Mystery train: Patti Smith at the Amtrak departure lounge in Penn Station, New York City, 2015.
THE PANDEMIC took us off the road for almost 18 months, and I realised how much we need to play music, not for the adulation but the physical and tion, it takes you to another place.
“I REALLY like my CD player. It’s about 10 years old and it’s really cool-looking. I love my CDs because they are portable. I don’t stream and I don’t really have many records left. I have a little EP of June Christy doing Something Cool. That’s one of the few records that survived. But I have lots of CDs:
What’s changed since the group started is our understanding of the material and how deep it runs, parallel to our growth as artists and humans. It’s not like sports where the body starts letting you down. I think, with musicians, there is a grace in growing older, and I understand better how to get to where I need to, and make each song new. What’s stayed the same is our commitment to our art and idealism, to bring a positive energy and inspire the audience to swim in their own sea of possibilities. We live in very difficult times at the moment, and what we offer is a beacon of hope and engagement, and by extension a sense of empowerment.
Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Maria Callas, and lots of soundtracks. I love Kenji Kawai’s soundtrack to Ghost In The Shell. If I have trouble sleeping, I’ll just put on Philip Glass’s soundcheck to Mishima. I also like to listen to that if I write.
IT’S A BEAUTIFUL SPRING MORNING IN ROCKAWAY BEACH, NEW YORK, AND Patti Smith is drinking black coffee in her small workers’ bungalow, a bolthole and retreat for the 75-year-old singer and poet since 2012. She’s part way through her extensive 2022 world tour and just back from Austin, Texas, where she entertained an audience of 3,000 with a transportive evening of songs and stories that encompassed her entire life.
I love seeing that our audiences are not age-dominated. The first five rows are still mostly girls, who see in Patti a passion and encouragement and the sense that, even if you’re a renegade or idiosyncratic, you can find a way to make your art. Our band came from as far left-field as we could, with poetry and one guitar. We didn’t set out to be a rock’n’roll band; we just followed our instincts.
If I’m feeling a bit boxed in I’ll put on some Glenn Gould, something without words. Maybe a little Ornette Coleman. The Naked Lunch soundtrack is a good one. These days I’ve also been listening a lot to Daniel Hart’s soundtrack to Green Knight, Hans Zimmer’s Dune soundtrack, which I just love, and Jonny Greenwood’s soundtrack to the Phantom Thread which is beautiful. I found that film so heartbreaking, when at the end Reynolds Woodcock [the Daniel Day-Lewis character] says, “Kiss me darling, before I get sick again.” It’s just the most mystically strange love story ever. The way Woodcock and [his wife] Alma are entwined.
Significantly, she has no album to promote, and hasn’t since 2012’s Banga, and the merchandise table is solely given over to copies of her 2019 book, Year Of The Monkey.
We’ll play all sorts, from soft, intimate moments to ramping it up into a field of healing noise.
The conspiracy between them. Because that’s what love is, a mutual conspiracy.”
Because Patti Smith is also a writer, has been from the age of 12. Since the 2010 publication of Just Kids, her award-winning memoir documenting her friendship with the late artist Robert Mapplethorpe – who took the iconic, imperious photograph of Smith that stares from the cover of her 1975 debut album, Horses – she has published a brace of poetic, funny, moving, lyrical and elliptic works – MTrain and Monkey – that she calls “autobiographical fiction”. More recently, she’s been busy on a surreal dream memoir called The Melting, that she reads for her thousands of followers on the online subscription platform, Substack.
For me, our relationship to the songs hasn’t changed. I’m really happy to revisit our hits, because you understand the impact they have made, but I get the same rush from playing Free Money as I did in 1976 – we amp up the energy, follow its twists and turns, and I feel I can move a mile an hour faster than I did then!
“I never wanted to be a songwriter,” she says, laughing. “I couldn’t write songs like Smokey Robinson. I don’t have that touch that strikes the common chord. I didn’t dream of being a songwriter. I dreamed of writing. I still struggle but it was a pleasure to write M Train and Year Of The Monkey and The Melting. Just Kids was total non-fiction, no embellishments, no exaggeration, but my current style is different, a sort of navigating of the territor y between fact and imagination, dream and reality.”
Land is still a jumping-off point for Patti to improvise a train of thought – as with Birdland, I love to see where that bird will fly! I still feel the emotional depth when we play Because The Night, specifically the love the lyrics embrace between Patti and [late husband] Fred, but it’s reflected by the audience as they sing it back to us.
It’s that territory that we’ve decided to explore today.
THE BAND is myself, Jay Dee [Daugherty, drums], Tony [Shanahan, bass/keys] and [Patti’s son] Jackson [guitar]. Everyone brings different influences and strengths, but the music goes through Patti’s persona and sense of drive. We all try to get to the door and open it for her before she whisks through!