Patti Smith

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Patti Smith
Patti Smith performing at the Summer Sundae festival in 2005
Patti Smith performing at the Summer Sundae festival in 2005
Background information
Birth name Patricia Lee Smith
Born December 30, 1946
Chicago, Illinois,
USA
Genre(s) Rock, punk rock, singer/songwriter
Occupation(s) Singer-songwriter, poet, journalist, author
Years active 1974–present
Label(s) Arista Records (1975–2002)
Columbia Records (2002–present)
Website pattismith.net

Patricia Lee ("Patti") Smith (born December 30, 1946) is an American musician, singer, and poet. She came to prominence during the punk movement with her 1975 debut album Horses. Called "punk rock's poet laureate", she brought a feminist and intellectual take to punk music and became one of rock and roll's most influential female musicians.

Although Smith's success has been limited in commercial terms (she has never had a RIAA certified record, has had just one Top 20 single, and has yet to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame), she is often regarded as one of the most influential and important artists in rock history: Rolling Stone magazine recently placed her at #47 in its list of "The 100 Greatest Artists of All Time."

Contents

[edit] Beginnings

Smith was born in Chicago, Illinois, and raised in Mantua, New Jersey. Her father was an atheist and her mother was a devout Jehovah's Witness. The family was not wealthy and, with her formal education temporarily over at 16, Smith went to work in a factory – an experience she found excruciating. She also bore a child whom she gave up for adoption while attending Teachers College. Smith dropped out after giving birth to the child. In 1967 she left New Jersey for good, and moved to New York and met Robert Mapplethorpe while working at a book store. The two were lovers for a time, in spite of Mapplethorpe's homosexuality, and they remained close friends until Mapplethorpe's death from AIDS in 1989. In 1969 she went to Paris with her sister and started busking and doing performance art. When Smith returned to New York City, she lived in the Chelsea Hotel with Mapplethorpe. (Among Smith's other well-known lovers were poet Jim Carroll and Television member Tom Verlaine. She later married the Fred "Sonic" Smith, formerly of the proto-punk band the MC5 (and not to be confused with Fred Smith, the bassist for Verlaine's band Television), with whom she had a daughter named Jesse and a son named Jackson). She spent the early 1970s painting, writing, and performing spoken-word poetry—frequently at St. Mark's Poetry Project. In 1971 she performed – for one night only – in the play Cowboy Mouth, a collaboration with the playwright and actor Sam Shepard (the published play's notes call for "a man who looks like a coyote and a woman who looks like a crow").

Smith subsidized her career in these years by publishing rock journalism, especially in Creem magazine. She also wrote songs during this period in connection with Allen Lanier of Blue Öyster Cult, who recorded several songs to which Smith contributed, including "Career of Evil," "Fire of Unknown Origin," "The Revenge of Vera Gemini," and "Shooting Shark."

[edit] Early career

Patti Smith in concert in Copenhagen, October 1976
Enlarge
Patti Smith in concert in Copenhagen, October 1976

By 1974, however, Patti Smith was performing rock music herself, initially with guitarist and rock archivist Lenny Kaye, and later with a full band comprising Kaye, Ivan Kral (guitar), Jay Dee Daugherty (drums) and Richard Sohl (piano). Financed by Robert Mapplethorpe, the band recorded a first single, "Piss Factory/Hey Joe," in 1974. The A-side describes the helpless anger Smith had felt while working on a factory assembly line and the salvation she discovered in the form of a shoplifted book, the 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations. The B-side was a version of the rock standard with the addition of a spoken-word piece about fugitive heiress Patty Hearst ("...Patty Hearst, you're standing there in front of the Symbionese Liberation Army flag with your legs spread, I was wondering will you get it every night from a black revolutionary man and his women...").

The Patti Smith Group was signed by Clive Davis of Arista Records, and 1975 saw the release of Smith's first album Horses, produced amidst some tension by John Cale, formerly of The Velvet Underground. The record fused rock and roll, proto-punk rock with spoken poetry and is widely considered one of rock's greatest debuts. The album begins with a cover of Van Morrison's "Gloria," and Smith's opening words are some of the most famous in rock: "Jesus died for somebody's sins ... but not mine." The austere cover photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe has become one of rock's classic images.

Stark in its simplicity, the cover of Patti Smith's first album, Horses, was a photo by Robert Mapplethorpe.
Enlarge
Stark in its simplicity, the cover of Patti Smith's first album, Horses, was a photo by Robert Mapplethorpe.

As the Patti Smith Group toured the United States and Europe, punk's popularity grew. The rawer sound of the group's second album, Radio Ethiopia, reflected this. Considerably less accessible than Horses, Radio Ethiopia received poor reviews. However, several of its songs, notably "Pissing in a River, " "Pumping," and "Ain't It Strange," have stood the test of time, and Smith still performs them regularly in concert.

While touring in support of the record, Smith accidentally danced off a high stage in Tampa, Florida, falling 15 feet into a concrete orchestra pit and breaking several neck vertebrae. The injury required a period of rest and an intensive round of physical therapy, during which time she was able to reassess, re-energize and reorganize her life, a luxury that had been denied her in her swift rise to fame.

The Patti Smith Group produced two further albums before the end of the 1970s. Easter (1978) was her most commercially successful record, containing the hit single "Because the Night" – co-written with Bruce Springsteen – which rose to #13 on the Billboard Hot 100. Wave was less successful, with "Frederick" and "Dancing Barefoot" receiving only minor radio airplay.

[edit] Retreat

Following the release of Wave, Smith, now separated from long-time partner Jim Carroll, met Fred "Sonic" Smith, former guitar player for legendary Detroit rock band the MC5, who adored poetry as much as she did. The running joke at the time was that she only married Fred because she wouldn't have to change her name. Through most of the 1980s Smith was in semi-retirement from music, living in a suburb of Detroit with her family. In 1988, she released the album Dream of Life, which was well-received, even though she didn't go on tour and it was much more mainstream than her earlier punk-influenced work.

In 1994 Fred died of a heart attack, and following the unexpected death of her beloved brother Todd later that year, Patti was urged by John Cale and Allen Ginsberg to seek help. She did, and subsequently became an active supporter of psychiatric treatment for mental illness and the maintenance of mental health. Smith also advocated the formation of anonymous suicide hotlines for people in need but unwilling to seek help. Reflecting on the deaths of Mapplethorpe, Fred and Todd, Patti toured briefly with Bob Dylan in December of 1995. When her son, Jackson, turned 12, Smith decided to move back to New York. Her son had a band called Back In Spades.

[edit] Re-emergence

After the deaths of her husband and brother, her friends Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and Allen Ginsberg (whom she had known since her early years in New York) urged her to go back out on the road. She toured briefly with Bob Dylan in December 1995 (chronicled in a book of photographs by Stipe). The next year, she worked with her long-time colleagues to record the haunting Gone Again, featuring, "About a Boy", a tribute to Kurt Cobain. Smith was a great fan of Cobain's, but was more infuriated than sad about his suicide. She was quoted in Rolling Stone, "When you watch someone you care for fight so hard to hold onto their life, then see another person just throw their life away, I guess I had less patience for that." [1] (The contrast was in reference to Mapplethorpe.) That same year she collaborated with Stipe on "E-Bow the Letter," a song on R.E.M.'s New Adventures in Hi-Fi, which she has also performed live with the band. During this period, she returned to New York.

Since the release of Gone Again, the Patti Smith Group has recorded three new albums: Peace and Noise (with the single "1959," about the Chinese invasion of Tibet) in 1997, Gung Ho (with songs about Ho Chi Minh and Smith's late father) in 2000, and Trampin' in 2004 (which included several songs about motherhood, partly in tribute to Smith's mother who died in 2002). This last album, Smith's first with a new label, Sony, was critically acclaimed and returned her to the Billboard 200 for the first time in years. A boxed set of her work up to that time came out in 1996, and 2002 saw the release of Land, a two-CD compilation that includes a memorable cover of Prince's "When Doves Cry."

Smith curated the Meltdown Festival in London, England during June 2005. It was by all accounts one of the most successful Meltdown Festivals ever held, with virtually every event sold out. The line-up, all hand-picked by Smith, comprised an extremely diverse array of actors and musicians, from Tilda Swinton and Miranda Richardson, to the London Sinfonietta, to Tuvan throat-singing group Yat-Kha which performed Purple Haze (as part of a tribute to Jimi Hendrix). The festival's penultimate event was a performance by Smith of her debut album Horses in its entirety, the first time she has ever done so. Guitarist Tom Verlaine (a former member of Television, who also played) took Oliver Ray's place. This live performance of Horses was released later in the year as Horses Horses.

In August 2005 Smith and the band opened the German RuhrTriennale and played two shows in the festival’s renowned songwriter’s concert series Century of Song. Amongst unusual versions of her own material she performed very personal renditions of Phil Spector songs and classics by Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix. The next morning she held a literary lecture about the poems of Arthur Rimbaud and William Blake. On this occasion she also talked about the difference between (song-) lyrics and poems.

On July 10, 2005, Smith was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Culture Ministry. In addition to her influence on rock and roll, the Ministry also noted Smith's appreciation for Arthur Rimbaud. [1] [2]

During the course of her career, Smith has published a number of books of poetry, including 1980's Babel; Patti Smith Complete, a collection of her lyrics; Early Work, collecting a number of the small poetry volumes and broadsides she published in the early 1970s; and The Coral Sea, an extended elegy to Mapplethorpe. In 2003 her artwork was exhibited in Pittsburgh at the Andy Warhol Museum.

She recently performed with Red Hot Chili Peppers at one of their concerts at Earls Court on 18 July 2006, which was preceded by two supporting dates in September 2005 for U2 at Madison Square Gardens, NYC.

Smith has been nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame seven times (every year since 2001) but has never received the requisite number of votes for induction. [3]

On Sunday, October 15, 2006 she performed the final show at CBGB in Manhattan. Her tour de force to close out CBGB's 33 year run lasted over 3½ hours, as she took the stage at 9:30 PM (EDT) and closed for the night (and forever for the venue) at a few minutes after 1:00.

On Friday, November 3, 2006, she performed live at the 2006 Edition of the BUE Festival, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

[edit] Political engagement

Smith was an active supporter of Ralph Nader's 2000 presidential campaign, touring with him and playing "People Have the Power" and "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" before crowds of thousands at the campaign's "super-rallies." She also performed at several of Nader's subsequent "Democracy Rising" events. She nominally supported John Kerry in the 2004 election; while she did not participate in the Vote for Change tour, "People Have the Power" was performed at all the shows involving Bruce Springsteen. However, after the election she raised money to help Nader's 2004 campaign, deeply in debt from lawsuits by the Democratic Party. She also toured with Ralph Nader in late 2004 and early 2005 to hold rallies to end the Iraq war and impeach President George W. Bush. Her mentions of Nader at concerts are usually greeted with boos by a substantial portion of the audience (who blame him for Al Gore's loss to Bush in 2000), to which she responds, "They booed Thomas Paine, too."

Smith premiered two new protest songs in London in September 2006. Louise Jury, writing in The Independent characterized them as "an emotional indictment of American and Israeli foreign policy". One song ("Qana") was about the Israeli airstrike on the Lebanese village of Qana, the other ("Without Chains") about the U.S. detention centre at Guantanamo Bay.

Jury's article quotes Smith as saying, "I wrote both these songs directly in response to events that I felt outraged about. These are injustices against children and the young men and women who are being incarcerated. I'm an American, I pay taxes in my name and they are giving millions and millions of dollars to a country such as Israel and cluster bombs and defense technology and those bombs were dropped on common citizens in Qana. It's terrible. It's a human rights violation."

"Without Chains" is about Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen who was born and raised in Germany, held at Guantanamo for four years. Jury quotes Smith, "He is the same age as my son, Jackson. When I read the story, I realised how I would feel as a mother if my son had been taken away at the age of 20, put into chains, without any hope of leaving, without any direct charge."[2]

[edit] Discography

[edit] Studio albums

[edit] Compilations

[edit] Singles

Year Title Chart positions Album
US Hot 100 US Modern Rock US Mainstream Rock UK
1978 "Because The Night" #13 - - - Easter
1988 "Up There Down There" - #6 - - Dream of Life
1988 "People Have The Power" - - #19 - Dream of Life

[edit] Bibliography

  • Seventh Heaven (1972)
  • A Useless Death (1972)
  • kodak (1972)
  • Early morning dream (1972)
  • WITT (1973)
  • The Night(Aloes Books 1976) Patti Smith & Tom Verlaine
  • Ha! Ha! Houdini! (1977)
  • Babel (1978)
  • Woolgathering (1992)
  • Early Work, 1970 - 1979 (1995)
  • The Coral Sea (1996)
  • Patti Smith Complete : Lyrics, Reflections and Notes for the Future (1998). The paperback edition, published in 1999, contains additional material and a revised title: Patti Smith Complete : Lyrics, Notes and Reflections.
  • Wild Leaves (1999)
  • Strange Messenger: The Work of Patti Smith (2003) – the catalog for a show of Smith's artworks at the Andy Warhol Museum, compiled by Patti Smith, David Greenberg and John W. Smith
  • Foreword to An Accidental Biography: The Selected Letters of Gregory Corso April 2005
  • Auguries of Innocence: Poems, October 2005

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Rolling Stone, July 11, 1996, quoted in South Coast Today (Massachusetts), June 23, 1996. Accessed online 27 November 2006.
  2. ^ Louise Jury, Patti Smith rails against Israel and US, The Independent (UK), 9 September 2006. Accessed online 7 Oct 2006.

[edit] External links

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