Life lessons from the “Godmother of Punk.”
Back in 2010, I picked up this book that everyone seemed to be reading that year: Patti Smith’s “Just Kids.” Smith is an artist who is sometimes called the godmother of punk.
Man, did I love that book. It’s one of the few I’ve read many times since.
“Just Kids” is a memoir of Smith’s early years in New York and her relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe. They were involved in the city’s art scene of the 1960s and ’70s — living in the Chelsea Hotel, bumping into Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Andy Warhol.
It’s a moment of creative ferment that I wish I could have seen and touched, even if just for a day or an hour.
But the beauty of “Just Kids” — the reason I think it worked for so many people and won the National Book Award that year — is that it’s one of those rare books that makes you feel what a moment like that must have been like. And feeling, to me, is the startling quality of Patti Smith’s music and writing. She makes you feel what she felt. She channels moments rather than simply describing them.
Reading her makes me interested in what life must feel like to her: What is it like to go around in Patti Smith’s mind, to be that open to experience and energy and intuition? What is the texture of the world that she lives in?
Smith’s latest book is “Bread of Angels,” another memoir that encompasses a much wider range of her life. It’s much more personal in a way — and also much more experiential. I loved this book, too.
Smith also writes a Substack these days, and right now, she’s on tour celebrating the 50th anniversary of her iconic album “Horses.” She’s someone who has stayed vibrant across many different eras of American art, and so I think she’s someone to learn from.
Ezra Klein: Patti Smith, welcome to the show.
Patti Smith: Thank you. I’m happy to be here.
You seem like you were a wonderfully unusual child. Tell me about the time you spent a morning talking to a tortoise.
Well, I suppose I was unusual, and when you’re a child, you don’t really understand that. You’re just who you are.
The girl from “Pan’s Labyrinth” reminded me very much of myself because she freely spoke to nature, whimsical characters, elves, fairies. I was very much like that — in contact with other worlds because I was completely open to them.
And once, when I was about 5 or 6 years old, I was on the way to school and took a shortcut through the forest. There was a little pond. I sat there for a moment, and a huge snapping turtle crawled out of the water. He was, to me, giant — the king of tortoises.
We looked at each other for a long time and just communed. It wasn’t unnatural to me because I communed with my siblings that way, without words. As a child, it seemed totally natural to commune with an animal, a dog, a massive snapping turtle, your brother and sister, without words.
But I must have been there a long time in tortoise consciousness because when I finally got to school, everyone was in an uproar. They thought I had been kidnapped because three or four hours had gone by.
I can’t tell you what we talked about. It has always been a mystery. But I can say with absolute certainty that we did have quite a journey together.
What did that feeling of communion — be it with tortoises or siblings or others — feel like to you, and are you still able to access it now?
Yes. It’s different now because when I was young, it was completely innocent. It was just what we did. Now I’m more aware of it.
For me it’s just a way of channeling vast consciousness or another human being, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. But it even has a lot to do with improvisation, channeling onstage, feeling the people, getting a sense of the people, getting a sense of a character that I’m building in a song, getting within them. It’s just something that I do.
I used to speak with William Burroughs a lot about this. He saw it as very shamanistic. But I was always embarrassed when he would say that to me because I was only 22, 23 years old, and I certainly didn’t feel like I deserved being called shamanistic.
This kind of thing was something he avidly believed in. Also, because we both had scarlet fever and suffered fevers as children, he felt that people who suffered a lot of fevers when young had a more open consciousness.
I think it’s also just a form of empathy, imagination. I can’t really break it down. It’s just a blessing that I have.
It’s interesting that the word “shamanistic” just came up. When we were preparing for this episode, we talked to the music journalist Caryn Rose, who has written a wonderful book about you, and she used the term “shamanistic.” We were then trying to track down whether Bruce Springsteen had used the term “shamanistic” around you.
Why do you think other people perceive you or something you do as shamanistic?
When I started performing publicly in the very early ’70s, I wasn’t a great singer. I’m not really a musician. I didn’t have any real experience. I really came to performing through poetry, but I was a very fluid improviser.
I would sometimes, whether it was at CBGB or a poetry reading, just go into a state where I could do long solos.
I always likened it to saxophone solos. You think of Coltrane or someone doing a long, 14-minute solo: They go out as far as they can, talk to God if they can and then return. And, of course, I always returned.
I’m not very analytical, so I never thought about it. It was just what I did. And that’s what people said. I find it flattering and sometimes undeserved, but I don’t know what else to call it.
That story about the tortoise leads to a story that I found very moving as a parent. People at the school were worried about you. You come in very late, you get in trouble. Your parents are called, your mom is worried. She asks you where you have been. You say that you’ve been “nowhere.”
There’s a big fight, and eventually your father asks you to show him your nowhere. Tell me about what you showed him and how he sort of knew to ask that. That’s a beautiful move as a parent.
My mother was very reactive. She was traumatized when she was young over the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. She was haunted by that, and she was always afraid we’d be kidnapped. She worried about things like that, and she worried about me because I was always wandering off, always going where I wasn’t supposed to.
My father was more open to my ways, but he understood my mother’s concerns. My father was not reactive — he was a very measured man.
So he took me for a walk. I just took him to the pond, and we sat on the rock. I told him exactly what had happened and told him I was talking to the tortoise, but without words, for a long time. And he said: Oh. And I said: Maybe he’ll come out again.
We waited for a while, like 45 minutes, but the tortoise didn’t come out. So we just sat there, and we didn’t even talk. It was such a pretty place. He held my hand. My father was also quite the dreamer, and I think that my father didn’t find that very strange.
He was a very interesting man, and he had a very flexible mind. We just walked back, and he said: All right, I’ll just tell your mother that you were just daydreaming and lost track of time. And I said: Will you tell her about the tortoise? And he said: No, let’s keep that to ourselves.
And we never spoke about it again.
You gave an interview some years ago where you said something about your father and his mind that I found quite beautiful. You said that he believed that the mind was a country, and you had to develop it. You had to build and build and build the mind. That was his whole philosophy — the development of the mind.
What did he mean by that — or what did you take him to mean by that?
Well, my father studied everything. He read various things. He read the Bible, the Old Testament, the New Testament. He read books on ufology. He read Plato and Aristotle. He read Jung.
He was a factory worker. He didn’t finish high school, but he was always searching and asking: What is the meaning of life? And asking different people. If any religious organizations came to the house, he loved to talk to them, spar with them, see what their ideas were.
It’s learning. It wasn’t building palaces. His country of the mind was after answers to very unanswerable questions. He was always probing: Why are we here? Who put us here? What is our purpose?
I developed a love of study, a love of personal evolution. Even if my goals were different, that idea always stayed with me.
You write in your book that you were a very inquisitive kid — inquisitive kids can be a lot for a busy parent to deal with — and that you had found your mom had written down some of the questions you had asked, scrawled in the margins of something: “What is the soul?” “What color is it?”
Yes, I was 1½. [Laughs.] Because I was a bit precocious, my mother got me in Bible school very quickly, but they couldn’t answer the questions, either. So even when I was 3 years old, I was understanding that I wasn’t going to get these answers from other people — I was going to have to figure out these answers myself.
You tell a story in “Bread of Angels” about a family trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the way it evoked in you the realization that you wanted to be an artist.
What did you feel that day? What did the recognition of that calling feel like?
It’s one of the great mysteries of my life. I was 12. I saw art in books — mostly religious art. It was the first time I saw art in person, and it was just such an experience.
But it was more like appreciating beauty at first — looking at the John Singer Sargents and Modiglianis. But then I went down to this one hallway where there were Picassos. I don’t know what happened. There were some Harlequins, some pieces from Picasso’s Blue Period, Rose Period and then Cubism — more attuned to the “Demoiselles” period.
Something about seeing these Cubist paintings struck me so deeply — as if I was struck, really struck, by lightning in my heart. It was completely unexpected. Like, really, love at first sight. Maybe it’s because they’re multidimensional or something, I don’t know. But when I saw his work, that’s what I wanted to do. That’s what I aspired to do.
And it has never diminished. I was just in Madrid, and for the 10th time went to see “Guernica.” I went before a concert so I could sit with it for a little while and see it again.
That’s what I wanted. I wanted to be in that world. I wanted to do that. I didn’t even know what “doing that” was. I was only 12. But it suddenly meant more to me than anything — except maybe my books.
What does it feel like to you now to see “Guernica”?
Usually, when I see it, I just feel grateful that Picasso did it. And I’ll look at it in different ways. I’ve written poems about his painting it. I’ve deconstructed it in my mind.
When I saw it this time, it was more painful because I could liken it to all the images I’ve seen of Palestine, all the pictures of Gaza — all the rubble, all the destruction and all the children dead. So it was a lot more painful to look at it this time because it struck a rawer nerve.
But every time I’ve seen it, I’ve felt something. It’s always meaningful.
What strikes me about some of these stories — and a reason I’m always fascinated to talk to artists about the feeling of being called toward art — is that it was pretty natural for you to be able to feel that at 12.
I’ve read biographies of Picasso and have tried — probably the wrong way — to deepen my appreciation of art over the years. But I still struggle with going to a museum and walking past masterful works that so many others have felt so much about — but not feeling anything.
Well, there’s nothing wrong with that. There are books that people love, there are movies that people love, that I feel nothing for. I don’t think that there are any rules and regulations that way. We’re drawn to what we’re drawn to in life.
I was drawn to books at 3 years old. I saw books, saw my parents reading them, and that’s what I wanted. I wanted to read. I begged my poor mother, who was a waitress who never finished high school, to teach me to read. But my siblings weren’t like that. My friends weren’t like that.
There is no requirement to have to stop in front of a Rembrandt and feel deeply. If you don’t, it just doesn’t speak to you. But there are other things that most likely speak to you that probably might not speak to me or speak to another person.
I wouldn’t fault anyone for not being moved by art or by a certain piece of music. It’s a very subjective thing.
What’s your first memory of reading?
My first memory of a book is I was fascinated with this red book my mother had. It had a red silk binding and gold stamping. I was about 3, and I hid it under my pillow because I thought if I slept on it, what was in it would come into my head. And my mother was distraught because she couldn’t find it.
It was my grandfather’s book called “Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.” It was a book with stories of poor martyred saints.
I’m sure when my mother started teaching me to read it was the normal Mother Goose or something. But I swiftly started reading books and was reading children’s classics like “Uncle Wiggily” and the “Bobbsey Twins” and “Pinocchio” and “Alice in Wonderland” and all the elves and fairy books. I’ve read them all, really.
Reading through your memos, you really get this beautiful biography of your life as a reader, too, and the authors who have meant so much to you. When you think about some of the books that were formative to you or some of the authors to whom you keep coming back, what are they or who are they?
“Pinocchio” was very important to me because I always knew I was a wayward kid. I wasn’t evil, but I didn’t always do what I was supposed to. I could relate to his desire to explore, but it’s also a redemptive story. It gave me hope as a kid.
He was a bad puppet, a bad son. But in the end, he saved his father. He gave his puppet life to save his father and was redeemed by becoming a real boy. So there’s redemption, and it gives one hope, even at 7.
And I love “Peter Pan,” of course, because I didn’t want to grow up. That was hope for a new place — Neverland — where you didn’t have to grow up.
When I wanted to write — but really wasn’t sure if I could ever write — I read “Little Women.” Jo March, of course, was an early hero — a girl who wrote, a girl who was sort of a tomboy, who didn’t like the fuss and feathers of being a girl and wanted to be a writer.
So I was very lucky to have many books to help me on my path.
I remember as a kid getting a book that had the fables and stories I knew, but it was an older version of them, and realizing with a thrilled delight how much darker and more menacing and more grotesque they often were.
Now I find myself reading to my children, and when I read them today’s books for their age group, they’re very funny, but they’re toilet jokes. Then, when I try to go back to read the classics to them, it feels somehow so culturally different. I have to go through this constant negotiation with myself: What am I going to tell them about? Which parts of this am I going to sanitize?
It feels like we believed children were more capable of absorbing a more extreme version of life, death, heroism, heartbreak and terror a couple of decades ago than we do today.
Yes, like you, there were the German versions of Grimms’ fairy tales that were very grim.
That is literally the book I’m talking about. [Laughs.]
Very grim, very dark. But I also accepted them as what they were: fairy tales. They weren’t real. I had a sense of the imaginative world and our social world.
I think that kids really have the ability, at least when I was young, to know that things weren’t real. You look at cartoons back then, Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck: They wrap dynamite around their head, and then their head explodes. Then they’re fine in the next cartoon. It wasn’t like we really thought that was happening.
I think that fantasy — maybe because we were always playing outdoors and we lived a different life — but the realm of childhood was akin to imagination and fantasy.
The book that really was disturbing, for me, was the Old Testament because I started reading it very young, and we’re supposed to accept the things in it as real and the people in it as real people.
You become very enamored with King David, the shepherd boy. You love him, and he does all these wonderful things. Then he wants someone else’s woman and sends the woman’s husband to the front lines to be killed.
As a young kid, 10 or 11 years old, I even asked my father about it. There are so many bad things in the Bible: people having 20 wives, someone’s wife is too old to have a baby so they have a baby with a younger person. I said: Daddy, there’s so much bad stuff.
It disturbed me. It confused me.
It was really when I had to face — my father would always quote Burns — “man’s inhumanity to man.” It’s a very real thing.
And what I think is more frightening to kids than whatever stories or books they’re reading is the news. The news is terrifying. What is the news telling us? What our leaders are saying is really disturbing.
I’m sorry that this was such a convoluted answer.
Oh, no, I agree with you. I find the news more terrifying than anything I read.
How could I explain to a child the duplicity of our present administration? The hypocrisy. There are so many dark things.
Good luck. Blessings upon you and your children. [Laughs.]
Thank you very much. I agree with you, by the way, that the Old Testament was a very hard book for me to read. When I was in third and fourth grade, I went to an Orthodox Hebrew school, and we read a lot of the Old Testament, and the instruction was to take it quite literally.
And in being told to take it quite literally and then trying to match that up to the way I had been told to understand God and told to understand spirituality —
And morals.
Yes, and morals. Seeing how little mercy there often was in that book, it honestly put me off religion and spirituality for quite some time. I was young, but to match those two things up was already too difficult then.
It’s interesting that we both suffered the same kind of questioning — and it wasn’t frivolous questioning, either. It wasn’t rebellious. It was true thinking.
Deeply earnest. [Laughs.]
Yes. “Deeply earnest” is a good way to put it.
Let me stay on, not the religious side, but the fairy tale side for a minute. You write about the book of Irish fairy tales that belonged to somebody you had cared about when you were young and who passed away. Your sister found a version of it for you as an adult.
A passage of that book that you wrote about said, “All desires save one are fleeting, but that one lasts forever. That was the desire for wisdom.” And when that character was asked what to do with that wisdom, he said, “I would make a poem.”
I know. I just love that so much.
Well, I read that, and having read your memoirs, that almost felt like your whole path.
I used to ask a very old Irish woman — the great-grandmother of a neighbor, named Aggie — to read me that over and over — which she did. She didn’t mind at all.
And I had forgotten it. I had forgotten it because I was 5 years old when she died, and after that, the book disappeared. I never saw it again. And truthfully, I’m ashamed to say that I had totally forgotten the passage.
When my sister researched, found the book and sent it to me — when I read that page, I felt almost that feeling of just being hit in the stomach. It was very powerful. It was like I reverberated right back to that child and remembered how it made me feel — yet I didn’t really know why.
It’s another one of these great mysteries: Why did that particular passage strike me so much when I was kindergarten age? But it did, and it probably, as you said, has something to do with being one of the main stones on my path.
I think so many people would hear that and think: If you had all that wisdom, why, of all things, a poem? What could a poem contain? And my sense is that you do have a sense of why a poem and what a poem could contain.
So why a poem?
It’s like the bread of life, a poem. I’m not an analyst. I can’t really break these things down. It’s just that, for me, true poetry is the hardest and the highest thing to write. There are a million poetry books and poet laureates and poetry prizes. But I’m talking about something that’s so exceptional that maybe a great poet — Rimbaud or Sylvia Plath or Dylan Thomas — only writes 10 of them.
But if you get the greatest of poems, it can distill everything like a teardrop. If you’re thirsty and you get that drop of water, it suddenly becomes like a liter of water. Then you’re satisfied. And that’s what a poem can do.
You went to New York City in the late ’60s. What did New York City feel like to you when you arrived?
Freedom. I had lived in South Jersey, and it was very rural in my area. There were no cafes, no galleries, no bookstores. You could walk to the library on a rainy day in South Jersey and see one person, some cows or a pig that escaped the pig farm.
I went to a very cool high school. It was extremely diverse and interesting, and I learned a lot from other kids. We were listening to Coltrane and then listening to Bob Dylan, and I read a million books and all of that, but it was a rural area. There was no real culture except for the culture of rock ’n’ roll and R&B — music that I shared with my classmates and friends.
But New York at the time, in 1967, was filled with young people. It was really cheap to live there. It was gritty. It felt safe. It was all this activity, energy — Washington Square Park and political activists and poets and people playing bongos. It was action.
It wasn’t like now. Down in the East Village and the West Village, it was mostly young people and creative people. You didn’t have any fancy stores or things like that. It was a place where you could evolve and grow and where nobody cared.
I didn’t have the look of my time — the beehive and lots of makeup. I had long straight hair — sort of a beatnik Joan Baez-looking kid. I just didn’t fit in anywhere. I was always such a weirdo.
But in New York, nobody cared. I was more of a hick in New York than a weirdo because my clothes were a little off.
But it was free. I could just walk around and be who I was. I didn’t have any money. I was often quite hungry until I got a job. But I was happy. I was happy because — I can’t say it enough — I just felt free.
I like reading memoirs of artists in New York City. It’s a genre I particularly love. But most of my work is in politics and policy, and I particularly do a lot of work on housing. And when I read them, some part of me always thinks: What you are seeing are the benefits of cheap housing.
So often these books seem to me like a memoir of what is possible when you can afford an apartment in New York City.
No, but you’re also seeing the benefits of less greed. It’s not just cheap housing.
We could get into a very unhappy discussion because you and I are on different sides of the fence on certain aspects of that. As you might know, I’ve been spending quite some time with my daughter, Jesse Paris Smith, and Joseph Reiver trying to save the Elizabeth Street Garden.
So I can’t get into a discussion with you about that because we have different ideas.
Fair enough.
Especially the cavalier way in which it’s treated — as if we’re a bunch of frivolous something. It’s a beautiful, beautiful place for children and people.
I’ve lived in New York since 1967. All the developments in New York are mostly corrupt. We have all this office space that’s completely empty. Whole empty buildings. And we just keep building them and building them.
I know that we need housing, but that’s not going to change the fact that in Greenwich Village, where it used to cost $110 or $150 for an apartment, the same apartment is $7,000.
It’s not going to change all the loopholes and stuff that these landlords and people have done. It’s not going to change the fact that places are filled with mold, but landlords don’t have to fix it. All my friends who have lived there since the ’60s moved out of New York because of the rent. You have a place, and your lease is up, and then they triple it. Just building some new space for 200 people is not going to change things. What we have to change is what’s going on with how much things are.
That’s what I’m concerned about. Not concerned about: Let’s get rid of these garden spaces that are taking up valuable space that we could develop. Some of that might be important, but it’s a way bigger issue than that.
Recognizing that we might see the possibilities here differently, I think we’re actually on the same side of thinking: Something has gone terribly wrong.
Yes. Terribly.
But what was it like finding housing when you first came to New York City? You came without a place to stay. You came without a place to live. What were the places you lived in like?
Well, one — right before I recorded “Horses” — I think it was ’74 — I needed an apartment and wanted to go to the East Village because the West Village started getting a little expensive.
So I walked down East 11th Street, not far from the church, more toward Second and First Avenues. And there’s some old guy sitting in front of a building — the super. You always knew the super — the supers were always there.
“Do you have an apartment?”
“Yeah, I got one. It’s on the sixth floor. Go look at it.”
You have to walk up six floors. It has a tub in the kitchen. There are cockroaches all over the place. But you could fix it up.
Go back down. “How much?”
“One hundred fifty dollars, but I need two months.”
“All right. I’ll come back.”
You shake hands, and you got an apartment. That’s what it was like. And it was a [expletive], but it was your [expletive], and it was up to you to fix it up.
There were a lot of abandoned buildings. People squatted, or they would pay cheap rent. And they had cold-water flats. They didn’t have electricity. And these artists slowly started making them better, making them nicer, making them livable.
Then, eventually, they get priced out. This is, sadly, what happens.
But it was great then. Because you got the rats and the cockroaches and the mold or whatever, but if you were resourceful, you could work with that. You could get a job as a waitress. You could get a job in a bookstore, pay your rent and have at least enough to eat.
I’m living in this world. I’m not fantasizing about living in my old world. But there were some aspects of it I do mourn. I mourn some of the innocence and the possibilities.
Right now, whether you have a little affordable housing here and there, it’s not going to change the fact that you have to have a lot of money to live in New York. You have to.
I’ve read “Just Kids.” It’s one of those books I’ve read repeatedly, and I know a lot of people for whom that’s true.
One of the reasons I think is that a lot of us sort of wish we had been there in that moment. It feels like a moment that was special. And your books sort of evoke it. They allow you to feel it.
It was a scene. You describe it in “Bread of Angels” as:
Looking back, the burgeoning scene was breathtaking, art rats embracing then breaking apart a vast cultural history, scurrying into the future with speedy and productive energy.
What to you made that moment that moment? We’ve talked a little bit about New York at that time, but why was the artistic moment so generative and now so legendary?
It was a very pivotal time. For one thing, because of the feminist movement, because of the gay movement. The fact that you could come to New York if you had new ideas. You could come to New York if you were homosexual. You could come if, like me, you were the weirdo.
It sort of accepted everyone. The Statue of Liberty was our girl because so many kids in America were disowned by their families for being homosexual, wanting to be a poet, wanting to be an artist. That wasn’t an accepted profession. You could be disowned for wanting to be an artist or a poet, let alone having a sexual persuasion that was against anything they believed in.
So New York was filled with misfits, people who weren’t accepted — including myself and Robert Mapplethorpe and Jackie Curtis. There are so many, many of them dead — so many gifted people, so many tragic people, at the same time.
In terms of what brought us together, I think it started with music. We were all listening to the same music — whether it was “Sgt. Pepper” or Bob Dylan or Neil Young or Janis Joplin, whatever. We were all — or most of us were — against the Vietnam War. All, of course, for civil rights, human rights, gay rights, women’s rights. We were young and conscious that these were rights that we all believed in. There was a kinship. So it was a very unique period.
But I don’t like painting things like it was the best era ever, so that young people in future generations feel like they missed out. Because that’s not fair. Being alive in present tense is the greatest thing you have.
One thing that strikes me about that time when I think about it, the way you talk about the music of it, Robert Mapplethorpe, who is such a central figure in your life and such a central artist — it’s a moment when art is taken very, very seriously.
Even compared to other times in American history — the music of Bob Dylan or the Beatles, the conceptual art of Andy Warhol — there is something about the culture’s relationship to art in that era that feels distinctive. Not just the art being produced but the seriousness with which it was received and lived out. I don’t feel like I know why it’s true, but it feels true.
That’s really interesting. Yes, there’s truth in that when I think about it. It’s like “The Journey to the East”: It was just one of those moments where a lot of people converged, and even if we didn’t always get along or there was pettiness or this or that, we were still like minds.
When I was working at Scribner’s, I waited on Larry Rivers, I waited on Robert Rauschenberg, I delivered books to the building where Mark Rothko lived and saw him on the elevator.
You saw these people. They were there. You knew where their studios were. Jimi Hendrix’s studio was across the street from where Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock painted. Art was everywhere. Andy Warhol ate in the same restaurants as we did. We all comingled more.
I sometimes joke: Janis Joplin was staying at the Chelsea Hotel when I lived there. We dressed similarly, only she had feather boas. We lived in the same hotel, only she had a bigger room. She had a suite of rooms, and I had the tiniest room. Other than that, we were all similar.
We dressed similarly, we listened to the same music, we had the same references. Art was like the jewel in our crown.
I just had this other thought that might be far-fetched: We were from the generation that had President Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy. When I was a kid, Eisenhower was president. But then you had President Kennedy and his wife — very connected with the arts, opera, ballet, fashion. They elevated the idea of culture in the American consciousness and also among young people.
For a brief time, that was our world, that was our president.
Archival clip of John F. Kennedy: Behind the storm of daily conflict and crisis, the dramatic confrontations, the tumult of political struggle, the poet, the artist, the musician continues the quiet work of centuries: Building bridges of experience between peoples. Reminding man of the universality of his feelings and desires and despairs. And reminding him that the forces that unite are deeper than those that divide. That’s art. And the encouragement of art is political in the most profound sense.
It did something. It was at least a subconscious influence. But, like I said, sometimes in talking about all of this, I don’t ever want it to seem like we’re living in End Times.
New things are being done constantly. New books are being written, new films are being made. And I always pin my faith on youth.
What was Andy Warhol like?
I didn’t particularly like him so much when I was younger. But I really appreciated him, especially when I was older. His “Last Supper” series, I thought, was brilliant.
But that was a world that really didn’t interest me. It could be a very competitive and petty world where a lot of really interesting work came out of. Sometimes the atmosphere just felt very high school to me.
I was more of a Holden Caulfield kind of kid. I really was. I used to think of myself as Holden Caulfield at the Chelsea. I was just some gangling St. Bernard jumping into the Chelsea Hotel, and there were hierarchies of people. But that’s a whole other subject.
Well, you come in, as you say, a sort of Holden Caulfield figure. You’re then known by others as the poet, and you become a very famous musician, and you release records.
But I’ve heard that you describe yourself as a poet and as a performer but not so much as a musician. So I’m curious about your sense of your own identities in that period — which ones you adopted and which ones you didn’t.
I never, in my life, considered myself a musician. I don’t deserve to be called a musician. I don’t think like a musician. I don’t apply myself. I can play really good and really loud feedback. I can write a song with a few chords. But I’m not a musician. My kids are musicians. My husband was a great musician.
I’ve been called so many names. When I was young, I was the queen of punk. Then I got too old, and I was the grandmother of punk or the godmother of punk. They always have a name for you — the poet laureate of punk.
What do all these things mean? I always tell people: If you want to call me something, call me a worker. Because that’s what I do. I work every day and try to do the best work I can.
I don’t say I am not a musician out of modesty. I’m just not. I’m a performer, and I think I’m a good performer and a strong performer — but not a musician.
What makes you a good performer?
Well, I have no fear. [Laughs.] I’m being cavalier, but I feel very comfortable onstage, and I do my best to stay in contact with the people. They’re not going to get perfection — who knows what they’re going to get? — but they always know that I’m aware that they’re there every second.
I don’t play at people, I play for them or with them. But that’s a natural thing.
You gave this performance at The Bitter End in the ’70s. It was your first performance with a drummer. Can you tell me a bit about that night?
That night will always be imprinted on my mind.
There were four of us. We didn’t have a drum, but we were playing in such a high-energy way. We had been playing CBGB, and it was really time for us to get a drummer.
We finally got one: Jay Dee Daugherty. He was only with us for a couple of weeks. We got a job at The Bitter End, and it was our debut with a drummer. So it was quite exciting.
We were at the club, and we were ready and excited. Going onstage — we were gathering a following, and I could feel the support of the people. But that night there was something extra. There was an electricity in the air that I can still access.
It was like nothing that I had felt before. And I thought: Oh, it’s probably because people are anticipating us performing with a drummer.
It was a great night. It was raucous. The people were so effusive and so with us. It was a club, but it was a small triumph. It was exciting.
I got off the stage, and I was filled with adrenaline, and I went backstage, and I heard this voice say [in a gravelly voice]: Any poets back here?
I turned around, and I went: I hate poetry.
It was Bob Dylan. I mean, I love Bob Dylan. Loved him. He was one of my greatest influences, and there he was in front of me.
I thought: Oh, that’s why it was so exciting — because Bob Dylan was there.
But I don’t know why I said that. I felt like a teenage boy — like when you act mean to a girl because you like her.
He just laughed. I always said we circled around like two pit bulls, sizing each other up.
Bob Dylan never went to see anyone. So it was quite a privilege. But I was such an upstart, I couldn’t even act grateful or anything. I was, like: Ah, so what? You’re here. So what?
I think that he understood. He was somewhat like that himself.
After that, everything just went at 78 speed because, for some reason, I felt him in our corner. So that was quite a night. And it was only a few months later that we recorded “Horses.”
Nineteen seventy-five was one of the fastest-moving years of my life, I think. It’s nice now to be celebrating it. Fifty years — that was half a century ago. Half a century ago, that night at the Bitter End. And then recording “Horses” and then going out into the world. And still here.
What has it been like to be out playing that album again?
I’m a person who keeps moving. My favorite thing is the thing I haven’t written, the next thing. But I understand what my task is when we perform it. The record has a lot of meaning to a lot of people, and we do our best to give it to them every night — not by rote but all over again.
It’s challenging, too, because I do it basically chronologically, and I have to open with “Gloria.” So I have to step onstage and start with “Gloria.” I feel grateful because people are still interested in this work that was committed half a century ago. It’s a lot of joy. But even sometimes, on certain nights, it’s — sorry. [Voice breaks.]
So many people are gone: my pianist Richard Sohl, whom I loved, too, was the founding member of the band with Lenny Kaye, and all my friends — Robert, Sam Shepard. My brother, who was the head of our crew. Oh, so many people.
Sometimes when we’re doing these songs, because they were all there then, they come back with such force. [Clears throat.] Sorry.
But despite that, I feel also the joy of celebration — and happy to be here, happy to be physically able to do it, to feel my voice is strong and that I can give the people, as authentically as I can, the experience of the record as a new experience every night. I want everyone who comes in wanting a special night to leave feeling that it was a special night — and not just another night on the road.
We did Europe, and pretty soon we’ll be starting in Seattle and ending in Philadelphia, where I got the bus to come to New York and where all these things unfolded. So it’s sort of fitting that it should end in Philadelphia.
You became big as a touring performer. You have these big records. You’re touring the world. You play stadiums. And this gets us to “Just Kids” and into your newer book: You decide to leave that behind, to move to Michigan with your partner and raise a family.
That’s quite a rare decision — to walk away from that kind of fame at that moment. And you have this line that I’ve been wondering about. You say: “After a time, if not prudent, one reaches a point of being unrecognizable to oneself.”
What about you or about your life had become unrecognizable to you?
I was getting quite popular in Europe. You play in front of 40,000 people, and you get off the stage, and you’re wired up. It was exciting. I loved rock ’n’ roll. I liked being a rock ’n’ roll star for a while. But it wasn’t what I aspired to.
I wasn’t evolving as an artist. I wasn’t writing anymore. I wasn’t evolving as a human being. I’m not criticizing anything. I’m just simply saying this had to do with me. It wasn’t my goal in life to become a rich and famous rock star or become an arrogant [expletive].
I wanted to do something important, hopefully, or something of worth, and I felt like I had to really reassess who I was and what I wanted to do. I left public life behind so I could really get a sense of who I was, what I wanted and to evolve as a human being and to be with the person I loved.
It was a very difficult decision. Very difficult — even painful. But I’ve never regretted it. Because in those next 16 years, I did evolve. Which is also painful because with evolving, you have to shed a lot of things, and you have to reassess who you are, what you have done, where you’ve been careless, how you can be better and get a more empathetic sense of the world and the people around you.
So it was a long learning process.
You open the book “Bread of Angels” with these sentences:
The pen scratches across the page rebel hump rebel hump rebel hump. What do these words mean, asks the pen. I don’t know, replies the wrist.
Throughout the book, you keep coming back to the words “rebel hump.” And it’s clear from the way you do it and the way you write that you don’t know yet what they mean. But they feel like something to you, feel like something so strong that they end up being the refrain of this entire work of art.
Yes.
So when those words came to the wrist, what did they feel like? How did you know there was so much life in them?
I didn’t. I started writing it in this fairly obscure hotel in Nice, looking at the Bay of Angels. I hadn’t written in a long time. I was distraught because I was having a period where I just wasn’t able to write.
Then all of a sudden, I started writing, and that’s what I wrote. So I didn’t question it. I sensed that it was something. I just knew that it had worth.
As I wrote the book, it kept revealing to me aspects of what it was.
There’s a passage from that book I’d love you to read. It starts: “We wage the fever of disappointment.”
[Smith reads.]
We wage the fever of disappointment, the realization that yesterday’s crumbling tower was not a fantasy, that like the Prince of Aquitaine, one is hurled and drawn like a human tarot card. How can we leap back up? Get back on our feet, grab a cart and start gathering the debris, both physical and emotional. Crush it into small stones, then pulverize them and as the dust settles, dance upon it. How do we do that? By returning to our child self, weathering our obstacles in good faith. For children operate in the perpetual present, they go on, rebuild their castles, lay down their casts and crutches, and walk again.
I love that: “Crush it into small stones, then pulverize them and as the dust settles, dance upon it.” And it makes me think of something you did in your own life — where you gave up the life of a rock star.
For a lot of people who do work that happens in front of an audience, whether they’re a writer or a musician or a performer or a podcaster, it’s very easy, as you become more successful, to measure how good the work is by how big the audience is.
I never think like that.
I’m sure you know many people who do, and I am sure there is a seduction in that for everybody. That’s some kind of measurement the world is giving you back.
How did you stay connected to the voice inside of you about whether the work was great — as opposed to the voices outside telling you what was great?
That’s not hard for me because I’m my roughest critic, really. I’ve never measured my worth by performing because it comes naturally. It’s my job to do a good job and connect with the people.
I don’t measure myself by the amount of adulation nor discord or hatred or anything. I don’t let those things affect me. I don’t measure how good my work is by what a critic says. I just do my job, and I perform for the people.
I just want to do something of worth. I want to write a book as good as “Pinocchio.” I want to do one book where I can look at it and go: This deserves the trees that were sacrificed for it.
Do you feel that way about any of the books you’ve written?
I think that in all my books there are some really good things. I can’t say I wrote the perfect book. I’m still trying.
I think it would be horrible to know internally that you have done the best work you can do. That would be a kind of death.
Yes, it would be. You’re right. So let’s say I haven’t made it yet. [Laughs.] I’m still trying.
You write about your life in Michigan:
Our life was obscure. Perhaps not so interesting to some, but for us it was a whole life. Sometimes challenging, yet I could feel my own evolution in slow but real time.
It was painful, as though scrubbing centuries of skin, ash, debris from an unearthed vessel coming at last into its own. rebel hump rebel hump.
Right there, in that passage — what are those rebel humps?
I think that’s more of a cry of: Where are you? Because the rebel hump — it’s many things. Some of the things that I found troublesome about myself were part of the rebel hump. Sometimes, when I had a small victory, the rebel hump glows or shimmers. Some aspects of the rebel hump you want to shed, but the essence of it, for me, is probably one’s deepest creative source, one’s imagination.
Sometimes we feel abandoned. In the New Testament, you even have Jesus feeling abandoned by his father. We all feel abandoned by our muse — in many, many different ways. And it’s a very painful thing, even if you know, because you have great faith, you aren’t abandoned. That you feel abandoned is painful, and it’s a hump that you have to get over.
What is that work like for you? If somebody is listening to this and they want to be a writer, what is the work of becoming better as a writer?
I always tell people it’s like a muscle that you have to exercise every day. I just write every day.
When you’re young, you think: Oh, I’m going to smoke some pot and write a poem. It’s not like that. In the ’80s, when I left public life, I wrote every single day. I struggled. I’d write the same paragraph 10 times because I write everything by hand. But I got to the point where I couldn’t not write. That’s when you know you’re a writer — when you can’t not write.
I could imagine life not performing, not singing, not drawing, not doing many, many things in life — but I could not imagine not writing.
I always think there are two sides to writing. We always focus on what gets written, what comes out of the person. But there’s also what comes into the person.
You have a lovely quote where you say: “That is something I can do, sit quietly, go elsewhere and not return empty-handed.”
How, as a writer, do you not return empty-handed? How do you create what to write with?
I study a lot, and I research a lot and think a lot. I’ll want to write a mystery story about Kyoto in the 17th century, so I’ll do a lot of studying and then maybe, months later, I’ll have all of the material in order to write some type of fable.
But other things, like in “Bread of Angels,” when I was sitting in that hotel, on the little balcony at the Bay of Angels, I had nothing in mind. I was so demoralized and so tired, and I was just looking out at the bay in a sort of circular way. I was receptive, and I was given the words to start the book.
And then when I was struggling to finish the book, I finished a tour in Paris, and I had several days off, and I just decided to go there again. All the burdens and all the beauty floating in that water. And I just wrote it out.
And I finished the book. But this was one of those rare moments where I began and ended something in the same place. Even thinking about it makes me feel very privileged. Those things can’t be planned, nor can they be pushed.
The way you said it was very nice: How does it come to you? Some things come to you. Other things you labor for, you study for. This other magical realm, you can’t really summon it. You can’t demand it. It will come to you.
Jim Morrison was right: “You cannot petition the Lord with prayer.” You can’t say: Great, mighty Bay of Angels, give me the words.
I was just generously given a gift.
There is a mystery to the process. I said a second ago that I always think there are two pieces to it: What comes in and what goes out.
That’s actually not entirely true — there’s this thing that happens in between those two. Some kind of processing of it all has to happen in the middle. And I don’t understand that process in myself. Something happens, and then there is what to work with — but it’s not exactly what came in. That’s the part that I find the strangest.
I’ve become much more respectful of the process over the years, but I still would not say I understand it.
That’s beautiful, and it’s the same thing — it’s sort of alchemy. That miracle area, that unspoken thing that’s our alchemical — I don’t know how else to say it. Because in alchemy you take all of these elements and produce something else. It could be gold, but it could also be some wisdom or enlightenment or just understanding of your own material. But that’s a precious realm, and you’ve articulated it perfectly.
But it also has to be nourished. Years of what you do, years of what I’ve done — we have to develop certain disciplines, and those disciplines come to hand.
It’s all the magic in creation. My mother could transform a bag of potatoes when my father was on strike and there was no other food — just a big bag of potatoes.
My mother would look at that bag of potatoes and think about it, in tears, because that’s all she had to give us. And by the end of the evening, she had created a mystical mountain of the best French fries ever, the best potato pancakes ever, and put it all on the newspaper, on the floor and let us watch “Frankenstein.” Then you weren’t conscious at all of the fact that they were struggling and that we were sort of hungry or that the cupboards were bare. All we knew was the magic that she had created for us.
I love that story as a parent who needs to do a better job of finding that magic for my children sometimes.
One thing I hear in that is that there has to be space to hear the voices. You said she would get quiet and look at the bag of potatoes. There’s chaos all around her —
Smoke a cigarette in tears. [Laughs.]
You discuss in your book about moving to Michigan and being away from the noise of the audience, away from the noise of fame.
I actually do think this is very important when you’re talking about nourishing that internal voice. I often think of it as listening to it. And it gets drowned out. You can become a more sensitive listener or a less sensitive listener. But even if you are a sensitive listener, if you’re listening to everything around you and outside of you, it’s very, very hard to hear.
So what are the conditions for you in which it’s easier for you to listen?
At this time in my life — I’m going to be 79 — I’ve been through all kinds of things, and I don’t really require anything. I can be in a noisy cafe or in the back of a taxicab or sitting on a park bench. I just have a lot of faith now.
I know what I want out of this next stretch of life. I know what I want to do, and I am just grateful for anything that I can do. I know what I want, and I know how I want to spend the lion’s share of my time.
Despite everything that’s happening in the world and everything around us and any frustration or helplessness we feel or betrayal we feel, we have to remember it’s also all right to feel the joy of being alive and feel the joy of your own possibilities. Even in the face of the suffering of so many people around us.
I have to hold on to the fact that I have my own life, and I have duties that I have to perform. I have a family to take care of. But I also have the same calling I did when I was young: to nourish and to do the work that I believe I was given the possibility to do.
I’m not going to let anything shake that faith, no matter what kind of rubble or debris of our time I have to walk through. I believe in my rebel hump. So I’m not going to let anyone destroy it. I’m just going to keep doing my work.
Before I ask for your book recommendations, which is always how we end the show, I want to go back to the beginning — to the questions you had asked your mom when you were little, when you realized you had to figure out the answers yourself.
Now, three-quarters of a century later, what is a soul — and what color is it?
I believe it’s the color of water — that’s what I think. I think the soul is the color of water.
And what is the soul? It’s not important to me to know what it is. It’s many things. But I believe in it. I believe it’s an energy that will keep traveling even when breath is gone. I’m hoping to keep traveling. I’m hoping to see Fred somewhere.
I don’t have any particular system. My system has no system at all. When I think about the first moment I saw Fred and how I knew he was the person — I can still access that. I can still access what it felt like to look at Picasso at 12. And I can still access how I felt hearing Bob Dylan for the first time. They remain within me. And I can still access joy.
And then, always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
Oh, my gosh. My head is swirling so much with a million books. But just for a little continuity, I would say read “Pinocchio” and “Frankenstein.”
There are two creators who have created life: Geppetto creates the naughty puppet who redeems himself. And then Mary Shelley writes “Frankenstein” — truly a masterpiece. Two different takes on creating, being an almost God figure and creating life. And “Pinocchio” because it’s redemptive.
And I would say always read some poetry by Sylvia Plath.
Read “2666” because I think it was our first 21st-century masterpiece.
By Roberto Bolaño.
Yes. I think it’s just brilliant.
I love so many books — it’s a terrible question to ask me. But “Pinocchio” is my go-to book. I’ve read it a hundred times. And that was always my dream — if I could write a book as good as “Pinocchio,” then I could say: OK, I did my job.
So I’m still working on it.
Patti Smith, thank you so much.
You’re welcome. Thank you.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
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