godmother of punk, yes, but that's not all
You might know Patti Smith best as the co-writer (with Bruce Springsteen) of "Because the Night," but this is a woman and an artist whose talents and vision extend beyond music. Read on.....
Photo by Steven Sebring
The incomparable Patti Smith
"Even as a child, I felt like an alien."
patti smith, a biography in 4 minutes
context
albums
Radio Ethiopia (1976)
Easter (1978)
Wave (1979)
Dream of Life (1988)
Gone Again (1996)
Peace & Noise (1997)
Gung Ho (2000)
Land (2002)
Trampin' (2004)
Twelve (2007)
The Coral Sea (2008)
Patti Smith on the Charlie Rose show
"She moves fluidly through the genres of music, visual art, and language."
a patti smith rock and roll timeline
courtesy of the rock & roll hall of fame
1967 Patti Smith migrates from New Jersey to New York City, where she befriends musicians, artists and playwrights and works on her poetry.
1971 Patti Smith performs with guitarist Lenny Kaye for the first time at a poetry reading with musical accompaniment at St. Marks Church on New York's Lower East Side.
1973 Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye join forces for a "Rock 'n' Rimbaud" performance in New York, sewing the seeds for the Patti Smith Group.
1974 The Patti Smith Group begins a regular gig at CBGB's, performing four nights a week for almost two months. Patti Smith records her first single - "Hey Joe" b/w "Piss Factory" - at Electric Lady Studios in New York. It is released on the Mer label and later re-released on Sire Records.
1975 Patti Smith's epochal debut album, Horses, is released on Arista Records. It will reach #47, but that middling chart position gives no sense of its ultimate impact.
1976 Radio Ethiopia, the second album by the Patti Smith, enters the album chart, where it will peak at #122.
1977 While performing "Ain't It Strange" while opening for Bob Seger in Tampa, Florida, Patti Smith falls offstage, cracking two vertebrae. The injury sidelines her for a year.
1978 Easter, the third album by Patti Smith, enters Billboard's album chart, where it will peak at #20, resurrecting her career following a year-long recovery from injury.
1978 "Because the Night," recorded by Patti Smith and cowritten with Bruce Springsteen, enters the Top Forty, where it will peak at #13.
1979 Patti Smith releases Wave, her fourth album, produced by Todd Rundgren, which will reach #18 - her highest showing. Smith, however, will not record again for nearly a decade.
1979 The Patti Smith Group goes into retirement following a tour-ending gig at a Florence, Italy soccer stadium.
1980 Patti Smith and guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith, late of the MC5, are married and settle down in Detroit to raise a family.
1988 Dream of Life, Patti Smith's first album since 1979's Wave, is released. The spiritually suffused set is highlighted by the anthemic "People Have the Power,"
1990 Richard "DNV" Sohl, keyboardist for the Patti Smith Group, dies of heart failure.
1994 Fred "Sonic" Smith, guitarist for the MC5 and Patti Smith's spouse, dies of heart failure.
1996 Patti Smith releases Gone Again, an elegiac album that mourns lost love ones while deriving strength from their memories.
1997 Peace and Noise, Patti Smith's seventh album, enters the charts for an abbreviated one-week stay.
2000 Patti Smith releases her eighth album, Gung Ho, and will launch a national tour in April.
2002 Land (1975-2002), a two-disc Patti Smith retrospective, is released.
2002 Strange Messenger, an exhibition of drawings, silk screens and photographs by Patti Smith, opens at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
2002 After a quarter century on Arista Records, Patti Smith signs with Columbia on the birthdate of French poet Arthur Rimbaud.
2004 Patti Smith's Trampin', her first album for Columbia Records, is released.
2005 Thirty years after its release, Patti Smith performs Horses in its entirety with her band at London's Royal Festival Hall. The performance will serve as the bonus disc on the Legacy Edition reissue of Horses, released in December 2005.
2007 Patti Smith is inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at the 22nd annual induction dinner.
in her own words
(1996)
"The evolution of my band, both past and present, has been an organic, collaborative effort. I was motivated by the desire to reinfuse rock and roll with the political, spiritual, and revolutionary energy that had inspired me. My love of the human voice, expressed thru opera and spirituals, and my love of improvisation, for example, the work of John Coltrane and Miles Davis have influenced the way in which I conduct myself in the arena of rock and roll."
(2003)
"The thing I've always liked about performing is that I decide what I want to wear, whether I want to comb my hair. No one ever told me what to do, and no one tells me now."
(2010)
because the night
"Her work and her career defy the traditional boundaries of both the art and music worlds."
some books by patti smith
- Early Work: 1970-1979. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005. Focuses on Smith's work during the punk movement and the chaotic 1970s. Photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and Judy Linn.
- Patti Smith Complete 1975-2006: Lyrics, Reflections & Notes for the Future. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006. Complete lyrics of all her records from 1975's Horses to Trampin (2006). Smith's commentaries and other writings provide context for her work. Superb collection of photographs.
- Auguries of Innocence. New York: Ecco, 2008.A collection of published poems and lyrics in which Smith reflects on contemporary issues such as the war in Iraq, global hunger and a return to innocence.
- Trois. London: Thames & Hudson, 2008. Three books created during a period of nearly 30 years, combined in a set. This collection showcases her poetry, photography, drawings and handwriting and reflects her interest in all types of artistic expression.
- Land 250. Thames & Hudson, 2008. Published to accompany an exhibition at the Fondation Cartier Pour L'Art Contemporain in Paris, it presents hundreds of Polaroids and black-and-white photographs, plus commentaries by Smith.
- Just Kids. New York: Ecco, 2010. In her first book of prose Smith looks at her relationship with legendary photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and her life in New York City in the late sixties and seventies.
gloria
patti smith "must haves"
smells like teen spirit
patti smith links
take a look at these
- patti smith>net
- what Patti's up to these days (some of it, anyway....)
- patti smith - my space
- more about patti
- patti smith rock & roll hall of fame profile
- smith was inducted in 2007
- the patti smith logbook
- setlists, exhibitions, tv, and other details
- patti smith
- biography, discography, bibliograhy...
- the eternal cafe
- a patti smith discussion forum
- In Bloom: The Blood and Energy of Patti Smith
- 2008 interview with patti smith
- Patti Smith - IMDb
- She was voted the 47th Greatest Artist in Rock 'n' Roll by Rolling Stone.
- Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe
- Interview magazine, September 2010
- Patti Smith at the National Portrait Gallery/Smithsonian
- Artist, musician, and National Book Award winner Patti Smith visited the National Portrait Gallery and spoke to a capacity crowd in the McEvoy Auditorium. December 2010.
Link to the video of this event. - Patti Smith at allmusic
- More information about Patti and her work
Destroy All Movies: The Complete Guide to Punks on Film
more context
Destroy All Movies!!! The Complete Guide to Punks on Film
Amazon Price: $64.75 (as of 06/02/2012)
Interview magazine says it best:
Like an algorithm zapped across a smoggy landscape of wastoid cinema and blown-out amps-from the sleaze of 42nd Street to Malcom McLaren's London-no suspect VHS or DVD was left unturned in the hunt for liberty spikes, rebellious acts, and agape mouths of paled normies. It's an exercise that may be interpreted as obnoxious, as trivial as the vacant state of punk in 2010. And yet each film is allotted a paragraph to several pages for reviews, supplemental interviews, and analysis that range from wittily divisive (Todd Phillips's Hated) to impassioned reconsideration (Valley Girl), all written in a fluid, knowledgeable manner and laid out in the clean and smart design expected of Fantagraphics, the book's publisher. Carlson and Connolly spoke to me about a variety of the book's punked-out pictures, which date from the mid-'70s through to the chosen cutoff year of 1999.
patti smith in the news
patti smith on iTunes
a selection of favorites
| Track | Artist | Album | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gloria | Patti Smith | Horses | |
| Rock N Roll N****r | Patti Smith | Land (1975-2002) [Remastered] | |
| Redondo Beach | Patti Smith | Horses | |
| Because the Night | Patti Smith | Easter | |
| Smells Like Teen Spirit (Featuring Steve Earle) [iTunes Originals Version] | Patti Smith | iTunes Originals - Patti Smith | |
| People Have the Power | Patti Smith | Dream of Life (Remastered) | |
| Midnight Rider (iTunes Originals Version) | Patti Smith | iTunes Originals - Patti Smith |
Patti Smith in Vanity Fair
Some of the many VF articles about and by Patti Smith
Diary: Patti SmithVoice of a Generation
Photos: Revisiting Love on the Left Bank
Tales of Mother Rock
The Crowded Mind of Johnny Depp
And there are more. Just visit vanityfair.com and search Patti Smith
explore patti smith's poetry
- Patti Smith, Meet Sylvia Plath (Slate magazine)
- There is nothing tidy about Patti Smith. Her wiry hair is often tangled. She is called the "Godmother of punk," but her "punk" songs last much longer than the conventional three minutes, and have been known to involve digressions about William Blake....
- Patti Smith: The Genre-bending Gender-bender
- In an essay published in CREEM magazine, poet and rocker Patti Smith riffed on the legacy of musicians who die young--Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, even Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, whom Smith calls...
- Patti Smith : The Poetry Foundation : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.
Rock N Roll Nigger
Under Review
Patti Smith
Patti Smith: Under Review
Amazon Price: $11.45 (as of 06/03/2012)
List Price: $18.99
by Richie Unterberger (allmusic.com)
Like other DVDs in the Under Review series, this 90-minute disc is a documentary heavily slanted toward critical evaluation of the performer's albums and songs, mixing vintage film clips and photo stills with interviews done specifically for the chapter. Patti Smith fans might be disappointed that the clips (though numerous and from various part of her career) are pretty brief excerpts of songs rather than complete performances, and that neither Smith herself nor some of her closest musical associates (like Lenny Kaye) were interviewed, although there are a couple Smith interview snippets from other sources. Otherwise, however, it's a pretty good overview of her career, properly concentrating on the four albums she issued during her mid- to late-'70s peak, though cursory coverage is given to her work from the 1980s onward as well. Even by the Under Review series' standards, the circle of critics providing commentary on her music is heavyweight, including two Smith biographers (Victor Bockris and Nick Johnstone), Robert Christgau, Anthony DeCurtis, Jon Savage, and Mark Paytress. But there are also a few good observations from people who actually worked on her albums, particularly Radio Ethiopia producer Jack Douglas (who remembers being called in to work on the title track in the midst of a hurricane) and Horses engineer Frank d'Augusta (who praises producer John Cale's tactic of staying out of sight from the group in the control room to make the bandmembers feel more comfortable). The minimal extras include a Patti Smith quiz and the strangely titled "Special Feature -- Horses for Courses -- The Making of a Landmark Album," which isn't a feature or about Horses at all, but a 90-second story about a Smith performance told by Victor Bockris.
Leave your comments and your poetry
but NOT your spam!
-
-
junior8rules
Aug 22, 2011 @ 8:12 am | delete
- Very well done, nice lens! Liked.
-
by Silver_Lotus
Silver Lotus is...a highly-rated eBay seller (100% positive feedback) and disseminator of eBay information, a committed environmentalist, a home-based... more »
- 16 featured lenses
- Winner of 4 trophies!
- Top lens » Full Figure Style: Celebrate Your Curves!
Explore related pages
- Top 25 Punk Rock Songs Of All Time Top 25 Punk Rock Songs Of All Time
- babelogue babelogue
- Vita Sackville-West Vita Sackville-West
- Pinterest, Copyright and Spam - for Visual Artists & Photographers Pinterest, Copyright and Spam - for Visual Artists & Photographers
- Poetry NoteBooks, Journals, Diaries and Philosophy Poetry NoteBooks, Journals, Diaries and Philosophy
- Poems About Horses Poems About Horses
Just Kids
Just Kids
Amazon Price: $12.75 (as of 06/03/2012)
"...a spellbinding memoir as notable for its restraint as for its lucidity, its wit as well as its grace, Smith tells the story of how she and Robert Mapplethorpe found each other, a true and abiding love that survived his coming out as gay, and the path to art in New York City during the heady late 1960s and early 1970s."
"Just Kids is the most spellbinding and diverting portrait of funky-but-chic New York in the late '60s and early '70s that any alumnus has committed to print."
Dream of Life
Patti Smith: Dream of Life
Amazon Price: $13.77 (as of 06/03/2012)
"Patti Smith wasn't just a rocker; she was a poet, and a book of her life calls for nothing less than fine art....the book captures her illustrious career in a way perfectly suited for the musician--poetic, engaging, and passionate." ~Chicago Magazine
Land 250
Patti Smith, Land 250
Amazon Price: $51.73 (as of 06/02/2012)
Patti Smith is known most widely as a musical artist and a poet, but her creative energies are not limited to those genres. This book offers a chance to explore the photography of the punk poetess. Published to accompany an exhibition at the Fondation Cartier Pour L'Art Contemporain in Paris, it presents hundreds of Polaroids and black-and-white photographs, plus commentaries by the artist.
