Patti Smith

Patti Smith is an American singer, poet and visual artist associated with art punk, art rock, blues, folk rock, garage rock and glam rock. She is born in Chicago, United States, and is closely linked to the New York punk movement, where she becomes known for combining beat poetry delivery with stripped-back rock music.

Early life and beginnings

Smith grows up in Deptford, New Jersey, after being born in Chicago. Her mother, Beverly, is a jazz singer and her father, Grant, works at the Honeywell plant. Raised in a Jehovah’s Witness household, she receives a Bible-based religious education but leaves organised religion as a teenager. After graduating from Deptford Township High School in 1964, she works in a factory. In 1967 she leaves Glassboro State Teachers College and moves to New York City, where she works in a bookshop with the poet Janet Hamill and meets photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

In 1969 Smith travels to Paris with her sister, busks and does performance art, then returns to New York and lives at the Hotel Chelsea with Mapplethorpe. She spends time at Max’s Kansas City and CBGB, appears with Wayne County in Jackie Curtis’s play Femme Fatale, and joins the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, where she paints, writes and performs in the early 1970s. She also appears for one night in Sam Shepard’s Cowboy Mouth in 1971 and writes rock journalism for Creem.

Patti Smith Group

By 1974 Smith is performing rock music with guitarist Lenny Kaye, later with a band that also includes Ivan Kral on bass, Jay Dee Daugherty on drums and Richard Sohl on piano. Robert Mapplethorpe finances the group’s first single, Hey Joe/Piss Factory, in 1974. The release pairs a version of Hey Joe with a spoken-word section about Patty Hearst, while the B-side draws on Smith’s factory work and her discovery of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations.

The Patti Smith Group signs to Arista Records under Clive Davis. Smith’s first album, Horses, follows in 1975 and is produced by John Cale. It mixes punk rock and spoken poetry, opens with a version of Van Morrison’s Gloria, and includes her line, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” The group tours the United States and Europe as punk grows in popularity.

Radio Ethiopia, the second album, has a rougher sound and is less accessible than Horses, but Smith continues to perform songs from it. In 1977, while touring in support of the record, she falls from a stage in Tampa, Florida and breaks several neck vertebrae, leading to rest and physical therapy. The group then releases two more albums in the 1970s: Easter in 1978, her most commercially successful record, and Wave in 1979. Easter includes Because the Night, co-written with Bruce Springsteen. Wave includes Frederick and Dancing Barefoot, both of which receive commercial airplay.

Later career

Before Wave is released, Smith meets Fred Sonic Smith, former guitarist with MC5 and Sonic’s Rendezvous Band. They marry and have two children, Jackson and Jesse. She spends much of the 1980s in semi-retirement, living with her family in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, north of Detroit. In 1988 she releases Dream of Life, which includes People Have the Power. Fred Smith dies in 1994, followed soon after by the deaths of her brother Todd and original keyboard player Richard Sohl.

After these losses, Smith returns to New York and tours briefly with Bob Dylan in 1995. In 1996 she records Gone Again, which includes About a Boy, a tribute to Kurt Cobain. That same year she collaborates with Michael Stipe on R.E.M.’s E-Bow the Letter. She then releases Peace and Noise in 1997 and Gung Ho in 2000. A box set, The Patti Smith Masters, appears in 1996, followed by the compilation Land (1975–2002) in 2002, which includes a cover of Prince’s When Doves Cry.

Smith’s 2004 album Trampin’ includes songs about motherhood and partly honours her mother, who dies two years earlier. In 2005 she curates the Meltdown festival in London, where the penultimate event is the first full live performance of Horses; Tom Verlaine replaces Oliver Ray for that show, later released as Horses/Horses. She also gives a literary lecture on Arthur Rimbaud and William Blake in 2005, and is named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.

In 2006 Smith performs at CBGB for the venue’s final night, ending with Elegie and a reading of names of dead punk figures and advocates. She is inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007 and dedicates the honour to Fred Smith, performing Gimme Shelter. In 2008 the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris hosts her exhibition Land 250, drawn from work made between 1967 and 2007. That year she also receives an honorary doctorate from Rowan University, and the documentary Patti Smith: Dream of Life is made about her. In 2012 she releases Banga, her 11th studio album, with songs inspired by literature including Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and Gogol.

Art and recognition

Smith’s work combines music, poetry and visual art, and her style is often identified with art-punk and spoken-word performance. Her influence on punk is reinforced by her early role in New York’s downtown scene, her association with writers and artists such as Mapplethorpe, Allen Ginsberg and Michael Stipe, and her long career across recording, performance, publishing and exhibitions. She also receives recognition from French cultural institutions and is inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.