Requiem Lass
Anton Corbijn
About a girl Patti Smith, poet, musician, author, photographer, in Paris, late June.
I met Patti Smith at the Electric Lady recording studios on West Eighth Street in Manhattan on a sunny August afternoon. Both the place and the date have a special significance in Smith’s personal mythos and in the broader mythology of rock ’n’ roll. The facility, which you enter through a nondescript storefront on a once famously scruffy block now given over to discount shoe stores and student-friendly eating places, was Jimi Hendrix’s brainchild, and it stands as an enduring part of his legacy. A rack in the reception area is stocked with foldout LP sleeves of some of the legendary records that were cut here — Stevie Wonder’s “Talking Book,” AC/DC’s“ Back in Black,” David Bowie’s “Young Americans” — and the psychedelic murals that Hendrix commissioned line the subterranean hallways leading to Studio A. There, his portrait hangs in the lounge, a benevolent godhead gazing down at the latter-day strivings of his fellow musicians.
“Actually, this coming Friday is the 41st anniversary of when it opened,” Smith told me as she settled into a couch under Hendrix’s gaze. She is, by her own admission, a prodigious talker, seeming at once to choose her words carefully and to wander through mazes of memory and free association. “And it’s also the anniversary, which is so amazing to me, of when I met Jimi Hendrix on the steps.” This was at a party to which Smith, then a young journalist, had been invited. “But I was too shy to go in. I was sitting out on the steps in my straw hat, and my polka-dot dress, whatever I was wearing back then, and Jimi was on his way out, and he stopped to talk to me. He took 10 minutes to tell me about his hopes and dreams for the studio. It was an amazing thing that happened. I was, like, 22 at the time, and I had no aspiration to record — no thought that I would ever make a record in my life.”
In memorial Patti Smith images from “Camera Solo,” which will open at the Wadsworth Atheneum museum on Oct. 21, above, from left: Pope Benedict XV’s slippers; a replica of William Blake’s life mask.
She was dressed now in a variation of her standard rock ’n’ roll mufti: black boots, black jeans, a black blazer over a worn T-shirt. Though Hendrix died shortly after opening his dream studio, Electric Lady quickly became — and has long remained — a workplace and pilgrimage site, and a spot to which Smith has frequently returned. Her breakthrough album, “Horses,” was recorded here, and so was “Gone Again,” the 1996 record that marked her return after a decade and a half spent out of the public eye, raising a family in Michigan. And Electric Lady is where, in 1974, she made her very first recordings: a version of “Hey Joe” and an extended, improvisational, visionary incantation called “Piss Factory,” a track that inaugurated her transformation from free-range New York bohemian into full-fledged rock star.
That passage is chronicled, with fondness and wry candor, in “Just Kids,” Smith’s best-selling, National Book Award-winning memoir of her relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who put up the money for that maiden recording session. The overwhelming popularity of the book was not something Smith had anticipated — “it’s the most commercially successful thing I’ve ever done,” she said a bit ruefully — but it is not altogether surprising that she should have added narrative prose to the long list of creative forms she has explored and made her own. “I am an American artist, and I have no guilt,” she proclaimed in “Babelogue,” a furious recitative on her great 1978 album, “Easter,” and she has never been one to confine herself to a single art form. A prolific poet — a literary discipline she sees as entirely distinct from songwriting — she has also been a visual artist for longer than she’s been a musician.
“I always wanted to write, but writing came slower,” she said, recalling the years when she was just starting out. “But I had a lot of energy, and I devoted a lot of time and discipline to drawing, and I had a unique style of drawing that was quite Twombly-esque, even though I hadn’t seen Twombly yet. I loved Picasso and de Kooning, and I loved Albert Ryder and the Sienese primitives. I loved art. I loved Diego Rivera.” She paused. “I was sort of on the cusp of writing poetry and drawing, but being with a visual artist who had a strong work ethic” — meaning Mapplethorpe — “I developed one too. We worked in tandem, and we really understood each other’s work.”
The first part of “Just Kids” is a portrait of two artists as young people, extracting inspiration and encouragement from each other and using whatever influences and materials were available. And the writing of the book followed a productive period of visual work for Smith. In the months after Sept. 11, 2001, she made a series of drawings and silk screens that fused images of the ruins of the World Trade Center with texts rendered in her fine, slanted handwriting. (Some of them are being shown at Hunter College until December, to mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11.) She has also been busy in the medium that was the source of Mapplethorpe’s fame, amassing hundreds of black-and-white Polaroid prints, a selection of which will be on display at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford from Oct. 21 to Feb. 19.
At the moment, though, her attention was focused on the new album, which had been delayed by unexpected demands that the success of “Just Kids” had placed on her time. She did not want to say too much about the record in advance: “I just want it to come out, to be a surprise, a magic experience,” she said. “I liked standing in line for a couple of hours trying to get ‘Blonde on Blonde’ and having no idea what was going to be on it. I liked standing in line to see ‘Psycho,’ having no idea what’s going to happen, except for the poster. That’s the way I like it, and I try my best, even in the present culture, to present our work like that.”
Death singing In her excursions to grave sites and house museums, Smith photographed, from left: Virginia Woolf’s bed; Susan Sontag’s grave in Montparnasse Cemetery.
So I hope it won’t spoil anything to describe the song she and some of her band were working on that day, a lilting, shimmering ballad, “This Is the Girl.” She wrote the lyrics (Tony Shanahan, the bassist who is producing the new album, provided the music) shortly after learning about the death of Amy Winehouse. Instead of the throaty, passionate singing and Memphis-soul arrangements that Winehouse favored, “This Is the Girl” channels another side of the ’60s pop legacy, the ringing pop of sounds associated with Phil Spector and the great girl groups of the era. Smith described it as “a white girl’s dream.”
It is also, like so many of her songs, an elegy, a heartfelt expression of loss — not only of Winehouse but also of the actress Maria Schneider, whom Smith described as “a girl I used to know back in the ’70s.” To spend any time with Patti Smith — in person or through her work — is to become aware of just how deeply death, the disappearance of loved ones and strangers alike, has left its imprint on her. “This Is the Girl,” paying tribute to a 27-year-old musician who died too young, feels like a natural companion to “About a Boy,” from the album “Gone Again,” which was inspired by the death, also at 27, of Kurt Cobain. From its earliest pages, “Just Kids” tallies up losses both public and personal: John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and then Mapplethorpe himself, who died of AIDS in 1989. Five years later, Smith’s husband, Fred Sonic Smith, the former MC5 guitarist she married in 1980, died, followed a week later by Patti’s beloved brother Todd. “Gone Again,” written and recorded in the wake of those deaths, is a permanent contribution to the literature of grief, anchored by “Fireflies,” a heartbreaking song that harks back to the funerary odes of the English Romantic poets.
When I brought up the persistence of grief in her songs, Smith laughed — it was certaintly not the first time an interviewer had raised the subject — and gently corrected me. “I think it’s less about grief than remembrance,” she said. “Grief starts to become indulgent, and it doesn’t serve anyone, and it’s painful. But if you transform it into remembrance, then you’re magnifying the person you lost and also giving something of that person to other people, so they can experience something of that person. That’s why when I’m traveling with my camera, I’ll often take pictures of, you know, Keats’s bed, Shelley’s grave or Victor Hugo’s desk. It has something of them. If I’m taking a picture of Brancusi’s grave, I know that there’s something of him, of his mortal remains, beneath my feet, and there’s something beautiful about that.”
Smith said she often organizes her tours around excursions in search of that kind of memorial beauty, seeking out places associated with the writers and artists she admires and with whom she feels a kinship that transcends mortality. The photographs in the Hartford show — black-and-white silver gelatin prints made from Polaroid negatives, small and square and in soft focus — are culled from a collection that documents hundreds of encounters with worldly effects transformed into sacred relics. A fork and a spoon that belonged to Arthur Rimbaud, the French symbolist poet who has been one of Smith’s touchstones forever. Mapplethorpe’s bedroom slippers and the tambourine he made for Smith. A chair that belonged to the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño. William S. Burroughs’s bandanna. A replica of a life mask cast from the features of William Blake.
From left, Roberto Bolaño’s chair; Arthur Rimbaud’s utensils.
Smith is modest about these pictures: “One of my great goals when I first started taking photographs or showing them publicly is that people might want one for over their desk. That’s my goal. You know, I could dream of getting the Nobel Prize in Literature — believe me, I’ve dreamed of everything. I’ve never been in a movie but dreamed of getting an Academy Award. I love all that stuff. But for my photographs, my dream is simply that they would have a place of honor above someone’s desk. When someone is writing or writing a letter or contemplating, they can look up and they would find a moment of serenity or a moment of centering from one of these little pictures.”
The pictures have a haunting, haunted quality that recalls the early history of the medium, when photography was new and strange and seemed to offer not only a means of recording the world but also a window into its mysteries. “They’re very 19th century,” she said. “Purposely. I just love the 19th-century amateurs. There are so many great 19th-century photographers, and it’s really my favorite period, but the amateurs did such beautiful work. You don’t know who did the fish on the line or an open book. There’s a certain amount of innocence and charm, but you can also feel, the way they framed things and their choice of what they photographed, and the light . . .” She trailed off.
“First I started taking a lot of pictures after my husband died, because I just couldn’t work. I couldn’t write. I was so tired. But then one day, I picked up an old Polaroid camera, and I took a picture of Nureyev’s slippers, which I own, I have a pair of his slippers, and I looked at it, and it was good. It made me happy and made me feel like I had accomplished something for that day. And the immediacy of it was comforting. And now my camera is my friend, and I take it everywhere.”
The figures her pictures commemorate are, very often, the animating forces in Smith’s other work, a visionary company she continually draws on for solace, inspiration and comfort. It is hard to think of another artist in any medium who is at once so completely original and so persistently devoted to acknowledging influence and paying tribute. “Just Kids” can seem at times like the reminiscences of a fan aspiring to be a muse — a young woman in love with the poems of Rimbaud, the music of Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix and the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Bresson, who also happened to be in love with Robert Mapplethorpe and Sam Shepard — until it reveals itself to be the story of a young artist finding her own voice and identity, not in the shadow of those others but through a complicated communion with them.
From left, Constantin Brancusi’s grave, also in Montparnasse; Robert Mapplethorpe’s slippers.
“It’s not hero worship,” she said, explaining this sense of affiliation and identification with other artists, living and dead. “It’s not that I have low self-esteem. I feel magnified by these people. I had a very good conversation with Allen Ginsberg about this very thing. He was like me, in his own way. He felt that he walked with Blake and Whitman. They were his people.”
To know Patti Smith is to know her people. “Outside of society — that’s where I want to be,” Smith sang in “Rock ’n’ Roll Nigger,” a gauntlet thrown at the feet of respectable opinion in 1978. But that song was also a statement of artistic solidarity (with Jimi Hendrix and Jackson Pollock, for example) and an open invitation to join the band of antisocial outsiders, to walk with poets and painters and unsung photographers. It’s not a pantheon or an artistic tradition but rather a kind of ecstatic community. “We were talking before about how I get very enamored of poets and writers,” Smith said to me on the day of my second visit to Electric Lady. “Whether it’s Eric Burdon or Bob Dylan or Keats. But also, I’ll get enamored by the new guard. I’ll see what a generation is doing, I’ll see what kids are doing now, how Blakean they are in that they’re attempting all modes of creation, and they’re proceeding without fear. I feel the same love and the same energetic connection. They don’t have to be doing the things I’d do or that I’d want to do, but it just makes me happy.”
At Electric Lady, Smith recorded her vocals in a closed-off booth, an isolated figure tucked into the corner of a cavernous room. But she was also the center of a constant hum of activity, as musicians and visitors came and went. “We may look like we’re hanging out, but we’re definitely working,” she assured me, noting that she had nudged a reluctant Lenny Kaye not to put off working out a new guitar part until the next day. But she was also taking frequent phone calls from her grown children, Jackson and Jesse, and her sister in New Jersey as well as welcoming visitors. The filmmaker Steven Sebring, director of the documentary “Patti Smith: Dream of Life,” came around to take pictures of her. The screenwriter John Logan (author of scripts for “Gladiator,” “Rango” and Ralph Fiennes’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus”) showed up to talk about a possible screen version of “Just Kids.”
One afternoon, I came into the studio and found Smith talking with a pale, dark-haired man, dressed in black and resting his hand on a skull-topped cane. It was Damien Echols, one of the West Memphis Three, who had been released, a week before, from death row in Arkansas, 18 years after he and two other young men, teenagers at the time, had been convicted of murdering three young boys. The case has been the subject of three “Paradise Lost” documentaries by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, and Echols and his co-defendants’ cause had been taken up by celebrities including Peter Jackson, Johnny Depp and Eddie Vedder.
Smith had played at a benefit concert for the three and now, on his first visit to New York, Echols and his wife, Lorri Davis, had come for an audience. Smith was motherly and solicitous, advising Echols, whose teeth were seriously damaged during his incarceration, about the importance of good dental care, offering him the names of doctors and acupuncturists and urging him to go get some sleep when it seemed he might nod off in the studio. He was reluctant to go: “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he said shyly. “No, no,” Smith said. “We’ll know each other for a long time.”
A lot of us, whether we have met her or not, have known Patti Smith for a long time. Like Walt Whitman, another one of her visionary precursors, she contains multitudes — or, rather, she draws them to her, the living and the dead, the famous and the outcast, anyone who can book imaginative passage into her world, which gets only bigger. It’s where you want to be.
The frontispiece of a First Folio in the Folger collection.
