Patti Smith

[MissMagAddict]

September 06, 2006
timesonline.co.uk​

Elegy for a lost soulmate

Joanna Pitman
Patti Smith is still inspired by her former lover Robert Mapplethorpe

NI_MPU('middle');
A tall, gentle woman with long dark hair opens the door of the house on a quiet street in Greenwich Village. She is pale and slim and dressed in a man’s black jacket, white shirt and jeans. No shoes. You would never pick her out in a crowd, but if you ever met her, you wouldn’t easily forget her. This is Patti Smith, the legendary rock’n’roll artist, poet and political radical, now 60 years old and undimmed in her creative energies.

Smith is calm and soft-spoken. She has been playing guitar and singing to her daughter Jesse, who is feeling low, curled up under a duvet on the sofa. Upstairs the rooms are large and light and all the doors are open which is very relaxing. The place is painted white and simply furnished, stacked with books. She guides me towards a glass display case in which sit various treasures — old photographs, bits of ivory, carved wood and a pair of black velvet slippers.

“These were Robert’s,” she says. On the toes “RM” is embroidered in gold thread: Robert Mapplethorpe. She stands in silence looking at them, smoothing the velvet. It is the instinctive, almost unconscious, movement of a woman recalling the comforts and pleasures of a man who has gone. Mapplethorpe died in 1989. She still loves him.

Their relationship is celebrated in an exhibition of his photographs and a video of her at the Alison Jacques Gallery in London, opening on Friday, together with Smith’s own tributes to Mapplethorpe at Tate Modern and Queen Elizabeth Hall.

Upstairs in her bedroom she guides me to a photograph of the two of them grinning carelessly together at Coney Island in 1969. They look young and happy, very much together. Hanging underneath is a tambourine streaming with ribbons, the bright colours now faded. “Robert made this for me. I’ve had it since 1968. He stretched the goatskin. He decorated it. He was so talented.” She moves on and shows me other treasures — Mapplethorpe’s camera, an etching from Pilgrim’s Progress, an Ed Steichen photograph of a Brancusi sculpture. Eventually we both sit down on the floor at the end of her bed and she brings me things, like a game of show and tell.

“Robert and I used to play show and tell. It was one of our main entertainments. We had no radio or TV and we used to look at art books together, talking about the pictures, what we liked or found interesting about them. Robert was a painter first. He loved doing collage. He loved the Surrealists and Duchamp, the merging of Dadaist ideas and Pop Art. He majored in sculpture and he loved Michelangelo. He was a modern artist with classical taste. Photography was great for him because he could apply his love of sculpture. You can see that in his nudes. When I look at his nudes I don’t think of sex. I think of classical sculpture.”

Smith and Mapplethorpe met in Brooklyn in 1967. Both were 20, both wanted to be artists. “We had nothing much to live on but we instantly became inseparable. We made art all the time together, out of anything, the cheapest materials. He was trained and very gifted and he shared many things with me and taught me things. He had the ability and I had the guts. We lived and worked side by side for years. We inspired each other, but his vision was fully formed. There was nothing I could teach him about his art. I read the books and he learned from me that way. We used to boost each other’s egos in those early days. He’d say, ‘Patti, that’s genius. But you wanna see something really genius?’ We loved to laugh. We used to compare ourselves to Braque and Picasso. The only reason Robert would be Braque was because Braque was a great dancer and Robert fancied himself as a dancer.”

They lived together, first in Brooklyn, later in the Chelsea Hotel and then in a loft near by. “People forget. We were so young then and inexperienced. He was my boyfriend. He was not evolved at all. We went through a lot of growing pains together, and that’s why our friendship lasted. We were always friends. We always knew where each other was and what the other was thinking. At a dinner party we might be at opposite ends of the table but if someone said some corky thing we both knew we couldn’t look at each other or we’d crack up.”

By the mid-Seventies the two were going their own ways. Mapplethorpe’s sexuality was evolving and he moved into the New York gay scene. Smith headed towards marriage, to the guitarist Fred Smith, and a decade spent away from music to bring up two children. “But we were so attached that we needed to stay close for a long time until it was time for us actually to part. It was so painful. It took us a long time to part. We couldn’t just wrench ourselves apart. We lived close to each other for years.”

It was when they were still living around the corner from each other in 1978 that Smith was offered a show for her drawings at Robert Miller’s gallery on Fifth Avenue. “I was completely amazed. It was such a beautiful gallery. I knew I couldn’t have a show there before Robert. I said I’d do it if I could do it with Robert. It was one of the greatest achievements of our friendship. Most of his photographs were of me, and some of my drawings were of him.” And seeking another aspect of their collaboration, the two of them decided to make a film. The result was Still Moving, which will be shown at the Jacques Gallery, along with many of Mapplethorpe’s photographs from this period.

“This film, I love it. It was so like us. He just said: ‘Let’s make a film. Come round tomorrow, about two.’ That was it. So I threw some stuff in a bag, an old white dress he’d given me, a Bible, a few other things. We never talked about what the film would be. He’d put up a bit of mosquito netting in his loft and a couple of his statues. He knew I would know what to do. I just started talking about Blake and all kinds of stuff and he shot it. We did it for about 20 minutes, and I later made a soundtrack.”

Unlike other large personalities, Smith is not loud or arrogant or uncommonly charming. I can sense her asceticism, her desire for purity and her resistance to compromise. But she also has an unexpectedly warm and enveloping spirit. She has been through great sorrow since first her brother, then her husband and then Robert all died, followed by the death of her pianist. As we sit there on her bedroom floor, she allows me to enter the secret room of her longing.

“I sometimes think I could be the saddest person in the world. Or the luckiest. Every one of them has magnified me. I’ve got better and better as a person with each loss. I try not to go too far into being sad. It can be a dark place. But most of the time I’m filled with energy and love. When Robert died, the energy I had was from all the things I knew of him and his life. Everything in my body was so accessible through him.”

Smith has been been doing her own photography since the Sixties. “It’s very nice for me because I think a lot about Robert when I’m taking photographs. I know what he would like. The act of taking them brings me close to him, to the same pleasure we shared of investing our hopes and dreams and knowledge in something. Who we were when we were together is still there, unfettered by anything.”

She takes her photographs, gentle black and white still-lifes, when she is on tour, stealing away from the Patti Smith bandwagon to find a museum or cemetery. Her images, in the manner of Eugène Atget, are about capturing the light on monuments to the past: Victor Hugo’s bed, Herman Hesse’s typewriter, Tolstoy’s grave, Nureyev’s shoes, Virginia Woolf’s desk.

She is also writing a book about Mapplethorpe, but she has missed her deadline. “There are things I know which no one else knows about him. I know right now he’s really annoyed with me because the book’s not finished. But however long it takes, it’s up to me to tell the story. And I must tell it with clarity and joy.”

 

[MissMagAddict]

ROLLING STONE ~ Issue No. 270 ~ July 27, 1978

Japanese Magazine ~ Doll ~ September 1996

all images ebay.com

 

[MissMagAddict]

Patti Smith: Rock's great survivor

Her poetry and proto-punk music blew open the doors for girls with guitars. But her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work is celebrated in a new exhibition this week, was a defining influence. By Liz Hoggard

10 September 2006



Patti Smith is telling me about her childhood love of Vogue. It seems incongruous that the woman hailed as the godmother of punk, who recorded 1970s classics "Piss Factory" and "Rock N Roll ******", should have a weakness for fashion magazines. But it was where she first encountered art photography. "I loved the old 1950s magazines Vogue, Bizarre and Harper's Bazaar with photos by Irving Penn and Diane Arbus."

Smith is in London for the opening of a new exhibition of work by the gay photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, her collaborator and first serious lover, who died in 1989. One room is devoted to the gelatin prints he made of Smith, including the cover of her 1975 album Horses - a stark black-and white portrait of an androgynous Patti in a white shirt.

Wandering round the gallery, Smith is visibly moved. Still dressed in her trademark man's shirt and trousers, with granny specs, she looks far younger than 60. Our conversation ranges from politics (she loathes the Bush administration), to environmentalism and cosmetic surgery. "I'm not the kind of musician who can sit and talk to you about chords," she warns.

Smith is rock's greatest woman artist. Her lovers include the actor and writer Sam Shepard; producer Todd Rundgren; and Tom Verlaine, frontman of Television. She was married to musician Fred "Sonic" Smith for 15 years before his death. More recently she was involved with musician Oliver Ray, 30 years her junior. But it is Mapplethorpe who remains the towering influence. When he died of an Aids-related disease, she wrote an extraordinary poem, "The Coral Sea", about their relationship.

Mapplethorpe would have been 60 in November. There is a retrospective of his work in Edinburgh. In contrast with his usual S&M images, those of Smith are generous and woman-friendly. "When I look at our pictures there's always a softness because even though we caused each other a lot of pain, we really loved each other."

Smith met Mapplethorpe in 1967 in New York. They lived together at the Chelsea Hotel and hung out with William Burroughs. Smith inspired Mapplethorpe, a sculptor, to take up photography. He persuaded Smith to perform her poetry live. In 1975 he paid for her first single to be recorded. With Horses, which fused Smith's free-form poetry with proto-punk rock, she blew the door open for girls with guitars.

The androgyny was never a pose. "I picked my clothes off the floor and we took the pictures. But I loved the way that manner of dressing expressed my version of Baudelaire and the 19th-century poets. When I look at the cover of Horses, I don't find it unfeminine at all: it's like a declaration of independence."

What does Smith think of today's soft-p*rn chic, embodied by the likes of Paris Hilton? "It's not even femininity. We're being sold an image of how to exploit one's self to get attention. It's about redesigning the surface. I've been horrified by all these articles about Botox and plastic surgery as if it's a normal thing."

A friend recently showed her how digital retouching can take 20lbs off someone. "This isn't some joke or unfortunate thing that happened to a newscaster in America. This happens continually. Young girls are getting anorexic because they don't look like people in magazines who often don't even look like that."

Smith has retired twice from performing, once when she broke neck vertebrae falling off stage, and then in the early 1980s to bring up her son and daughter with Sonic. "I had to live a life where, like everybody else, I did tons of laundry and cleaned toilet bowls, changed hundreds of diapers and nursed children. I learned a lot."

In 1994, while she was still mourning the death of Mapplethorpe, her husband and younger brother both died of heart attacks in their forties, and Smith broke down. She has since become an active supporter of psychiatric treatment.

One senses that her life and music are full of ghosts. "I keep my communication lines with the people I have lost." But her political engagement is total. She opposed the war in Iraq and has just written a new song, "Qana", protesting against Israel's bombardment of south Lebanon.
"We have gone backwards in terms of the anti-war movement, in terms of understanding there are no righteous wars. We've got to take note of how we are destroying our environment. Nature is the real woman scorned. We're going to see things that we've never dreamed of. America is still shaking in its boots because more than 2,000 people were killed in the World Trade Center. Well, this is a terrible thing, but over 40,000 Iraqi citizens have been killed since September 11 and 100,000 died in the tsunami."

Smith's music has always been for outsiders. "As a teenager I was the worst wallflower weirdo." She wore an eyepatch for a tremor her family could not afford to have corrected. She contracted tuberculosis and scarlet fever, which caused her to experience hallucinations. Her saviour was literature: influences on her music include Rimbaud and Blake as much as Keith Richards or Bob Dylan.

These days, Smith lives "the simple life of the artist", touring when she wants to, taking photographs and making albums. This week she will be performing The Coral Sea with music by Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine. "I wrote it when I was absolutely grieving for Robert and it is encoded with our whole life: from the gold signet ring carved out of a nugget to the purple dish in the shape of cow that my mother gave him in 1969.

"In fact," she brightens, "after Robert died, Sotheby's was dividing up the saleable items, and they were very puzzled by the cow. My mother cried when she heard that he'd kept it."

Smith's mother sounds a real character. "She had a lot of tragedy in her life, but she was not a depressed person. In fact," she laughs, "she always wanted me to do medleys like Frank Sinatra. She'd say, 'I've figured out a medley for you. You go from "Horses" to "Gloria" to "Rock N Roll ******".' I said: 'Mommy, they're the three longest, most challenging, vigorous songs I do!' But actually, I would do it occasionally when she came to see me."

BIOGRAPHY: A voice raised in protest
Born: Patricia Lee Smith in Chicago, 1946. Left formal education at 16 and went to work in a factory

1967: Moved to New York and met Robert Mapplethorpe

1974: Formed Patti Smith Group

1975: Released debut album Horses, produced by John Cale

1979: Released fourth album, Wave, and married Fred "Sonic" Smith, guitarist for Detroit band MC5. Retired to bring up a family

1988: Released solo album, Dream of Life

1996: Returned to performing with the release of the album Gone Again, featuring a tribute to Kurt Cobain

2004-2005: Campaigned with Ralph Nader to end the Iraq war and impeach President Bush. Released critically acclaimed album Trampin'

2005: Toured with Bob Dylan. Curated London's Meltdown Festival, where she performed Horses in its entirety for 30th anniversary

2006: Recorded "Qana", protesting against Israel's bombardment of south
Lebanon


Robert Mapplethorpe: Still Moving & Lady is at Alison Jacques Gallery, London W1, 020 7287 7675, until 7 October. Tomorrow and Tuesday, Patti Smith presents 'The Coral Sea' at Queen Elizabeth Hall, South Bank. Tickets: 08703 800400


independent.co.uk

 

[MissMagAddict]

Patti Smith, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

By Chris Mugan 12 September 2006



You could bet your bottom dollar this was not how George W Bush would want to spend the anniversary of 9/11. One of his most outspoken critics was out to celebrate an artist obsessed with S&M.

To begin, Patti Smith emerged in her trademark baggy, androgynous suit. She simply recited numbers of the dead on and since that day five years ago. Then she crumpled up her list as she mentioned the "inestimables", the broken families and shattered lives.

Tonight, though, was about one person's actual life. When Smith and guitar maestro Kevin Shields first came together, at last year's Meltdown Festival, which the punk icon curated, the event was overshadowed; 2005 was about her performance of classic album Horses, while now was the perfect time to improvise around The Coral Sea, Smith's prose elegy to her friend and sometime lover Robert Maplethorpe. The photographer would have been 60 this year, an anniversary also celebrated by exhibitions in London and Edinburgh.

Smith, though, was in the midst of her own revitalised period, since she returned to performance in the mid-90s having raised her children. So the first part of the evening focused on the artist's supposedly quieter material. She is still best known here for "Because The Night", so here was a chance to reprise lesser-known numbers and preview new ones.

Hardest hitting was "Qana", mourning the dead children of Lebanon. It was an angry reminder of the footage of bodies in that bombed out village. "Without Chains" brought to life Murat Kurnaz, the German resident held for four years in Guantanamo Bay.

The cellist Giovanni Solima added expressive tones beside bass player and pianist Tony Shanaban. Jason Pierce, Spiritualized's front man, was the surprise package who came out to back up Smith's rusty guitar playing. The artist's most effective instrument was her voice, even more powerful without her usual trad rock backing. All that let her down was the rambling, repetitive introductions that although sweetly personal made her appear like an absent-minded professor.

Perhaps Smith was put off by the stern "recording in progress" sign that reminded us this night was to be taped for posterity. And she was meant to enjoy improvisation.

Nothing phased a youthful Shields, a figure with almost as much mystique as Smith, given his reclusive nature. Sat on a sofa under a chintzy standard lamp, his light action conjured ebbs and flows that mirrored her maritime imagery. A boat journey told the story of Maplethorpe's own life, though only hit home when Smith got visceral and described the photographer vomiting his own flesh. It was Dylan Thomas's "rage against the dying of the light" for the Aids generation.

Smith's deep voice was powerful enough to match the guitarist's increasingly overwhelming slabs of noise, though her random clarinet interludes were embarrassing. Shields had his own longeurs over the 55-minute performance, though when Smith lay down on a sofa beside his, she was as spent as the rest of us.


You could bet your bottom dollar this was not how George W Bush would want to spend the anniversary of 9/11. One of his most outspoken critics was out to celebrate an artist obsessed with S&M.

To begin, Patti Smith emerged in her trademark baggy, androgynous suit. She simply recited numbers of the dead on and since that day five years ago. Then she crumpled up her list as she mentioned the "inestimables", the broken families and shattered lives.

Tonight, though, was about one person's actual life. When Smith and guitar maestro Kevin Shields first came together, at last year's Meltdown Festival, which the punk icon curated, the event was overshadowed; 2005 was about her performance of classic album Horses, while now was the perfect time to improvise around The Coral Sea, Smith's prose elegy to her friend and sometime lover Robert Maplethorpe. The photographer would have been 60 this year, an anniversary also celebrated by exhibitions in London and Edinburgh.

Smith, though, was in the midst of her own revitalised period, since she returned to performance in the mid-90s having raised her children. So the first part of the evening focused on the artist's supposedly quieter material. She is still best known here for "Because The Night", so here was a chance to reprise lesser-known numbers and preview new ones.

Hardest hitting was "Qana", mourning the dead children of Lebanon. It was an angry reminder of the footage of bodies in that bombed out village. "Without Chains" brought to life Murat Kurnaz, the German resident held for four years in Guantanamo Bay.


The cellist Giovanni Solima added expressive tones beside bass player and pianist Tony Shanaban. Jason Pierce, Spiritualized's front man, was the surprise package who came out to back up Smith's rusty guitar playing. The artist's most effective instrument was her voice, even more powerful without her usual trad rock backing. All that let her down was the rambling, repetitive introductions that although sweetly personal made her appear like an absent-minded professor.

Perhaps Smith was put off by the stern "recording in progress" sign that reminded us this night was to be taped for posterity. And she was meant to enjoy improvisation.

Nothing phased a youthful Shields, a figure with almost as much mystique as Smith, given his reclusive nature. Sat on a sofa under a chintzy standard lamp, his light action conjured ebbs and flows that mirrored her maritime imagery. A boat journey told the story of Maplethorpe's own life, though only hit home when Smith got visceral and described the photographer vomiting his own flesh. It was Dylan Thomas's "rage against the dying of the light" for the Aids generation.

Smith's deep voice was powerful enough to match the guitarist's increasingly overwhelming slabs of noise, though her random clarinet interludes were embarrassing. Shields had his own longeurs over the 55-minute performance, though when Smith lay down on a sofa beside his, she was as spent as the rest of us.

independent.co.uk

 

[MissMagAddict]

Patti Smith rails against Israel and US

By Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent 09 September 2006



The singer-songwriter Patti Smith has produced an emotional indictment of American and Israeli foreign policy in two new protest songs she will premiere in London next week.

The American singer takes the Israeli bombing of Lebanese civilians and the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay and as her subjects in the songs "Qana" and "Without Chains".

She condemned an Israeli air strike on the Lebanese village of Qana in July as "an atrocity" for which America was partly to blame. At least 56 people were killed, including 32 children.

Smith said she was further ashamed of America for its detention of young men in Guantanamo Bay. "I wrote both these songs directly in response to events that I felt outraged about," she said. "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 they are giving millions and millions of dollars to a country such as Israel and cluster bombs and defence technology and those bombs were dropped on common citizens in Qana. It's terrible. It's a human rights violation."

Smith said she was not sufficiently well versed in Middle East politics to discuss the differences between Israel and Lebanon. "But there was no righteousness attached to destroying the infrastructure of this country that had been rebuilding. It's an atrocity not only against the people but against the land. I find it really unforgivable."

In the second song, "Without Chains", she details the story of Murat Kurnaz, who was finally released from Guantanamo on 24 August after four years. Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen who was born and raised in Germany, was in the process of becoming a German citizen when he was arrested in Pakistan in late 2001.

Smith said: "He is the same age as my son, Jackson. When I read the story, I realised how I would feel as a mother if my son had been taken away at the age of 20, put into chains, without any hope of leaving, without any direct charge."

She will perform the songs on Monday and Tuesday at the South Bank Centre where she was the guest director of last year's Meltdown Festival.
As part of that, she was partnered by Kevin Shields, the ex-guitarist of My Bloody Valentines, on "The Coral Sea", a prose lament to the artist Robert Mapplethorpe, a former boyfriend, who died of Aids.


The singer-songwriter Patti Smith has produced an emotional indictment of American and Israeli foreign policy in two new protest songs she will premiere in London next week.

The American singer takes the Israeli bombing of Lebanese civilians and the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay and as her subjects in the songs "Qana" and "Without Chains".

She condemned an Israeli air strike on the Lebanese village of Qana in July as "an atrocity" for which America was partly to blame. At least 56 people were killed, including 32 children.

Smith said she was further ashamed of America for its detention of young men in Guantanamo Bay. "I wrote both these songs directly in response to events that I felt outraged about," she said. "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 they are giving millions and millions of dollars to a country such as Israel and cluster bombs and defence technology and those bombs were dropped on common citizens in Qana. It's terrible. It's a human rights violation."

Smith said she was not sufficiently well versed in Middle East politics to discuss the differences between Israel and Lebanon. "But there was no righteousness attached to destroying the infrastructure of this country that had been rebuilding. It's an atrocity not only against the people but against the land. I find it really unforgivable."


In the second song, "Without Chains", she details the story of Murat Kurnaz, who was finally released from Guantanamo on 24 August after four years. Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen who was born and raised in Germany, was in the process of becoming a German citizen when he was arrested in Pakistan in late 2001.

Smith said: "He is the same age as my son, Jackson. When I read the story, I realised how I would feel as a mother if my son had been taken away at the age of 20, put into chains, without any hope of leaving, without any direct charge."

She will perform the songs on Monday and Tuesday at the South Bank Centre where she was the guest director of last year's Meltdown Festival.
As part of that, she was partnered by Kevin Shields, the ex-guitarist of My Bloody Valentines, on "The Coral Sea", a prose lament to the artist Robert Mapplethorpe, a former boyfriend, who died of Aids.

independent.co.uk

 

[rollagasper]

thanks for all the articles, missmagaddict!
Patti is such an inspiration. What an awesome artist.

 

[Multitudes]

I and I alone
I will wash your feet
and dry them with my hair
I will give to you
every other tear
thy breath thy spear
thy season of mirth
seven steps
until I can rest
seven steps
til I am blessed by you
all I ever wanted
I wanted I wanted
all I ever wanted
I wanted for you
Fireflies

ondarock.it

Ooh how I love this woman ... I new when I first stumbled upon Patti Smiths music(Horses was the first album I heard ..) in my college years, I new she would be a lifetime companion ...

Such an imposing inspiration ...

 

[Multitudes]

Live version, recorded from her performance at Queen Elisabeth Hall 12 September 2006, of ...

My Madrigal

Two versions of Patti Smiths latest song titled Qana she wrote in response to Israels bombing of the Lebanes village Qana ...

Qana(Solo)

Qana(Band)

rinet.ru

 

[Multitudes]

Patti Smith on writing ...

"I don't consider writing a quiet, closet act.
I consider it a real physical act.
When I'm home writing on the typewriter, I go crazy.
I move like a monkey.
I've wet myself, I've come in my pants writing."

...

Some of her poems and prose ...

Oh beloved it is so
Thy wrath, thy wrath is so
These feet, these burning feet
Move upon thy wrath
Praise thee in their dance
With outstretched palms
Thy wrath is come
Consumed in flame
Of life of love
May thy anger
Be slow, be sweet
May it discipate
Lift not thy holy hands
Against me
Take my burning arms
My turning skirts
To thy truth
To thy
Transparent
Breast
poem from les nouvelles polyphonies corses' in paradisu album

Autobiography

Où est Baudelaire?

On Jeanne Moreau

Shots In The Dark

pattismith.net

 

[MissMagAddict]

^Multitudes ~ Thank You for the music links

Patti Smith ~ Coming Soon

Patti Smith: American Artist (Hardcover)
by Lenny Kaye (Foreword), Frank Stefanko, Patti Smith (Introduction)
Hardcover: 136 pages
Publisher: Insight Editions (October 3, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN: 1933784067

Just Kids : From Brooklyn to the Chelsea Hotel, a Life of Art and Friendship (Hardcover)
by Patti Smith
Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: Ecco (October 1, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN: 006621131X

Essential Patti Smith CD : Poetry of Patti Smith (Audio CD)
by Patti Smith, Smith Patti (Narrator)
Audio CD
Publisher: Caedmon (September 1, 2006) Still shows as pre-order from amazon.com
Language: English
ISBN: 0061170674

I would love to read what she's written of her relationship with Mapplethorpe so far.
I hope she finishes the book soon!

 

[Multitudes]

^Multitudes ~ Thank You for the music links

You're most welcome ... and thank you again for the articles ...

Photos by Mapplethorpe ...

postmodern.com

 

[Multitudes]

Another Mapplethorpe ...

Photo by Judy Linn ...

Photo by Lynn Goldsmith ...

From a film by Sandy Daley ...

postmodern.com

 

[MissMagAddict]

Mother Superior
Arts Interview
Alice O'Keeffe


In the 1970s, Patti Smith revolutionised rock'n'roll. Now, she tells Alice O'Keeffe, her priorities are the environment, the anti-war movement and good dental hygiene

Patti Smith raises her arms and lets loose a howl. "What is the point?" she wails. "What is the point?" A wall of guitar noise ebbs and screeches, with the occasional crunch of feedback. She blows frantically into a clarinet, eliciting a succession of piercing squeaks, then spits on to the stage floor. We may be a well-heeled crowd at the South Bank in London, but she has conjured us into a smoke-filled poet-hole in Greenwich Village. About half of the audience look like they are on a spiritual journey; the other half are clearly keen to get home and have a stiff whisky.

She may be approaching 60, but Smith has lost none of the bohemian spirit for which she was so well known. Her live performances, during which she draws audiences into an improvised world of pure emotional energy, have been described as "religious", even "shamanic". With her unbrushed tresses of greying hair, outsized cowboy boots and bony, angular features, she is an icon whose name sits comfortably in the rock pantheon alongside the likes of Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.

The odd thing is that she has not sold very many records. She had one top 20 hit, and that was in 1978 - a duet with Bruce Springsteen called "Because the Night". Smith herself recognises this: when she released Land 1975-2002, a collection of songs from her previous albums, she joked that it wasn't called Greatest Hits because "we would have had to call it Greatest Hit and have the same track 15 times over".

Nevertheless, she maintains an extraordinary influence over popular culture, continuing to play concerts all over the world. When she curated the Meltdown festival at the South Bank last year, it was the hottest ticket in town. It seems a strange paradox: Smith fulfils our desire for a true, pure artist - and yet she is clearly famous for something other than her art.

I put this to her when we meet, a few days before the concert, at the Alison Jacques Gallery in central London. She is launching an exhibition of portraits by Robert Mapplethorpe, her late best friend and sometime lover. In pride of place is the portrait of Smith from the cover of Horses: a familiar, androgynous figure in shirt and braces, staring confrontationally from the frame. This is the image that defined the rock'n'roll female, establishing a tradition that has been kept by everyone from Chrissie Hynde to P J Harvey.

In person, Smith is grounded and mellow. She sometimes takes a surprisingly homespun, motherly tone. "I would like to think that the quality of the work I do with my band merits people still being interested," she says. "Also I'm politically concerned, and I voice my concerns - perhaps that's another reason."

I wonder whether she would agree that people are fascinated by her as a symbol of a more dig nified age - a kind of anti-Paris Hilton. "I think there is a certain amount of truth in that. When I made my first record, rock'n'roll was a new form. I didn't think about making money, I didn't imagine being rich and famous. My motivations were not to get a bunch of cute guys, get drugs and have a limousine. I really wanted to do something important to contribute to the canon of rock'n'roll."

Smith's career has always been driven by a sense of mission. When she first started reading her poetry backed by an electric guitar, in 1970s New York, she wanted to "return rock'n'roll to the people". She was alarmed by the commercialisation of the music industry, as the gen eration of rebel artists of the 1960s either went stellar (the Rolling Stones) or bit the dust (Hendrix and Morrison).

"I came from an era when people felt they could make a difference. We felt that we could stop war. We felt that we could start a revolution, express our poetic and sexual energy, do something positive. That is part of the legacy of rock'n'roll and people can still do that. Some 16-year-old could wake up tomorrow and say, 'I'm going to make a record which will wake up the world.'"

Few artists who spoke for the children of the 1960s or 1970s would still talk so idealistically about the transformative potential of rock mus ic. And yet, unlike so many of her rock peers, Smith has studiously avoided the hedonism and self-importance of many people who work in the music industry. At the height of her fame in the 1970s, she suddenly retired to concentrate on raising a family with her husband, the guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith.

"She is one of the few performers I know who has actually managed to get off the road," says Glenn Max, contemporary culture producer at the South Bank, who worked closely with Smith on last year's Meltdown. "No male artist I know has ever succeeded in doing that."

Predictably, it has been suggested that her husband demanded that she retire, but Smith herself has always insisted that it was her decision. "I had said everything I knew how to say, so I would either be redundant or merely start getting rich and famous," she told one interviewer when she re-emerged with the album Gone Again in 1996. "I needed to learn more, so I had more to give."

It has proved to be a wise choice. Family life has given Smith a solid foundation from which to continue her work, and a genuine sense of perspective on her fame. "I really don't want you to think that I sit around at home thinking of myself as an icon," she tells me at one point, with great emphasis. "I'm a mother, I'm a normal person, and I never think about myself in those terms, although of course it is flattering to hear it. I believe that fame is fleeting: it is only good work that endures."

Raising children has also given Smith an instinctive sympathy with younger people, who she believes are doing their best in a hostile world plagued by materialism and "devoid of spiritual content". All one can do, she says, is offer them positive alternatives. "You can't judge young people - you have to set an example. Give them tools. Try to inspire them. I know the new gen eration will figure it all out. And if I can answer any questions, if I can be of any help or service, then, you know, I'm around."

When I press her for detail, her counsel takes a somewhat surprising form: "Things like, eating a lot of fast food is really bad for you. All that salt and sugar creates high blood pressure; it makes you overweight, it makes you sluggish. And take care of your teeth, because when you get older it's such a drag. There's nothing worse than feeling creative, wanting to do stuff, and not being able to because you've got teeth problems and you don't have enough money to take care of them." Thus speaks the rock goddess.

While Smith's ability to hang on to her youthful idealism has endeared her to fans worldwide, it has a less cuddly side. She earned the anger of many American liberals for supporting Ralph Nader as Green Party candidate in the US presidential elections in 2000. Nader was blamed for George W Bush's victory when he won nearly 98,000 votes in Florida, where Al Gore lost to the Republicans by a slender margin. I ask her if, with hindsight, she ever regrets that decision. "Absolutely not. Ralph is a great man and if he was president the world would be glowing." She argues that Gore ran his campaign poorly, failing to fight back against corrupt tactics from the Bush camp. "A lot of people find it convenient to blame Ralph Nader. But the truth of the matter is that if Al Gore had fought to the end, the outcome would have been very different."

It is more difficult to justify her insistence that she would do the same again in the 2008 elections. "Would I campaign strategically to get rid of Bush? No. I would always back the candidate I believed in. If I'm voting for someone, I have to feel that I can live with myself about it."

It seems appropriate that our interview ends with that uncompromising statement. While those around her have resigned themselves to realpolitik, Patti Smith is still rooting for her dreams. And even if she sometimes sounds a wrong note, the world is a richer place for it.

"Robert Mapplethorpe - Still Moving & Lady" is at the Alison Jacques Gallery, London W1, until 7 October.

newstatesman.com
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[rollagasper]

Just Kids : From Brooklyn to the Chelsea Hotel, a Life of Art and Friendship (Hardcover)
by Patti Smith

what is this book about? is it the one about her and mapplethorpe? if so, sounds very interesting.

 

[MissMagAddict]

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][SIZE=+2]PATTI SMITH PERFORMANCE TO CLOSE CBGB[/SIZE][/FONT]

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Veteran rocker PATTI SMITH will play the last gig at New York punk mecca CBGB next month (OCT06). The GLORIA star will perform alongside her longtime guitarist LENNY KAYE on 15 October (06). CBGB was due to shut up on 30 September (06) after 33 years but will now close its doors for the last time 15 days later. CBGB boss HILLY KRISTAL, who lost his lease last year (05), recently confirmed he is moving the club to Las Vegas, Nevada. CBGB hosted the New York punk revolution in the mid-to-late 1970s, staging regular shows for the Smith, RAMONES, BLONDIE and TALKING HEADS, among others.
22/09/2006 03:27 contactmusic.com

July/August 1996 (ebay.com)

 

[rollagasper]

it's such a shame that CBGBs is closing up. The scene especially inthe 70s was legendary.
It's a wonderful way though, to have patty play there last. although i think i would have preferred Television since they were the first rock band to play there.

 

[MissMagAddict]

More Patti by Mapplethorpe (I apologize if any of these were posted before/I didn't have time to go through the entire thread)

alisonjacquesgallery.com

 

[MissMagAddict]

alisonjacquesgallery.com

 

[MissMagAddict]

alisonjacquesgallery.com

 

[MissMagAddict]

United Colors of Benetton Show Paris Oct 10, 2006

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