[ed. Not much of a Patti Smith fan but loved her memoir Just Kids.]
The woman who cuts my hair – forty-something, old enough to remember punk but a neo-hippy these days – recently mentioned she’d been to see Patti Smith, who was touring her 1975 album, Horses, for its 40th anniversary. ‘Patti, yeah! Went to see her at the Roundhouse. Paid £30, which I didn’t think was too bad … Didn’t stay that long, though’ – snip, snip – ‘Went up the front and had a proper look, up close and personal’ – snip, snip – ‘And then I left early.’ This is fitting for a performer it’s almost de rigueur to call ‘iconic’. The price of entrance is paid to receive the benison of her holy presence, not to listen to the once volatile, trance-inducing music.
Smith (née Smith), who turns seventy this year, has had just one hit single (‘Because the Night’ in 1978, co-written with Bruce Springsteen) in forty years, and the only one of her 11 albums with an unassailable reputation is her glorious debut, Horses. I’ve known many people who dearly love Horses, but I can’t recall a single person ever declaring a passion for any of the other work, intermittent poetry and photography included. (If you type ‘patti smith lyrics’ into Google, five of the eight most popular songs are on Horses, and one is ‘Because the Night’.) For a while now, Smith has been the sort of feel-good, feels-real celeb who gets invited to ‘guest edit’ Vogue when the Dalai Lama is resting. But it’s hard to know how much anyone likes any of her post-Horses work, or what ‘popular’ really signifies in her case. Smith isn’t Bruce Springsteen or Beyoncé popular; but neither is she some divisive figure out on the blasted perimeter, like Scott Walker. Devoted fans prize her as one of our culture’s great ungovernable Outsiders. This fan club includes the grandees of the French establishment, who in 2005 named her a commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, making Smith about as much of an insider as it’s possible for an outsider to be. ‘Outside of society/That’s where I wanna be!’ she once bawled, in the lamentably titled ‘Rock’n’Roll Nigger’. This kind of earnestly meaningless rallying cry may be forgivable in the very young (or very stoned); Smith was 31 when it was recorded. ‘I’m pretty much unmanageable at this point,’ she claimed in a 2002 New Yorker profile. The same profile went on to detail a full itinerary of gigs and poetry readings, a big new official retrospective CD, new books, the continuing sales of Horses etc.
Horses is one of a handful of punk-era albums that people still listen to, and find stirringly polyvalent. It’s difficult now to capture just how wild and singular it felt when it came out. Smith crumbled scores of unspoken barriers just by being herself: spiky, garrulous, unguarded. The Robert Mapplethorpe portrait on the album cover – a deceptively simple monochrome shot – dared each viewer to find his or her own take on its sibylline RSVP: this is who I am, take it or leave it. If you were a young woman looking for a sympathetic figure to embody various inchoate feelings, the choice at the time was almost non-existent. Smith was a tiny echo from the future. White shirt, dark hair; white background, dark eyes; tiny white equine jewel, dark tie; hands in a cagy gunfighter’s arch over her wide-open heart: this hauntingly simple image anticipated so much to come in fashion, and helped launch a whole new pared-back aesthetic. Watch any BBC4 repeat of Top of the Pops from the mid to late 1970s and it seems inconceivable that the Smith of Mapplethorpe’s photo belongs to the same blithe, peppy era. She seems more real than the crinkly tinfoil stars of the time, but also a thousand times more fantastic. Think of all those 1970s prog rock sleeves and their multicoloured worlds of sauciness and sorcery – then switch to the stark monochrome field of Horses, and other images waiting in the wings: Richard Hell, Iggy Pop, the Ramones. It really was, as the old cliché has it, that black and white. (...)
The woman who cuts my hair – forty-something, old enough to remember punk but a neo-hippy these days – recently mentioned she’d been to see Patti Smith, who was touring her 1975 album, Horses, for its 40th anniversary. ‘Patti, yeah! Went to see her at the Roundhouse. Paid £30, which I didn’t think was too bad … Didn’t stay that long, though’ – snip, snip – ‘Went up the front and had a proper look, up close and personal’ – snip, snip – ‘And then I left early.’ This is fitting for a performer it’s almost de rigueur to call ‘iconic’. The price of entrance is paid to receive the benison of her holy presence, not to listen to the once volatile, trance-inducing music.
Smith (née Smith), who turns seventy this year, has had just one hit single (‘Because the Night’ in 1978, co-written with Bruce Springsteen) in forty years, and the only one of her 11 albums with an unassailable reputation is her glorious debut, Horses. I’ve known many people who dearly love Horses, but I can’t recall a single person ever declaring a passion for any of the other work, intermittent poetry and photography included. (If you type ‘patti smith lyrics’ into Google, five of the eight most popular songs are on Horses, and one is ‘Because the Night’.) For a while now, Smith has been the sort of feel-good, feels-real celeb who gets invited to ‘guest edit’ Vogue when the Dalai Lama is resting. But it’s hard to know how much anyone likes any of her post-Horses work, or what ‘popular’ really signifies in her case. Smith isn’t Bruce Springsteen or Beyoncé popular; but neither is she some divisive figure out on the blasted perimeter, like Scott Walker. Devoted fans prize her as one of our culture’s great ungovernable Outsiders. This fan club includes the grandees of the French establishment, who in 2005 named her a commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, making Smith about as much of an insider as it’s possible for an outsider to be. ‘Outside of society/That’s where I wanna be!’ she once bawled, in the lamentably titled ‘Rock’n’Roll Nigger’. This kind of earnestly meaningless rallying cry may be forgivable in the very young (or very stoned); Smith was 31 when it was recorded. ‘I’m pretty much unmanageable at this point,’ she claimed in a 2002 New Yorker profile. The same profile went on to detail a full itinerary of gigs and poetry readings, a big new official retrospective CD, new books, the continuing sales of Horses etc.
Horses is one of a handful of punk-era albums that people still listen to, and find stirringly polyvalent. It’s difficult now to capture just how wild and singular it felt when it came out. Smith crumbled scores of unspoken barriers just by being herself: spiky, garrulous, unguarded. The Robert Mapplethorpe portrait on the album cover – a deceptively simple monochrome shot – dared each viewer to find his or her own take on its sibylline RSVP: this is who I am, take it or leave it. If you were a young woman looking for a sympathetic figure to embody various inchoate feelings, the choice at the time was almost non-existent. Smith was a tiny echo from the future. White shirt, dark hair; white background, dark eyes; tiny white equine jewel, dark tie; hands in a cagy gunfighter’s arch over her wide-open heart: this hauntingly simple image anticipated so much to come in fashion, and helped launch a whole new pared-back aesthetic. Watch any BBC4 repeat of Top of the Pops from the mid to late 1970s and it seems inconceivable that the Smith of Mapplethorpe’s photo belongs to the same blithe, peppy era. She seems more real than the crinkly tinfoil stars of the time, but also a thousand times more fantastic. Think of all those 1970s prog rock sleeves and their multicoloured worlds of sauciness and sorcery – then switch to the stark monochrome field of Horses, and other images waiting in the wings: Richard Hell, Iggy Pop, the Ramones. It really was, as the old cliché has it, that black and white. (...)
For its awed young audience, Horses was a noisy firework inauguration; for Smith, it pretty much announced the end of an era. She had developed her work from the end of the 1960s and through the 1970s inside a small protective circle of New York friends: no pressure, no deadlines, all the time to rewrite in the world. She could experiment with how much to reveal, what to mythologise, how far to dare, how loud or quiet to read, what to hold back. One of the reasons Smith sounds so confident on her debut is that she had been working on it for years. The unforgettable intro of the opening song, ‘Gloria’ (‘Jesus died/for somebody’s sins/but not mine’), began life as a long, barely punctuated text from 1970 originally titled ‘Oath’, and later ‘In Excelsis Deo’, as she confirms in Collected Lyrics 1970-2015. If these spooky proclamations don’t sound like your average 1970s rock song it’s partly because they didn’t start out as rock songs. They started out as poems, or as the kind of avant-garde-lite poetry in vogue at the time. No capital letters, ‘w/’ instead of ‘with’ and ‘thru’ instead of ‘through’: Emily Dickinson via Charles Bukowski; Artaud and Bataille laced with American me-first and can-do. (...)
In 1980, she married another rock’n’roll lifer, MC5 guitarist Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, and together they took a long time-out from the music business. They settled just outside Detroit and had two children. They released one album together, 1988’s Dream of Life. Her new book, M Train, makes this time sound like the period when life and dream merged for her, indissolubly. You get the impression her slightly more grounded partner brought her back to her senses, showing her that ordinary back-garden life could be a source of alchemical gold, too. Then, in 1994, Fred Smith had a massive heart attack and died, aged just 45; her brother Todd died unexpectedly soon afterwards. Robert Mapplethorpe had died in 1989, after complications arising from HIV/Aids; Richard Sohl, the pianist in the Patti Smith Band, had died of a heart attack aged 37, in 1990. Anyone might have been floored by such a cruel turn of events, and friends encouraged Smith to return to music as a way of coping. Grief became entwined with songwriting. She wrote about Kurt Cobain in ‘About a Boy’, and elsewhere referenced the deaths of two of her mentors, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. The sleeve of Gung Ho (2000) was the first not to feature her own portrait, replacing it with an old snapshot of her late father. She seemed to be securing some kind of future by assessing her past (a not uncommon manoeuvre in middle age, even among non-artists). When Just Kids, the memoir devoted to her life-changing relationship with Mapplethorpe, came out in 2010, many readers, myself included, were pleasantly surprised by a new turn in her writing: there was far less straining for wild ‘poetic’ effect, and far more delight in the joys of everyday life.
For the most part, M Train continues in this vein. It reads like the work of someone who has learned to trust her instincts, telling us what she genuinely takes pleasure in rather than what she thinks she ought to be seen referencing. Even if some traces of the old googly-eyed boho persona remain, she seems to have realised she is not duty bound to put on a grand show of seamy decadence when that is not really (or not always) who she is. (She also seems to have found a good, old-fashioned, no-nonsense editor; neither M Train nor Just Kids has the longueurs of many other rock memoirs.) It’s no use pretending your life is all Verlaine and Rimbaud when you’ve mostly been raising a family in suburban Michigan. Once her diaristic poem-texts let us in on her ‘urge to shit voltaire style’; now we get Our Lady of the Cat Litter Tray. (...)
The spell-casting mood of M Train demands that Smith fly off on a moment’s whim, spurred on by nothing more than a lovely line in a new book she’s picked up: she realises she loves Writer A, who either lives or is now buried in City B, decides she has to be there NOW, and before you know it she’s graveside again, the Intercity angel of death in dark Helmut Lang pants and Ann Demeulemeester cloak. It’s all so smooth and hassle-free it could be a 1980s edition of the old BBC Holiday programme. While Smith certainly wouldn’t give Mariah Carey anything to worry about in the diva stakes, she is still a well-known rock star, and this is definitely not global travel as most of us experience it. In the late 1970s, Smith’s path crossed with another mysterious traveller, Bruce Chatwin, who was part of the same moneyed, arty, cross-continental gay set as Mapplethorpe and his patron/lover Sam Wagstaff. There are things in M Train that niggle at me in the same way Chatwin’s work often did: the feeling that for all their much vaunted ‘realism’ these treks occurred in a rather privileged sphere. There’s always a rich pal to provide a bed, a dinner table, a handy castle to stay at for the season; there’s always someone in the background to make sure the plane tickets arrive; fresh figs on the bedside table. Special people, living by special rules. Like Chatwin, Smith is also a bit of a consumer fetishist: the simplest things have to have a special aura or signature – or, let’s get real, a high-toned brand name. It has to be a certain Moleskine notebook. The pencil has to be Conté. The ink has to be from a little shop no one knows in the backstreets of Florence. (Full disclosure: like many writers, I too work with a special favourite pen – it’s a freebie from my wife’s West London dentist’s.)
In 1980, she married another rock’n’roll lifer, MC5 guitarist Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, and together they took a long time-out from the music business. They settled just outside Detroit and had two children. They released one album together, 1988’s Dream of Life. Her new book, M Train, makes this time sound like the period when life and dream merged for her, indissolubly. You get the impression her slightly more grounded partner brought her back to her senses, showing her that ordinary back-garden life could be a source of alchemical gold, too. Then, in 1994, Fred Smith had a massive heart attack and died, aged just 45; her brother Todd died unexpectedly soon afterwards. Robert Mapplethorpe had died in 1989, after complications arising from HIV/Aids; Richard Sohl, the pianist in the Patti Smith Band, had died of a heart attack aged 37, in 1990. Anyone might have been floored by such a cruel turn of events, and friends encouraged Smith to return to music as a way of coping. Grief became entwined with songwriting. She wrote about Kurt Cobain in ‘About a Boy’, and elsewhere referenced the deaths of two of her mentors, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. The sleeve of Gung Ho (2000) was the first not to feature her own portrait, replacing it with an old snapshot of her late father. She seemed to be securing some kind of future by assessing her past (a not uncommon manoeuvre in middle age, even among non-artists). When Just Kids, the memoir devoted to her life-changing relationship with Mapplethorpe, came out in 2010, many readers, myself included, were pleasantly surprised by a new turn in her writing: there was far less straining for wild ‘poetic’ effect, and far more delight in the joys of everyday life.
For the most part, M Train continues in this vein. It reads like the work of someone who has learned to trust her instincts, telling us what she genuinely takes pleasure in rather than what she thinks she ought to be seen referencing. Even if some traces of the old googly-eyed boho persona remain, she seems to have realised she is not duty bound to put on a grand show of seamy decadence when that is not really (or not always) who she is. (She also seems to have found a good, old-fashioned, no-nonsense editor; neither M Train nor Just Kids has the longueurs of many other rock memoirs.) It’s no use pretending your life is all Verlaine and Rimbaud when you’ve mostly been raising a family in suburban Michigan. Once her diaristic poem-texts let us in on her ‘urge to shit voltaire style’; now we get Our Lady of the Cat Litter Tray. (...)
The spell-casting mood of M Train demands that Smith fly off on a moment’s whim, spurred on by nothing more than a lovely line in a new book she’s picked up: she realises she loves Writer A, who either lives or is now buried in City B, decides she has to be there NOW, and before you know it she’s graveside again, the Intercity angel of death in dark Helmut Lang pants and Ann Demeulemeester cloak. It’s all so smooth and hassle-free it could be a 1980s edition of the old BBC Holiday programme. While Smith certainly wouldn’t give Mariah Carey anything to worry about in the diva stakes, she is still a well-known rock star, and this is definitely not global travel as most of us experience it. In the late 1970s, Smith’s path crossed with another mysterious traveller, Bruce Chatwin, who was part of the same moneyed, arty, cross-continental gay set as Mapplethorpe and his patron/lover Sam Wagstaff. There are things in M Train that niggle at me in the same way Chatwin’s work often did: the feeling that for all their much vaunted ‘realism’ these treks occurred in a rather privileged sphere. There’s always a rich pal to provide a bed, a dinner table, a handy castle to stay at for the season; there’s always someone in the background to make sure the plane tickets arrive; fresh figs on the bedside table. Special people, living by special rules. Like Chatwin, Smith is also a bit of a consumer fetishist: the simplest things have to have a special aura or signature – or, let’s get real, a high-toned brand name. It has to be a certain Moleskine notebook. The pencil has to be Conté. The ink has to be from a little shop no one knows in the backstreets of Florence. (Full disclosure: like many writers, I too work with a special favourite pen – it’s a freebie from my wife’s West London dentist’s.)
by Ian Penman, LRB | Read more:
Image: Robert Mapplethorpe in front of his cover for Patti Smith’s Horses, 1975 ca
