She tried to play “Wing,” another song for which she wrote the music, but she forgot the chords and gave up and paraphrased the lyrics for the audience. They applauded enthusiastically. Ralph Nader was watching her, standing in a corner eating garbanzo beans with a plastic fork. Smith put her guitar down and began an a-cappella version of “People Have the Power,” her arms stretched out at shoulder level toward the crowd, her fingers fluttering in that hypnotic gesture she uses. The muttering at the edges of the room stopped, and the place was perfectly silent.
Last summer, while Smith and the band were on an around-the-world tour, I received an e-mail from her. She was in Sicily, and she said that she had been given a poetry prize in Turin the previous night and was involved in protests against the economic summit meeting of G-8 nations in Genoa. She had channelled Miles Davis at the Montreux Jazz Festival. The tour had begun at the Roskilde Festival, in Copenhagen, where they played before a crowd of fifty thousand people.
The band appeared in Japan at the Fuji Rock Festival, and then travelled back to the United States via Hawaii. I met them in San Francisco, where they played two nights at the Fillmore. An hour or so before the second performance, rows of glass chandeliers lit up the old Italianate dance-hall space. Andrew Burns, who had been managing the equipment throughout the summer tour, had arranged an Oriental rug on the floor of the stage and put African cloths on the amplifiers. Guitars stood in neat rows on stands, and there were candles and flowers. Smith and the band were in her dressing room, making up the set list from the laminated “Patti’s Place” menu of their songs, which has been designed to look like it comes from a diner. Smith was leaner than she had been before the tour started, and the angles in her face were sharper. Her hair was in braids and her jeans were rolled up so that a band of pale skin was visible above her socks. She wore her black jacket and a T-shirt commemorating the first anniversary of a coup in Suriname, which she had picked up when she and Fred passed through there in 1981, on the way to visit the derelict prison colony on Devil’s Island.
The show opened quietly, with “Southern Cross,” the meditation on Oliver Ray’s near-death experience in Guatemala, but in about ten minutes, when Smith was dancing and jabbing her hands at the audience and growling about “God’s parasites in abandoned sites,” the crowd was dancing, too. She told jokes and read Ginsberg’s “Footnote to Howl” (“Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! . . . The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!” etc.), and played the clarinet and the guitar and the harmonica, and covered a Stones song (“The Last Time”) and a Buddy Holly song (“Not Fade Away”). During “Rock n Roll Nigger” she blindfolded herself with a Vietnamese flag and ripped the strings off her guitar.
Things were tense at the Roxy in Los Angeles the next night. It’s a small club, and a line of fans had formed several hours before the doors opened. There was shoving and screaming, and the manager was muttering about riots. A guy with spiky dreadlocks, several of which were bleached, and a girl in a motorcycle cap found a place to stand near me. Rosemary Carroll was there with Meg Ryan and Rosanna Arquette. When Smith entered the room, everyone—movie stars, L.A. punks, old fans from the seventies—stood, and nobody sat down again for nearly three hours. She sang, “Don’t forget who you are, you’re a rock-and-roll star,” and turned her back to the audience and strafed her guitar, then threw the pick into the crowd. She spat on the floor and played a song to commemorate the anniversary of Jerry Garcia’s death. At the end of “Dancing Barefoot,” she was standing on a chair, with the microphone in her right hand and her left arm stretched out, singing “Oh, God, I’m back again.”
“Sometimes things are just joyfully right,” Smith said to me later. “Sometimes, in the middle of ‘Be My Baby’ or something, when everybody seems so happy, I feel like my bones are electric. I have the band, the people, the night, the new city. I consider myself pretty lucky.” ♦
