This year, the singer-songwriter celebrates the 50th anniversary of ‘Horses’, the album that made her famous, and releases her memoir ‘Bread of Angels.’ Her voice, steadfast in its commitment to the world’s just causes, continues to resonate through her writing and performances
Celebrating 50 years of her first album ‘Horses,’ with which she revolutionized music and literature while remaining true to herself
New compilation ‘Before Easter After’ features portraits, many of them previously unpublished, taken of the singer in the 1970s
‘Will you pretend you’re my boyfriend?’ she asked the artist, hoping to escape another man. That night, they stopped pretending. They shared a dazzling love story, marked by excess and art
The pair maintain a powerful bond that speaks to a way of understanding both songs and life from a bygone era
Patti Smith and Bob Dylan have known each other since 1975 and it could be said that their friendship has transcended ordinary life and entered the realms of greatness. Greatness in its original sense and not as a cliché is always complex and, as we know, the complex is often reduced, ridiculed and even vilified in a world driven by capital, post-truth and social media noise. The complex is always the enemy of ignorance.
Manuel Jabois
Sanxenxo, 14 August 2024
On July 3, 1967, 20-year-old Patricia Lee Smith arrived in New York wearing dungarees, a black turtleneck, an old gray trench coat, and a small red-and-yellow checked suitcase containing several notebooks, drawing pencils, and a copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, which was changing her already upturned life: pregnant at 19, she had put her baby up for adoption. Months later, in New York, she went to the address she had been given and there, in a room, she found a guy sleeping on an iron bed. “He was pale and slim with masses of dark curls, lying bare-chested with strands of beads around his neck […] He rose in one motion, put on his huaraches and a white T-shirt, and beckoned me to follow him […] I had never seen anyone like him,” she wrote 43 years later. The young man helped her to her room, and they said goodbye.
| Patti Smith and Robert Mapplehorpe |
In 1967, Patti Smith moved to New York City from South Jersey, and the rest is epic history. There are the photographs, the iconic made-for-record-cover black-and-whites shot by Smith’s lover, soul mate, and co-conspirator in survival, Robert Mapplethorpe. Then there are the photographs taken of them together, both with wild hair and cloaked in homemade amulets, hanging out in the glamorous poverty of the Chelsea Hotel. It is nearly impossible to navigate the social and artistic history of late ’60s and ’70s New York without coming across Smith. She was, as she still is, a poet, an artist, a rock star, and a bit of a shaman. But it is her friendship with Mapplethorpe where her legend begins—and like most beginnings, this one has been romanticized to the point of fantasy. How is it that two such beautifully feral-looking young people with no money or connections, who later would go on to achieve such extreme success—Smith with her music and Mapplethorpe with his photography—found each other? It is a myth of New York City as it once was, a place where misfits magically gravitated toward one another at the chance crossroads of a creative revolution. That’s one way to look at it. But Smith’s new memoir, Just Kids (Ecco)—which traces her relationship with Mapplethorpe from their first meetings (there were two of them before one fateful night in Tompkins Square Park) to their days in and out of hotels, love affairs, creative collaborations, nightclubs, and gritty neighborhoods—paints a radically different picture. In this account, the two struggle to pay for food and shelter, looking out for each other and sacrificing everything they have for the purpose of making art. Just Kids portrays their mythic status as the product of willful determination as much as destiny. Smith’s immensely personal storytelling also rectifies certain mistaken notions about the pair, revealing specifically that they were not wild-child drug addicts but dreamers, more human and loving than their cold, isolated stares and sharp, skinny bodies in early photos lead one to believe. Smith left New York for Detroit in 1979 to live with the man she would eventually marry, the late former MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith, just as Mapplethorpe’s career as one of the most shocking and potent art photographers was reaching its apogee (his black-and-whites of gay hustlers, S&M acts, flowers, and children were headed to museum collections and a court trial for obscenity charges). By then Smith had already produced Horses and had risen to international fame. Her book follows Mapplethorpe all the way to his death in 1989 from complications due to AIDS, but it’s mostly about two kids who held on to each other.
| Patti Smith by Jilliam Tamaki |
| Patti Smith |
| Patti Smith |
| Patti Smith, 1977, for her album Easter Photograph: Lynn Goldsmith |
| Sam Shepard and Patti Smith Hotel Chelsea, New York, 1971 Photo by David Garhr |