Patti Smith’s terrible, magical year
Legendary rocker talks about her memoir, losing friends, Jesus and Instagram
It starts off with a Polaroid snapshot of a sign: The Dream Inn. Old neon, retro atomic styling. And a search for a cup of coffee.
It’s New Year’s Day, 2016. Patti Smith was supposed to be here with Sandy Pearlman, the guy who told her she should start a rock band some 40 years earlier. The old friends were going to head out to a secret diner he knew that made these amazing tacos.
Instead, he had been found unconscious in a parking lot in San Rafael, Calif., and taken to hospital.
“I was suddenly on this little excursion ... and I found myself alone,” says the legendary Smith, now 72, on the phone from New York to talk about her new book “Year of the Monkey.” “And when I’m alone, I usually write — even if I don’t have any specific thing I’m writing — just accounts of the day or a dream or something.”
The book, really, starts that day, after a night at the Fillmore, where the godmother of punk had performed a suite of shows, culminating with New Year’s Eve, ringing in 2016 with some guy “with a greasy ponytail” puking on her boots. It’s also, she later discovers, the Chinese year of the monkey. Her 69th birthday, the beginning of her 70th year. The year Pearlman dies.
And so she writes. And it becomes this memoir; it’s not just a physical journey — Smith takes us where her imagination does. “Nothing in this book was intentional,” she says.
With a life that seems beset with losing the people she loves — Robert Mapplethorpe, her brother Todd, her husband Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, her mother — loss isn’t the focus, although it informs their time together and weaves throughout. Grief and life existing side by side.
Her first book, “Just Kids,” which won the National Book Award for memoir, was about moving to New York and her relationship with the photographer Mapplethorpe. Her second, the acclaimed “M Train” was less a freeform book than she thought she’d write. “I wound up writing so much about my husband,” she says, looking back more than she thought. “Year of the Monkey,” though is the first book she’s written in real time.
“There’s a lot of overlapping of ‘M Train’ and ‘Year of the Monkey,’ ” she says, for those who want to play reader detective, “references that link the books.”
Together, she reckons, they are “almost like a diptych. And I actually think someday I’ll write a third so it will be a triptych.”
There’s a black coat she loses that a poet gave her in “M Train,” and the poet shows up again in the new book. “The biggest one is probably that the cowpoke in ‘M Train’ is Sam Shepard, and then Sam Shepard appears in ‘Year of the Monkey’ as himself.”
Ah, Shepard. During this year she visits him often on his Kentucky ranch. It’s difficult even to read about Shepard in a wheelchair — the celebrated playwright, always a handsome and vital man — is losing the use of his hands as the ALS he was diagnosed with in 2010 gets progressively worse; far more so to imagine what it’s like for Smith.
“We had trips planned, and all kinds of things we were going to do in the future,” including to Ayers Rock in Australia, she says. “I never saw that coming. He was always so healthy. I never anticipated that.”
As Smith wanders through California and Kentucky and back to New York, she weaves in the more prosaic facts of life. The narrative progresses through the days, there’s an overlap of dreamscape, but even among the dreamscapes she has to go pee, get a cup of coffee — she’s always looking for a cup of coffee — make sure she has enough money or get something to eat.
“When I’m writing in this manner, all of these things have ... equal weight, because they’re all things that make up this little journey, they’re all stepping stones,” she says. “You (think) ‘Oh, I have to eat, it’s such a drag, I have to leave this particular headspace because I have to find something to eat.’ But it all is part of the whole thing, you know, where I go has its own magic.”
It’s about keeping the truth of the story. “I wasn’t doing anything extraordinary. But if you present an atmosphere, you have to somehow not break from the atmosphere. So all of these things seem suddenly very special.”
It is a moment of insight into Smith’s creative process. But besides being transitions from one moment to the next, prosaic as they might be, these are still intimate details that she shares with us. This intimacy brings us into the memoir, into Smith’s life, and this is what makes these 180 or so pages so powerful.
She talks about the rhythm of the work and repetitions of themes and words and how they create a rhythm in the book. There are plenty of examples — jukeboxes are one. In a first reference one is described as “a coin-operated song selector.” Later on, Allen Ginsberg’s collected poems are “an expansive hydrogen jukebox.”
Aside from getting ready for her book tour, she has been travelling a lot — concerts in Europe, across the U.S. She was in an airport recently. Chicago? Detroit? Newark? Wherever it was, she found her favourite coffee spot.
“There was an Illy, and I was so happy. And I got my coffee. And they had a cinnamon doughnut, which is my favourite. I’m just in this airport, this generic airport ... And I just had 10 more pages to read on my Patrick Modiano book. And I don’t know how else to explain it, it’s just like a miracle,” she says.
It sounds almost spiritual, this way of looking at the world. You can be spiritual without being attached to any particular system, she says, noting that at the core of religions, “the root is love.”
Which gets us talking about current American politics. “That is why, again, the Trump administration — and they are supposed to be the so-called religious right? — they are not working in the way of Jesus,” she says. “Who would Jesus be hanging out with? He’d be hanging out with the migrants, people who were being disenfranchised because of whatever their identity was.”
When she’s in Seattle, she says there’s a mission she goes by sometimes. “I always give them money.” While there she came across a homeless guy who’s writing on the wall “Why Does Belinda Carlisle Matter?” Well? “Because she’s got the beat,” he whispers to Smith. It becomes the name of a chapter, in which she retells this moment, one that culminates in a joyful, perfect paragraph where she goes from dancing to Belinda Carlisle to William Blake in the space of a few sentences, saying something about life in the meantime.
“I don’t want to seem conceited but I think every once in a while I write something that I think is as good as anything else,” she says.
At the beginning of “Year of the Monkey” Smith mentions a driedup old poet “grabbing inspiration from the erratic air.” Sometimes, she says in our conversation, she might find her own thought processes “very mundane.” Not that it happens often, but when she finds she has nothing to write “I’ll sit there and listen to people’s conversations, and they’ll say something … that is so unexpected or ... evocative and I just sort of snatch it and build something on it.”
“Year of the Monkey” ends as it began — with a shot of The Dream Inn. But this time, the photo’s taken with her phone, not a Polaroid. Film’s hard to come by, they don’t make it anymore. Plus, Smith says, “if you understand light, and you know how to work with a phone, you can get some very nice images.”
“Sometimes,” says Smith, “you have to shift with the times.”
Over the years, she has taken thousands of Polaroids. She has exhibited some of them — others are just filed away — pictures taken simply to remember something, a facade, perhaps. She’ll ask herself, “Is it art? Or is it utilitarian? There’s no sorta art, only art is art.”
With her love of Polaroids, Instagram seems the natural social-media place for Smith. Her daughter set up an account for her a few years ago. “So many people were doing it in my name and they weren’t very good,” she says, suggesting that being associated with mediocre art was the big problem. “So the only recourse I had was to start one” — it’s verified with the blue check mark so it can’t be mistaken. She’s quick to block people who are argumentative or provocative.
“It’s not a forum for venting … It’s a friendly public service. I can tell people what I’m up to, but also I can share them. I see a great movie, I’ll go to Metrograph (a Manhattan movie theatre), I’ll tell them a movie that’s there. Or, maybe it’s (Russian director Andrei) Tarkovsky’s birthday. And I’ll write something about Tarkovsky ... It’s a way to share.”
Even though Shepard couldn’t go with her, Smith made it to Ayers Rock, in 2017. “Sam was in a difficult stage when I called him from there. And I made it. I made it on my own. It was a funny journey. But I made it on my own. And I touched the rock with my hand, and it was beautiful. I spent some days there, mostly just sitting looking at it for hours on end.”
And when you phoned him, What did you say? How did he react?
“He was just happy, just laughed. And, you know, we didn’t have the best connection because I was in the middle of Uluru with a cellphone. (But) we had a good enough connection for him to know that I was there and thinking about him.”
Shepard died on July 27, 2017.
“If I write my triptych, I’m sure it will be in there,” she says about the journey that she finished alone.