“New scenery, new noise.”
—Arthur Rimbaud
A product of her times, Patti Smith exemplifies the characteristics and talents of an excellent musician who was never afraid to express her cultural and political beliefs nor break new ground. Smith was a highly influential figure in the New York City punk rock scene. Her career began with her spoken poetry in the New York underground art scene. Her album Horses is a prime example of how she combined poetry and punk rock, to become a literary and musical legend.
Her sounds and words are incisive, giving the music a certain fluidity and momentum. Upon hearing her music one cannot help but ask: Is life an endless search, a journey?
“The only thing you can count on is change.” She wrote in Woolgathering, an autobiography of her life. This small book is a memoir from her twenties in New York cafes in MacDougal Street interweaving these times with her childhood and adolescence; like a long lyrical poem of memories. She completes it in Michigan when she’s 45, where she lived with her husband and two kids. They lived on the outskirts of Detroit near a canal in an old stone house where an ivy and morning glory climbed its walls. She always imagined writing books and wrote many. She dedicated this book to Sam Shepard with this quote: “Relaxed, beneath the sky contemplating this and that.”
She led and continues to lead an active life. In New York she had an affair and lived with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. She wrote the book Just Kids when she found out he had died. “I have lived for love, I have lived for art.” This was her way of telling their story, her way of saying goodbye. How do things come together in ones life. She met and married Fred “Sonic” Smith, moved to Michigan where they lived until his untimely death. Then, she returned to the music scene and went on to release 11 albums. She says she sings because of her passion for sound and “to communicate silence.” Smith’s a poet, a musician, a visual artist, playwright, political inciter, a photographer, and has written many books including Witt, Babel, The Coral Sea, and Just Kids; which won The National Book Award in 2010.
Born on December 30, 1946, in Chicago, Illinois, when she was four they moved to Philadelphia then to New Jersey when she was nine. Smith attended a racially integrated high school. There she befriended and dated her black classmates. While in high school, Smith also developed an intense interest in music and performance. She fell in love with the music of John Coltrane, Little Richard and the Rolling Stones, performing in many of the school’s plays and musicals. She wanted to be an art teacher and attended college, but her experimental style and refusal to follow the established curriculum didn’t sit well with the administration. So in 1967 she moved to New York and worked as a clerk in a Manhattan bookstore and began performing spoken word and later formed the Patti Smith Group (1974–79).
She gave her first public reading on February 10, 1971, at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery. The now legendary reading, with guitar accompaniment from Lenny Kaye, introduced Smith as an up-and-coming figure in the New York arts circle. Later the same year, she further raised her profile by co-authoring and co-starring with Sam Shepard in his semiautobiographical play “Cowboy Mouth.”
Over the next several years, Smith dedicated herself to writing. In 1972, she published her first book of poetry, Seventh Heaven. She also began to more fully explore rock ‘n’ roll as an outlet for her words and poetry.
After her marriage she lead a secluded life in Michigan, then returned to the music scene when Fred died in 1994. It seems to have been the impetus to revive her music career. She achieved a triumphant return with her 1996 comeback album Gone Again, featuring the singles “Summer Cannibals” and “Wicked Messenger.”
Since then, Smith has remained a prominent fixture of the rock music scene with her albums Peace and Noise (1997), Gung Ho (2000) and Trampin’ (2004), proving Smith’s ability to reshape her music to speak to a new generation of rock fans. Her 2007 album, Twelve, featured Smith’s take on a dozen rock classics including “Gimme Shelter,” “Changing of the Guards” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Smith followed with the critically acclaimed Banga (2012), proving that after 35 years of music, she still has plenty to say.
Patti Smith has a political side and has always been very politically active. She was a supporter of the Green Party and backed Ralph Nader in the 2000 Presidential Election. She was a speaker and singer at the first protests against the Iraq War as U.S. President George W. Bush spoke to the United Nations General Assembly. Smith supported Democratic candidate John Kerry in the 2004 election. In the winter of 2004/2005, Smith toured again with Nader in a series of rallies against the Iraq War and called for the impeachment of George W. Bush. In 2006 she premiered two new protest songs in London as an indictment of American Israeli foreign policy. The song “Qana” is about the Israeli air strike on the Lebanese village of Qana. “Without Chains” is about Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen who was born and raised in Germany, held at Guantanamo Bay detainment camp for four years. She said that she wrote these songs in response to events that “I felt outraged about. These are injustices against children and the young men and women who are being incarcerated. I’m an American, I pay taxes in my name and millions and millions of dollars are given to a country such as Israel and cluster bombs and defense technology and those bombs were dropped on common citizens in Qana. It’s terrible. It’s a human rights violation.”
In 2009, in her Meltdown concert in Festival Hall, she paid homage to the Iranians taking part in post-election protests by saying, “Where Is My Vote?” in a version of the song “People Have the Power”. Her art and activism continue to adapt to the times and crimes through which we live.
♦
Leticia Cortez. Born in México and grew up in Chicago. She worked as a teacher at Truman College. She is a writer, educator and activist who currently lives and teaches in Santa Fe, Nuevo Mexico.
♦ ♦ ♦