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| Birth Name(s) : Patti Lee Smith |
Date of Birth: December 30, 1946 |
| Status:
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Partner:
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| Profession:
Actor/Musician |
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Full Patti Smith Biography
Born in Chicago and raised in Woodbury, New Jersey, just across the state line from Philadelphia, Patti's mother, Beverly, was a jazz singer cum waitress. Her father, Grant, worked at the Honeywell plant; she was the oldest of four siblings: her sisters Linda and Kimberly (the latter plays mandolin on Gone Again's "Ravens,"), and brother Todd. Unable to find her place in high school society, she took refuge in the images of Rimbaud, Bob Dylan, James Brown, and the Rolling Stones. Dropping out of Glassboro State Teacher's College, she headed for the bright -lights-big-city of New York.
When she arrived in town, she met an art student named Robert Mapplethorpe and they moved in together. Patti found a job as a bookstore clerk at the Strand and Scribner's. In 1969, she traveled to Paris with her sister Linda, working on the street as a performance artist, and making her first forays into the visual arts. Returning to New York as the seventies got underway, she rebounded between the back room at Max's Kansas City and the Hotel Chelsea. Encouraged by such as Dylan cohort Bobby Neuwirth and blues virtuoso Johnny Winter, Patti made a name for herself in underground theatre (starring in such plays as Jackie Curtis' Vain Victory at the Cafe La Mama), and collaborating with the playwright Sam Shepherd, with whom she co-authored Cowboy Mouth. She was also writing poetry.
On February 10, 1971, she opened for Gerard Malanga at a Poetry Project weekly reading at St. Mark's Church on the Lower East Side. She was joined for three songs by Lenny Kaye, a rock writer and record store clerk whom she had met through an article he'd written for Jazz and Pop magazine about "Accapella" music, the unaccompanied doo-wop of the Philly-New York corridor. Discovering they liked the same type of obscure records, and knowing that he played guitar, she added his rhythmic chording to her chant-sung poetry, though there was little sense of where it might be heading.
After successfully touring America and Europe, sounding a "wake-up call" to the legions of aspiring guitarists waiting in the wings, the Group returned to the studio in the summer of 1976 to record Radio Ethiopia with producer Jack Douglas. Featuring a more rock-based sound—as in "Ask The Angels" and "Pumping"—even as the title cut heralded a field where anything could and should happen. The band's touring was cut short when Patti fell from a stage in Tampa, Florida, during "Ain't It Strange," cracking two vertebrae in her neck and taking an enforced convalescence.
Patti continued to write, releasing a compendium of her seventies' poetry in Early Work (Norton); Woolgathering (Hanuman); and beginning a novel. She and Fred created songs together, with an eye to recording in the summer of 1995, until Fred's death of heart failure on November 4, 1994; among his last accomplishments was to teach Patti her guitar chords. The passing of her brother, Todd, of a heart attack a month later, further brought home to her how slight is our time on this earth. She worked through her grief with song, as singers have done immemorial, in memorium.
She had given a handful of performances, mostly poetry—her summer, 1993, reading in Central Park attracted several thousand fans—over the years. Yet increasingly she felt the need to perform, to reconnect with her audience not only for them but herself, and she began appearing in out of the way venues, from Ann Arbor to Toronto, to understand how to present her music in a modern setting. She gathered her longtime collaborator Lenny Kaye, and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, and added bassist Tony Shanahan, a New Jersey musician who had worked with both Kaye and John Cale, to provide live backing. Another Central Park reading in 1995, an impromptu appearance at New York's Lollapalooza on the second stage, and tour of the west coast both in poetry and full rock mode—all helped her find her stage presence again. She contributed tracks to the Ain't Nothin' But A She Thing album (a version of Nina Simone's "Don't Smoke In Bed") and the Dead Man Walking soundtrack (Oliver Ray's "Walkin' Blind").
In the summer of 1995, she entered New York's Electric Lady land studios to begin recording her sixth album. Produced by Malcolm Burn and Lenny Kaye, Gone Again features old friends like Tom Verlaine and John Cale, new friends like keyboardist Luis Resto and guitarist Oliver Ray, guest appearances by singer Jeff Buckley, cellist Jane Scarpantoni, and mandolin player Kimberly Smith; and the inimitable Smith magic of song and the spoken word. |
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Additional Patti Smith Biography
Patricia Lee ("Patti") Smith (born December 30, 1946) is an American musician, songwriter, and poet. She was influential in the birth of the punk movement with her 1975 debut album Horses. One of rock's great female icons, Smith is perhaps most widely known for the song "Because the Night," which was written with Bruce Springsteen, who also had a successful recording of the song.
Smith's commercial success has been limited in that she has never had an RIAA certified record and has had just three Top 20 singles (One each on the Hot 100, Modern Rock and Mainstream Rock charts). However, Rolling Stone magazine placed her at #47 in its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. On March 12, 2007, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Smith was born in Chicago, Illinois, and raised in Woodbury, New Jersey. Her father was an atheist and her mother was a Jehovah's Witness. The family was not wealthy and Smith went to work in a factory – an experience she found excruciating. Smith graduated from Deptford Township High School in 1964.
In 1967 she left New Jersey for good, moved to New York City and met photographer Robert Mapplethorpe while working at a book store. Mapplethorpe's photographs became the covers for the Patti Smith Group LPs, and they remained friends until Mapplethorpe's death in 1989. In 1969 she went to Paris with her sister and started busking and doing performance art. When Smith returned to New York City, she lived in the Chelsea Hotel with Mapplethorpe; they frequented the fashionable Max's Kansas City and CBGB nightclubs.
As the Patti Smith Group toured the United States and Europe, punk's popularity grew. The rawer sound of the group's second album, Radio Ethiopia, reflected this. Considerably less accessible than Horses, Radio Ethiopia received poor reviews. However, several of its songs, notably "Pissing in a River, " "Pumping," and "Ain't It Strange," have stood the test of time, and Smith still performs them regularly in concert.
In 1994 Fred "Sonic" Smith died. Shortly afterward, she faced the unexpected death of her beloved brother Todd. When her son, Jackson, turned 21, Smith decided to move back to New York. Her son had a band called Back In Spades.
After the deaths of her husband and brother, her friends Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and Allen Ginsberg (whom she had known since her early years in New York) urged her to go back out on the road. She toured briefly with Bob Dylan in December 1995 (chronicled in a book of photographs by Stipe). The next year, she worked with her long-time colleagues to record the haunting Gone Again, featuring, "About a Boy", a tribute to Kurt Cobain. Smith was a great fan of Cobain's, but was more angered than saddened by his suicide. She was quoted in Rolling Stone, "When you watch someone you care for fight so hard to hold onto their life, then see another person just throw their life away, I guess I had less patience for that."
On Sunday, October 15, 2006 Patti Smith performed at CBGB, with 3½-hour tour de force to close out Manhattan's legendary live-music venue. She took the stage at 9:30 PM (EDT) and closed for the night (and forever for the venue) at a few minutes after 1:00, after performing a medley of "Horses" and "Gloria" , and finally her song "Elegie", while reading a list of punk rock musicians and advocates who had died in the previous years.
Smith was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame March 12, 2007. Zach de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine gave Smith's induction speech. Smith dedicated her award to the memory of her late husband, Fred. Smith gave a performance of the Rolling Stones classic "Gimme Shelter", a song she termed a great anti-war song. As the closing number of 2007 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction evening, Smith's "People Have the Power" was used for the big celebrity jam that always ends the program. Among those playing or singing were Eddie Vedder, Stephen Stills and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. All the other inductees to the Hall that night joined: Sammy Hagar and Mike Anthony of Van Halen, the Ronettes, Grandmaster Flash and Furious Five and R.E.M. including Bill Berry on drums.
Smith premiered two new protest songs in London in September 2006. Louise Jury, writing in "The Independent", characterized them as "an emotional indictment of American and Israeli foreign policy". One song ("Qana") was about the Israeli airstrike on the Lebanese village of Qana, the other ("Without Chains") about the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay. Jury's article quotes Smith as saying:
I wrote both these songs directly in response to events that I felt outraged about. These are injustices against children and the young men and women who are being incarcerated. I'm an American, I pay taxes in my name and they are giving millions and millions of dollars to a country such as Israel and cluster bombs and defense technology and those bombs were dropped on common citizens in Qana. It's terrible. It's a human rights violation.
"Without Chains" is about Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen who was born and raised in Germany, held at Guantanamo for four years. Jury quotes Smith: |
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