‘I CAN’T BE PINNED DOWN’
Rocker Smith has finally become the artist she always wanted to be
Patti Smith stands near the shoreline, a block from her Far Rockaway bungalow, Jimmy Choo motorcycle boots wedged in the sand, as she gazes at the Atlantic.
“I wanted to be something great, to be like Madame Curie,” she says. “Rock ’n’ roll, it just happened.”
In the early years, in the Lower Manhattan clubs, “I was this mangy-looking girl who was very well-read, with this south Jersey truck-driver accent, delivering sometimes very sophisticated poems, and then singing these little R&B songs,” she says, now 72, her voice still seeped in Deptford Township. “There wasn’t any place for me, really.”
So Smith, once she discovered her formidable talent, blasted one into the firmament. “I loved rock ’n’ roll, and I felt like I had a responsibility,” she says. “To add something, to be the best I could be at it.”
Smith was deemed the godmother of punk, and later the high priestess of punk-poetry, and then the grandmother of punk. But she wanted to transcend mere rock stardom: She harboured grand dreams of being a literary writer. And now this accidental rock legend has achieved what she yearned for all along.
Her latest book, Year of the Monkey, is a collection of reveries — she concedes to veering more toward fiction with each book. This volume follows 2015’s M Train and 2010’s Just Kids, the latter winning her accolades and the National Book Award.
In her early 20s, the child of a machinist and a waitress moved to New York to box with giants, living at the Chelsea Hotel, hanging out with Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan — basically, everyone. She took up with Robert Mapplethorpe, Sam Shepard and Tom Verlaine of the band Television. Still, she says as she smiles, a gate of crooked teeth: “I’m not so bad myself.”
Smith became a rock icon in 1975, when she torched the music scene with Horses. Rolling Stone judged it the 44th greatest album of all time (of 500).
Rock ’n’ roll, she jokes, is her other gig, the one at night. The books are the opposite of her music and damn-the-torpedoes performances: quiet, inward and elegiac.
Smith published several volumes of poetry before Just Kids, which recounts the early years with Mapplethorpe. “We had nothing. Robert always worried about me. He asked me to write this book on his deathbed” in 1989 at age 42, while he was suffering from AIDS, she says. “The responsibility of that book was so intense. I would have never written that book if he hadn’t asked.”
At the time, Smith was married to the late MC5 musician Fred “Sonic” Smith. She basically dropped out of music during her 14-year marriage to Smith, raising two children, now in their 30s. She moved from New York to Detroit to be with him and would have taken his last name, she says, had it not already been hers.
“I was heavily criticized,” she says, “when I left public life and my so-called career to be a wife and then a mother, as if I had betrayed, you know, some kind of ideology that I never embraced,” she says.
After her children got older, and Fred died in 1994 at age 46, Smith found more time to write. It took 20 years, and almost as many drafts, to complete the memoir.
Smith is great company, prone to laughter, generous and warm. Our interview was preceded by days of calls (“Hi, hi, hi, it’s Patti”) and emails, and began and ended with enveloping hugs. But she’s also prickly, known to abruptly end interviews when questions displease her. Before our meeting, she cautioned that she didn’t want to talk about her husband, Mapplethorpe and Shepard.
She talked about them all. Smith’s life has been soaked with profound loss. “Sam is dead. My brother is dead. My mother is dead. My father is dead. My husband is dead,” she writes in the new book. “Yet still I keep thinking that something wonderful is about to happen. Maybe tomorrow.”
“I’m not very social at all. I’m much more comfortable on my own,” she says, while constantly mentioning myriad friends. During the interview, her phone blows up: Legendary photographer Robert Frank has died. Of course, she knew him. They did a music video together. REM’S Michael Stipe came to her financial aid after her husband died. The first concert tour after moving back to Manhattan in 1996 was with Dylan. Smith performed A Hard Rain’s A- Gonna Fall at Dylan’s Nobel Prize ceremony in 2016.
Year of the Monkey is set during that same year, the one when she turned 70, the one when Trump happened, though she doesn’t mention him by name. In person, she doesn’t hold back. “He’s the worst of our generation.”
Despite her political leanings, Smith resists the feminist label. You don’t put Patti in a box. “I’m a worker ... I can’t really be pinned down to any specific ideology,” she says.
There’s more work to be done. She plans to write another, more fact-rooted memoir to follow Just Kids and also a followup to Monkey, part of a trilogy.
“I don’t really need the accolades and I just have to, like, shrug off the criticism,” she says. “Have I suffered because I was a female in trying to get my work done? Perhaps. But I think I suffered more because of my creative choices, because I wouldn’t compromise.”
Then again, “I’ve never really suffered because, in the end, I’ve done what I wanted, right?”