[MUSIC - Patti Smith: Gloria]

David Remnick: That line, the opening to Patti Smith's album Horses, has got to be one of the best openers to an album ever. Amazing to think that Horses, which still feels fresh and raw and transgressive, came out almost 50 years ago this week. Horses launched Patti Smith to musical and avant-garde stardom almost overnight. Yet, being a star wasn't Patti Smith's intention at all. She was a poet. She was publishing poems years before the record came out. She'd written a play with Sam Shepard. Music was a kind of afterthought, as she tells it, an accompaniment to the words.

Becoming one of the founding figures of punk was something that happened almost by accident. In recent years, many people have come to know Patti Smith as a writer as well as a performer. Her memoir, Just Kids, about her friendship with the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, won the National Book Award. M Train reflected on her withdrawal from music as she raised a family. In Bread of Angels, which was just excerpted in The New Yorker, Smith writes intimately about her life in music and also her personal life, particularly her marriage to Fred "Sonic" Smith and his early death. At times, she shares deep revelations about her past, and it's nothing if not a book of tremendous honesty.

You say somewhere in the book that this book took you 10 years to write. Is that because life is just so busy, or the active memory and the act of writing is difficult?

Patti Smith: I was writing about difficult things, but also certain things in my life and things that came to pass, as you see in the book. Things that were revealed to me made me-- I had to stop for a couple of years and process. I kept having to process things that were happening in real time or really make certain that I was articulating fact properly, especially when I'm talking about other people.

The same thing with Just Kids. It took me a very long time. I write profusely, fiction, fairy tales, all kinds of things that aren't even published without a care. Writing a memoir, bringing other people into it, one has to really be prudent and search themselves and make sure that they're presenting the right picture.

David Remnick: What was the most difficult thing to encounter? You obviously write about the death of your husband, but toward the end of the book, you write about the revelation about your own family, and that seems particularly complicated, no?

Patti Smith: That was the most difficult part.

David Remnick: Tell the story of that.

Patti Smith: The most difficult part of the writing process, and just my process as a human being, was the revelation that my father, who I pretty much worshiped and modeled myself after, and who I had spent a lot of time in the earlier part of the book bringing to life, was actually not my blood father. I never knew this, of course. Although there was always a little speculation because I am a bit different than my siblings, I never resembled my father physically, though I modeled myself after him.

In learning this, it took me a long time to process. I wasn't angry. I didn't feel any bitterness or anything of my mother. I admired her stoicness. My mother knew how I felt about my father. In fact, I often showed more love for my father than my mother. Instead of being resentful, I think she did everything she could to protect me.

David Remnick: How did the revelation come to pass, and when? How did you specifically find out about it?

Patti Smith: Specifically, through a test. After my mother died, my sister and I, we got curious, and just out of curiosity, which I thought really would not come up with anything, we did a test. We didn't do a paternal test; we did a sibling test, a blood test, because we didn't know the difference. When we did the blood test, it showed that we were only half-siblings, which was heartbreaking.

It was heartbreaking only because I love my sister so much. I love my father so much. It was just the romance of blood. Really, she was still my sister a million percent. My father was still my father. That produced a certain amount of pain. In terms of the book, I had worked so hard for this book to be a monument to truth and to be exactly as it was. Suddenly, I didn't know where I stood. I didn't know if I had to rewrite the book. I really put it away for a couple of years until I figured all of this out. My sister and I, together, reconciled this.

She was so helpful because we talked about it endlessly. One day, she said she had an epiphany, and it was that she loved me so much, and she realized that the person she loved only existed because of the union between my mother and my blood father.

David Remnick: Wow.

Patti Smith: When she realized that, she suddenly felt immense gratitude to him. That is how we proceeded. I feel the same way. I mean, he's in my prayers, he's in my thoughts. It turned out I was his only child. He died young. I keep him with me. My father will always be my father. He is the one I aspired to be like.

David Remnick: You write of him that, "My father lived in his own world. He left the new world to my mother."

Patti Smith: Yes. My father was-- Well, he studied all the time. My father worked in a factory, but he was reading Socrates and Plato and Jung and UFOlogy and the Bible. He was hungry for knowledge. I aspired to be like that. He was hoping, after the world wars, that man would wake up. The inhumanity, man's inhumanity to man, his favorite line from Robert Burns. He was hoping that that's what the new time would be. He was so disgusted with the humanity. If anything, I'm glad he's not seeing our world now. My father loved Ralph Nader, always voted for him.

David Remnick: Still very much with us, Ralph Nader.

Patti Smith: Yes, and a good friend.

David Remnick: Part of the book, early on, is a kind of accounting for in a collection of the deep influences, almost talismans that you-- First, there's the recording of Madame Butterfly, then a biography of Diego Rivera. You read Arthur Rimbaud, which is not the usual thing for somebody that young. Then, maybe most fatefully, your mother, at a drugstore, buys for less than $1 a copy for you of Another Side of Bob Dylan, which is not the first Dylan album, but it's early on. It's a transitional one.

Patti Smith: No, I had heard of him, and I'd listened to whatever I could hear-

David Remnick: On the radio.

Patti Smith: -but I never had a record. Just looking at him in that picture and reading his liner notes, and I associated him so much with Rimbaud, a song like A Hard Rain’s A‐Gonna Fall, very Rimbaudian. Even his face is very like the young Rimbaud, and he was alive. Finally, I had somebody I could--

David Remnick: That's not unimportant.

Patti Smith: I loved Robert Louis Stevenson and Louisa May Alcott. All the people I loved, they were all long gone, and Rimbaud long gone. Finally, somebody in real time that I could fantasize about or follow or learn from.

David Remnick: He was alive and yet a little bit out of reach, too, which added to the allure.

Patti Smith: Of course.

David Remnick: I remember being a fanatic on this subject. We've talked about this before, but so rarely would you hear his speaking voice. Once, I remember listening to WPLJ, I think it was, or NEWFM. He was being interviewed by Mary Travers. He was answering questions. He was irritated and the usual things. It was something-- It's very hard to explain now.

Patti Smith: Oh, I still remember I saw him in Philadelphia in '65, and he introduced Visions of Johanna before he recorded it. I remember he came to the microphone, he said, "This song is called Obviously Not a Freeze Out."

David Remnick: [laughs]

Patti Smith: Obviously Not a Freeze Out. The first words I hear from Bob Dylan, and I've never forgotten them. I can hear it in my-- It was amazing to hear him speak.

David Remnick: Many artistic memoirs, including Dylan's Chronicles, have that moment where you arrive, you physically arrive. In your case, the arrival at the gates of New York, and you write this. "I stepped out of Port Authority bus terminal with my plaid suitcase." I love that, the plaid suitcase. "My greatest desire at the time was to surrender as an artist." What a word, surrender. Then you go on. "Perhaps I lacked the necessary skills, but I had the willingness to develop them, for I believed in the truth of my calling and was single-minded in my pursuit to find work. It had come to me as if struck with an ecstatic paralysis." Then the next paragraph, you're off to the races.

When did you start to get the idea of, "This is what I could be"? You start writing poems, and then you get the idea to be backed up by musicians while doing so at St Mark's Church, an old church downtown where they have poetry readings. When does the penny start to drop, and this is the path I can pursue that will fulfill the vision of who I might be and what I want to say?

Patti Smith: Actually, because it wasn't my first pursuit. I wanted to be an artist. By then, I had a feeling that I really didn't have the necessary physical skills, that I was always going to be good at what I did. I felt that I had certain gifts, but I had really embraced being a writer. It was Sam Shepard who-- I did Sam Shepard--

David Remnick: You wrote a play together.

Patti Smith: Yes, but I had been to poetry readings and they seemed so boring to me, and I didn't want to be boring. I was talking to Sam, and he said, "Well, you sing little songs like little blue--" We used to do little blues songs together. Like, "Why don't you get a guitar player and do a couple of songs?" I had just met Lenny Kaye, and he had said that he played some guitar, so I recruited him on one poem to do a car crash.

David Remnick: [laughs]

Patti Smith: He had like a really tiny little champ amp and electric guitar, and he did like a car crash to one of my long poems. It caused quite a commotion that I didn't expect. The fact that we had an electric guitar in the church--

David Remnick: This is at St. Mark's?

Patti Smith: Yes. A girl doing that got a lot of negativity, but also--

David Remnick: It got negativity? How was that expressed?

Patti Smith: Well, desecration of the church, for one, and also little blasphemous poems, I suppose. I don't know, I can't say to this day why it made such an impression on people. I was offered after that a record contract. I was offered all kinds of things, and I thought it was really stupid.

David Remnick: Stupid? Why?

Patti Smith: All that attention over that, I thought, "No, I'm not going to get involved in all that yet." I just thought it was an awful lot, and I wasn't prepared for it. I just didn't want to be boring.

David Remnick: You just didn't want to be boring at all?

Patti Smith: No, I didn't want to be boring.

[laughter]

David Remnick: Let me ask you, one of your first recorded utterances, I remember hearing this record, is Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine. Yet, you were brought up in a highly religious or religiously inflected or infused household. Your mother became a Jehovah's Witness, if I recall correctly. What was your relationship to God and Jesus and religion by the time you were--

Patti Smith: I was going to Bible school at two and a half. I was asking questions about prayer. I made my mother crazy, asking her, "What is the soul? What color is the soul? Will the soul come back if it goes away while I'm sleeping?" My mother finally sent me to Bible school. I had a very strong Bible education. My father read the Bible. My father loved to argue with all-- If any religious person or any organization came to the door, he'd bring them in and usually truthfully wipe them out because he knew more about the Bible than they did. I was a Jehovah Witness till I was 12 years old. At 12, I was grateful for all my education, but I felt that I was not a candidate for organized religion.

David Remnick: Were you in rebellion toward it, do you think?

Patti Smith: It wasn't rebellion. I didn't rebel. I just understood that it wasn't right for me.

David Remnick: Did you become an atheist?

Patti Smith: No, no, I still love God. Even when I wrote--

David Remnick: I didn't think so.

Patti Smith: People would say, when Horses came out, "You don't love Jesus. You don't believe in Jesus." I said, "I believe in him so much he's the first word of my record." That was not against Jesus; it was really more my statement about organized religion with a lot of young bravado. I wrote that poem in 1968 and recorded it in '75, but I had written it quite some time before.

Not long after even I recorded that in studying Jesus in a different angle, not through religion, I came, actually, to deeply admire him. I still study the New Testament with my sister, or actually, the whole Bible with my sister, because she's a very devout witness. We have Bible studies because I love to talk about and interpret or think about different things in the Bible. Also the language. I mean, the revelations was another influence on me aesthetically, because of the language. The King James Version, it's quite poetical. I'm still the same way. I have my own relationship with God. It might shift through the years.

David Remnick: How would you describe that relationship?

Patti Smith: Basically, I trust that God understands my heart, knows who I am. He knows my trespasses. I never petition God.

David Remnick: You don't?

Patti Smith: Even when Robert was sick, I never--

David Remnick: Your friend, Robert Mapplethorpe?

Patti Smith: Yes. I prayed for him. I pray for everyone. I pray for the hostages, for the Palestinian people. I pray for everyone. I'm not discriminating and praying for people, but I pray, just as I prayed for Robert, for the strengthening of their heart to endure what they have to endure.

[music]

David Remnick: This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm speaking with Patti Smith. We'll continue in a moment.

[music]

David Remnick: This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I'm speaking today with Patti Smith. This is a pretty big week for Patti Smith. Her debut album, Horses, came out exactly 50 years ago, November 10, 1975. An anniversary reissue has come out this year, and Smith has also just published the third of an extraordinary series of memoirs dealing with a pretty extraordinary life. The book is called Bread of Angels.

The book arguably pivots in the mid-70s. Not the whole of the book, but there's a kind of pivotal-- Two things happen in the mid-70s. The first thing is that you record, and it's now, remarkably, to my mind, the 50th anniversary of Horses, I think, in November 10th. Some of these songs you still play to this day. Then something personal happens. You meet the man who'd become your husband, and eventually, you withdraw from that life that you were having as a rock star, as a public persona. Tell me about that falling in love and then this withdrawal, because it is, in many ways, the heart of the book and extraordinarily moving.

Patti Smith: Well, thank you. One of the reasons I wrote this book, and this book is really-- Bread of Angels is really the idea of its gratitude or gestures of kindness. I wanted these people to be remembered as I knew them, not as how they're speculated upon or written about. I wanted Fred to be remembered as the man that I loved and shared, albeit, brief but very condensed and wondrous time together.

David Remnick: What's amazing, you encounter Fred "Sonic" Smith in Detroit. You were on tour.

Patti Smith: Yes.

David Remnick: Even after we get to know him in this book, there's a degree to which he's hard to penetrate as a person for you.

Patti Smith: He was very private. He was very private. There was aspects that were impenetrable, but that was part of that understanding, or understanding that I'll never completely understand him was part of the mystical contract. I never thought of myself as getting married and have a family. It was 1976, March 10th, our first show in Detroit. We were on the Horses tour. We were briefly at a party thrown for us. I stopped in because I don't really like parties that much, so I didn't want to be there too long. Everyone was so nice, but then I wanted to leave.

Just as I was about to leave, I saw him. He was standing there in a dark blue overcoat by a white radiator, right at the door. We looked at each other. It was like in movies where everything stops and everybody dissipates and it's only a second, but it feels like it could be several minutes. I knew instinctively with all my being that that was the fella I was going to marry. We developed a long-distance relationship for a few years, and all that parting became increasingly difficult.

Back then, you didn't have cell phones, you didn't have Zooms, you couldn't see the person. Long-distance calls were really expensive. I remember gathering every piece of change in, I think it was Ireland, found a phone booth, and filled the phone booth with-

David Remnick: [laughs]

Patti Smith: -so much change to talk to him for two minutes. Finally, it was just too difficult, and the conflict was difficult. Also, I wasn't really growing as an artist. I wasn't really writing. I neglected my notebooks. I wasn't studying. Finally, in 1980, exactly four years later, we did marry.

David Remnick: You made a decision to stop. "I threw it all away. Love is all there is."

Patti Smith: Well, it wasn't just for love that was yet at the heart of it. It was also for self-preservation because I could see my future, and I could see that I would get bigger, most likely. I don't know what kind of music we'd produce, because I didn't even know if I had more records in me or anything. As a performer, we were quite big in Europe, but I wasn't evolving at all. I was getting, I think, more high-strung. I wasn't happy.

David Remnick: As I understand it, you weren't self-destructive. Drugs were not your thing.

Patti Smith: No, I was never-- I was such a sickly kid. I had to be nursed through bronchial pneumonia at birth and tuberculosis and scarlet fever, and then the pandemic flu of 1958, and then mononucleosis, plus all the measles, monks, chickenpox. I had had to struggle so much to live. Then, when I came to New York and when Robert and I moved to the Chelsea in 1969-

David Remnick: Your friend Robert Mapplethorpe.

Patti Smith: -I saw a lot of great people destroying themselves and who never made it past 27, or other people who did make it for a while, but had so damaged themselves. I never wanted to be like that. In fact, at the Chelsea, because I didn't do anything, I didn't even smoke pot, there was rumors for a while that I was a narc.

David Remnick: [laughs] Patti Smith, narcotics agent. I like that.

Patti Smith: I swear to you. Robert even told me, he said, "Some people are saying that you're a narc." We thought it was funny, but they were suspicious of me.

David Remnick: Let's go to your time at home with Fred. How did you experience life after this unbelievably tumultuous time and exciting time you're at home? How did you live your life, and how long did that last, your experience of domestic happiness, if that's what it was?

Patti Smith: I missed my brother. I'm an East Coast person. I missed the ocean. I missed all the cafes. I miss the camaraderie of my band. I miss traveling. I'm very lucky because I have other outlets of creative expression. I wasn't wanting, I wasn't suffering because I wasn't on stage. I didn't depend on adulation for my self-worth. Those kind of things didn't come into play. One of the things I missed the most was cafes, just to be able to walk out my door and go to a cafe.

David Remnick: This is something we share. You're also a coffee freak.

Patti Smith: Yes, I like my coffee. I liked our life. Fred, like me, was always studying. He studied to be a pilot, and he got his pilot's license. He was studying navigation. We both love that aspect of learning. We wrote music at home. I don't know, I'm not domestically inclined. I wasn't the greatest housekeeper, but I'm good at laundry. I did the laundry, and I washed the diapers. My kids, I love my kids.

David Remnick: What year did Fred die?

Patti Smith: The end of '94.

David Remnick: You were left with just this gigantic loss and hole in your life. What was your determination to do the next days and months?

Patti Smith: Well, I had two children. They were 7 and 12. Also, I had the promise from my brother when he died that he would help me raise the kids. Just unexpectedly, he had a massive stroke a month later and died at 42. It wasn't just the loss of Fred that I had to deal with; it was the loss of my brother Todd.

David Remnick: Did you think you could come back from all of that?

Patti Smith: Well, I had to. A mother.

David Remnick: You came back to music with a record called Gone Again.

Patti Smith: Yes.

David Remnick: What did that moment feel like for you?

Patti Smith: It was very painful because Fred and I had worked on a record toward the end of his life. He wanted to call it Going West. We did a lot of work on the record, and I had to take that work and sort of transform it and write new work for a new record. It was very necessary because we had lived so frugally and simply. There were many doctor bills and all kinds of things, and I was really obliged to return to work. Of course, I have very good friends that all help me get my feet back on the ground.

Even though, yes, it was wonderful to record with them was great, but I think I said in the book I had to take the photographs without Robert, play music without Richard Soule, my beloved pianist, who also died of heart failure at 37, without my brother at the helm, without Fred by my side. It was something that I had to navigate, and I was very lucky to have-- All kinds of people helped with that record. I got through it with the help of friends.

The idea of returning, performing was really daunting. It was Allen Ginsberg, another friend, who kept entreating me to go back to public life and go back on stage. I believe it was Allen that talked to Bob Dylan. Then Bob Dylan offered us an East Coast tour. It was my first tour in 16 years.

David Remnick: Patti, there's a remarkable passage that opens the last chapter, I believe. I wonder if you could read that for us.

Patti Smith: For a long time, I maintained a vestige of innocence, a feathery wisp adrift somewhere inside me, affording me a generous measure of enthusiasm, tempering loss and disappointment. I held a constancy with my youthful calling, a blood vine circling the ankle of a 12-year-old girl, a messenger attaching his wing and bruising her heel. I felt blessed with the aspiration to produce worthy work. Recently, I've sensed a pulling away, mercurial droplets tapping my skull as I fitfully seek sleep. My ears press against the pillow, a repeating phrase pulsating, "We who no longer believe." When did I write that and why? It disturbs me. Have I really felt that for more than a few sullen moments?

David Remnick: Patti, tell me about that feeling of no longer believing.

Patti Smith: It still shocks me, even reading it now, because I haven't-- Actually, if I really deeply think about it, think it's part of the aging process and going through so much loss, so much experience, and maybe fatigue, almost losing motivation, like why am I creating? What is the point? It's trying to pray. I've always had a one-to-one relationship with God. After each person died, Robert and Fred and my brother, my father, my mother, I sometimes wondered, "Who am I praying to?" I sometimes just didn't know.

Now I think it doesn't matter. Prayer is always beautiful. I think for a while I felt disconnected with everything. When I wrote that, it did disturb me. It disturbs me still because I'm filled with belief. I believe in so many things. I believe, as I wrote in the book, I believe in belief. I'll believe in someone else's belief wholeheartedly. My belief does not cancel out another person's belief. I believe there are many beautiful truths. Not many evil truths. There's just one evil truth, but many beautiful truths.

David Remnick: Do you find it harder of late, because of what's happening in the public world, to sustain that?

Patti Smith: I have a Substack, and I tell the people freely sometimes. I find it very hard sometimes to post and tell them funny stories or read them Uncle Wiggily or just go into some abstract mode. I sometimes feel strange posting something on Instagram because I have a sense of frivolity in the face of so much suffering. I can't get the suffering of the people out of my mind. It wakes me up in the middle of the night. It's on my mind when I wake up, but I still feel that-- I'm 78 years old. I have still much work to do. I have to do my work. I'm a mother. I have three kids. I have to be there for them. I have to celebrate the life I've been given.

David Remnick: What gives you joy now?

Patti Smith: What gives me joy is when my kids seem good. That's one of my great joys. It gives me joy when I write something, and I think it's good. In fact, I was writing all morning. I've been struggling a bit, and I wrote all morning, and when I finished, I went, "Oh, good work," almost out loud to myself.

David Remnick: Well, I hope you feel that way about Bread of Angels, because it brought me enormous, enormous joy.

Patti Smith: Oh, David, thank you. Well, it's just, I like to see people happy or I like to do something. It's one of the great joys, still, of performing to see people spirited and full of energy and hopeful. If it's helpful or inspires people in their own struggles, that'll make me happy, too.

David Remnick: Patti Smith, thank you so much.

Patti Smith: Thanks, David.

[music]

David Remnick: Bread of Angels is the new book by Patti Smith, and you can read a beautiful excerpt from it at newyorker.com. It's called Art Rats in New York City. You can, of course, subscribe to The New Yorker there as well, newyorker.com.

 

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