Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith (born December 30, 1946) is an
American singer-songwriter,
poet and
artist who was a highly influential component of the
punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album
Horses. Called the "Godmother of Punk"
[1], she integrated the
beat poetry performance style with
three-chord rock. Her allusions introduced American teens to 19th century French poetry while her "unladylike" language defied the disco era. Smith is most widely known for the song "
Because the Night" which was co-written with
Bruce Springsteen and reached number 13 on the
Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1978. In 2005, Patti Smith was named a Commander of the
Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture,
[2] and in 2007, she was inducted into the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
[3]Smith was born in Chicago. Her mother, Beverly, was a jazz singer and father, Grant, worked at the Honeywell plant. She spent her entire childhood in Deptford, New Jersey.[4][5] Raised the daughter of a Jehovah's Witness mother, she claims she had a strong religious education and a very good Bible education, but left organized religion as a teenager because she felt it was too confining and much later wrote the opening line ("Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine") of her cover version of Them's "Gloria" in response to this experience.[6] Smith graduated from Deptford Township High School in 1964. The family was not wealthy and Smith went to work in a factory.[7] Patti Smith was voted "Class Clown" in her senior year.
In 1967 she left Glassboro State Teachers College (now Rowan University) and moved to New York City. She met photographer Robert Mapplethorpe there while working at a book store with a friend, poet Janet Hamill. Mapplethorpe's photographs of her became the covers for the Patti Smith Group LPs, and they remained friends until Mapplethorpe's death in 1989.[8] In 1969 she went to Paris with her sister and started busking and doing performance art.[4] When Smith returned to New York City, she lived in the Hotel Chelsea with Mapplethorpe; they frequented the fashionable Max's Kansas City and CBGB nightclubs. The same year Smith appeared with Wayne County in Jackie Curtis's play Femme Fatale. As a member of the St. Mark's Poetry Project, she spent the early '70s painting, writing, and performing. In 1971 she performed – for one night only – in Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth.[9] (The published play's notes call for "a man who looks like a coyote and a woman who looks like a crow".) She collaborated with Allen Lanier of Blue Öyster Cult, who recorded several of the songs to which Smith had contributed, including "Debbie Denise" (after her poem "In Remembrance of Debbie Denise"), "Career of Evil", "Fire of Unknown Origin", "The Revenge of Vera Gemini", and "Shooting Shark". During these years, Smith also wrote rock journalism, some of which was published in Creem magazine.[10]
By 1974 Patti Smith was performing rock music herself, initially with guitarist and rock archivist Lenny Kaye, and later with a full band comprising Kaye, Ivan Kral on bass, Jay Dee Daugherty on drums and Richard Sohl, on piano. Ivan Kral was a refugee from Czechoslovakia, fleeing in 1968 after the fall of Alexander Dubcek. Financed by Robert Mapplethorpe, the band recorded a first single, "Hey Joe / Piss Factory", in 1974. The A-side was a version of the rock standard with the addition of a spoken word piece about fugitive heiress Patty Hearst ("Patty Hearst, you're standing there in front of the Symbionese Liberation Army flag with your legs spread, I was wondering were you gettin' it every night from a black revolutionary man and his women...").[11] The B-side describes the helpless anger Smith had felt while working on a factory assembly line and the salvation she discovered in the form of a shoplifted book, the 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations.[7]
