Dua Lipa has expressed admiration for her writing, and Taylor Swift referenced her in “The Tortured Poets Department,” singing: “You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith.”
Fifty years after Smith’s era-defining album, “Horses,” she returns to the road and releases a new memoir, “Bread of Angels.”
“The idea of the book came to me in a dream,” Patti Smith revealed in an interview.
The memoir offers a compelling portrait of an artist at the heart of New York’s 1970s counter-cultural scene, where Smith interacted with figures like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and William Burroughs.
During that vibrant era, she performed at CBGBs, which, as she notes, “wasn’t legendary yet… it was completely unknown.”
Smith also defied the expectations of male record producers. “I had a lot of armour and it wasn’t easily pierced,” she stated.
Her debut album, “Horses,” resonated with the disenfranchised and marginalized.
“We were still living in a time where if a kid told their parents they were gay in the Midwest or somewhere, they were disowned. New York was filled with the disowned,” she explained.
Smith recently performed at the London Palladium during her European tour.
Performing songs that are decades old to audiences of all ages, including young fans who know her lyrics, is a humbling experience, she shared. “It makes me feel like I’m still doing something useful – and that’s a great feeling.”
Patti Smith, a poet, writer, artist, activist, and trailblazer, is driven by a desire to be useful, as reflected in her anthemic rock song, “People Have the Power,” a call for standing up for one’s beliefs.
She co-wrote the track with her late husband, musician Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, who passed away over 30 years ago at the age of 44.
The song was “his concept,” she noted, “and it was for the people of the future, for marches, for protest, for just feeling some strength.”
She has since been present at marches where “people didn’t know I was marching – and they were singing that song spontaneously.”
While it is “heartbreaking” that Fred did not live to see its impact, it also fills her with “so much pride for him and happiness.”
When asked if the new book is a love letter to him, she was visibly moved. Even after 30 years, talking about Fred can still bring her to tears. After composing herself, she affirmed, “it’s not a sad feeling.”
Her most well-known hit was also linked to Fred. Bruce Springsteen’s recording engineer offered her a song the singer had abandoned, to see if she could create lyrics. She waited to listen until one night while awaiting her weekly call from Fred, who was in Detroit.
Upon playing the tape, she recalled thinking, “It’s one of those darn hits. I knew it, as soon as I listened to it. It was in my key, it was perfect, it had sensualness, it was anthemic.”
She penned the lyrics to “Because the Night” while waiting for Fred’s call, including the lines, ‘Have I doubt when I’m alone? Love is a ring, the telephone’. (He eventually called).
Smith stepped away from her music career at its peak, during European tours and fan frenzy, after falling in love with Fred. She left the band to return to poetry and marital bliss, and the couple had two children.
The book “is a love letter to my parents, to my siblings, to my husband, to my brother, to all of the people named and unnamed that helped shape me.”
Smith has experienced more than her share of loss.
In addition to Fred, her close friend, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, died from AIDS in 1989 at 42. (Smith’s 2010 book “Just Kids” chronicles their relationship and was described by Dua Lipa as “an incredible book and such a time capsule of creativity when it was really emerging, especially during that time in the 1960s and 1970s”).
Patti’s brother, Todd, also died at 45.
In “Bread of Angels,” Smith vividly describes her upbringing. Her family relocated 11 times before she was four; they were evicted and lived with relatives, eventually moving into a rat-infested tenement in Philadelphia.
The book emphasizes how she developed her artistic passions from a young age.
While others honed motor skills with toys, the young Smith explored philosophical questions and became fascinated by words.
Poetry, she writes, “formed a map that led to the kingdom of the infinite imagination.”
She became obsessed with French poet Arthur Rimbaud, and at 17, transitioned “seamlessly” to Bob Dylan.
“Both poets’ words seemed as if they were written for the tribe of black sheep, outsiders trying to exist in the times they were dealt,” she states.
As her 1.4 million Instagram followers know, she is an artist at her core.
The book explores the influences that shaped her.
Smith recounted discovering Vogue magazines as a child and becoming fascinated by contemporary photography.
She was “shocked, stunned, beguiled. It was a whole new world… I can’t say why a little seven-year old kid was drawn to that, living in a lower middle class area after World War II, but it was a real thing.”
At nine, she contracted a virus during the Asian flu pandemic and was told by a doctor she would likely not survive. Her mother bought her a box set of Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly” and placed it near her bed.
Smith believes her desire to listen to the opera helped her recover.
During the family’s only visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, young Patti wandered into a hall of Picassos and was “smitten,” having “fallen for art.”
Her father took her to that museum. Smith was often ill as a child, suffering from bronchial pneumonia, tuberculosis, German measles, mumps, and chickenpox, which resulted in “periods of lengthy bed rest.”
Her mother told her that her father saved her life as a baby, when she was “born coughing.” He would hold her above a steaming washtub to help her breathe.
Her love for him is evident. However, after her parents’ deaths, she and her sister took a DNA test to learn more about their heritage. Smith made the “shocking” discovery that her biological father was someone else, which she reveals for the first time in her memoir.
“I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit broken-hearted.”
“It actually held the book up for a while because I had to process that. So much of my book is dedicated to my father and it still is.”
“He will always be my father, but now I have two fathers.”
She learned her biological father was Jewish, “one hundred percent Ashkenazi,” with relatives who were driven from Russia to Ukraine, then to Liverpool, England, Newfoundland, Canada, before settling in Philadelphia.
“I don’t know a whole lot about him,” she confessed. “But everything I found out about him, I recognise. I recognise myself in his face. I’ve only seen a couple of pictures, but the same attitude. I can just feel it.”
The discovery provided answers about “things about yourself that the rest of your family doesn’t have.”
Smith praised her mother for keeping the secret, stating, “This is how great my mother was. My mother knew in her lifetime that I favoured my father, so she never said a word to make me feel that he wasn’t… she did her best to protect me.”
Patti Smith has always seemed uncompromising, as exemplified by those iconic, gender-defying photographs from the 1970s.
She was the embodiment of countercultural cool.
Upon meeting her, I found a warm, thoughtful person with an intense aesthetic sensibility and a profound love for family. Her losses have shaped her.
Her poetic artistry has shaped us all.
She is also a strong supporter of younger female artists like Dua Lipa and Taylor Swift, deeming that they are “doing a good job” because the music industry is “dominated by women.”
She calls them “strong girls… like the song ‘The Kids are All Right,’ the girls are all right. They’re facing a lot of stuff, but they’re facing it well.”
Bread of Angels by Patti Smith is published on 4 November