1967—1973: New York
In 1967, she left Glassboro State College (now Rowan University) and moved to New York City. She met photographer Robert Mapplethorpe there while working at a book store with a friend, poet Janet Hamill. She and Mapplethorpe had an intense romantic relationship, which was tumultuous as they dealt with times of poverty, and Mapplethorpe with his own sexuality. Smith considers Mapplethorpe to be one of the most important people in her life, and in her book Just Kids refers to him as 'the artist of my life'. Mapplethorpe's photographs of her became the covers for the Patti Smith Group LPs, and they remained friends until Mapplethorpe's death in 1989. In 1969 she went to Paris with her sister and started busking and doing performance art. When Smith returned to New York City, she lived in the Hotel Chelsea with Mapplethorpe; they frequented the Max's Kansas City and CBGB nightclubs. Smith provided the spoken word soundtrack for Sandy Daley's art film
Robert Having His Nipple Pierced, starring Mapplethorpe. The same year Smith appeared with Wayne County in Jackie Curtis's play
Femme Fatale. As a member of the St. Mark's Poetry Project, she spent the early 70's painting, writing, and performing. In 1971 she performed — for one night only — in
Cowboy Mouth, a play that she co-wrote with Sam Shepard (The published play's notes call for "a man who looks like a coyote and a woman who looks like a crow".) She wrote several poems, "for sam shepard" and "Sam Shepard: 9 Random Years (7 + 2)" about her relationship with Shepard.
Smith was briefly considered for the lead singer position in Blue Öyster Cult. She contributed lyrics to several of the band's songs, including
Debbie Denise (inspired by her poem
In Remembrance of Debbie Denise),
Career of Evil,
Fire of Unknown Origin,
The Revenge of Vera Gemini (on which she performs duet vocals), and
Shooting Shark, and was romantically involved at the time with the band's keyboardist Allen Lanier. During these years, Smith also wrote rock journalism, some of which was published in
Rolling Stone and
Creem magazines.
1974—1979: Patti Smith Group
By 1974, Patti Smith was performing rock music herself, initially with guitarist and rock archivist Lenny Kaye, and later with a full band comprising Kaye, Ivan Kral on bass, Jay Dee Daugherty on drums and Richard Sohl, on piano. Ivan Kral was a refugee from Czechoslovakia, fleeing in 1968 after the fall of Alexander Dub?ek. Financed by Sam Wagstaff, the band recorded a first single, "Hey Joe / Piss Factory", in 1974. The A-side was a version of the rock standard with the addition of a spoken word piece about fugitive heiress Patty Hearst ("Patty Hearst, you're standing there in front of the Symbionese Liberation Army flag with your legs spread, I was wondering were you gettin' it every night from a black revolutionary man and his women..."). The B-side describes the helpless anger Smith had felt while working on a factory assembly line and the salvation she discovered in the form of a shoplifted book, the 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud's
Illuminations.
Patti Smith Group was signed by Clive Davis of Arista Records, and 1975 saw the release of Smith's first album
Horses, produced by John Cale amid some tension. The album fused punk rock and spoken poetry and begins with a cover of Van Morrison's "Gloria", and Smith's opening words: "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine." The austere cover photograph by Mapplethorpe has become one of rock's classic images. As the popularity of punk rock grew, Patti Smith Group toured the United States and Europe. The rawer sound of the group's second album,
Radio Ethiopia, reflected this. Considerably less accessible than
Horses,
Radio Ethiopia initially received poor reviews. However, several of its songs have stood the test of time, and Smith still performs them regularly in concert.
On January 23, 1977, while touring in support of
Radio Ethiopia, Smith accidentally danced off a high stage in Tampa, Florida and fell 15 feet into a concrete orchestra pit, breaking several neck vertebrae. The injury required a period of rest and an intensive round of physical therapy, during which time she was able to reassess, re-energize and reorganize her life. Patti Smith Group produced two further albums before the end of the 1970s.
Easter (1978) was her most commercially successful record, containing the single "Because the Night" co-written with Bruce Springsteen.
Wave (1979) was less successful, although the songs "Frederick" and "Dancing Barefoot" both received commercial airplay.
1980—1995: Marriage
Before the release of
Wave, Smith, now separated from long-time partner Allen Lanier, met Fred "Sonic" Smith, former guitar player for Detroit rock band MC5 and his own Sonic's Rendezvous Band, who adored poetry as much as she did. (
Wave's "Dancing Barefoot" and "Frederick" were both dedicated to him.) The running joke at the time was that she only married Fred because she would not have to change her name. They had a son, Jackson (b. 1982), who would go on to marry The White Stripes drummer, Meg White in 2009, and a daughter, Jesse (b. 1987). Through most of the 1980s Patti Smith was in semi-retirement from music, living with her family north of Detroit in St. Clair Shores, Michigan. In June 1988, she released the album
Dream of Life, which included the song "People Have the Power". Fred Smith died on November 4, 1994. Shortly afterward, Patti faced the unexpected death of her brother Todd and original keyboard player Richard Sohl. When her son Jackson turned 14, Smith decided to move back to New York. After the impact of these deaths, her friends Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and Allen Ginsberg (whom she had known since her early years in New York) urged her to go back out on the road. She toured briefly with Bob Dylan in December 1995 (chronicled in a book of photographs by Stipe).
1996—2003: Re-emergence
In 1996, Smith worked with her long-time colleagues to record
Gone Again, featuring "About a Boy", a tribute to Kurt Cobain. Smith was a fan of Cobain, but was more angered than saddened by his suicide. That same year she collaborated with Stipe on "E-Bow the Letter", a song on R.E.M.'s
New Adventures in Hi-Fi, which she has also performed live with the band. After release of
Gone Again, Patti Smith had recorded two new albums:
Peace and Noise in 1997 (with the single "1959", about the invasion of Tibet) and
Gung Ho in 2000 (with songs about Ho Chi Minh and Smith's late father). Songs "1959" and "Glitter in Their Eyes" were nominated for Grammy Award for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance. A box set of her work up to that time,
The Patti Smith Masters, came out in 1996, and 2002 saw the release of
Land , a two-CD compilation that includes a memorable cover of Prince's "When Doves Cry". Smith's solo art exhibition
Strange Messenger was hosted at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh on September 28, 2002.
2004—present
On April 27, 2004 Patti Smith released
Trampin' which included several songs about motherhood, partly in tribute to Smith's mother, who had died two years before. It was her first album on Columbia Records, soon to become a sister label to her previous home Arista Records. Smith curated the Meltdown festival in London on June 25, 2005, the penultimate event being the first live performance of
Horses in its entirety. Guitarist Tom Verlaine took Oliver Ray's place. This live performance was released later in the year as
Horses/Horses.
On July 10, 2005, Smith was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. In addition to her influence on rock music, the Minister also noted Smith's appreciation of Arthur Rimbaud. In August 2005, Smith gave a literary lecture about the poems of Arthur Rimbaud and William Blake. On October 15, 2006, Patti Smith performed at the CBGB nightclub, with a 3½-hour
tour de force to close out Manhattan's music venue. She took the stage at 9:30 p.m. (EDT) and closed for the night (and forever for the venue) at a few minutes after 1:00 a.m., performing her song "Elegie", and finally reading a list of punk rock musicians and advocates who had died in the previous years.
Smith was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on March 12, 2007. She dedicated her award to the memory of her late husband, Fred, and gave a performance of The Rolling Stones staple "Gimme Shelter". As the closing number of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony, Smith's "People Have the Power" was used for the big celebrity jam that always ends the program.From November 2006 - January 2007, an exhibition called 'Sur les Traces' at Trolley Gallery, London, featured polaroid prints taken by Patti Smith and donated to Trolley to raise awareness and funds for the publication of Double Blind, a book on the war in Lebanon in 2006, with photographs by Paolo Pellegrin a member of Magnum Photos.From March 28 to June 22, 2008 the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris hosted a major exhibition of the visual artwork of Patti Smith,
Land 250, drawn from pieces created between 1967 and 2007. At the 2008 Rowan Commencement ceremony, Smith received an honorary doctorate degree for her contributions to popular culture.
Smith is the subject of a 2008 documentary film,
Dream of Life. A live album by Patti Smith and Kevin Shields,
The Coral Sea was released in July 2008. On September 10, 2009, after a week of smaller events and exhibitions in the city, Smith played an open-air concert in Florence's Piazza Santa Croce, commemorating her 'legendary' performance in the same city 30 years earlier.In 2010, Patti Smith's book,
Just Kids, a memoir of her time in 1970s Manhattan and her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe was published.
On April 30, 2010 Patti Smith headlined a benefit concert headed by band-mate Tony Shanahan, for The Court Tavern of New Brunswick. Smith's set included "Gloria", "Because the Night" and "People Have the Power."
On May 17, 2010, Patti Smith received an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Pratt Institute, along with architect Daniel Libeskind, MoMA director Glenn Lowry, former NYC Landmarks Commissioner Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, novelist Jonathan Lethem, and director Steven Soderbergh. Following the conferral of her degree, Smith delivered the commencement address and sang/played two songs accompanied by long-time band member Lenny Kaye. In her remarks, Smith explained that in 1967 when she moved to New York City (Brooklyn), she would never have been accepted into Pratt, but most of her friends (including Robert Mapplethorpe) were students at Pratt and she spent countless hours on the Pratt campus. She added that it was through her friends and their Pratt professors that she learned much of her own artistic skills, making the honour from the institute particularly poignant for Smith 43 years later.
