A poet who also makes music, Patti Smith has more in common with Jim Morrison than she does with Courtney Love. Like Morrison, Patti Smith was a Romantic, steeped in Byronic passion, Baudelaire’s dark beauty, and Rilke’s angel-haunted obsessions who lived in a world of grand imaginings far from her working-class Jersey. Self- schooled and self-styled, the former factory worker found New York in the late ‘60s to be the perfect canvas for her artistic ambitions. She also found a soulmate in photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who turned their friendship into art with his now-famous monotints. Patti read poetry at Max’s Kansas City to audiences of glittery night creatures like Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgewick and her boyfriend Sam Shepard, and hosts of hookers and actresses, in a coked-up atmosphere somewhere between William Blake’s Hell and an uber-noir Berlin nightclub. She started by accompanying her ripping poems on a toy piano and graduated to a full band where she astonished everyone with her singing. Her song “Because the Night” became a Top 40 hit and made her a rock star. Then in 1978, she fell off stage one night, shattering her neck.
Soon after, she pulled one of the greatest disappearing acts of music history when she moved to Detroit to raise two children and run a household with her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, the guitarist for MC5. The deaths of both Robert Mapplethorpe and Fred Smith moved Patti to music again. Her album Gone Again and sold-out tour established Patti as a survivor. She still reads poetry at her shows, to rapt audiences who understand her as she screams out, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.”
This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.
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