PATTI SMITH

Born: Patricia Lee Smith; Chicago, Illinois, 30 December 1946

Genre: Rock

Best-selling album since 1990: Land (1975–2002) (2002)

Hit songs since 1990: "Summer Cannibals," "Strange Messengers"

While painting and poetry were her first obsessions, Patti Smith changed direction in the early 1970s to form an amplified band and record several albums of authentic rock and roll, blending furious, passionate but sometimes tender verse and grainy, grimy white R&B. In doing so she propelled poetry into the forefront of the pop experience for the first time since Bob Dylan had offered his own forays into Beat-inspired writing a decade earlier.

Ignited by the spark of New York's new wave, Smith became the high priestess of punk poetry, declaiming her views on life and love to a jagged rock soundtrack. In doing so, she became one of the most significant artists working at the edge of the avant-garde and popular culture. Yet her career since has been far from straightforward. At the beginning of the 1980s she took an extended break from the business of performing and recording, returning during the next decade to prove that her muse had not deserted her.

Born in Chicago, Smith moved with her family to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1950; they later relocated to New Jersey in 1955. After graduating from high school in 1964 she did factory work—an experience that fed into one of her earliest songs, "Piss Factory"—but then set out on a course to train as an art teacher.

Rimbaud, the Rolling Stones, and Manhattan's Musical Hotbed

Her painting was at the center of her creative activity at the time—she was inspired by the Paris-based painters at the turn of the twentieth century, Amedeo Modigliani and Chaim Soutine—but she also took close notice of the French poets like Arthur Rimbaud, who had lived in the French capital around the same time. She was also deeply affected by her early sightings of the Rolling Stones on American television.

Moving to New York in 1967, she began to develop an artistic network that sustained her for the next few years. She had a relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, lived in the Chelsea Hotel (the famed hangout of artists on the margins), and at the end of the decade became a denizen of Max's Kansas City, a club where painters, including Andy Warhol, met. At the time, it was beginning to attract a crowd interested in rock music.

In 1969 Smith made her first public appearance before an audience when she took part in a play entitled Femme Fatale, a piece written and produced by members of the Warhol entourage. Linking with guitarist Lenny Kaye and keyboardist Richard Sohl, she became vocalist in a trio that performed her poetry with a rock backing. In 1974 they issued their first single—"Piss Factory" backed with a version of "Hey Joe"—and the following year, joined by Ivan Kral on bass and Jay Dee Daugherty on drums, Smith issued her acclaimed debut album, Horses (1975).

The album marries Smith's distinctive poetic voice on tracks like "Redondo Beach" and "Birdland" with new interpretations of 1960s classics like "Gloria" and "Land of a Thousand Dances." Produced by former Velvet Underground member John Cale, the record signalled the arrival of a major talent and, in its acerbic, aggressive manner, shaped in the musical hotbed of Manhattan, the recording was a fine example of the new energy and attitude infusing the rock revolution that was punk.

On the subsequent albums Radio Ethiopia (1976), Easter (1978), and Wave (1979), released in the name of the Patti Smith Group, she maintained her aural assault with "Babelogue" and "Rock 'n' Roll Nigger" distilling her uncompromising methods. She also reveals a more reflective side on "Because the Night," a co-composition with fellow rocker Bruce Springsteen that gave her a hit in the United States and the United Kingdom in 1978, and "Frederick," a tribute to Fred "Sonic" Smith, the musician she would marry in 1980.

That year she left New York with Fred Smith to relocate to Detroit, where she took an extended break from the rock and roll lifestyle, raising her two children during most of the 1980s. It was not until 1988 that she released her next album, Dream of Life, co-produced by Fred Smith, and with Sohl and Daugherty still on board. Critically well received, the record was not a commercial winner. Critics noted that Patti Smith's absence and the poor health of her husband, which affected live promotion of the piece, contributed to a disappointing public response.

Deaths of Friends and Her Husband

Yet this setback did not derail the Smith project entirely. Despite the loss of friends (Mapplethorpe in 1989) and collaborators (Sohl in 1990), she entered the new decade with an appearance at a major AIDS benefit in 1991 and contributed musically to the soundtrack to Wim Wenders's motion picture Until the End of the World (1991).

A book of short stories, Wool Gathering, was published in 1993 but in late 1994 she suffered the latest of a sequence of personal blows when her husband died of a heart attack. A tribute concert to her late partner was given in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in spring 1995 as Smith threw herself into a demanding tour schedule. During the summer she also made an unannounced contribution to the New York leg of the Lollapalooza tour. At the end of the year she opened for Bob Dylan at a number of East Coast tour dates.

Returning to the studio, she dedicated her 1996 album Gone Again to Fred. Affected by Dylan's recent World Gone Wrong, Smith's release echoed that acoustic melancholy. It includes a title track penned with her husband, and another song written with Fred, "Summer Cannibals," plus a Dylan song, "Wicked Messenger." Also featured is a piece written with Oliver Ray, a younger musician who had become part of the Smith band and who later became her lover.

Stipe Hooks up with European Trek

Although she did not tour the United States to showcase Gone Again, she did successfully take her band—including Lenny Kaye, Jay Dee Daugherty, and former Television front man Tom Verlaine—to Europe and was joined by R.E.M. vocalist and friend Michael Stipe, who photographed the tour for a book.

Peace & Noise (1997) followed and saw most of the compositional credits shared with Oliver Ray. It features a song called "Spell," which makes reference to work by the American poet Allen Ginsberg, a large influence on Smith, who died the same year the album was released.

Smith's own role as poet had not been shelved. Numerous appearances in this guise saw her read at an Albert Hall event in London in 1996 and in 1998 she participated in a benefit for Tibet, performing extracts from Howl, the key verse work by Ginsberg, and John Lennon's "Power to the People."

In 2000 the album Gung Ho was released. It offers a lengthy critique of the urban nightmare on "Strange Messengers," and draws comparisons to Blondie on the track "Gone Pie." But her new work lacks the resounding power of her earlier recordings and the arrival of Land (1975–2002), an outstanding compilation of her career output, only serves to emphasize this assessment. Over two compact discs, the collection captures the intensity of her oeuvre on album and in a live setting.

Determinedly eclectic, Smith has never been tied down by notions of pop stardom. Her existence has been shaped by an ability to move across the creative arts with facility, from painting to theater to spoken word. But without the doors that rock music opened to her, she would have been a significant artist who remained in the shadows of the mainstream. Rock afforded her a large, global audience. Through the upsurge of the new wave, and specifically the quality of her first album, Smith achieved a notable triumph. She managed to combine the potency of raw, direct verse with the muscular rhythms of rock and roll and showed that a woman could take an active part in a world previously dominated by men. As a result, she has been a role model for several waves of women since—from punks to riot grrrls.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

Horses (Arista, 1975); Radio Ethiopia (Arista, 1976); Easter (Arista, 1978); Wave (Arista, 1979); Dream of Life (Arista, 1988); Gone Again (Arista, 1996); Peace & Noise (Arista, 1997); Gung Ho (Arista, 2000); Land (1975–2002) (Arista, 2002). Soundtrack: Until the End of the World (Warner Bros., 1991).

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

V. Bockris, Patti Smith (London, 1998).

WEBSITE:

www.Pattismithland.com.

simon warner