Smith, Patti

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Patti Smith

Singer, songwriter

Patti Smith grew up in Pitman, a lower-class, melting-pot town in New Jersey. Until she saw the Rolling Stones on an Ed Sullivan show, she was totally into the popular black groups of the early sixties. “I was just one of a million girls who could sing Ronettes records almost as good as the Ronettes,” she told Rolling Stone. After high school she began working in a factory around the same time she discovered the poetry of the French symbolist Arthur Rimbaud. While in junior college, Smith became pregnant and gave up the child for adoption. She moved to New York for a brief period and eventually took off for Paris with her sister to study art. In France she began to have premonitions of Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones’s death just days before he actually died.

She moved back to New York, living at the Chelsea Hotel, a veritable hotbed of musicians, writers, actors and artists during the early seventies. She began working at a local bookstore where she befriended rock-historian/guitarist Lenny Kaye. She also started writing for magazines like Rolling Stone, Rock, and Creem, offering poetry and critical essays. By 1973, three of her poetry books had been published:Seventh Heaven, Kodak and Witt. Friends persuaded her to read her works in public, and, with the accompaniment of Kaye on guitar, she could be heard at New York clubs like Max’s and CBGB’s, opening for bands like the New York Dolls. After the addition of Richard Sohl on piano, the trio even performed at San Francisco’s Winterland.

Clive Davis of Arista Records signed Smith to a recording contract and in 1975 she entered the studio to record her debut LP, Horses. She personally picked the producer, ex-Velvet Underground member, John Cale. “All I was really looking for was a technical person,” Smith told Rolling Stone’s Dave Marsh. “Instead, I got a total maniac artist.” Cale pushed Smith and her band (Kaye and Ivan Krai—guitars and bass, Jay Dee Daugherty—drums, and Sohl—piano) to their artistic limits. Horses is a compilation of all Smith’s referential influences. The surrealism of Rimbaud, the violent prose of William Burroughs, and the simple, yet masterful, rhythms of the Velvets are all in some way represented on the album.

Horses features six songs co-written by Smith, her band, Blue Oyster Cult guitarist Alan Lanier (her boyfriend at the time), and Television’s Tom Verlaine. The other two songs are reworkings of the Chris Kenner hit, “Land of a Thousand Dances,” and the old Them/Van Morrison tune, “Gloria”; both restructured around Smith’s poetic vision. Smith became the darling of the in-crowd from coast to coast. Complimentary reviews appeared in Time, Knight newspapers, Mademoiselle, and even Rolling Stone, in which Smith told of another premonition

For the Record…

Born in Pitman, N.J.; daughter of a factory worker and a waitress; married Fred “Sonic” Smith (a musician); has children.

Gave poetry readings during early 1970s; singer, songwriter, recording artist, 1975-79, 1988—.

Address: c/o 3 E. 54th St. #1400, New York, NY 10022.

she once had. “I’ve known I was gonna be a big shot since I was four. I just didn’t know it had anything to do with my throat.”

Smith charged back into the studio after a triumphant tour of the States to make her follow-up LP, Radio Ethiopia. Unfortunately, the album ended up sounding more like a showcase for a garage band than for Smith’s poetry: Her voice was nearly drowned out in the mayhem of heavy metal support offered by a group who did not seem to recognize their own musical limitations. As Charles M. Young observed in Rolling Stone, “The punks present their instrumental incompetence in the spirit of farce and satire. The Patti Smith Group presents it as a holy sacrament.”

The album was a financial flop and the band members were forced to find other means to support themselves. Tragically, during the tour to support Radio Ethiopia, Smith fell off the stage in Tampa, Florida, on January 23, 1977, and broke her neck. She spent the following year wearing a neck brace and undergoing physical therapy. She was, however, able to complete another book of poetry, Babel, during the time off.

Smith was back in 1978 and determined to make her music more communicative (i.e. commercial) this time around. Herthird album, Easter, contained heronlyTop 20 hit, “Because The Night”, co-written by fellow New Jersey rocker Bruce Springsteen. In his Rolling Stone review, Dave Marsh wrote, “Easter makes good on Patti Smith’s biggest boast—that she is one of the great figures of Seventies rock & roll. More importantly perhaps, it focuses her mystical and musical visions in a way that makes her the most profoundly religious American popular performer since Jim Morrison.”

Smith released her fourth album, Wave, in 1979, but the magic seemed to be gone. It was a directionless effort with only one real gem, the song “Dancing Barefoot.” The rest of the album, according to Robert Christgau in Christgau’s Record Guide was “as listenable as Radio Ethiopia.” Her creative well appeared to have dried up and, after her marriage to former MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith, she went into retirement for nine years to raise a family.

In 1988 Smith decided to make a comeback, and she recorded the album Dream of Life.”Sonic” provided guitar layers and co-produced the album with Jimmy lovine; former band members Daugherty and Sohl also appeared. In the age of MTV and record executives pushing everything off as ‘the next big thing,’ Robert Palmer observed in Rolling Stone: “What may be most striking about Dream Of Life is that there is no product here at all, only music.”