Patti Smith

PATTI SMITH – WORKER. Patti Smith was born in Chicago in 1946. In the 1970s the American poet, songwriter, singer, and visual artist blazed a trail for punk rock artists, especially women. Patti Smith earned herself such titles as “godmother of punk” and “punk’s poet laureate” with her androgynous appearance, intense live performances, and penchant for writing lyrics that often blend poetry with subversive themes, She retreated from public view in the 1980s but made a successful return to performing in the 1990s. Following her comeback, she has published several acclaimed memoirs about her life and career as one of rock’s most avant-garde artists.

27 minutes read time.

You can listen to the podcast of this interview here.

Patti Smith, we are in Arles, what are you showing at LUMA Arles in Frank Gehry’s building?  

We are actually in an outbuilding, a very large compound in LUMA, and I’m working with Soundwalk Collective, an international sound art group, on a multimedia series, film, drawings, vitrines of a visual diary of our work. The subject matter of the work is poetry, art, our environment, the loss of many species, forest fires in the last century, but also the future – our children. There are so many different topics, through art, through poetry, through film. It’s an exhibition that hopefully serves the people in terms of promoting awareness, but also inspires them to do their own work, so I’m very happy.  

At the same time you are signing your new book that is published in French by Gallimard as Le Pain des Anges. The English title is The Bread of Angels. Another memoir, you started this genre of writing with Just Kids, which won the 2010 National Book Award, and then you wrote M Train and others. Being a rock singer and a poet, why did you write memoirs about your life, your feelings, your loves, your family?  

I actually consider myself a fiction writer. I never thought of writing such intense memoirs, except Robert Mapplethorpe asked me to write our story only hours before he died in 1989. This was a big task for me, because I hadn’t written non-fiction, and it took 10 years at least. I thought that would be the end of it, but what I really like writing is a kind of auto-fiction that I learned from Jean Genet, the French novelist and playwright, which is that one is the character of their own book, which often mixes fiction and non-fiction. I like very much this kind of narration so that I can move freely into different realms, but when I’m writing straight non-fiction I try to keep it as factual and truthful and accurate as possible. I didn’t want to write another memoir, but so much has been written about me by other people, often not only inaccurate but just not true, made-up stories speculating about my life with my husband. People imagine because we left public life that we became ne’er-do-well drug addicts, which couldn’t be further from the truth. We lived a quiet, productive life. We raised two children. Even though my husband died young, at 44 in 1994, we did much work together. I wanted to be able to tell people who were interested the important things of my life, instead of people getting half-truths and rumours. I told everything truthfully.

Patti Smith on the road with Bob Dylan

Patti Smith, in your very interesting latest book The Bread of Angels, I love the idea that you are in a room in Hôtel Suisse in Nice, the same hotel where James Joyce wrote his Finnegans Wake, and watching the Bay of Angels which is the bay of Nice. You talk about your childhood, your parents, what happened with your siblings, and your decision to leave Philadelphia and go to New York where by chance the first person you meet is the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe? 

When things happen when you’re young you just accept fate, but as I look back I realise the beautiful wondrous thing of meeting Robert. I came to New York to be an artist and I meet another 20-year-old, who doesn’t want to be an artist, but knows he is an artist. That was very important, because I learned the difference right from the start between wanting and being. Robert always said to me, “You can’t want to be an artist. You are an artist. You can’t want to be a poet. You are a poet, and you have to accept that you were born a poet and that’s what you are.” This was a very simple beautiful lesson that gave me confidence at 20-years-old, and I’ve never lost it.  

At first you lived in a small room in the mythical Hotel Chelsea at 222 West 23^rd Street in Manhatta, where you wrote in the lobby and met people? 

I met many people who became friends and mentors. Bobby Neuwirth, who introduced me to the musical world, introduced me to Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan, and then to the writer William Burroughs, who became my friend for life and introduced me to many of his friends, but also gave me great counsel through my life.  

Robert Mapplethorpe, your lifelong friend, goes somewhere else to live, and you become the playwright Sam Shepard’s girlfriend and get involved in acting? 

More important than acting, with Sam we wrote and performed a play together, Cowboy Mouth. Within the play, Sam wrote a section that we improvised on stage, a poetic argument, and I didn’t know anything about improvising. I said, “How do we do that?” And he said, “You just let it flow. Just argue with me with poetry,” and then he spouted out words to show me. He said, “Don’t be afraid. Have no fear. It’ll come to you.” I said, “What if I make a mistake?” And he said, “You can’t. If you’re improvising and you feel like you’ve hit one wall, break through it.” So once again, someone comes into my life and gives me simple instruction that changed my life, because after that I developed. I found that I had an affinity for improvising, which I didn’t know. Much of what I’ve done, like Horses (1975), my debut album, began with improvised poems.  

Both Horses and the record Because the Night became very well known.  

Because the Night was later, on the album Easter (1978), but the very first album, Horses, was a very raw record coming out in the midst of the rise of punk rock. The most well-known song on Horses was probably my version of Van Morrison’s Gloria, which I began with a poem that started: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” Which for a girl to open a record with in 1975 was a very strong statement.  

A poet is often a very secretive person, but you have become used to being on stage. Are you shy?   

It’s a funny thing. I’m not shy, but I’m not very social and I always preferred working alone, but I also have another side where I like to perform for people. It’s a natural gift. When I was very young I would perform Vachel Lindsay poems for my siblings. Vachel Lindsay wrote these long, narrative, almost children’s poems: 

“Down cellar,” said the cricket,
“Down cellar,” said the cricket,
“Down cellar,” said the cricket,

“I saw a ball last night,”…… 

I would read these poems for my younger brother and sister to entertain them, and in doing that I developed an affinity for performing poems or entertaining people. I really have a dual nature.  

What about music?  

I’m not really a musician, I’m really a performer. I’ve never studied music. I don’t play anything. I can write melodies in my head, but I think of myself not as a musician but a performer. As a performer, I really have no fear. I don’t get stage fright. If I make a mistake, I can laugh with the people or just keep going. As I said, I have a dual nature: one is very solitary – the person who wants to sit in the hotel room or on the balcony in Nice and write alone for hours. That’s very much me. I like my solitude. But another part of me has a relationship and an affinity and affection for public life, so these are two different poles that I navigate.  

Performing music, you were helped by Lenny Kaye, the guitar player, and Richard Sohl, the pianist? 

Because I got quite bored just reading poetry. I had so much energy as a young person, people would think that I took ‘speed’, a very popular drug in the late 60s, and I never had ‘speed’ in my life. I was naturally speedy; I didn’t take drugs to be quick or fast. I have a lot of physical things to deal with, such as chronic bronchitis. A lot of illnesses. Tuberculosis. So I wasn’t messing too much with things like that. In terms of music and support, I had so much high energy, so in ‘72 and ‘73, when I was doing poetry readings by myself, even in ‘71, I just desired more. Sam Shepard said to me, “I think you should get a guitarist to play with you, have a guitarist to provide you with some chords.” That’s when I asked Lenny Kaye to play it with me, but I had no real plan to be a singer or make records. I was a poet, but I was a very energetic poet, and I admired people like Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan and John Lennon, people that fused poetry with performance. All of these people that I liked in the ‘60s, even Jimi Hendrix, all had a sense of poetry, but especially somebody like Jim Morrison. So I just thought, ‘Well, I can do that.’ 

On tours around the world, especially in Europe, they treated you like a goddess. How did you feel about suddenly becoming a star, with fans everywhere wanting to photograph, touch and kiss you? 

This, of course, is very exciting, but also, I’m a worker, and sometimes I would feel I was still evolving. My difficulty with it was often that the question is not, “Is my work good enough?” but, “Have I earned all this adulation?” Because in the late 70s, less and less time was spent developing my work, developing my studies and evolving as a human being. More and more time was spent doing interviews, running from here to there. I felt like I was doing more self-promotion than evolving, and as an artist this is very dangerous. One of the reasons that I stepped back and left public life was to reassess.

Patti Smith, you were very much in love with the guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith and spent a lot of money on the telephone with him? 

People think I just went crazy and fell in love and ran away. That’s not the case at all. I thought about this deeply for at least a year, quietly in myself, but it was more to do with self-evolution. I didn’t see myself growing. I didn’t see my work evolving. I didn’t want to wind up famous or rich or having this kind of a semi-glamorous life with no content. I thought it was very important.  

You were much better known than Fred, who was also an artist and a musician, but you decided to step back?  

Moving out of public life is not moving a step back. Fred was a master guitarist. He was great at everything he did, but he also had been part of a revolutionary political band and had been tracked by the FBI for years. When he was young, they all had fallen into drugs, but by the time I met him, even though he was only 26 years old, he had been through much more than I had been through. He understood the political landscape much more than I did. Yes, I was more well known, but these things don’t matter to me.  

You were living in Detroit, but after a while your strong nature decided that you needed adventure, and you started travelling with Fred to faraway places? 

I always loved to travel. He wanted children, so we both realised if we had children our life would completely change because obviously our first responsibility would be to the children. So he gave me an opportunity and asked me where I’d want to go in the world before we had children. I wanted to go to French Guiana, because I read about French Guiana in Genet’s The Thief’s Journal, and I just wanted to go there. A crazy choice, I suppose, but it was a great adventure. We went to Suriname and French Guiana and Brazil. Fred and I travelled in many different ways. We travelled in America some. but more, we really travelled through study. Fred learned to be a pilot and was studying navigation. I was reading and studying all kinds of things and writing. This period away from public life is when I became a true writer.  

In the book there is a final chapter called Vagabondia which is a bit of a synthesis of your moods, and your move from the North of Boston, in islands, to Trieste?  

I called it Vagabondia, and I ended the book there because I felt like I talked enough about my history and my life. I just wanted to bring people into the present, and the present future because Vagabondia, the last chapter of The Bread of Angels, is still non-fiction but in the manner that I like to write autofiction. My next book that I’m working on now is fiction, but it’s still the same character. I suppose like Genet, I am my favourite character. I’m ashamed to say it, but it’s true.  

You write about Joyce, about the Sabbath, about the only concentration camp in Italy where the Jews were kept? 

In Trieste, where they had the one crematorium. I talk about the things that I see, and that’s what I do in life. People ask me: “Do you go to a lot of parties? What’s your social life? What do you do on the road? What’s exciting?” Well, what I do, I go visit the grave of the Swiss writer Robert Walser. I visit the grave of James Joyce. I go to the Café de l’Odéon because that’s where many writers convened, Recently, I was in Vienna and I went to the grave of Moritz Schlick. I visited the Hall of Philosophy where he taught and where the Vienna Circle would convene, I went to a famous cafe. I went to the graveyard where The Third Man was shot, where Harry Lime’s funeral was shot. These are the things that I like to do. My real life and imaginary life are very closely entwined, and that’s why I finished this book with Vagabondia, because I’m telling about myself. But in the last part, this is my true self. This is really who I am. This is what I love.  

Do you like being a writer?  

Yes, that is the thing, because I’m a visual artist and of course a performer and a songwriter, but if someone said you can only have one, it was always writer. I always wanted to be a writer. I love books more than anything.  

At the beginning you worked in a bookshop in New York?  

Yes, like Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face, I was thrilled to get a bookstore job. Even when I was recording Horses, I was still working in a bookstore, and when I recorded Horses I thought, ‘Oh, this is so nice. I get to do a record, but then I’ll go back to the bookstore.’ Because I still had no money.  

Soon you’re going to Rome for a concert, what will you do during the day, because the concert is at night?  

Perhaps I will go to the Vatican to visit Pope Francis and to visit his tomb. Maybe I will speak to someone there. In one church, there is a bone of the foot of Mary Magdalene and a beautiful sculpture of a foot, and I want to visit that. I always go to visit some kind of museum. Maybe I’ll see some Caravaggios.  

France gave you the Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres?  

Yes, they did. There is a lot of France in my book because I love France and I always write well in France. I began and ended Bread of Angels in Nice. I wrote of devotion in Lourmarin where Camus is buried, and I wrote almost the whole book in the Café de Flore in Paris.  

In the book you dig into your life, into your roots, and speak about your relationship with Linda, your younger sister. It’s very moving because you really want to know where you come from and you do a DNA test because you’re not sure that you were your father’s biological child? 

I look very different than my siblings, and there were always rumours, but I adored my father who raised me. Grant Smith was a beautiful man, but I didn’t really resemble him or his ancestors in any way, and it turned out that he wasn’t my biological father, but I really shaped myself after him because he was a man who read all the time, who asked a million questions. He was innately spiritual without having a religion, and I just loved him so much and still do.  

Why did you actually do the DNA test?  

Because right before my mother died, she told me she wanted to tell me something about my genetics, but then she had a bad fall and she was not coherent. She didn’t remember. And so she never got to tell me the story that she was going to tell me at the end of her life. She fell, as I said, and had a blood clot in her brain.  

And instead of thinking that you were Irish, you discovered that you had an Ashkenazi Jewish father?  

100%. The funny thing is my father was Irish and I was in Belfast for years telling people my father was Irish, going to visit Bobby Sands’ grave, and I befriended the band U2 and we were talking about being Irish. I received a medal for contributing to the arts in Ireland and then I find out that I don’t have any Irish in me! But I feel like I have virtual Irish from my father, and it’s very interesting that I should be half-Jewish because I was born after World War II and the sentiment toward what happened to the Jewish people during World War II was felt deeply by everyone and by my family. I come from a very compassionate family, and like every young girl back then in the late ‘50s I read The Diary of Anne Frank. I was very sympathetic and I’ve always had this affinity, but never imagined that I had this blood, and it’s very strange for me now because I’ve worked in my own way for the Palestinian people and am very concerned and heartbroken in what has happened to their country and now what is happening in Lebanon. Because I speak out about this a lot, I’m often called anti-Semitic, which I think is funny, especially now, since I’m biologically half-Jewish. But I’m not anti-anything. I’m for. I’m for children. That is my number one concern.

Patti Smith – Year of the Monkey

Patti Smith – Woolgathering

Patti Smith – A Book of Days

Patti Smith, with your own children, were you able to be a mother with so much travelling?  

My children didn’t even know that I played rock and roll. My children had maybe a bohemian, but very happy childhood. We played music, but we didn’t have our own records sitting around. My children had no sense of any fame that I had, and when my husband died and I needed to make a living and went back to performing, my first tour was with Bob Dylan. My son was 13 and my daughter 8, we were backstage and I introduced them to Bob Dylan, and there was also a reporter there who said, “What’s it feel like to have Patti Smith for a mother?” And my son said, “Oh, you know, she does the cooking and washes our clothes.” Which I loved. He was like, “What are you talking about? She’s my mom. She makes our dinner, washes our clothes.” Now that they are grownup I talk to my son every day and he is my guitarist now.  

Now he knows who you are.  

He’s 43 years’ old, I think he knows. I’ve never lived like a rock star. I don’t have that kind of lifestyle and sensibility. They know that I work. When they were little, they didn’t know that I performed rock and roll, but they knew that I wrote every day. I was always writing or doing something. They knew that that was a part of my daily practice, and they knew sometimes I had a book, but that didn’t really interest them.  

How do you divide your life? 

It’s all work oriented, because I’m not a vacationer and I don’t have a companion. I live alone, but I spend a lot of time when I can with my daughter. Both my son and daughter play with me. My daughter often comes to our shows and plays piano, and she’s my good friend.  

Now you’re touring Europe?  

Yes, with my son; and my daughter will probably come to Paris and play, but she doesn’t come on the whole tour. I’m going to the Netherlands and Ghent, Paris. Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, ending in Milan and Rome, where we’re going to play the Circus Maximus, which is exciting.  

Will you spend time in Italy before you go home?  

I’m always spending time in Italy. I am going to be in Italy quite a bit in November and December because with Soundwalk Collective we’re doing a huge exhibition at the Milan Triennial, like a retrospective. It’s everything because there’s ten films and I improvise the soundtrack of all the films and then I do drawings that have to do with the exhibition and help with the execution of some of the installations.  

You talk about your pen in the book. Do you always write longhand?  

Yes, I always write long hand. I edit on the computer. My assistant, who I’ve been working with for 50 years, transcribes for me, because she can understand my handwriting, and then I edit it. I have hundreds of notebooks. I have to feel the sense of paper and the pen on the paper.  

When is your next book coming out and what is the title?

I’m hoping to finish it by the end of August. I made a M trilogy. There’s M Train, which is 70% non-fiction. Then Year of the Monkey, another M book, and that is 50-50. And then this one is going to be called The Melting, another M word, and it’s 90% fiction. Each book progressively goes into another realm. It starts in New York during the pandemic and then it bleeds into a parallel world. That’s all I can tell you. That’s the trailer!  

Do you still love your life and what you do?  

I’m going to be 80, and truthfully, I have physical challenges. It’s harder for me. I certainly don’t have the agility that I had, and my chronic cough, which I’ve had my whole life, is more challenging. I don’t have the same stamina as I had, so I’m careful when I’m on the road. Wherever my responsibility is gets my energy, and so when I am on the road I don’t do too much during the day. I stay quiet. Maybe I read. Maybe I’ll go to see a couple of paintings in a museum or go to a favourite café, but all my energy is for the performance. I’ve learned how to pace myself. When I was younger, I didn’t have to pace myself. I had enough energy for everything. But I’m in generally good health and I’m happy. At 80, I have more doors open to me than any time in my life.

Ultimately, what motivates you?  

I like to do good work. My dream was always to write a book as good as Pinocchio, a universal book that everyone can read – children, adults – that offers them many things. I’m like the typical mythical artist who spends his whole life wanting to create a masterpiece and doesn’t know if they’ve already created one. I want to do something worthy. I love the work of others. I watch Tarkovsky movies or I’m reading Roberto Bolaño or it could be Hermann Hesse, and I look at the work of others, paintings by Joan Mitchell or Lee Krasner, or I’m listening to Rosalia. All these people make me still want to offer what I can. People used to say: “Don’t you regret leaving public life? You could have been rich and famous.” and I said, “Rich and famous! I’m too conceited to want to be rich and famous. I don’t want to be rich and famous. I want to be great.” And this is the truth.  

You would have liked to be a genius? 

Yes, unfortunately that’s not going to happen, but I would have loved to have been a chess genius or something. No, I can tell you I’m not, but I just want to keep trying and, hopefully, I would like to do one work that I could look at and say: “That’s perfect. That book is perfect.” Like I look at a film or I look at a Brâncuși, something that has complete clarity that you can’t question at all.  

Maybe you already did it.  

Maybe, but I’ll keep trying. I love to work. When I die, if somebody said: “What do you want on your tomb? How do you want to be known?” It would just say: PATTI SMITH – WORKER. Just worker, because it’s all work. Writer is great, but it’s all work to me.  

Is it somehow to be part of them that you like to visit all these tombs?  

I like to go and sit there, and think, and thank them. It’s just the proximity. I visited Sylvia Plath’s grave, which was difficult to get to. Just sit there, alone sometimes, and think about their work and thank them for their work. Or, because Sylvia Plath’s grave is in a very lonely place, just sit there and be company. I feel like a good visitor. I can’t say I feel part of them, but I feel like I’m a visitor that perhaps they would like to have.  

Patti Smith, thank you very much for this conversation.

Portrait of Patti Smith at the 81st Venice International Film Festival 2024 by Harald Krichel

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