PATTI SMITH on love, family and life’s storms

Rock poet Patti Smith and her daughter, Jesse, chat with Samantha Trenoweth about love, family, and riding the storms of life.

Patti Smith stands on a tiny stage in a cavernous marble art gallery in Sydney. She wears her signature jeans, T-shirt, scruffy old boots. She’s here to read a little poetry, sing a couple of songs, chat informally with fans (who run the gamut from 20-something fourth-wave feminists to gnarly old artists). They’re expecting maybe a little shouting, a little swearing from this pioneer of the New York punk movement. Instead, Patti quotes her mother on the importance of counting one’s blessings:

“‘I wept because I had no shoes, then I saw a man who had no feet.’ That was what my mother always told us,” she says, in her soft New Jersey drawl. Then she goes on matter-of-factly to impress upon the audience the importance of sensible, woollen socks.

At 72, Patti sees her mother’s aphorisms (of which there were many) as solid preparation for the travails that life has flung her way. She has weathered more than her share of

storms since her 1975 album, Horses, took music by the collar and shook it hard. Patti has outlived many of those she’s loved best and her most recent book, The Year of the Monkey, reads almost as a meditation on letting go.

“This is what I know,” she writes. “…My brother is dead. My mother is dead. My father is dead. My husband is dead. My cat is dead. And my dog who was dead in 1957 is still dead. Yet still I keep thinking that something wonderful is about to happen. Maybe tomorrow.”

Patti attributes this tenacious sense of hope to her mother, Beverly, a bighearted Jehovah’s Witness who was a jazz singer in her youth, then raised four children while working as a waitress. Many years later, she took on the task of answering Patti’s fan mail, and would often include a fragment of her downhome wisdom and occasionally a copy of the Witness’ newsletter, The Watchtower, for good measure.

Patti’s daughter, Jesse, now 32, describes her grandmother, who died in 2002, as a: “generous matriarch,

overseer of the family … She was full of genuine unconditional love, but she was tough. She had seen a lot. Someone to strive to be more like, for sure; someone to look towards when you need a little edge, a little dose of genuine toughness to push you through. She loved music. She had a great memory for lyrics and a cool and beautiful way of singing songs from her generation. I think my mom has been deeply influenced by her in more ways than we can know.”

Patti’s childhood was materially frugal but rich in ideas. She was born in Chicago during the Great Blizzard of 1946, “long and skinny”, she wrote in her memoir Just Kids, “but with bronchial pneumonia”. Allergies and lung problems would plague her childhood, leaving her often in bed with books (Little Women,A Child’s Garden of Verses) in the spring and summertime while her brother and sisters joined the tribes of neighbourhood children in the gardens and streets.

“I really believe I inherited my enthusiasm for life from my mother,” Patti tells The Weekly on a warm afternoon in New York, where that summer cough still intermittently interrupts conversation. “My mother had a very difficult childhood. There was a lot of tragedy in her life. She lost her own mother as a child. She was raised by a very austere grandmother. She lost her brother and then her son. Yet, watching my mother field tragedy and always accept the responsibilities awaiting her was a good lesson.

“My mother always found a way to make things feel like they were going to be alright.

She used to say, ‘When my ship comes in, you can eat all the steak you want,’ or ‘When my ship comes in, I’m going to buy us a house by the sea’. It never came in really, but her bright optimism always made us feel like things were going to be better. All our struggles were just the struggles of the day and tomorrow things would be wonderful.”

Beverly also inculcated in Patti a love of books, the lifelong habit of daily prayer and an inquisitiveness about religion.

As a child Patti worried that her soul might be “mischievous” and sneak away in the night.

Instead it was her body that caused trouble. At 19, Patti slept with a boy and conceived a child whom she carried to term and adopted into a “loving and educated” family. She’s said a prayer for the child every day of her life. Then, throwing caution to the wind, she bought a one-way bus ticket to New York to live as an artist. For a time, Patti lived on the streets, sleeping in parks, on stoops, in graveyards and (when she finally found a job) in the back room of the bookshop where she worked.

Then she met the young artist, Robert Mapplethorpe. “We were as innocent and dangerous as children racing across a minefield,” she wrote. Together they worked devotedly on their art and explored New York bohemia, moving into the Chelsea

Hotel (which had at one time sheltered Dylan Thomas, Janis Joplin, Jackson Pollock, Bob Dylan, William Burroughs and more) and socialising on the fringes of Andy Warhol’s Factory set, with beat poets and in the burgeoning punk movement. Robert became famous for his boundary-pushing photography and Patti – with her disregard for convention, her mystical, musical raptures, her literary allusions – became an iconic figure in music.

Then one night, at a hot-dog cafe in Detroit, she was introduced to a guitarist, Fred “Sonic” Smith. She knew little of his music but remembered later that in her teens she’d cut a picture of him out of a magazine and stuck it on her wall. Patti fell for him hard.

“Words cannot express,” she says now, still with an impish smile. “I saw him and the moment that I saw him – I hardly even saw him – I felt him. And in that first moment, I knew I was going to marry him. I didn’t even want to get married … There was a mutual sense of almost surrender. It’s like when you completely embrace a religion. I think the word Islam means surrender. There is a mutual unconditional pact. It doesn’t mean that you agree on everything. It doesn’t mean there won’t be difficult times, because there certainly are and were. It just means that the canopy above all that is a high canopy and the things that happen beneath it are not going to shatter that sheltering canopy.”

In The Year of the Monkey, she describes the unicorn as “a metaphor for the terrible power of love”. While Patti admits that a love of this magnitude “sometimes requires sacrifice”, she maintains that, in her marriage to Fred, she gained far more than she lost. “I can only say,” she adds, “that he was the one.”

Which is why, at the height of her fame, Patti completely disappeared from the public eye. She married Fred and raised two children (Jackson and Jesse) in a lakeside suburb of Michigan. When family finances were tight, in ’88, she released the powerful, contemplative Dream of Life, then went silent again. There were years spent exploring the American coastline, walking along beaches, caring for children, rising at five in the morning to work because Patti never stopped writing in all those years.

Those years were also punctuated by grief. In 1989, Robert was felled by AIDS-related illness. Then, towards the end of ’94, Fred died of heart failure. Jackson was 12 and Jesse only seven. Patti’s brother, Todd, whom she adored, offered to move in with the family and help raise the children, but just a few weeks later, he too was gone, after a fatal stroke. These three losses reverberated through the family for years.

“I don’t really believe that time heals all wounds,” Patti says. “Grief is not a linear thing that starts really deep and then gets easier. Sometimes you don’t notice it and then two years later, you’re walking down the street and the loss of – for me it could be my brother or my mother or my husband – is so overwhelming that it’s as if I’d just lost them.

“I’ve learnt to think of it almost like you’re a ship captain and you’re manning your own little boat. Sometimes in your life voyage, the waters are very calm and steady, then all of a sudden a storm whips up and it’s turbulent and you have to get through that storm and just keep on. Even though it’s a simple metaphor, life is really like that. You have to be ready to embrace it all.”

After Fred’s death, Patti went back into the studio and onto the road. She also unleashed the reams of writing she’d worked on all those years in Michigan and published a string of books, including the autobiographical Just Kids, which

“You have to just keep on … to be ready to embrace it all.”

won the National Book Award in the USA, and the less literal memoirs M Train and now The Year of the Monkey. She still gets up early every day to write.

Often Patti’s artistic ventures have been family affairs. As Jackson (a guitarist) and Jesse (a pianist) grew, they felt free to come and go from the band. They’ve both toured with Patti, and Jesse remembers joining her onstage at the annual Tibet House benefit in New York when she was still in her teens.

Jesse and Jackson have become respected musicians in their own right, and this month Smithsonian Folkways

will release an album, Songs from the Bardo, on which Jesse has collaborated with conceptual artist Laurie Anderson and Tenzin Choegyal, a Tibetan flautist. Jesse has also trained in healing with sound and in grief education. “It’s an area of life that is very meaningful and important to me,” she says, “I have spent a lot of time thinking about death, reflecting on my own losses, and helping others with the losses in their own lives.”

Patti and Jesse, meanwhile, have co-curated exhibitions and Patti has been a dedicated supporter of Jesse and her friend Rebecca Foon’s Pathway to Paris initiative, which brings together artists, academics, politicians and others to work towards making the Paris climate targets a reality. That her daughter is now working with the United Nations Development Fund and city councils around the world to limit carbon emissions hasn’t come as a huge surprise to Patti, who has been watching Jesse’s passion for the issue grow since she read her first article about global warming in high school.

“What I admire most about Jesse is her empathetic nature, not just for people but for the earth,” says Patti. “She always had this. She was always concerned about the world, and from a very young age, she was always joining groups that planted trees, recycling groups, trying to promote awareness about our environment. She is a very empathetic person, and this is something that comes from deep within herself. This is something that is very particular to Jesse.”

Jesse and Patti share that deep commitment to nature. As the afternoon draws to a close, Patti mentions a trip to Uluru that was an afterward to her last Australian tour. It was 2017, the year she was 70 and reprised Horses to packed houses and critical acclaim around the word.

Patti had made a pact with her friend and former lover, the actor-playwright Sam Shepard, that they would visit Uluru together. But Sam was in the final stages of ALS, a motor neurone disease, so she decided she must visit the rock for them both. She gave one of the great performances of her life at Bluesfest in Byron Bay (where she’ll be back again in 2020). Then, when the tour wound up, she sent her band home and travelled alone into the desert.

Patti stood in the shadow of Uluru and reached out to touch it: a pale New York poet’s hand on ancient rust-red rock. It was the fulfilment of a dream.

“I went in the morning to watch the sun rise and in the evening I watched it set, and I did that every day for four days,” she says softly. For a woman who can shout and keen to raise the dead on stage, in conversation she’s been warm and generous. “I walked and I sat in the rock’s presence, and I put my hand upon it and it was like putting my hand on a giant’s chest to feel a giant’s heart.

“In the evenings, I would look at the stars – I could see the Southern Cross – and I was completely happy. I felt that I had accomplished my goal and I wanted for no more.”

The Year of the Monkey ($29.99) and a new illustrated edition of Just Kids ($59.99) are published this month by Bloomsbury. Patti Smith and her band will play at Bluesfest, Byron Bay, 9-13 April 2020.