Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine
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Freedom is inside of me, it means that I'm not hung
up with like anybody's idea of how I should be.
I'm outside of society, I'm an artist, rock and roll is my art
and I'm free because I can leap up and scream, I can put my fist up in the air.
I don't give a shit.
In 1975, the rock scene was completely shaken up by an extraordinary woman,
unlike any other.
Personifying the '70s New York underground scene,
Patti Smith revolutionized rock through her poetry as well as her style.
If you have the balls or the conceit to call yourself a poet,
then you should only want to be as great as the greats.
Punk in her soul, she blurred the boundaries of the genre, wielding art
as a political weapon.
Patti Smith according to a lot of rock critics is unique
among female rockers for an awful lot of reasons.
One of them is that, unlike most female rock singers,
she doesn't play the vamp and she doesn't play the victim.
Take me now, baby, here as I am,
pull me close try and understand.
During her fifty-year career, with only one commercial hit,
Patti Smith managed to become a living legend
without ever minimizing her fringe spirit.
On which we feed.
Because the night belongs to lovers,
Because the night belongs to lust.
A complex, introverted, electrifying personality, she represents the ultimate essence of the artist.
It's the story of a free woman who shaped her life into how she'd dreamed it.
Kids Are People Too MPC - ABC, 1979
What did you want to be when you were a kid?
I always wanted to be something special most, most of all.
I just generally felt estranged,
but not only from the other kids, I felt estranged from the planet.
Well, I felt sort of like an ugly duckling,
I spent most of my childhood believing that I was an alien.
I used to walk through forests and feel completely free.
It's like a pony would walk up out of, out of a field and talk to me.
I just felt telepathic with everything.
I felt like in tune with the universe.
All my life, I've been trying to like, get back to that freedom.
PATTI SMITH ELECTRIC POET
Summer 1967: That year, it was all happening on the American West Coast.
Flower power overran San Francisco.
The musical cream of the crop flocked to the Monterey Pop Festival,
which epitomized the values of the growing counterculture.
While the young generation dreamed of peace and love,
the government escalated its presence in Vietnam,
and capital cities erupted in race riots.
The incandescent Jim Morrison turned the heat up a notch with “Light My Fire,”
The Ed Sullivan Show Sullivan Productions - CBS, 1967
the perfect soundtrack for a country on the verge of imploding.
Come on baby light my fire.
Try to set the night on fire.
Landing in Manhattan, 20-year-old Patricia Lee Smith
was about to experience another Summer of Love.
Having left rural New Jersey with only a few bucks in her pocket,
she'd packed up her most precious possessions:
a copy of Rimbaud's Illuminations,
a few colored pencils and a notebook.
I had no money, no friends.
I slept in sidewalks, I slept on the subways.
The cops beat me up. I had no food, but like, I was so happy, you know, because like,
well, I guess I was romantic, but I read all these books
about Brancusi, Modigliani,
Rimbaud, all of them. None of them had money, all poor.
In 1964, I found a book of Illum inations, and I opened it up.
The beautiful face of Rimbaud, the language in it just totally seduced me and
I fell in love.
Relationship stuff was in your head anyway
so what was the difference whether I had a crush on some boy
in class who ignored me or Rimbaud, who,
so that I could pretend he didn't ignore me?
With its oppressive heat and through-the-roof crime rates,
families were fleeing drug-riddled New York City as,
for many, the metropolis resembled a kind of hell.
They robbed me, they robbed me and if you don't think I'm gonna do it,
I'm gonna kill them up my fist.
In that setting of chaos and grime,
Patti-by contrast-was in heaven.
I didn't have any dough. Maybe I'd have 50 cents,
so 50 cents on 42nd Street, you can be there all day.
You can hang out and play land, watch the real slick dudes shoot pinball.
When you have trouble with your bosses, remember one thing:
there's one big boss for all of us, oh my god,
Squalid slum or realm of all possibilities,
New York was the perfect place for reinvention.
The first time I came to New York, he camerized me.
Filmed me with nothing.
''I'm going to put you in my Rip Van Winkle movie'', and I went,
''Oh, rocket to stardom.''
It was here, amidst this backdrop, that Patti felt she could transform.
Empowered by poetry and words, she dreamed of becoming an artist.
I was very poor when I was young,
and what always concerned me was like
the richness of my imagination.
I mean, material things, they just didn't matter.
What mattered to me was developing my mind.
She'd no sooner arrived when an encounter changed the course of her life.
His name was Robert Mapplethorpe: he was devilishly handsome
and exuded bad-boy allure.
An arts school graduate, he'd cut ties with his family and was hanging out in Brooklyn.
They became lovers, and were inseparable.
We were both 20 years old
and we were both struggling, idealistic, somewhat misfit.
She could tell him anything, even the toughest confessions.
Like how she'd gotten pregnant and had a baby just three months earlier;
and had given the child up for adoption.
I just wasn't ready as a human being,
and that although I knew that I would be responsible and loving,
that I just was not equipped to embark on that path.
It would have been difficult for everyone, I think.
This was a widespread phenomenon amongst young women in the '60s.
Consequently, Patti made a promise to herself:
she'd make her dreams come true, without regrets.
In just the same story that could be in any country.
But I never stopped believing.
I felt the desire to live. And like, I rose up.
This secret sealed the intimacy of her relationship with Robert.
When he later came out regarding his attraction to men,
their romance evolved into an indestructible friendship.
We both felt we had a calling.
And both of us magnified one another.
In 1969, they decided to share a room at the Chelsea Hotel,
the den of counterculture.
It was both an artistic residency and utopian nest.
Here, you could spend one night or several years.
It was a very heightened time at the Chelsea.
If one was sitting in the lobby of the Chelsea, one might encounter
in one evening, Janis Joplin,
Jimi Hendrix, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg.
All of these people were trying to
make enough money to pay their bill at the Chelsea Hotel.
A lot of people think that the Chelsea is full of freaks mixed with the bohemian, -
STANLEY BARD MANAGER OF THE CHELSEA HOTEL
It was the avant garde, the Chelsea was the avant garde, the forefront of every, every kind of creative.
Why do you think it all took place? Because the cheap rooms, no?
Cheap rooms, fun people.
In Room 1017, the hotel's smallest living quarters,
Patti spent hours writing.
She pinned up sources of inspiration onto the walls:
Jean Genet alongside James Dean,
Albert Camus, Brian Jones, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Bob Dylan...
Whether high culture or pop culture,
they all had pride of place on Patti's personal altar.
She added a drawing practice to her writing practice,
but her poetry quickly took precedence.
New York is the thing that seduced me.
New York is the thing that formed me. New York is the thing that deformed me.
New York is the thing that perverted me.
New York is the thing that converted me.
And New York is the thing I love too.
Living here brought Patti and Robert closer to the artistic avant-garde.
To partake in it, this was where you had to be, which is to say:
downtown, where the rebellious heart of the metropolis beat,
ever since the maestro of Pop Art and his Factory had moved in a few black away.
A hybrid establishment-part gallery, film studio and concert hall...
Andy Warhol's Factory gathered together
New York's artists, eccentrics, druggies and jet-setters.
We're sponsoring a new band, it's called The Velvet Underground,
and we have this chance to combine music and art
and films all together.
Acting as a benefactor,
Warhol also produced the soundtrack that accompanied this subversive subculture.
The Velvet Underground crystallized a dissonant, dark sound:
one of heroin and amphetamines,
an urban reality in which one longed for their drug dealer
as one would a lover.
This fascinating, intimidating world was walled off from the rest;
Robert and Patti were determined to vanquish it.
The first place they conquered was Max's Kansas City.
Max's Kansas City, a restaurant near the factory,
is the gathering place for New York's underground.
Almost every evening, Warhol's clan can be found here.
Kansas City functions as both an unofficial casting agency
and a public playground.
It's here that Warhol's films continue on in real life.
While they weren't in the foreground yet, it wouldn't be long before they were.
Robert and I, we were both outsiders,
kind of wallflowers.
But it was a very creative atmosphere,
everyone exchanging ideas and very competitive atmosphere.
And, I found it very inspiring.
That night, back at the Chelsea Hotel,
Patti made a radical decision.
She vowed to stop being a wallflower.
She grabbed a pair of scissors,
and an hour later, Keith Richards' little sister materialized.
Patti decided to embraced her androgynous side, and it worked for her.
She was cast in Femme Fatale,
a play written by and starring Jackie Curtis,
Andy Warhol's transgender leading lady.
I carried his baby.
And then I ditched him.
In a church in the Bowery.
No!
I hate him!
Oh oh, here she comes!
Hey Cabrini, any mail today?
At experimental theater La Mama,
Patti replaced a male actor at last minute, in the role of a junkie.
Boy or girl, it didn't matter; in this queer scene where trash mixed with glamor,
one thing was certain: everyone was free to be who they wanted.
The excitement of waiting for the curtain to open,
when you're in front of the curtain,
it's like a surge power you feel when people are applauding for you.
Man, what a great feeling.
I have to admit it's even better than being with a man,
it's almost better than that.
A man: Patti was madly in love with one,
actor/playwright Sam Shepard,
with whom she continued her foray into the world of theater.
Together, they wrote and performed Cowboy Mouth.
I was still a fledgling writer.
He encouraged me and was one of the people that
got me in motion to perform.
It was a meta-play featuring their passion.
But at the third performance,
Sam took off to rejoin the wife and child he'd left behind in Canada.
The play was canceled. Patti didn't let it break her;
she was undeterred in pursuing her artistic future.
I found a fairy land right inside myself here,
because when I lived in South Jersey or whatever, life was simpler there.
Life was simpler because, you know, we worked,
we slopped the hogs, you know, we picked the peaches and all that stuff.
And then you came in and you ate your supper, and you thanked the Lord, and then you went to bed.
But that's all there was. There was no chance for extension.
There was no chance to be destroyed or really be creative there.
You just lived.
And that's OK for some people, but I always felt something different stirring in me.
Ever since she'd met William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg
and Gregory Corso-the giants of the Beat Generation at the Chelsea Hotel.
Patti no longer had doubts about her calling.
She too wanted to update poetry, make it less snobby and refined.
Brilliant and provocative,
the Beats were literary bad boys
who spurred the protest movements of the '60s,
with their rejection of the American way of life
and politically-fueled writings.
The young poets rise
to kiss the soul of the revolution
in Vietnam the body is burned
to show the truth of only the body...
In my train seat I renounce
my power, so that I do
live I will die.
Ex-cons, druggies, broke or gay,
Patti loved everything about them;
they would soon serve as her guides.
On February 10, 1971, Patti turned a corner.
At the Holy of Holies of avant-garde poetry,
namely the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church,
she opened for Gerard Malanga,
an artist and Warhol's personal assistant.
It was the first time she'd performed under her own name.
Tonight, Patti Smith, she's a terrific poet.
Patti Smith.
She felt enormous pressure.
Every Factory hipster and Beat Generation luminary was in attendance.
The murdered boy, the murdered boy. Oh I was bad.
I got to do something special because if I don't do something special,
Gregory Corso, who was mentoring me not to be a boring poet,
is gonna, you know, throw tomatoes at me or something.
She shoved me in a hole.
With a small lamp, a humble little set-up,
I wanted to perform my poetry.
I had just met Lenny and I asked him if he would do some electric guitar
in a poem about a car crash.
No one had ever done that.
No one had brought an electric guitar in the church before.
Certainly not a girl.
The audience was wowed by her writings,
which she performed with the fervor of a preacher.
I've been reading the bible since I was a child and
always found it inspiring, not only spiritually but poetically.
I was a Jehovah witness, and in those days,
Jehovah witnesses were stricter
about one's pursuits outside of...
being a witness.
I was about 12, I went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art with my father and
saw art in person and immediately wanted to become an artist.
My desires sort of collided with their teachings,
so I left the witnesses to become an artist.
At age 25, enriched by various influences,
Patti was honing her own voice, somewhere between poetry and song.
With the musical touch of Lenny Kaye to boot, she had something unique.
The hype that surrounded Patti from that point on
opened new doors for her.
She published her first collection of poems,
Seventh Heaven, immediately followed by Kodak, then Witt.
When I started writing the poems, I used to put the Rolling Stones on,
to be able to get me into a rhythm where my word and my body connected.
And I was writing poetry.
Get in my typewriter, get into a rhythm,
you know, and start writing, you know,
start writing in the rhythm of the Rolling Stones, but I'd write my own language.
Poetry was the most releasing drug for me.
More and more convinced that the rhythm of her writing would be sublimated through music,
she decided to record two songs at Jimi Hendrix's famous Electric Lady Studios.
Thanks to money from Robert, the single was an immediate hit.
In the wake of this, she did a series of live performances with her fledgling group.
Alright, this is my guys: Richard Sohl on piano,
Lenny Kaye on guitar, and me Patti, this is our single, it's called Piss Factory.
She took her androgynous look up a notch with a shirt and tie,
borrowing a boyish wardrobe-and attitude.
Sixteen and time to pay off
I got this job in a piss factory inspecting pipe
Forty hours a week, thirty-six bucks it's real bullshit
But you know it's a paycheck, Jack.
It's really hot in here too, hot like Sahara
But all these bitches are just too lame to understand
They're just too grateful to get this job to realize
they're getting screwed up the ass
Through both her body and her lyrics,
Patti firmed up her style.
With “Piss Factory” she exorcized her demons,
recounting the ordeal of working a summer job in a factory in her native New Jersey.
Floor boss comes up to me and he says
''Hey Smith, come here
You know you're doin' your piece work too fast,
You screwin' up the quota,
You get off your mustang sally
''Cause you ain't goin' nowhere, you ain't goin' nowhere.''
I lay back. I take a swig of Romilar
Patti's juxtaposition of poetry and music were working,
all that she was missing was a place she'd feel at home.
CBGB's was a little bar down in the Bowery,
right near where William Burroughs lived,
where the winos and the bums slept on the streets,
you know, were dogs peed in front of and
it was just a little bar that nobody cared about.
In this seedy setting, the band Television
was experimenting with songs several nights a week.
The emerging group played experimental rock, without compromising or posturing.
I was so excited to see this band.
Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell, both being poets,
they were doing a lot of what we were doing.
A little wild raggedy, like ourselves.
And I saw a real future, I felt a real brotherhood with them.
The attraction was mutual. Television's band members recognized within Patti's masculine, experimental vibe a bit of their own intellectual rage and deconstructive spirit. They soon suggested sharing a bill.
Television's band members recognized within Patti's masculine, experimental vibe
a bit of their own intellectual rage and deconstructive spirit.
They soon suggested sharing a bill.
Crashing his head against the locker
It was an opportunity for Patti and her band to test their songs
in front of a young, cynical audience
who rejected established values.
When suddenly Johnny gets the feeling he's being surrounded by
We played there for weeks and weeks and months, and young people started coming from all over to come to CBGB's because at last we had a place.
And young people started coming from all over to come to CBGB's because at last we had a place.
To come to CBGB's because at last we had a place.
I think what's happening, we're at a big transitional period. I think that rock'n'roll was down and was sleeping, and I feel that all these new bands and my band saw this, we're doing our best to say 'wake up'.
I think that rock'n'roll was down and was sleeping, and I feel that
all these new bands and my band saw this, we're doing our best to say 'wake up'.
The wake-up call was intense, electric and highly charged.
Within a few months, CBGB became an incubator of the New York punk movement.
It encompassed not only the birth of a music scene,
but also a state of mind, a community.
You call them punk because you got nothing else to say about them.
No other way to link them.
But it's like the heartbeat that links them. You know, the beat.
With her weekly appearances, Patti quickly became the club's figurehead.
She was soon joined by the Ramones;
Blondie and the band's alluring lead singer, Debbie Harry,
and the Talking Heads.
It didn't matter if you knew how to play well;
energy and attitude mattered above all else.
The buzz around Patti continued to grow.
Her unconventional magnetism drew people from all corners of the city.
It took only one night for Clive Davis, who had discovered Janis Joplin,
to sign her to his new label, Arista.
With a contract worth several thousand dollars,
Patti was now in the big leagues.
She could afford a studio session with John Cale,
the genius producer once part of the Velvet Underground.
That collaboration led to the creation of a unique album.
Rimbaud's self-appointed kid sister turned every code upside down.
The standard verse/chorus template was knocked aside,
singing and sermon coexisted, the urban and the mystical intertwined.
The lyrics were intimate, political manifestos. It was groundbreaking.
I was consciously trying to make a record
that would make a certain type of person not feel alone.
People like me, different since they were a kid.
I wasn't targeting the whole world, I wasn't trying to make a hit record,
but I thought if a hundred people liked it, that would be great.
Saturday Night Live NBC, 1976
On November 10, 1975,
the album Horses was released.
The very first track, “Gloria,” set the tone right away.
Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine.
Meltin' in a pot of thieves
Wild card up my sleeve
Thick heart of stone
My sins my own
They belong to me, me
I ain't afraid to say anything like that,
I'm not afraid of being struck down by lightning,
and if I do, I know it'll be an ecstatic experience.
So maybe some people can alleviate
guilt through me, you know, let me be bad for them.
In addition to competing with God,
she took up Van Morrison's song and his masculine refrain,
addressed to the titular Gloria.
Patti took his place, bellowing out her desire for another woman.
When you came to my room
And you whispered to me and I took the big plunge
And oh, you were so good, oh, you were so fine
And I gotta tell the world
that I make her mine, make her mine, make her mine...
G-L-O-R-I-A Gloria G-L-O-R-I-A
NOT EVERY BOY DREAMS OF BEING A MARINE
Providing a platform for marginalized communities,
Patti echoed the demands of the gay community,
which was mobilizing and becoming visible.
She pushed back against voices of the conservative majority,
which dominated television sets.
If we were going to go on a crusade across the nation and try to do away with the homosexuals...
Let's pray for him right now, Anita.
Father, we wanted to ask that you forgive him
and that we're praying for him, and I just...
If you are male and choose other than female,
you must take the responsibility of holding the key to freedom
Equally disturbing and fascinating,
the album received both critical and popular success.
It sold 200,000 copies and placed at the top of the charts.
The impact was both musical and visual.
Photographed by her best friend Robert Mapplethorpe, the album cover blurred the boundaries of gender.
Patti posed in a man's shirt and tie, a blazer flung over her shoulder.
No makeup, no hairstyling, and a clearly visible downy mustache:
She looked like no one else, and certainly not what anyone expected of a woman.
My record company, they wanted to doctor the picture,
hairbrush my hair to make it look a little better,
and they were trying to improve me. But that wasn't what I wanted.
So the shot stands as it was shot.
Patti had no interest whatsoever in performing the female gender.
She'd been unclassifiable for a long time.
So when it came to finding role models, she followed her heart.
I think that all the performers that affected me have basically, all they've been male.
I loved Rimbaud so much, but Bob Dylan was alive.
I was so smitten with him aesthetically,
he influenced me in the way I walk,
sometimes the way I dress or the way I wear pants, you know,
it's just, I adored him.
She was sixteen when Bob Dylan participated, in August 1963,
in the March on Washington.
The '60s spawned the fight for civil rights.
I have a dream.
There was opposition to the Vietnam War and, more broadly,
a demand for a new social order.
Criticism is very patriotic.
It is this our duty to protest if we think that things are unjust.
It's part of the American way.
A tree in paradise
Major figures of protest music, like Joan Baez,
set the tempo for those activist years.
I think that, you know, someone's going to sell five million records,
they should be saying something within those five million records.
They should be communicating something than just, dull wiretap.
I mean, to me, most people that are selling that many records right now
aren't doing anything really to communicate.
They're just, they're just taking people's money
and giving them sort of mediocre entertainment in exchange.
We today have concluded an agreement
to end the war and bring peace with honor in Vietnam.
THE WAR IS OVER!
Within that socio-political context,
Patti's activism grew.
When the end of the Vietnam War was celebrated in Central Park, in May 1975,
she was only just becoming a public figure.
But it felt self-evident for her to partake in the event,
and she took the stage alongside her teenage idol, Joan Baez.
We're really opting for peace, especially our generation, which really
worked really hard to stop war.
But we come from
from centuries and centuries of being warriors,
we have to do something with that physical kind of energy.
This is our instrument of war,
and for my generation, this is our instrument of battle.
This is the only instrument of battle that we want left.
We want to get rid of all machine guns
and all the bombs and all that shit,
and we just want to fight each other out with sound.
With this new weapon in hand, Patti was determined to spread the good word of rock.
My band and myself,
we are not a career driven band.
We have always been driven by political, revolutionary spiritual ideas.
The whole idea of rock and roll was that it was a revolutionary art
and that people had a grassroots way of expressing themselves.
Move!
Ask the angels who they're calling,
Go ask the angels if they're calling to thee
Ask the angels while they're falling
Who that person could possibly be
And I know it's hard sometimes,
You got accuse accuse across the floor?
And I know it's hard sometimes
Committed to this mission, the workaholic musician
released a new opus less than a year after Horses,
filled with references to Rimbaud's exile and to Rastafarianism.
Radio Ethiopia is the name of our new record,
and it represents to us
a naked field where in
anyone can express themselves, it's a free radio.
The more people submit
and the more I submit, the greater show it's going to be,
the greater we're going to be.
Do you not go to the palace of answers with me Marie?
Backed by electric guitars and shamanic drums,
Patti performed before audiences who awaited her like the messiah.
On stage, she sang-screamed-in what seemed, at times,
like a nearly trance-like state.
Her concerts were unforgettable performances.
She might extend a song for over 20 minutes,
and she required her band to improvise,
never letting them repeat their approach twice.
Every day I want to feel some sensation,
every day I want to create, every day I want to know that I'm alive,
I want to know that I'm on the Planet.
And when I'm on the stage, my time of the day
to like go through every sensation possible.
Performing involves so much of your, of your physical brainiac,
moral energy, all your energies into one and you extend and expend so much of yourself
that the idea of saving up life, you know
for later just seems to me totally pointless.
And it has totally made me not afraid of dying anymore.
With their succession of promotional tour dates,
covering the United States and Europe,
It's Radio Ethiopia!
Patti and her band were on the road for an entire year.
Radio Ethiopia got mixed reviews,
and Patti's theatrical meanderings cost her with critics,
who didn't understand them.
She is socially approved how the loony of rock and roll.
She is good at times and excessive at other times.
The pressure mounted.
During a live radio show, Patti got carried away and said “fuck” live.
Officially prohibited by federal law,
this cost her an on-air ban for the rest of the tour.
Scandalized, she published an article in which she decried this act of censorship.
You Can't Say Fuck in Radio Free America
They don't like me to come on the station live
because they're afraid of what I'll say, because I talk about
too many things that disturb the middle class, you know?
At a press conference in London, a journalist criticized her lengthy songs.
Enraged, she threw sandwiches at him.
The tide was turning.
She was now being reproached for everything people had loved about her.
They even made fun of her look on TV.
THE MIKE DOUGLAS SHOW Westinghouse Broadcasting Company, 1978
You're wearing some of the strangest outfits on our show.
What do you mean strange, this stuff cost a fortune.
What are you talking about?
Nothing matches Patti.
Matches?
They're all striped. Everything.
The jacket isn't striped.
It's like a... Well, it's all silk.
I don't know, already I'm insulted.
I've been on here a little three and a half minutes, I've been insulted 14 times.
It was all happening fast-too fast.
On January 23rd, 1977,
dancing like a whirling dervish, Patti fell.
Skirting a true catastrophe, she got away with just two broken vertebrae.
Bedridden and under sedation for weeks,
she was thrown back into a state she had known well in childhood.
I was very sickly most of my childhood.
I was like seven years old and I had scarlet fever and
it stuck me in such a state like where I'd start hallucinating really early.
I slept right next to a coal stove,
and I was watching this blue flame and it just felt like
I was being suffocated by comets, skulls
and animals like foxes with like human faces coming at me real fast
and all that kind of stuff, and it sort of never went away
and it just made me feel alien
from everybody because I couldn't really express it, you know?
This reconnection with her imagination enabled her to write Babel.
The collection of poems contained a tidal wave of hallucinations and ecstasies.
She is unique in the rock and roll world,
she is also a serious poet.
Literary critics do take her very seriously and say she is a
creative woman to be reckoned with.
And her latest book, Babel,
was lengthily reviewed by no lesser a publication
than the New York Times review of books.
The high priestess of rock made her comeback by way of literature.
She even shared a book-signing, surrounded by her heroes.
For an artist so fond of symbolism, a brush with death inevitably had meaning.
I continually want to communicate with God,
even though I know it's very dangerous territory,
which is one of the reasons why I had my accident,
but I don't want to die. This is my chance on the world.
I'm here right now and I want right now to be the greatest time.
This is my golden age, this is our golden age.
I'm not there in the past, I'm not there in the future, I'm right here.
You see what I mean? The time to flower is now.
Be it divine will or fate's helping hand,
Patti retrieved a melody sketched out by Bruce Springsteen,
which would propel her next album, Easter, to the top of the charts.
Take me now, baby, here as I am
Pull me close, try and understand
“Because the Night” became her first mainstream hit,
released in the spring of 1978.
Because the night belongs to lovers
Because the night belongs to lust
Because the night belongs to lovers
Because the night belongs to us
Have I doubt when I'm alone
Love is a ring, the telephone
Love is an angel disguised as lust
The song rang so true because Patti was in love.
At a concert in Detroit,
she met the legendary Fred “Sonic” Smith of MC5,
one of the wildest bands on the American rock scene.
For her longtime fans, the radio-friendly romantic ballad didn't go down well.
I was criticized, they said, ''Well'',
you're supposed to be a punk rocker and you have a popular song'', and I said:
punk rock does not mean not to be popular, it means freedom,
and I'll do what I want.
At age 31, Patti had managed to climb to the top of the charts,
without ever compromising.
It took her less than five years to become a rock icon,
whose faithful following came in droves to attend her high mass.
Every time you do a performance, you're trying to seduce
anywhere from three hundred to three thousand strangers
and it becomes a very intimate, you know, sexual thing,
and not the only way to have sex is to be in bed with each other.
Patti was playing with fire, giving everything to
audiences who energized her yet totally consumed her.
People even talked about it on TV, but she remained oblivious.
THE MIDNIGHT SPECIAL. NBC, 1978 You have some really maniac fans, why do you
think the kids get so crazy at your concerts?
Well, I was pretty maniac kid myself.
I mean, I still am. I mean, I feel that a concert,
you know, like, like Mick Jagger said at Altamont is not just for people
coming to see a performer, but for a mutual experience.
Moving from an underground scene into the spotlight, Patti had her doubts.
How do you stay true to yourself, once you've become adored?
Covering a song by the Byrds on the emptiness of the star system,
Patti sent out a thinly-veiled message on the irony of her own condition.
A little insane.
You're a little insane,
All the things that you gain
Is the public acclaim
Don't forget who you are,
You're a rock and roll star
In that song,
there's a line that you sing ''Don't forget who you are, you're a rock and roll star''.
And I'd just like to know what that means to you now.
Mm-hmm. I don't like how I look on that... thing.
Her inner malaise grew in tandem with stadium capacities.
On September 10th, 1979, in Florence, in front of more than 80,000 people,
Patti made her decision.
It was over. She was bowing out at the height of her career.
The following day it was straight to the airport, destination Detroit.
On March 1st 1980,
Patti Smith married Fred Smith, and went off the radar for nine years.
In 1988, to everyone surprise,
Patti return with a new album ''Dream of life'', co-written with Fred.
One day I was in the kitchen, cooking,
and he looked at me and he said:
People have the power, write it.
And I said, ok.
They made only a single appearance, in March 1990,
for Arista's 15th anniversary.
That's What Friends Are For: Arista Records 15th Anniversary Concert. CBS, 1990
through our union
We can turn the world around
We can turn the earth's revolution
We have the power
People have the power
The people have the power
The power to dream
Although the song became an anthem, returning to public life was out of the question.
After that brief detour, it was back to family life.
People say to me,
Gee, you didn't do any work in the eighties and I want to like
strangle them, you have no idea how hard,
I mean, how hard, you know, a mother works.
I mean, I was born an artist, you know,
I believe that I have a calling to be an artist and
my gifts are God given. But my domestic skills,
I had to learn from scratch.
On November 4, 1994, unimaginable sadness:
Fred “Sonic” Smith died of a heart attack, at the age of 46.
After my husband died, I didn't want to do anything,
I didn't even want to get out of bed,
but I had children and I have work to do
and my brother really made me get out of bed and said,
well, instead of, you know, mourning Fred and not
getting up, you should be writing songs for him.
A year later, the album Gone Again was released.
Her life had fallen apart;
Patti leaned on self-expression to rebuild it.
It's been a hard time
And when it rains
It rains on me
The sky just opens
And when it rains
It pours
It's like the checks and balances of life.
We have beautiful things happen. We have terrible things.
Patti encountered yet more grief.
In under five years, she lost her best friend Robert Mapplethorpe, her husband Fred Smith,
her pianist Richard Sohl, and her brother Todd.
Grieving is a very complex thing.
Some of it is very draining,
but sometimes in the middle of grieving, for no apparent reason,
one feels extreme joy, I think just to be alive.
At age 49, Patti got her group back together and went on the road.
Artists don't retire, they just shift conditions.
After a 17-year absence, the public was still there for her.
But there was no way Patti was going to play the game for the mainstream.
I was told just today that the reason an artist such as myself
can't get airplay is because I'm too issue orientated.
What better time to
speak about issues than at a time when people don't want to hear about them?
And music is an excellent forum to
talk about the things that we need to do.
At the turn of the millennium, Patti Smith was more connected than ever to the world around her.
It is the people that must wake up
and take more civic duties and more responsibility.
If you see things around you,
unjust, unclean, that need change,
don't seat on your ass, use your voice!
Take it to the streets!
And it's election year, use your voice, use your voice!
I still get enraged,
I imagined that I was going to return and be a little bit more stately
and be a little, a little wiser, maybe a little more, a little conservative,
but it's not like that.
Still consumed by that same creative impulse,
Patti added photography to her music, poetry and drawing practices.
Thanks to her Land 250 camera from the 1960s,
she created sensitive, vintage-looking Polaroids.
Robert Mapplethorpe's slippers, Virginia Woolf's bed,
Arthur Rimbaud's tomb:
Patti unveiled her relics, her memories, and her wanderings to the public.
She dialogued with the dead,
with those who had inspired her as well as those whose lives she'd shared.
EXPOSITION LAND 250, 2008 She never created a hierarchy, and always stayed true to herself.
I started taking Polaroids very seriously after the death of my husband
because its simple, gave me immediate response to a creative need.
After words and music, she was being recognized as a visual artist.
In 2010, at the age of 64,
Patti published Just Kids, her first autobiography.
Through this narrative, she made good on her promise to Robert to tell their story.
Digging through her memories, she conjured up her move to New York and her beginnings.
I accepted a date with an older man
and he walked me down to Tompkins Square Park
and I was so nervous and we sat down. And then he said, “Would you like to come up to my apartment for a cocktail?”
And I thought, “Oh, I'm done”, I was so scared, I didn't know what to do.
And this boy appeared as if the clouds parted.
This boy that I had just casually met once or twice,
and I ran up to him and said,
“Will you pretend you're my boyfriend?” And he said, “Sure”.
He rescued me and then we never separated.
We were so in tune in kind that
when we did a work, we wanted the other to see it ;
when we leapt to a new place, when we
had an illumination, it felt truer, more magnified in the eyes of the other.
Now over 70 years old, Patti has lived many lives.
Always navigating the margins, she represents-through her radical nature...
The very essence of an artist.
But above all, she personifies a spirit of freedom, of fully being oneself.
Once you finish a work, it belongs to the people,
but what belongs to the artist is the process. But it's a struggle that I'm proud to have.
It's decreed, the people rule.
I've never been normal, but I'm just a normal eccentric person.
Vengeful aspects became suspect, and bending low as if to hear
My public life is something I do to share my energy or
ideas with the people.
But when I finish my concerts, I'm just myself,
you know, I don't turn into a rock star to to perform,
I'm wearing the same clothes I'm, I just go on stage,
I spend two hours or so with the people, and then, you know back on my way.