Patti Smith sinks into the armchair of a Berlin bar, all sharp angles and
scarecrow intensity. Even at 61, the veteran poet-rocker still exudes an
ageless and androgynous beauty. For such an iconic figure, she also seems
strangely pagan and untamed, like the world’s most bohemian bag lady.
Wiry and compact, with an unkempt tangle of greying hair, Smith still has some
of the regal cool of Keith Richards and the ugly-sexy aloofness of a young
Bob Dylan. She exudes maternal warmth and intelligence, but there is
something flinty and haughty too.
Her wild conversational forays tend to begin in the present day, loop back
through 1970s New York, and finish somewhere in 19th-century Paris, sipping
absinthe with Rimbaud and Verlaine. The New York Times may have
dubbed Smith the “Godmother of Punk”, but she is far more hippie earth
mother than spiky rebel rocker. After all, she began performing with her
long-time guitarist Lenny Kaye in 1971, five years before punk rock was even
christened. Kaye has even called the Patti Smith Group “the last of the
1960s bands”. Her current cultural heroes are more Wagner, Proust and Brecht
than any of her rock peers.
But unlike most of her punk contemporaries, Smith’s creative flame has burnt
ever brighter in middle age. This year alone, she has hosted a major
exhibition of her art and journals at the Cartier Foundation in Paris,
published two books of poetry and photography, and released a collaborative
album with the My Bloody Valentine guitarist Kevin Shields based on her epic
1996 poem The Coral Sea.
Smith’s other major current project is Dream of Life, a
remarkable low-budget documentary about her life and work. Shot over an
11-year period by the fashion photographer Steven Sebring, the film offers a
stream-of-consciousness portrait of the singer, her artistic passions and
absent friends. It also features recent live footage of Smith, who remains a
feral and fiery performer.
“I’ve aged, obviously, in appearance and chronologically, but I’m not that
different a performer,” she says. “I find it interesting that I can dig into
my electric guitar and access the same feeling I had at 24. It’s the same
adolescent irreverence. When I get on stage and plug in my guitar, I am such
an animal. It just brings out something so primitive.”
More impressionistic scrapbook than rockumentary, Dream of Life is
opaque and pretentious in places, but full of sublime and haunting moments.
Much like a conversation with Smith, Sebring’s film slips fluidly between
past and present, eliding the personal and the political, summoning ghosts
and literary heroes.
Smith met Sebring through a mutual friend, Michael Stipe of R.E.M. “We met in
Detroit in 1995, on a photoshoot,” Sebring says. “Michael brought me to
Patti and there was an immediate spiritual connection.” The clincher, Smith
recalls, was when her children instantly warmed to Sebring. “It was like God
gave me a new brother,” she says.
At the time, Smith was reeling from the sudden death of her brother Todd and
musician husband Fred “Sonic” Smith in quick succession. With his wife, Fred
Smith virtually retired from music in the 1980s to raise their two children,
Jackson and Jesse. All three appear in Dream of Life, as well as
touching footage of Smith’s parents.
These flashbacks to Smith’s childhood provide some of the most illuminating
scenes in Dream of Life. Grant and Beverly Smith, who both died while
the film was gestating, were working-class liberals with broad cultural
tastes who bequeathed to their tomboy daughter a lifelong love of opera,
jazz and literature.
“It wasn’t necessarily a bohemian household,” Smith recalls. “I didn’t totally
fit in even to that. I had my own ideas, my own drives. Also I was tall and
skinny, a brooding kind of kid, into jazz and Joan Baez and then Bob Dylan,
in a rural community where the things that preoccupied me were foreign to
most of my neighbours.”
Smith has multiple projects in the works, including a new album and a memoir
of her relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. The singer
met her former lover and soulmate in 1967, soon after leaving her family
home in rural New Jersey for the low-rent bohemia of downtown New York.
Mapplethorpe took the much-fêted, much-debated cover shot of Smith looking
intriguingly genderless for her 1975 debut album Horses. He died of
an Aids-related illness in 1989, aged just 42. Smith seems keen to clarify
the relentless myth-making about their shared past as the royal couple of
arty-party New York.
“I’m writing a book about Robert,” she says, “because I promised him I would.
I can tell you now, anything you read about that period of my life — my main
criticism, aside from a lot of lies and exaggerations, is that it’s devoid
of magic. That period had a very special magic and no one has ever captured
it, so I decided I would write about it myself.”
Dream of Life begins with a newly widowed Smith returning from
hibernation, encouraged by musician friends to record and play live again.
R.E.M. recorded a duet with her, and Bob Dylan invited her on tour. It was
the dawn of the most prolific decade in her career.
“Bob Dylan gave me my first tour in 16 years,” Smith says, clearly still in
awe of the man she describes as the “secret boyfriend” of her adolescence.
“The first couple of times I got on stage I felt almost as if I was going to
have a heart attack, so emotionally moved I could hardly speak. But people
were very patient and encouraging.”
Dylan appears fleetingly in Dream of Life as a typically shadowy
background presence. Other famous fans are not so elusive. Sam Shepard,
Smith’s lover during her boho-empress heyday, drops by to strum a ramshackle
guitar duet. Stipe, Bono, Thom Yorke, of Radiohead, and Flea from the Red
Hot Chili Peppers also pay tribute on camera.
“All these people, I listen to them and I can’t really hear any influence,”
Smith frowns. “If they say we gave them any inspiration then I’m proud of
that, but all these people have done great work. They were all supportive
when I had to come back, because of fate, into the public eye.” Smith talks
warmly of her musician friends, but she can be prickly if they breach her
famously guarded personal boundaries. When Bono described her as “a sister,
lover and mother” at a 1997 awards ceremony she snapped back: “I’m not your
mother, Bono. Do your own dirty work. F*** you.” Afterwards she told NME,
“I’m not up for grabs”.
Smith’s former lovers include musicians and artists such as Mapplethorpe,
Shepard and Tom Verlaine. Her most public relationship since losing her
husband was with her former guitarist, Oliver Ray, which ended around 2005.
But she cautions against mistaking the gender-blurring, untamed sexuality in
her songs for intimate confessionals. “My work does not reflect my sexual
preferences,” Smith has said, “it reflects the fact that I feel total
freedom as an artist.”
At 61, Smith’s vagabond existence glimpsed in Dream of Life is
one of ramshackle apartments, crumbling houses and spartan rooms strewn with
arty clutter. Smith may be international rock royalty, but the material
world seems almost immaterial to her.
“The things that come with celebrity, whether it’s a magazine cover or
adulation or money, do not tell me who I am,” she shrugs. “It didn’t help
when I had to cook dinner or scrub floors or take care of my children. It
didn’t make any difference when I lost my husband and my brother and had to
start my life again. The gods of celebrity don’t care. And no amount of fame
or prosperity can replace the value of great work.”
As Dream of Life demonstrates, Smith has also become a much more
political animal in recent years than during her 1970s punk-poet days. A
passionate critic of the Bush Administration, the singer’s 2004 album Trampin’
contained one of the first recorded protest songs against the Iraq war,
Radio Baghdad.
More recently, Smith has written songs condemning Israel’s airstrike on the
Lebanese town of Qana and the incarceration of the Guantánamo Bay prisoner
Murat Kurnaz. Earlier this year she wrote a short preface to Kurnaz’s prison
memoir, Five Years of My Life.
“When I was young I was so depressed about Vietnam; now it seems almost a
luxury that that was all I had to be depressed about,” Smith sighs. “There
is so much injustice and corruption, it just seems endless. But one has to
do one’s work, to live one’s life and do the best one can.”
Barack Obama’s victory, at least, appears to have renewed Smith’s faith in
people power and American optimism. “My country is in big trouble right
now,” she says. “But we are a young country and we are very tough. Better
times will come.”
The ghosts of the past may haunt any conversation with Smith, but she still
seems excited and engaged. “Somebody asked me the other day: what’s your
greatest time?” she says. “And short of saying when my husband was alive,
when my children were small and we were all together — for me, it’s right
now.”
Rock docs
Woodstock (1970) Hendrix, The Who and Joplin in the mother of all rock
festivals.
No Direction Home (2005) Exhaustive Bob Dylan profile by Martin
Scorsese
Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten (2007) Julien Temple’s all-star
epitaph to the punk legend.
