garde playwright Sam Shepard and various minions of
Andy Warhol to national attention as a leading contender for the title of
rock's new poet laureate.
The waiflike Smith, who wears jeans and T shirts and a beatnik-delinquent
insolence, understands that rock thrives on fantasies and raw emotions,
exposed and flaunted. "I desperately wanted a god, but I wasn't ever
satisfied, so art replaced it, and rock 'n' roll," she says earnestly. "Kids
are so hungry -- I'm trying to put new thinking in people's minds."
Patti Smith grew up mostly in Pitman, N.J. -- in a part of the state filled
with "factories, pig farms and swamps." Early on, she developed a passion for
rock music and religion. She dates her musical awakening from the time that
she first heard Little Richard -- "I felt I'd been shocked by lightning" -- and
until the age of 12 she was a member of the Jehovah's witnesses. In high
school, she hung out with black students who danced to the music of James
Brown and the Marvelettes and listened to John Coltrane and Nina Simone. "We
were really into jazz and poetry and developing our cool and our walk. It was
the best education I ever had."
Self-Image: She wanted to be an artist. "I quit the Jehovah's witnesses,"
she says, "because they said the Museum of Modern Art wasn't going to be around
after Armageddon." So, after dropping out of teachers' college and doing
factory work, she headed for New York in 1967. There she met art students,
began writing poetry and devised a self-image made up of an odd assortment of
her favorite personalities: the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Jeanne Moreau, Jean
Genet, the Marvelettes and Oscar Brown Jr. She linked up with Sam Shepard --
"I used to yell poetry at him and he'd bang his drums" -- and began appearing
in little clubs, reciting her impassioned verse to artists, poets and
musicians. In 1974, she formed a band and began writing songs that took up
where her recitations left off. Then this year she signed with Arista Records.
Horses and a four-and-a-half-month national tour were the result.
Last week Patti Smith opened that tour at the Bijou Cafe in Philadelphia.
Punching the air like a boxer, striking mock-Napoleonic poses, chanting and
belting out songs, she was in complete control of the swagger-strut-and-sneer
brand of rock. Piaf's little sparrow occasionally peeped through, as did a
suggestion of Judy Garland's strutting, sentimental trouper. But Jagger and
Dylan are her most obvious influences. "People tend to romanticize the fact
that I love all these male performers," says Smith, and the most interesting
part of her act is her struggle to master all her influences and balance them
with her own personality. Fortunately, she is not wedded to any of them: "I
got a lot of plans for when I grow up," she says. They range from becoming
like Julie London -- "mink and hi-fi" -- to a jazz singer's urge to "synthesize
language with a saxophone." Patti believes "that's how you grow old
gracefully -- you go from one thing to another." Watching Patti Smith grow old
will be quite a spectacle.
Copyright © Margo Jefferson 1975
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