SiennaInLondon
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If any of you have VH1, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony is one now. CONGRATS PATTI!
Patti Smith
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rollagasper
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^That's wonderful! She totally deserves the recognition.
I am so excited for her new album 12!!! I've heard clips of a couple of the songs online, and they sound real good. Her voice is still top notch. And as an added bonus, Tom Verlaine plays on a few. He was wonderful on Piss Factory and I'd assume he is as great here.
I am so excited for her new album 12!!! I've heard clips of a couple of the songs online, and they sound real good. Her voice is still top notch. And as an added bonus, Tom Verlaine plays on a few. He was wonderful on Piss Factory and I'd assume he is as great here.
rollagasper
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^ me too!
SiennaInLondon
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Ugh no clips have made Youtube so far. Anyone have an alternate source?
Here's a youtube of "People Have the Power" from the induction ceremony!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bktQV3DFVTc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bktQV3DFVTc
rollagasper
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can't see it!
SiennaInLondon
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WOAH! That is going to leave a bunch of "Hotlinking is disabled" boxes scattered across TFS like the scorched Earth villages armies leave in their wake.
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susanmernit.blogspot.com
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New long and in-depth interview from The Sunday Times 
{timesonline.co.uk}
Nearly 30 years ago, Patti Smith turned her back on rock’n’roll. The woman they called the female Bob Dylan quit, choosing obscurity and her family over wealth and fame. Robert Sandall found her in Paris on a mission to roll back the years.
She arrives on foot, there is no stretch limo in the vicinity, hair and make-up were never in the frame, and none of the hotel’s other residents gives her a second glance. Patti Smith may be one of the most feted female pop icons of our time, but today, wandering around Paris with her Polaroid camera, she is way off the celebrity radar. In her jeans, black coat, long grey hair and granny specs, she looks more like an academic or bookish tourist than someone who will, the day after this interview, fly to New York to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
At the ceremony at the Waldorf Astoria, Smith will be, as she so often is, the odd woman out. With her on the 2007 Hall of Fame honours list are the 1960s girl group the Ronettes, the heavy-rock band Van Halen, the rap pioneer Grandmaster Flash, and REM. All have been huge sellers. By contrast, over a 30-year career, Smith has had, in 1978, one top-20 hit, Because the Night, which was co-written with Bruce Springsteen. Most of her 10 albums never made the top 50. She is the least commercially successful musician to have been given the nod by the Hall of Fame. It’s a similar story with her poetry. In 2005 she was awarded a literary medal by the French Ministry of Culture designating her Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters. The only other American writers to have received this award in recent years have been William Burroughs and Susan Sontag. Although Smith has been reading her poems in public since 1971 and published her latest volume, Auguries of Innocence, in 2005, her poetry has never been on the bestseller lists. But despite the overall indifference of readers and record-buyers, Smith enjoys a huge reputation for maverick integrity. The fact that she doesn’t sell is in line with the fact that she can’t be bought, has never courted commercial success, and still refers to herself as “poor”.
To spend a couple of hours talking, and mainly listening, to her is to appreciate what an intriguing tangle of contradictions she is. Much misconstrued was the monochrome image of a 29-year-old Smith staring off the cover of her first album, Horses. A benchmark of gamine, ambisexual cool, it made her the poster girl of the 1970s feminist movement. Yet a few years later she abandoned her career, and her independence, to assume the role of mother and housewife, married for 16 years to a man she worshipped and deferred to. She still refers to her dead husband, Fred Smith, as “the better man of the two of us”.
Her forays into politics have been ambivalent in a different way. She has held rallies to urge the impeachment of George Bush for his “illegal occupation and destruction of Iraq”, as she terms it, but she has also made foes of the Democrats she ostensibly supports who blame her support of the maverick independent Ralph Nader’s presidential campaign for the defeat of Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004. Smith sang at Kerry’s rallies and helped raise funds to fight the lawsuits he faces. Her mentions of Nader at her concerts usually elicit booing. “They booed Thomas Paine too,” she observes truculently.
On the face of it, her acceptance of the Hall of Fame award looks like another about-face. When the Hall of Fame started in 1986, Smith was publicly against it. As she accepted a Q award in London in 1997, she launched into a diatribe against rock’s burgeoning gong culture. “People, we can do better than this!” she taunted the audience. She still describes rock as “a cultural voice, a kind of spiritual awakening”, and opposes the way MTV and others have turned it into “a quick way to get rich and famous”. But she also now says the induction, and the red-carpet back-slapping that goes with it, “makes me so happy to be appreciated”. When she adds that she’s “proud to be considered in the same breath as Dylan and Hendrix”, you wonder if her head might finally have been turned by the hype machine of the American rock establishment. She’s good and she’s been highly influential, but she’s never been up there with Bob and Jimi.
Which is not to deny that Smith is now, possibly more than ever, a consummate performer. When she headlined the Latitude festival in Suffolk last July, accompanied by her longtime guitarist Lenny Kaye, the power of her vocals was mesmerising and unprecedented. She couldn’t move air around like that in the 1970s. She puts this down to the fact that she breathes more deeply now, a side effect of having learnt, during her years as a housewife, to play the jazz clarinet. “I used to sing through my nose. I was always a sickly, bronchial child. But I’ve never had issues with drink or drugs, and I don’t smoke. So now I’ve got healthy.”
Smith is in Paris to promote her new record, Twelve, a collection of cover versions of rock classics whose most arresting track is a bluegrass version of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, featuring her old friend, the playwright and actor Sam Shepard, and his son Walker, both on banjo. But she’s just as keen to talk about her new book of photographs, celebrating the tools and the surroundings of artists she admires. Of her photographic method she says: “These are meant to be surface images, and I don’t take many people. But hopefully, soulfully they have depth.”
The indirect nature of many of her pictures is the most revealing thing about them, and, to an extent, her. Smith has photographed Keats’s bed, Picasso’s brushes, Robert Mapplethorpe’s slippers, a country road in France where her favourite poet, Arthur Rimbaud, used to walk. The Ferris wheel in the film of The Third Man she shot “because I wanted to see what Orson Welles would have seen”.
The general absence of people in her photos reflects a reticence on her part. Another Smith paradox means she is articulate but shy. The scarring sadnesses of her life she will allude to reluctantly, but does not discuss in detail. These include the teenage pregnancy that resulted in her dropping out of college; the death in 1989 of her first great love, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, from Aids; the death of her husband in 1994, the same year her much-loved brother Todd died unexpectedly. “There’s been a lot of loss and sadness,” she says matter-of-factly, concluding brightly: “I’ve had a very interesting life.” Ask her about her happiest time and she becomes almost snappish. “I don’t like saying things like that. I’m happy now. I was happy with Fred. I was happy with Robert. I had a happy childhood.” Full stop. The implication being, there have always been more important things to Smith than boring old happiness.
Patricia Lee Smith was born in 1946 into a family where money was tight but books were plentiful. Despite being in her estimation “very intelligent people from good New England families, with good educations”, her parents struggled to provide for their three children. Dad was a factory worker, Mom a part-time waitress. The first home she remembers was a prefab in a field on the outskirts of Philadelphia, built as temporary housing for returning GIs like her father. By the time she escaped for New York in 1966, the Smiths were living in the cultural wilderness of rural New Jersey.
Home life was “a lot of fun, a very creative atmosphere”. Her mother was a Jehovah’s Witness who raised her children as Witnesses, with all the doorstep evangelising that entailed. “But she wasn’t pious. I wouldn’t even call her a religious woman. She was true to her faith, but she was a fun-loving person who loved rock’n’roll.” However, the most important book in the Smith household, the Bible, was required reading. “It was considered literature.”
While her girlfriends were getting into Barbie and beehives, Smith spent her early adolescence studying fashion magazines to discover what older, more sophisticated women were up to.
“I got my education from copies of Vogue and Harper’s that I pulled out of trash cans. I loved the fact that they covered art, and photographers like Irving Penn. In the 1950s these were high-culture magazines.” They led her to “thrift” clothing stores, where she would dress herself in rich fashionistas’ castoffs. She remembers at 14 buying a second-hand Harris tweed coat and a Balenciaga green silk raincoat “for nothing. You can’t find things like that there now. What I did was unusual back then, because it’s what poor people did. My mother was ashamed of it”.
Shame of a different kind may have clouded Smith’s later teenage years. At some point in the early 1960s she bore an illegitimate child, who was given up for adoption, dropped out of teacher-training college, and worked briefly in a factory. She was captivated by the music of James Brown, John Coltrane, Little Richard, and Joan Baez, whose wearing of long black braids she copied. And she loved the operas of Puccini. But it was poetry that was buzzing loudest in her head when, aged 19, she left New Jersey for good.
For the next six years, Smith worked in Manhattan bookshops by day, and hung out with downtown creatives and budding art stars by night. She acted in an early play by Sam Shepard, Cowboy Mouth, playing “a woman who looks like a crow”. She met Robert Mapplethorpe through friends who knew him from Pratt’s University in Brooklyn. She says: “It was a happy accident,” fleetingly alluding to the attraction felt by a closet gay man for a flat-chested, boyish-looking woman. More to the point, though: “Robert bought me my first copy of Sylvia Plath’s poems.” Reading the emotionally tortured verse of Plath convinced Smith that poetry had to be performed if it was to be heard properly.
Her first public reading was in St Mark’s Church, opening for the Andy Warhol protégé Gerard Malanga in summer 1971. A stellar audience turned out – which Smith refers to as “just the people we knew”– for what was to be a life-changing night. “Because [the beat poets] Gregory [Corso] and Allen [Ginsberg] were coming, I knew I couldn’t be boring. So Sam Shepard said, ‘Why don’t you get someone to play electric guitar?’ Luckily, I’d just met this rock writer Lenny Kaye who played guitar.”
Four years and many electric performances later, Smith and her band were making waves on New York’s garage-punk scene. Although she had begun to sing, Smith “never considered myself a singer. I went to a school that was half black where everyone sang all the time. The average girl in my school was as good as most of what you heard on the radio”. She says her vocal efforts were well below average.
But with her white silk shirts, baggy trousers and severe asexual fringe, she knew she had the look. “Baudelaire Catholic schoolboy,” she calls it. One afternoon she and Mapplethorpe wandered over to a minimalist, white-walled apartment that belonged to Mapplethorpe’s patron, Sam Wagstaffe. Their mission was to shoot the cover photo of her debut album.
In her poet-about-town gear, black jacket slung across her shoulder, she posed briefly in the shadow cast by Wagstaffe’s giant avocado plant. Mapplethorpe took no more than a dozen shots. “He said, ‘I got it,’ and I said, ‘How do you know?’ He said, ‘I just know.’ Robert,” she adds, “was never wrong in that respect.” Of all the many pictures that have been taken of her over the years, it remains the one that, by highlighting her aquiline features, shows Smith’s part American-Indian ancestry most clearly.
Her plan was to quit after Horses, but she kept going for three more albums “because I came from a poor family, and playing rock’n’roll allowed me to tour and see the world”. She enjoyed meeting people. She remembers playing on the same bill as the Clash in London in 1976. “They were literally starving. We gave them our per-diem allowances to buy food.” Back in the States, she urged the president of CBS Records, the Clash’s label, to give them a break. Around the same time, at a gig in Detroit, she met Fred “Sonic” Smith, formerly guitarist with the 1960s agitprop band the MC5. His new group, Sonic’s Rendezvous Band, was supporting hers. “He was great. Intelligent, beautiful, gifted, soft-spoken, a gentleman?” Thirty years later she still sounds like a moonstruck teenager. Could this have been the first time she had fallen properly in love? Wrong question. “I’d say that it felt like I had met my future husband,” she says crisply.
In 1979 the couple married and elected to withdraw from public life, settling in an old house by a canal in north Michigan. “I loved Fred. I wanted to be his wife, to have children, for them to lead a decent, simple life, not to grow up on the road with a couple of rock stars.”
The next 16 years were tough. Neither Smith was earning much from royalties and the one album they made together in 1988, Dream of Life, sold poorly. For Patti, separated from friends, family and the East Coast cafe society she loved, the isolation was uncomfortable. You suspect that only a person as used to contradicting herself as she is would have put up with it. “I’m too dyslexic to drive. It takes too long to discern my right from my left. And here I was, living in a state that depends on driving.”
Her domestic routine was austere – and not exactly what her many feminist followers at the time might have predicted. “I’d wake at 5am, write or read books till 8, then get the kids ready for school, iron clothes, make their lunch. Then I’d attend to whatever my husband’s needs were.”
Together they lived the life of mature students enrolled on a self-designed course of Mad Eclecticism. “We studied everything: politics, baseball, golf, aviation, Japanese literature, whatever we were interested in. Fred was brilliant. I learnt so much through him.”
In 1993, Fred began to suffer heart problems, and in less than two years he died. He was 45 and left his more or less penniless widow with their 12-year-old son, Jackson, and seven-year-old daughter, Jesse. She vividly recalls one of their last conversations. “Fred told me, ‘Trisha, one day you’ll be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. You’ll have mixed feelings but I want you to accept it like a lady. From me, because I’ll never get there, and from all the other people like us. The maverick people.’ ” She was shocked, not at the thought that a semi-retired singing poet such as herself might get nominated, but because she “always felt that of the two of us, he was the better man, in the old-fashioned sense”.
{timesonline.co.uk}Nearly 30 years ago, Patti Smith turned her back on rock’n’roll. The woman they called the female Bob Dylan quit, choosing obscurity and her family over wealth and fame. Robert Sandall found her in Paris on a mission to roll back the years.
She arrives on foot, there is no stretch limo in the vicinity, hair and make-up were never in the frame, and none of the hotel’s other residents gives her a second glance. Patti Smith may be one of the most feted female pop icons of our time, but today, wandering around Paris with her Polaroid camera, she is way off the celebrity radar. In her jeans, black coat, long grey hair and granny specs, she looks more like an academic or bookish tourist than someone who will, the day after this interview, fly to New York to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
At the ceremony at the Waldorf Astoria, Smith will be, as she so often is, the odd woman out. With her on the 2007 Hall of Fame honours list are the 1960s girl group the Ronettes, the heavy-rock band Van Halen, the rap pioneer Grandmaster Flash, and REM. All have been huge sellers. By contrast, over a 30-year career, Smith has had, in 1978, one top-20 hit, Because the Night, which was co-written with Bruce Springsteen. Most of her 10 albums never made the top 50. She is the least commercially successful musician to have been given the nod by the Hall of Fame. It’s a similar story with her poetry. In 2005 she was awarded a literary medal by the French Ministry of Culture designating her Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters. The only other American writers to have received this award in recent years have been William Burroughs and Susan Sontag. Although Smith has been reading her poems in public since 1971 and published her latest volume, Auguries of Innocence, in 2005, her poetry has never been on the bestseller lists. But despite the overall indifference of readers and record-buyers, Smith enjoys a huge reputation for maverick integrity. The fact that she doesn’t sell is in line with the fact that she can’t be bought, has never courted commercial success, and still refers to herself as “poor”.
To spend a couple of hours talking, and mainly listening, to her is to appreciate what an intriguing tangle of contradictions she is. Much misconstrued was the monochrome image of a 29-year-old Smith staring off the cover of her first album, Horses. A benchmark of gamine, ambisexual cool, it made her the poster girl of the 1970s feminist movement. Yet a few years later she abandoned her career, and her independence, to assume the role of mother and housewife, married for 16 years to a man she worshipped and deferred to. She still refers to her dead husband, Fred Smith, as “the better man of the two of us”.
Her forays into politics have been ambivalent in a different way. She has held rallies to urge the impeachment of George Bush for his “illegal occupation and destruction of Iraq”, as she terms it, but she has also made foes of the Democrats she ostensibly supports who blame her support of the maverick independent Ralph Nader’s presidential campaign for the defeat of Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004. Smith sang at Kerry’s rallies and helped raise funds to fight the lawsuits he faces. Her mentions of Nader at her concerts usually elicit booing. “They booed Thomas Paine too,” she observes truculently.
On the face of it, her acceptance of the Hall of Fame award looks like another about-face. When the Hall of Fame started in 1986, Smith was publicly against it. As she accepted a Q award in London in 1997, she launched into a diatribe against rock’s burgeoning gong culture. “People, we can do better than this!” she taunted the audience. She still describes rock as “a cultural voice, a kind of spiritual awakening”, and opposes the way MTV and others have turned it into “a quick way to get rich and famous”. But she also now says the induction, and the red-carpet back-slapping that goes with it, “makes me so happy to be appreciated”. When she adds that she’s “proud to be considered in the same breath as Dylan and Hendrix”, you wonder if her head might finally have been turned by the hype machine of the American rock establishment. She’s good and she’s been highly influential, but she’s never been up there with Bob and Jimi.
Which is not to deny that Smith is now, possibly more than ever, a consummate performer. When she headlined the Latitude festival in Suffolk last July, accompanied by her longtime guitarist Lenny Kaye, the power of her vocals was mesmerising and unprecedented. She couldn’t move air around like that in the 1970s. She puts this down to the fact that she breathes more deeply now, a side effect of having learnt, during her years as a housewife, to play the jazz clarinet. “I used to sing through my nose. I was always a sickly, bronchial child. But I’ve never had issues with drink or drugs, and I don’t smoke. So now I’ve got healthy.”
Smith is in Paris to promote her new record, Twelve, a collection of cover versions of rock classics whose most arresting track is a bluegrass version of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, featuring her old friend, the playwright and actor Sam Shepard, and his son Walker, both on banjo. But she’s just as keen to talk about her new book of photographs, celebrating the tools and the surroundings of artists she admires. Of her photographic method she says: “These are meant to be surface images, and I don’t take many people. But hopefully, soulfully they have depth.”
The indirect nature of many of her pictures is the most revealing thing about them, and, to an extent, her. Smith has photographed Keats’s bed, Picasso’s brushes, Robert Mapplethorpe’s slippers, a country road in France where her favourite poet, Arthur Rimbaud, used to walk. The Ferris wheel in the film of The Third Man she shot “because I wanted to see what Orson Welles would have seen”.
The general absence of people in her photos reflects a reticence on her part. Another Smith paradox means she is articulate but shy. The scarring sadnesses of her life she will allude to reluctantly, but does not discuss in detail. These include the teenage pregnancy that resulted in her dropping out of college; the death in 1989 of her first great love, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, from Aids; the death of her husband in 1994, the same year her much-loved brother Todd died unexpectedly. “There’s been a lot of loss and sadness,” she says matter-of-factly, concluding brightly: “I’ve had a very interesting life.” Ask her about her happiest time and she becomes almost snappish. “I don’t like saying things like that. I’m happy now. I was happy with Fred. I was happy with Robert. I had a happy childhood.” Full stop. The implication being, there have always been more important things to Smith than boring old happiness.
Patricia Lee Smith was born in 1946 into a family where money was tight but books were plentiful. Despite being in her estimation “very intelligent people from good New England families, with good educations”, her parents struggled to provide for their three children. Dad was a factory worker, Mom a part-time waitress. The first home she remembers was a prefab in a field on the outskirts of Philadelphia, built as temporary housing for returning GIs like her father. By the time she escaped for New York in 1966, the Smiths were living in the cultural wilderness of rural New Jersey.
Home life was “a lot of fun, a very creative atmosphere”. Her mother was a Jehovah’s Witness who raised her children as Witnesses, with all the doorstep evangelising that entailed. “But she wasn’t pious. I wouldn’t even call her a religious woman. She was true to her faith, but she was a fun-loving person who loved rock’n’roll.” However, the most important book in the Smith household, the Bible, was required reading. “It was considered literature.”
While her girlfriends were getting into Barbie and beehives, Smith spent her early adolescence studying fashion magazines to discover what older, more sophisticated women were up to.
“I got my education from copies of Vogue and Harper’s that I pulled out of trash cans. I loved the fact that they covered art, and photographers like Irving Penn. In the 1950s these were high-culture magazines.” They led her to “thrift” clothing stores, where she would dress herself in rich fashionistas’ castoffs. She remembers at 14 buying a second-hand Harris tweed coat and a Balenciaga green silk raincoat “for nothing. You can’t find things like that there now. What I did was unusual back then, because it’s what poor people did. My mother was ashamed of it”.
Shame of a different kind may have clouded Smith’s later teenage years. At some point in the early 1960s she bore an illegitimate child, who was given up for adoption, dropped out of teacher-training college, and worked briefly in a factory. She was captivated by the music of James Brown, John Coltrane, Little Richard, and Joan Baez, whose wearing of long black braids she copied. And she loved the operas of Puccini. But it was poetry that was buzzing loudest in her head when, aged 19, she left New Jersey for good.
For the next six years, Smith worked in Manhattan bookshops by day, and hung out with downtown creatives and budding art stars by night. She acted in an early play by Sam Shepard, Cowboy Mouth, playing “a woman who looks like a crow”. She met Robert Mapplethorpe through friends who knew him from Pratt’s University in Brooklyn. She says: “It was a happy accident,” fleetingly alluding to the attraction felt by a closet gay man for a flat-chested, boyish-looking woman. More to the point, though: “Robert bought me my first copy of Sylvia Plath’s poems.” Reading the emotionally tortured verse of Plath convinced Smith that poetry had to be performed if it was to be heard properly.
Her first public reading was in St Mark’s Church, opening for the Andy Warhol protégé Gerard Malanga in summer 1971. A stellar audience turned out – which Smith refers to as “just the people we knew”– for what was to be a life-changing night. “Because [the beat poets] Gregory [Corso] and Allen [Ginsberg] were coming, I knew I couldn’t be boring. So Sam Shepard said, ‘Why don’t you get someone to play electric guitar?’ Luckily, I’d just met this rock writer Lenny Kaye who played guitar.”
Four years and many electric performances later, Smith and her band were making waves on New York’s garage-punk scene. Although she had begun to sing, Smith “never considered myself a singer. I went to a school that was half black where everyone sang all the time. The average girl in my school was as good as most of what you heard on the radio”. She says her vocal efforts were well below average.
But with her white silk shirts, baggy trousers and severe asexual fringe, she knew she had the look. “Baudelaire Catholic schoolboy,” she calls it. One afternoon she and Mapplethorpe wandered over to a minimalist, white-walled apartment that belonged to Mapplethorpe’s patron, Sam Wagstaffe. Their mission was to shoot the cover photo of her debut album.
In her poet-about-town gear, black jacket slung across her shoulder, she posed briefly in the shadow cast by Wagstaffe’s giant avocado plant. Mapplethorpe took no more than a dozen shots. “He said, ‘I got it,’ and I said, ‘How do you know?’ He said, ‘I just know.’ Robert,” she adds, “was never wrong in that respect.” Of all the many pictures that have been taken of her over the years, it remains the one that, by highlighting her aquiline features, shows Smith’s part American-Indian ancestry most clearly.
Her plan was to quit after Horses, but she kept going for three more albums “because I came from a poor family, and playing rock’n’roll allowed me to tour and see the world”. She enjoyed meeting people. She remembers playing on the same bill as the Clash in London in 1976. “They were literally starving. We gave them our per-diem allowances to buy food.” Back in the States, she urged the president of CBS Records, the Clash’s label, to give them a break. Around the same time, at a gig in Detroit, she met Fred “Sonic” Smith, formerly guitarist with the 1960s agitprop band the MC5. His new group, Sonic’s Rendezvous Band, was supporting hers. “He was great. Intelligent, beautiful, gifted, soft-spoken, a gentleman?” Thirty years later she still sounds like a moonstruck teenager. Could this have been the first time she had fallen properly in love? Wrong question. “I’d say that it felt like I had met my future husband,” she says crisply.
In 1979 the couple married and elected to withdraw from public life, settling in an old house by a canal in north Michigan. “I loved Fred. I wanted to be his wife, to have children, for them to lead a decent, simple life, not to grow up on the road with a couple of rock stars.”
The next 16 years were tough. Neither Smith was earning much from royalties and the one album they made together in 1988, Dream of Life, sold poorly. For Patti, separated from friends, family and the East Coast cafe society she loved, the isolation was uncomfortable. You suspect that only a person as used to contradicting herself as she is would have put up with it. “I’m too dyslexic to drive. It takes too long to discern my right from my left. And here I was, living in a state that depends on driving.”
Her domestic routine was austere – and not exactly what her many feminist followers at the time might have predicted. “I’d wake at 5am, write or read books till 8, then get the kids ready for school, iron clothes, make their lunch. Then I’d attend to whatever my husband’s needs were.”
Together they lived the life of mature students enrolled on a self-designed course of Mad Eclecticism. “We studied everything: politics, baseball, golf, aviation, Japanese literature, whatever we were interested in. Fred was brilliant. I learnt so much through him.”
In 1993, Fred began to suffer heart problems, and in less than two years he died. He was 45 and left his more or less penniless widow with their 12-year-old son, Jackson, and seven-year-old daughter, Jesse. She vividly recalls one of their last conversations. “Fred told me, ‘Trisha, one day you’ll be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. You’ll have mixed feelings but I want you to accept it like a lady. From me, because I’ll never get there, and from all the other people like us. The maverick people.’ ” She was shocked, not at the thought that a semi-retired singing poet such as herself might get nominated, but because she “always felt that of the two of us, he was the better man, in the old-fashioned sense”.
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^(continued)
Cruel as it may sound, if it hadn’t been for Fred’s death, we might not have heard much more from Patti Smith. As it was, the news of her bereavement galvanised old friends and new. First, Allen Ginsberg invited her to accompany him on his poetry readings to fellow Buddhists. Then Bob Dylan took her on tour as his support act. Her old boyfriend Tom Verlaine, leader of the art-rock band Television, helped her record an album commemorating her husband, Gone Again. But the man who really put her back on track was Michael Stipe. She calls him “a knight in shining armour”, describing how he came to visit her at home in north Michigan after REM played a stadium gig in nearby Ann Arbor. “Michael was a complete stranger, but he helped to get me back on my feet. A day doesn’t go by when I’m not grateful to him.”
Stipe’s great act of generosity was to set her up with an apartment in Manhattan, allowing Smith and the children to move back to New York in 1996. To ease her cash crisis, Stipe got her to write lyrics to a song, E-Bow the Letter, which appeared on REM’s album New Adventures in Hi-Fi. “Now I’m completely independent, but at that time, when I needed a helping hand, Michael unconditionally gave me his,” Patti says.
She has never been so prolific. As well as albums from the reconvened Patti Smith Group, there have been any number of poetry events, like last year’s The Coral Sea Sessions, in remembrance of Mapplethorpe. In 2003 her art works were shown at the Andy Warhol museum. In 2005 she wrote a foreword to a book of Gregory Corso’s letters and curated the Meltdown festival on London’s South Bank, during which she performed her Horses album live, 30 years after its original release. In 2006 her role as a godmother or midwife of punk was reprised when she put on a 31/2-hour show to close CBGBs, the club in Manhattan where she made her name in the 1970s. Next month she will headline the first Women’s Arts International Festival in Kendal, Cumbria, of all places, where she will be playing in public with her two children for the first time.
That she is so much in demand reflects the general scarcity of her spirit of independence. The point about her career is firstly that it’s been unmistakably hers, and secondly that she hasn’t let it take precedence over her life. It’s who she is, as much as what she’s done, that casts a spell.
In another bout of self-contradiction, she wishes she wasn’t so infected by the art bug.
“I always have to be doing something. I have so many ways of expressing myself. And in some ways that’s a blessing, because I’m never bored, but in other ways it’s a burden. Everything I do, it seems I have to turn it into something else –another picture, another song or a poem.
I sometimes wish I could just be free; take a walk by the sea, listen to music or look at a painting, and leave it at that.”
Well, that isn’t going to happen, is it, I say. At which Patti Smith performs her final flip. “No, I guess not. I’ve just turned 60. I’m healthy. I have a lot to contribute, and a good quality of mind.”
Cruel as it may sound, if it hadn’t been for Fred’s death, we might not have heard much more from Patti Smith. As it was, the news of her bereavement galvanised old friends and new. First, Allen Ginsberg invited her to accompany him on his poetry readings to fellow Buddhists. Then Bob Dylan took her on tour as his support act. Her old boyfriend Tom Verlaine, leader of the art-rock band Television, helped her record an album commemorating her husband, Gone Again. But the man who really put her back on track was Michael Stipe. She calls him “a knight in shining armour”, describing how he came to visit her at home in north Michigan after REM played a stadium gig in nearby Ann Arbor. “Michael was a complete stranger, but he helped to get me back on my feet. A day doesn’t go by when I’m not grateful to him.”
Stipe’s great act of generosity was to set her up with an apartment in Manhattan, allowing Smith and the children to move back to New York in 1996. To ease her cash crisis, Stipe got her to write lyrics to a song, E-Bow the Letter, which appeared on REM’s album New Adventures in Hi-Fi. “Now I’m completely independent, but at that time, when I needed a helping hand, Michael unconditionally gave me his,” Patti says.
She has never been so prolific. As well as albums from the reconvened Patti Smith Group, there have been any number of poetry events, like last year’s The Coral Sea Sessions, in remembrance of Mapplethorpe. In 2003 her art works were shown at the Andy Warhol museum. In 2005 she wrote a foreword to a book of Gregory Corso’s letters and curated the Meltdown festival on London’s South Bank, during which she performed her Horses album live, 30 years after its original release. In 2006 her role as a godmother or midwife of punk was reprised when she put on a 31/2-hour show to close CBGBs, the club in Manhattan where she made her name in the 1970s. Next month she will headline the first Women’s Arts International Festival in Kendal, Cumbria, of all places, where she will be playing in public with her two children for the first time.
That she is so much in demand reflects the general scarcity of her spirit of independence. The point about her career is firstly that it’s been unmistakably hers, and secondly that she hasn’t let it take precedence over her life. It’s who she is, as much as what she’s done, that casts a spell.
In another bout of self-contradiction, she wishes she wasn’t so infected by the art bug.
“I always have to be doing something. I have so many ways of expressing myself. And in some ways that’s a blessing, because I’m never bored, but in other ways it’s a burden. Everything I do, it seems I have to turn it into something else –another picture, another song or a poem.
I sometimes wish I could just be free; take a walk by the sea, listen to music or look at a painting, and leave it at that.”
Well, that isn’t going to happen, is it, I say. At which Patti Smith performs her final flip. “No, I guess not. I’ve just turned 60. I’m healthy. I have a lot to contribute, and a good quality of mind.”
Love this performance. 'Because the night' (Live)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoGdx3I3dPE
And hate most of the cover versions of this song >.<
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoGdx3I3dPE
And hate most of the cover versions of this song >.<
SiennaInLondon
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Patti's is a cover (kind of) of Bruce Springsteen. He wrote most of it, she changed bits and hey presto.
Twill Bill
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I thought he wrote it for her - so I don't think it's a cover.
ETA:
ETA:
Wikipedia said:
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