Patti Smith - London, UK, Spring 2004
By: Tim Dellow
'Punk has no heroes.' Not anymore. Amidst an age in which even the young indie record-label seems to need a degree in law, computer science and public relations, we need all the heroes we can get. Why? To show us that it's been done, that it can be done. To show us there have been others, throughout history, who have fought the good fight, against all the odds.
Patti Smith is one of these. Personally, she's my hero. She's my heroine. Sometimes it seems that I need her, and all that she represents, more than anything. I need her music, her spirit and her attitude just to carry on. She's my Heroin.
We meet in the Rex bar. I'd like to say just me and her in London's most exclusive cinema. I'd be lying. It was me. And her. And about fifteen of the old garde; a generation of journalists who can remember her first single. Who have always been on the outside, sucking up to the bands and labels, following press-releases for stories. Lazy, fat, corporate swine. Three times my age and write for the broadsheets. Intimidating encyclopaedias* that think that the essential thing to ask the woman who invented punk is 'Patti, Patti, pray tell, what badges are you wearing today?' F**kers.
Patti takes it in her stride, however. The myth says she hates interviews. I suggest to her, that in this informal setting - where she can play a couple of acoustic songs before answering our questions - she can distance herself from the personal, and put on a performance. Become Patti the icon as opposed to Patti the person.
'I like gatherings like this,' she croaks, playing up to her part. 'Truthfully, I don't like interviews that much, and the reason is, sometimes they're just embarrassing. People ask me questions like, 'How does it feel to be a rock icon?''
She raises an eyebrow as I put a red line across my notepad erasing the aforementioned question. Adieu to the tabloidial.
'I was in New York, doing the laundry, getting my daughter's food. And feeding the cats. The cats threw up. And I'm cleaning the throw-up. And I go across the road (to do an interview) and the guy's like (adopts faux-male chauv. accent): 'So, Patti, how does it feel to be a rock icon.' And I'm like, 'I'm not a rock icon; I'm a person who just cleared up cat shit.' It feels conceited. But the reason I started these gatherings
is that it feels less...' she trails off.
'Intimate?' I suggest.
'No,' she snaps back, the brash New Yorker replacing the hippie-witch, 'it's actually more intimate; it takes away this weird barrier. You're sitting with the journalist and talking semi-seriously, but sometimes the journalist wants to know personal information. Which I don't want to tell, you know, they want to know about my companion, or whatever.' To me, it seems like she's suggesting through implication the topics she wants to discuss, not to avoid. I feel suddenly like a shrink.
*I was going to suggest that the 'paed' in encyclopaedia was the only reference to their inner-child left in them. Then I considered the libel suits that these f**kers (and, I pray, future employers) might engage in if I swivelled my syntax and suggested that, in fact, they were inside the child.
And if you can imagine what it would be like being Jesus' shrink (think of the mother complex), then you can't imagine how strange it feels to be the psycho-the-rapist of a rock and roll goddess.
This isn't what I want anyway. It's not what you want either. You want hope and passion. And this woman is full of both. So I lead her to it. The chance to show these burn-outs that she's never going to fade away.
Making use of my surroundings, I ask her about her foray into the world of the journalist. Writing for 'Creem' in the 70's, she's been on the other side of the Dictaphone. Does she feel that there's separatism nowadays due to the machinery of the industry, which makes it impossible to transcend these prescriptive roles?
'It's all up to individuals.' She clearly states, 'People keep asking me, 'is rock 'n' roll finished? You know, it's so materialistic,' or I read a certain amount of journalism and it seems to suck, or even watching the news, it seems tabloidial.'
Pausing to make sure the importance of what she's about to say will be absorbed
'It's the people that have to change that. I mean, all you need is one good journalist.' She looks deep into my eyes. I ask myself if this is my ego speaking. Then I remember I'm here to question her, not indulge my own inflated sense of self.
'Even when I was writing back in '70-74, I wasn't a prolific writer, I mean I'm not a true journalist, but when I was writing things, there were a few people that were trying to really make journalism something to be proud of, and to really say something and to be a real voice.'
She pauses again, as if it's striking her for the first time. I watch her with fascination as she tries to voice her still-developing train-of-thought, struggling again with her linguistic constructs, searching to clarify meaning. To pin it down into sense.
'... A voice actually for the artist; like Baudelaire, journalism can be a very proud vocation. But it's up to the person to make it a proud vocation.' she starts to become heated, the 'Piss 'n' Vermin' swelling up inside her, still a vitriolic force.
'I mean, when people say to me, 'Oh, I had to write like that because of the magazine,' I say, 'Bullshit!' A meek ripple of applause escapes from a number of the corpses occupying the crypt. 'What's a f**king magazine? You know, if a magazine's telling you how to write, make your own magazine. You shouldn't let people dictate...'
She trails off as I remember the classic Patti anecdote. When presenting to Arista the now-infamous Robert Mapplethorpe portrait for the cover of 'Horses', the executives shat themselves. Exclaiming that they couldn't market an 'unsexy' female solo artist. Obviously, they were blissfully unaware of the sexless tragedy that was Joni Mitchell, parading the halls with her bucked-toothed, saccharine-sweet world-view, while they berated the sole survivor of a Piss Factory with the words 'at least let us airbrush off your moustache.'
'I mean, people say to me, (faux-chauvinist accent again) 'You have to do a photo-shoot,' and do blah, blah, blah for the magazine, and I say, 'No I don't, it's not in the declaration of independence that I have to...' F**k them,' she resiliently brushes them off with a flippant back-hand gesture, before adding more considerately, almost resigned to the fact; 'it's the same with any of it... I don't have to do stuff because 'they said so' and neither does a journalist, and neither does a musician.
They say, 'Well, I had to look like that for the rock video.' F**k that! People have become total wimps. People say, 'I had to do that cos the marketing-person said...' Who are you people?
'Rock 'n' roll was a revolutionary activity. I remember when rock 'n' roll was invented, sorry I'm so old but I do, and I remember my mother was walking me to school and some kid had a record-player and his door open and I heard, might have been, 'Girl Can't Help It' or 'Tutti Frutti'... anyway, it was Little Richard for the first time.' She dramatically halts to reiterate its importance, changing the severity of her tone; 'I didn't know what that was. And I was just a skinny little girl, but, that music...' She slinks into nostalgia before clicking her fingers with the exclamation: 'It made me go, 'Whoah!'' and with the same magic that a parent uses to captivate its child with a bedtime story, she continues, 'I let go of my mother's hand and ran towards that music.
'Rock and roll was revolutionary, people were afraid of it. In America, ministers and churches was afraid of it... it was looked upon as the devil's music, people were afraid of it, because of its energy and all of the things that one expressed through it, and it grew to become the music of the revolution. The spiritual, political and emotional content was stirring, and it was important, and it gave us strength. That's the history of rock 'n' roll. It wasn't made so a bunch of managers or marketing people or whoever, could sell more records. That's bullshit. That wasn't what rock 'n' roll is all about, but that's the way it's evolving, and it's everybody's fault: the artists, music-television. It's everybody's fault. We've completely forgotten what a great thing, potentially, rock and roll is... I mean, not all of us.'
I decide to push my luck. I have to know if she's for real, or if she seduced me with her witch's web of lyrics and rhetoric.
'Is that what you told Columbia when you signed to them?' I ask.
The room explodes with a plethora of gasps.
'Who does this audacious kid think he is?'
'It's not up to us journalists to challenge the artists.'
'You're talking to a rock icon; show some respect.'
F**k you. I'm treating her with respect, challenging her in the same way that she might challenge Little Richard.
She stares still. In control. She understands.
'I didn't have to,' she soothes me, a maternal smile cracking her wizened face, 'there are actually people there who know that.'
'Trampin', her new album, or return-to-form, depending on whom you ask, is her ninth. Being in the lazy journo camp, I ask her what she thinks people expect of a new Patti Smith album. More to question how she sees her own work, and its relevance today, than to find a glib pull-quote with which to review the record.
'Perhaps people expect piss 'n vermin.' She smiles with mournful eyes, almost resigned to the image of Patti that she feels she should live up to. 'I don't really think about people's expectations, I think about people's needs,' she adds.
'Consciously?' I enquire, 'You consciously think about other people when you write?', again fascinated by her juggling of the personal and the public.
'When I write poetry or when executing a painting or taking a photograph, I seldom think about anyone.' She explains, 'I'm thinking about the composition, the work, my struggle with language, I might be thinking of my god. But when I do albums, I'm always thinking about people. When I was executing 'Horses', I was thinking about the fringe people, the mavericks, or the disenfranchised, but at this time of our life I think the disenfranchised is more the majority than the minority. In this album, I'm hopefully addressing more global concerns than personal ones.'
A worthy motive, yet I cannot understand how such a pragmatic woman, is so blissfully unaware of the input of her personal life. 'Piss Factory', instigated by the dole-drums of working on a shitty assembly line, 'Break It Up', about her relationship with the best white guitarist of all time, and now, 'Trampin', an album as much to do with coming to terms with the loss of her mother as the war in Baghdad.
Any living 'Rock Icon' is still a person, and as a result, she can't help but spin a moving yarn about her mother's love of 'Rock and Roll Nigger', spoken with such honesty, as if sharing something so personal, that to print it would feel like an opportunistic breach-of-trust. Her desire to detach her 'work' from the personal is clear, and wholly understandable, yet, paradoxically, she can't help to volunteer this information to a roomful of strangers.
While other women use seduction to entrance journalists, elevating themselves through their sexuality to a climax of orgasmic reviews, Patti uses the sympathetic card, attempting to garner empathy from the hunters with a plethora of nostalgic anecdotes. Whoever you rally against, we all have a desire for acceptance. I am aware of the irony.
Yet, just as she sought to escape the Piss Factory, she's still fighting; 'I'm aware that this is perceived as a young man's game, and I believe this. And I know I'm of a certain age, but for some reason I still have a calling for Rock And Roll. I would have never considered in '75 that I would be making albums at this time in my life. First of all, I didn't even think that I would live this long. And it does surprise me that I still have this energy. I can still plug in my guitar and kick the shit out of my amp. I'm still similar in a lot of ways to how I was 25 years ago, and in a lot of ways I've evolved. As Walt Whitman said, I contain multitudes, I contain all my ages, I feel like a hundred some days, but others I feel as awkward as a seven-year-old kid.'
This is where the personal belongs. In her poetry. And her day-to-day life. She can expand on it in language, coding things to be uncovered by future generations, while in Rock 'n' Roll, her 'Public Service', she tries to be direct. Pushing for a meaning, place and understanding of this world that we all share. A collective experience.
I tell her the industry's been getting me down. As a young man I feel used up. How has she survived for what seems like an eternity, and to have actually lived through the defamation of her beloved art-form? The answer is in the code. The tapestry of rock history.
In her new album 'Trampin', she sings about the guy who keeps her going. Her precursor, her hero.
'William Blake to me has always been a great inspiration, not only as an artist, but as a human-being, because he had such a life of strife, such derision around him, such corruption around him. He never really got a break, never had any real success, he died obscure, someone ridiculed and poverty-stricken. But he never, never, never let go of his vision. He never stopped believing in his vision or in himself as an artist, and speaking out against social injustice in his work.'
Victory writes History. The fight's not over yet.
Artists in this article: Patti Smith