Patti Smith: The Biography

197 Pages·2012·11.08 MB·English

by  Nick Johnstone

Contents
Acknowledgemetns
Introduction
Digital Timeline
1: The Path To New York City
2: New York City
Hear the Music: The Early Influences
3: In Search Of Seventh Heaven
4: Rock’n’Rimbaud
Picture Section A
5: The Rise And Fall Of Patti Smith
6: Patti’s Resurrection
Hear the Music: The Early Contemporaries
7: Wave Goodbye
8: Wife, Mother, And Writer
Picture Section B
9: A Season In Heaven And Hell
10: Back Again
Hear the Music: The Greatest Songs
11: On The Road
12: Patti the Icon
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Discography
Poetry Bibliography
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Patti Smith has always measured her own life against the lives of those who have
influenced her. One of her lifelong heroes has been the French poet Arthur
Rimbaud. At a time when Patti was discovering her own identity and writing
poetry, and hadn’t even considered being in a rock band, she was struck one day
by a possible direction: she would write a book about the life and work of Arthur
Rimbaud, a man who had inspired her and to whom she wanted to pay tribute by
writing a book that took her closer to his myth. The idea passed, but his
influence remained in her life.
My idea to write a book about Patti Smith came from a similarly pure motive.
I hoped that Patti Smith would be able to collaborate with me on this project but,
after a long period of deliberation, her management in New York explained that
she would have to decline to participate with the writing of this book.
Close associates explained that the reasons were twofold. Firstly, she had
collaborated with Patricia Morrisroe’s Mapplethorpe biography and publicly
voiced her disapproval of the finished product and was now generally ‘anti-
biographers’. Secondly, she didn’t want to see a definitive text appear that
attempted to categorise her work. Unfortunately, when she declined to assist me
in the writing of this book, she also declined on behalf of John Cale, Tom
Verlaine, Jay Dee Daugherty, Lenny Kaye and many others in her immediate
circle.
I would, on the other hand, like to extend my gratitude to all those who helped
me with the research for this book and to all those (whether quoted or not) who
offered their insight into a remarkable story. Special thanks are due to the
following people, who spared valuable time to help me: Andreas Brown, D.D.
Faye, David Fricke, Gold Mountain, Thurston Moore, Fred Patterson and Lee
Ranaldo. I would also like to thank Chris Charlesworth and Omnibus Press for
backing this book from the very beginning.
Introduction
I
T’s freezing cold. The wall is about 15 feet high. Dozens of tiny crosses wave
over the top of it. I stand at the entrance to Père-Lachaise cemetery on Rue du
Repos in Paris. Patti Smith comes to this cemetery whenever she visits Paris. I
follow in her footsteps and walk through the gates and up the Avenue Principale.
This is the place where Patti Smith realised that she was an artist.
She had first visited the cemetery in 1969, to pay homage to those she
admired. When she returned in summer 1972 she stood over the grave of Jim
Morrison, who had died the previous summer, and waited for inspiration to wash
over her. Morrison, like Patti, had been obsessed with the French poet Arthur
Rimbaud and, in his bid to emulate Rimbaud’s romantic myth, had worn out his
body and died.
After her trip to Paris in 1969, Patti had returned to New York and continued
writing and drawing, beginning to feel that her own work was more valuable
than the art of those she hero-worshipped and had fantasised about. Three years
later, standing over Jim Morrison’s grave, she suddenly realised that she no
longer needed to be inspired by him because she now considered herself to be
inspired from within. At this point she knew herself and was free to become a
poet. This experience in Paris inspired the song ‘Break It Up’ on her debut
album, Horses, in 1975.
It is hard to think of a better place for Patti Smith to have discovered herself.
The tombs and graves in Père-Lachaise cemetery date back to 1804: some are
crumbling, some disintegrating. Statues of angels and saints are worn and
stained by the rain. If you find a good vantage point, it sprawls like an ancient
village. The Avenue Principale leads to the Monument aux Morts, an imposing
mass of stone, surrounded by greenery. The paths to each side twist between
seas of graves and names and crypts, with trees and bushes hanging overhead.
Hundreds of cats dart about in between the slabs of stone. Patti would have also
visited the graves of celebrated writers such as Honoré de Balzac, Guillaume
Apollinaire, Colette, Paul Éluard, Marcel Proust and Oscar Wilde. She would
have visited the twin grave of artist Amedeo Modigliani and his tragic mistress
Jeanne Hébuterne, paying homage to a man whose paintings taught her to
celebrate her unusual looks, rather than feel self-conscious. These are some of
the artists who encouraged a young Patti to break from the life she saw ahead of
her, who showed her how to live, who made her feel that she wasn’t an alien.
She devoured biographies of these artists, teaching herself and preparing for the
life of an artist.
Patti Smith walked offstage from a Patti Smith Group concert to 70,000
people in Florence, Italy on September 10, 1979. Her record Wave was the
band’s most commercially successful album to date. Her four-album career had
seen her rise from being a cult writer and poet on the New York art and music
scene to become one of the most influential singers in rock’n’roll. She had
succeeded in re-defining all the music industry formulas that restricted female
artists, setting new precedents for rock literacy. She had found herself revered as
a punk poet, a rebel rocker, a feminist icon and a visionary. But a critical
backlash had coincided with the release of Wave and the tepid reviews reflected
Patti’s own feeling that the passion had gone. She was tired of the media
attention, she was suffering health problems from the pressures of fame and
from touring, and she had met the love of her life.
Patti Smith left her rock’n’roll career in September 1979 for an altogether
different challenge: in March 1980, she married Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, musician
and former member of MC5, Ascension and his own Sonic’s Rendezvous Band.
The pair set up home in the Detroit suburb of St Clair Shores, Michigan, and
effectively retired from music. Women who had projected a powerful feminist
image onto her were baffled by Patti’s exchange of artistic fame for domesticity
and motherhood in the suburbs. But actually Patti Smith had found what she had
always wanted: a partner who loved and understood her. She never claimed to be
a feminist and her working-class upbringing in rural New Jersey was a source of
traditionalist values. Patti was always searching for answers and in this love she
had found one of the most important.
Her self-chosen sabbatical was broken only by 1988’s Dream Of Life album, a
collaboration between her and Fred, received with weak applause by both critics
and fans. The album seemed a far cry both musically and lyrically from her
debut album, Horses, a record that still features in many rock critics’ top ten
albums of all time.
Horses merged her poetry and rock’n’roll aspirations and was instantly hailed
as a classic upon its release in 1975. Patti’s tomboy, tough-girl, street-smart
image was a striking mixture of Keith Richards, Bob Dylan, French poets Arthur
Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire and French actresses Anna Karina and Jeanne
Moreau. She was a femme fatale disguised as a decadent male rocker or
romantic poet. Her early poetry smirked at the conventions and boundaries of
gender and favoured rock’n’roll rhythms, slang and pop culture references.
Patti had a dazzling array of musical influences which she had nurtured while
stranded in New Jersey, including The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, The Ronettes,
Jim Morrison and The Doors, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. Aside from Joplin
and older legends such as Billie Holiday and Nina Simone, Patti was often
frustrated to find that the inspiration she looked for was to be found mostly in
male figures. For this reason, she became intrigued by the stories of artists’
mistresses and when she left New Jersey for New York City in 1967, her
intention was that: to become an artist’s mistress.
Patti Smith tore down music and gender conventions by using her poems for
lyrics and then pasting them over her band’s proto-punk garage rock. And then
there was that voice: rich, rasping, simultaneously old and young, a banshee
wail, a whisper, fragile, assured, sensuous, confrontational, sexual, defiant,
other-worldly, deep, resonant, soulful, timeless, passionate, spooky, beautiful. A
cross between Janis Joplin and Billie Holiday.
Her androgynous rebel pose on the sleeve of Horses was revolutionary for its
time: mocking the tradition of female artists appearing on their record sleeves as
either feminised clichés or overt sex objects. When she struck a more typical
feminine pose for 1978’s Easter, it was with unshaven armpits, another symbol
of her uncompromising nature.
Patti was also one of the first female artists to challenge her record label and
demand to have complete artistic control. This, along with her independently
released and self-financed 1974 debut single, ‘Hey Joe’/’Piss Factory’, and her
charismatic personality, did a lot to build her legend as a punk priestess.
Her powerful image and use of ambiguous gender narratives revolutionised
the mainstream perceptions of both rock’n’roll and women in rock.
After all this, it is not surprising that so many fans felt betrayed or confused
when their spokesperson and female icon retired to get married and start a
family, the most stereotypically conventional female role.
The period between Dream Of Life (for which there was no tour and virtually
no press) and her return to the recording studio in 1995 saw her move from
happy suburban life to tragedy. Robert Mapplethorpe, photographer, key friend
and influence throughout Patti’s life, died of AIDS in March 1989. On
November 4, 1994, Fred Smith died of heart failure. Her brother Todd, who had
immediately advised her to return to her work as a way of surviving her grief,
died one month later of a stroke. And so it was, Patricia Lee Smith arrived at her
48th birthday on December 30, 1994, in a haze of grief.
Shortly before Fred’s death, he and Patti had been planning a rock album
which was to serve as a noisy comeback. He felt that Patti should reclaim her
crown from contemporary artists like Thalia Zedek (singer/guitarist with Boston-
based outfit Come), Liz Phair, P.J. Harvey, Justine Frischmann (of Elastica),
Diamanda Galas, The Nymphs, Carla Bozulich (singer/guitarist of Los Angeles
band The Geraldine Fibbers) and the entire Riot Grrrl movement (L7, Bikini
Kill, Bratmobile, 7 Year Bitch et al), who had all proclaimed her influence on
their work. The album was slated to be recorded during the summer of 1995 and
two songs were already written: ‘Gone Again’ and ‘Summer Cannibals’. Fred
had also been encouraging Patti to develop her guitar playing and to become
more comfortable with writing melodies in addition to chord sequences.
After his death, Patti channelled her tragedy into art and set about recording
what would become Gone Again, the record which served as an outlet for her
stupendous grief. The comeback was high-profile, and alongside the album came
a touching book in memory of Robert Mapplethorpe, entitled The Coral Sea. In
support of Gone Again, her celebrated return to live performance saw her
explaining the reasons for her 16-year sabbatical at each show: “To many of you
I’ve been out of your eye for a while. And I can only explain that by saying that
it was because I was privileged to have been the wife of a great man … Fred
‘Sonic’ Smith.”
Sixteen years after her low-key resurrection/final goodbye show in Detroit in
June 1980, the house lights dim at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire theatre in
London. The crowd is packed tight. Uncomfortable older fans who obviously
haven’t been to a show for some time stand shoulder to shoulder with younger
anxious admirers seeing the legend for the first time. Wide-eyed adolescents and
early 20-somethings wait to see why R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, Throwing Muses’
Kristin Hersh, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Hole’s Courtney Love hold
this 49-year-old woman in such high regard.
A roar goes up and Patti appears. She looks gracefully dishevelled, wearing
spectacles and a raggedy old jacket. She has violet socks and silver Dr Marten
boots, and is rake thin, her unkempt black hair streaked with the greys of time.
After adjusting the reading glasses that sit on the tip of her nose, she holds up a
book of her verse and, with manic intensity and emotion begins reciting ‘Piss
Factory’, her first single. All you can see are hundreds of smiling faces. Patti
Smith has returned.