Rains are going to fall

Year of the Monkey

Patti Smith Knopf

At the 2016 Nobel Prize ceremony, Patti Smith stepped before the king and queen of Sweden, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and a host of dignitaries and began to sing A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall by Bob Dylan, that year’s laureate for literature. As Smith later wrote for The New Yorker, “I had it in my mind to sing the song exactly as it was written and as well as I was capable of doing. I bought a new suit, I trimmed my hair, and felt that I was ready.” And then, two minutes into her performance, Smith forgot the lyrics.

She appeared to, anyway. “I was simply unable to draw them out,” she wrote. With her voice carrying every wounded note of Dylan’s song, Smith faltered, asked the conductor if she could begin again, and apologized with a crushing, worried smile. The sympathetic audience applauded, and Smith returned to the song.

That extraordinary moment is noticeably absent from Smith’s new memoir, Year of the Monkey, but it’s illustrative of how masterfully the writer and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer can rescue beauty from disaster. Beginning on New Year’s Day 2016 and ending a few days after Donald Trump’s inauguration the following January, Year of the Monkey is a moving account of the emotional stumbles, physical and intellectual wanderings and deep losses Smith experienced in her 70th year. She is, as she writes in the book, “still going about my business, that of being alive, the best I (can).”

As readers of Smith’s books have learned, that business involves drinking many cups of coffee, watching hours of TV in hotel rooms, writing in cafés, taking photos with a Polaroid camera and reading. Smith finds art everywhere, and each of her books offers a welcome look at what has captured her attention.

Two important men in her life, record producer-music critic Sandy Pearlman and writer-actor Sam Shepard, are dying, Pearlman from the effects of a cerebral hemorrhage, Shepard from Lou Gehrig’s disease.

As with most everything else, Smith accepts what has happened to her friends. “I did not ask the fate of Sandy. Or Sam,” she writes. “Those things are forbidden, as entreating the angels with prayer. I know that very well, one cannot ask for a life, or two lives. One can only warrant the hope of an increasing potency in each man’s heart.”

Put another way: Hard rains are going to fall. The secret to enduring them is to know your song well before you start singing.