THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW PATTI SMITH
NICHOLS, JOHN
THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW Patti Smith 'To me, rock 'n' roll is a totally people-oriented, 'grassroots music. But it's not ours anymore.9 BY JOHN NICHOLS Almost thirty years have passed since...
...And I said, "All right...
...Let's take it over...
...It's the artist's duty to do good work...
...I've really never considered—especially when I was younger—that my work itself was that important...
...But I really felt that rock 'n' roll was going into a bad place...
...We're constantly being warned about things—about the environment, about health issues, about these new viruses...
...And what are we being distracted from...
...People Have the Power" was the perfect song for the two of us to write...
...I did have concerns, but still, as an artist and a human being and an American, I was basically self-centered...
...I was certainly comforted by it, inspired by it, excited by it...
...Rock 'n' roll is great because it's the people's art...
...Q: As an artist, did you feel you had to pick up a guitar and form a band to get your message across in an age where there are so many voices competing for attention...
...An artist must concern himself with the quality of his work...
...I really wanted to be a painter, but I just didn't quite have the stuff to be a painter...
...To respond to those warnings requires us to cut back on things that make life easier...
...You drive through downtown Detroit, a once-proud city that's trying to build up, and then you drive through deeper downtown—which is pretty much boarded up...
...By going through life and doing what we need to do and what we want to do, but also do enough that reverberates some good around us...
...We're not really being spoken to, or informed, or drawn together...
...Certainly, he was the inspiration for the Beat movement...
...I picked Tibet, which I had learned about in the library...
...Patti Smith: I've always loved the format of rock 'n' roll...
...Basically, right now, we're all being distracted...
...When Allen was dying, I went to his loft, and I spent time with him...
...He really had that sixties thing right to his death...
...The people decide how they want to use the work of a certain artist, or how the work of that artist affects them or their ideas...
...So we just merged all of our ideas...
...Though she continued to write poetry and songs, she published only sporadically and released just one album...
...It's not my bent...
...The country belongs to us...
...He really was, and is, a very radical figure...
...Maybe I overreacted...
...There's a lot of resistance to that...
...But we don't think of it that way...
...I went to the Walt Whitman Cultural Center and did a benefit for them...
...Then in the early 1970s, when I really felt that rock 'n' roll was losing some of its strength—when it just seemed like a format people were visiting for some kind of glamorous lifestyle, or to take a lot of drugs, twist people's minds, make a lot of money, and then exit—I reacted...
...Q: Is creating that spark, causing that reverberation, what motivates you as an artist...
...People have to decide that they want to take over again...
...The Beats were also informed by his openness concerning his sexual persuasion, which was a radical thought in Ginsberg's time, let alone Whitman's...
...He had a benevolent ego— he had a huge ego, but he loved mankind, and he loved people of all walks of life...
...The Dalai Lama, they thought, was dead, and they didn't know what had happened to his family...
...Q: Perhaps the most powerful song on Peace and Noise is "1959...
...He says in his poetry that he is speaking to you—to you personally: To the poet who is reading this, 100 years from now, 200 years from now, I am thinking of you, I am telling you that I did all these things, suffered all these humiliations, went through these particular joys and illuminations, just as you are, and I am with you...
...She published critically acclaimed books of poetry...
...I've thought about it a lot...
...In truth, there's nothing stodgy about him...
...I was thinking a lot about all this, and he and I spent several days talking about what we were going to try to communicate through this song—we often did that, he'd have an idea and a philosophy but he'd ask me to write the lyrics...
...One can't say we are all equal in every way, I know that...
...People want things quick, and their attention span is short...
...But it's got to be new people, new guard, who are going to have to fight and say they're not going to stand for this...
...Q: You set out to address this a decade ago, with the song, "People Have the Power," which touched a lot of activists...
...I had never had any aspirations toward being a musician...
...We look at children in Somalia dying on TV and then we just flip the channel and put on whatever sitcom we want to see...
...It's got to be people across the board...
...Camden is a struggling city, and they had seen me open up for Bob Dylan in Philadelphia and send a salute to Camden, New Jersey, and they thought I might be open to this...
...When I was younger, the last thing I wanted to be was a citizen...
...I was very taken with the Dalai Lama and his philosophies...
...It seems to me a lot like it was in the 1950s...
...That's not my real interest...
...I look at it now and the doors need to be kicked through because it's just as bad as any other time I can remember...
...And I try as a person to do the best that I can, to be maybe some kind of example...
...It s really a shame to lose him because I can't think of anyone else who brought so many people together, which was completely obvious at his deathbed...
...I had to wash diapers and clean toilet bowls and nurse sick children and find time to do art...
...What I thought was important was that I had a certain amount of energy, and I seemed to affect people in a certain way, and so I wanted to use that power to get people who were more articulate than me, more motivated, to take the next step and do things...
...I took it as my right...
...he was a very meditative man, but he seemed revolutionary because of the nature of his work...
...And I think it's our duty to find a way for each of us to have the best story possible...
...I felt proud that I was living in a state where they had things honoring Walt Whitman...
...Picasso was revolutionary because of the way he looked at the world...
...It's like when I lived in Detroit and I would drive through Detroit on this road called Jefferson...
...The second verse was actually about Afghanistan—Russia had invaded Afghanistan—and I was imagining these Afghani shepherds and the Russian soldiers just lying together on a hill at night and looking at the stars and talking about things, instead of fighting...
...When you look around, when you open your eyes, you see things that make you angry...
...And we're all going to die...
...Smith: That's right—the sense that this country can be about something more than just the gratification of the individual...
...But it's not ours anymore.9 BY JOHN NICHOLS Almost thirty years have passed since Patti Smith burst out of South Jersey, with a poem—"Piss Factory"— that declared, "I'm going to be somebody, I'm going to go on that train and go to New York City, I'm going to be so bad, I'm going to be so big, I'm going to be a big star, and I will never return...
...People hear a lot of warnings...
...The government works for us...
...I didn't really have an understanding of what it was like to be a citizen...
...There's plenty of people writing the kind of songs or singing the kind of songs or developing the sort of image that will entertain America...
...It came from the earth...
...It's really a shame...
...I think it's a very important song...
...That's pretty much all I wanted to be...
...It was heartbreaking...
...I had to get up at five in the morning and write before the baby woke up...
...Then, in 1979, she "retired" to raise a family in Detroit with legendary MC5 guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith...
...I'm not a true musician...
...In the wake of those deaths, Smith has forged a comeback...
...Q: That said, Peace and Noise contains a great many statements of a political nature...
...But it's not impossible...
...But there are ways where we are equal...
...It's totally accessible...
...There are all these things that we could do that could send out a reverberation, make things better—not just for ourselves, but for everyone...
...Unification...
...Those things are great...
...I've been baffled by the Tibet situation since 1959...
...It's not our inalienable right to have a car, or a nice house...
...I was concerned about certain things—about censorship, about nuclear power, about the Tibetan situation, and the famine in Ethiopia...
...I like people to have a good time when I'm performing...
...It came up from the people, from the blues...
...In the late fifties, when I was a schoolgirl, we all had to pick a country to do a year report on...
...I also had addressed these things...
...We are equal because we are all human...
...One of the most memorable things was that there was a very peaceful portrait of Walt Whitman by his bed...
...We've got plenty of entertainment happening in America...
...I was devastated by this...
...I was pretty much raised with the idea that the great wars were settled and the world was free...
...Over the next fifteen years, she brought up a daughter, Jesse, and a son, Jackson...
...But in terms of a singer-songwriter leading a rock band, there really wasn't anyone I could think of...
...I washed a lot of diapers, and, yes, that's a drag...
...It's not an intellectual art...
...We did everything ourselves, whether it was clearing our little piece of land or—because we lived on a canal that often flooded—sandbagging in the middle of the night...
...Parallel to that, I always wanted to write...
...If we all did it, there would be tons and tons and tons less of that kind of pollution...
...The chords are totally accessible...
...I had things to say, and I felt that it was my right to say those things in the format of rock 'n' roll...
...Then we wandered over to Patti's house—a venerable 150-year-old structure on land once owned by Aaron Burr...
...I insisted on keeping Tibet...
...When I was younger, I thought I'd be a missionary, or a preacher or a teacher...
...He had a strong sense of himself...
...The format is totally accessible...
...We're getting, unfortunately, on a real materialistic ride right now...
...Can you describe your sense of the role of the artist as citizen...
...All of that reverberation is connective tissue...
...If that work inspires people—if he's a politically articulate artist—that's great...
...Then, a block away, there is one of the richest communities in America, Grosse Point...
...It's almost like everything has just become a CNN soap opera...
...We have different callings...
...Smith: My feelings about that are mixed...
...It's about Tibet, which is a trendy cause now, but for you this is an expression of a very old concern, isn't it...
...He was more politically articulate...
...Do you feel different responsibilities...
...I have always admired Walt Whitman...
...Our heads have been turned...
...There's a huge independent-music scene in recording, in performing...
...Our inalienable rights are much purer, much more important than that...
...How do we do that...
...Music TV is really a disappointment...
...But this was the first time I really addressed it in a song...
...We're being distracted from what we need to be doing: deemphasizing material acquisition and finding some common beliefs on which we can rebuild our country...
...How did you come to write it...
...I've always seen rock 'n' roll as a vehicle to share ideas or to incite people...
...Haunted and fragile on last year's album, Gone Again, she emerged this fall with Peace and Noise, which Billboard magazine declared to be "as potent an artistic statement as Smith has ever crafted...
...We all enter life, and we all are going to have a story...
...The real American thing, to me, is first of all charity...
...I came to understand George Washington's quote after he left the Presidency, when he said, "I have resumed my life as a citizen...
...We faced financial struggles...
...We toured his home and his grave site, and it was all very moving...
...And much to my shock, in March of 1959, the Chinese invaded and all of a sudden this country that I adored and was so obscure was suddenly all over the newspapers...
...On a wooden table in the kitchen sat a copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass...
...On the eve of a series of concerts in New York, where she now lives, Smith met me at a cafe in Soho...
...Smith: He was the first true modern American poet...
...artists should not be working for the music business...
...Smith did become a star...
...An artist's role in society is often decided by the people...
...We don't even own it...
...Some artists become political just because what they're doing is revolutionary...
...I took comfort from that, because I actually became "as a citizen...
...We still perform that song...
...Radio is more formatted than ever...
...Right now, rock 'n' roll belongs to business...
...I just try as an artist to do the best that I can...
...I'm not just talking about musicians and artists...
...An artist must concern himself with what's motivating him, whether it's a spiritual motivation, or a vision thing, an abstract principle, or something totally intellectual...
...So I just didn't think about it...
...It's flabbergasting...
...This country should be built on charity...
...His band, the MC5, was a very political band...
...The first verse abstractly addressed the state of the environment...
...I remember that the B-side of our first single, "Gloria," is "My Generation," recorded live in Cleveland...
...We are not going to have equal joys...
...I was very taken with Walt Whitman...
...Peace and Noise is Smith's most politically charged album, with songs that address Tibet, the Heaven's Gate suicides, AIDS, memories of Vietnam, and anger at the lingering hangover of the Reagan era...
...And what I really couldn't understand was how no one seemed to mind...
...I had to become much more focused in those time periods when I could work...
...What ended the Vietnam War, as much as anything, was a handful of photographs looking at the atrocities in Vietnam...
...He had protested the Vietnam War, he had supported the civil-rights movement...
...Q: There is anger in "1959," and in a number of the other tracks on the new album...
...We've gotten all twisted around to a point where we think that we work for the government...
...No one's ever heard about it...
...I don't think it's the artist's duty to be political...
...Smith: I intentionally do that...
...And so I try to pass it onM...
...She traveled in the circles of Warhol and Map-plethorpe...
...I do work hoping only for that...
...And Whitman's descriptions of the Civil War—which come from having been there, having nursed soldiers—are some of the most informative and beautifully written pieces I have ever read...
...I gained a lot of respect for people...
...We do that by living as decent human beings...
...His speeches, the concepts he was addressing, were very similar to the lyrics in the song...
...But the main thing is to inspire people or to comfort them or to touch them in some way, which may or may not be political...
...There's a lot to be angry about...
...The music business should be working for us...
...They want answers, and by the time they get those answers they want something new...
...Simultaneously, I got a letter from the Walt Whitman Cultural Center in Camden, asking if we might consider helping them...
...I love to make people laugh...
...And I said, "No...
...Smith: I think the artist's first responsibility is to his work, to the quality of his work...
...Smith: Very hard...
...I would like to be, and I would like to think that occasionally I write a pure poem or a pure prose piece...
...Smith: I got involved in the Tibetan situation as a young girl...
...Q: Has that changed your sense of art...
...I don't have the vocabulary, nor the energies, nor the organization skills to do the things that have to be done...
...To get America and Americans more connected...
...We're being distracted from finding some kind of common ground, from mobilizing, and getting things done...
...For all of its politics, however, Peace and Noise retains the reverence for poetry and the faith in rock 'n' roll that has always underpinned Smith's work...
...And I think that people are going to have to fight...
...I think the soul is there, if you look for it...
...he designed it himself and it's very simple—slightly overgrown, very peaceful, right across from an old abandoned factory...
...Whitman intentionally communicates with us in our time...
...In 1979, when I moved to Detroit to live with Fred, my life changed drastically...
...What drew you there...
...Q: It's hard to break through the apathy that seems to go hand-in-hand with the entertainment culture, isn't it...
...We couldn't take the guilt...
...For instance, we know that if everybody would just stop buying Pampers and just wash diapers, it would make a big difference for the environment...
...All the communication that comes out in formatted radio and music television is token...
...It's not the end of the world, though...
...We are not going to have equal lives...
...Q: You've been very engaged with people like Ginsberg, who have tried to make America live up to its promise—in a variety of different ways...
...That song came out in an election year, in 1988, and I saw Jesse Jackson delivering speeches and I felt like, if I knew his phone number, I'd call him and say, "I have a song for you...
...What got instilled in the American population in the eighties was this sense that it's not only our right but our duty to better ourselves materially...
...But I'm not there to entertain people...
...It was a vision...
...They exchange ideas through vehicles that I'm not even really schooled in—through computers and the Internet...
...And I hope it's a phase...
...Q: You've been at it for a quite a while...
...To me, rock 'n' roll is a totally people-oriented, grassroots music...
...The roots are deep...
...I had been reading the Bible, as I often do, and I had just reread the section about how the meek shall inherit the Earth...
...In terms of female performers, we had memories of Edith Piaf, Bil-lie Holiday, jazz singers, then you had Janis Joplin coming up, and Tina Turner...
...We are different as people...
...They never took advantage of the potential that was there...
...member, as a child, watching rock 'n' roll develop...
...But those are not our inalienable rights...
...I like to see people laugh...
...I went to teacher's college...
...We're too busy...
...I always felt comfortable and I had a desire to speak...
...And now people seem like they just can take anything...
...I just think, right now, we're preoccupied...
...Smith: I don't worry about that so much anymore...
...I'm not really much of a singer...
...I actually worried that it would just disintegrate...
...Jackson Pollack was not a political revolutionary...
...We said on there, "We created it...
...I don't have middle-class sensibilities, desires...
...Smith defined the punk aesthetic, wrote a hit single ("Because the Night") with Bruce Springsteen, released four stunning albums, and performed before crowds that numbered in the tens of thousands...
...But the music industry is worse than ever...
...We are equal because we all have breath...
...Smith: When I was a teenager growing up in South Jersey, 1 was allowed to take the bus to Camden, and when I got off the bus there was the Walt Whitman Hotel...
...But it seems to me your ideas have evolved...
...We're not looking for the messages that poets have left for us...
...I had small children...
...And it should be built on the idea that, while all of us should find our individual strengths, we should also promote a certain sense of equality...
...My father had fought in World War II...
...Smith: "People Have the Power" was Fred's phrase...
...We lived very simply...
...It's got to be people working at radio stations, people at the college level...
...But, in terms of rock 'n' roll, I never set out to be a purist...
...It's our thing...
...That's the thing I really didn't like about the whole Republican era in the eighties...
...I wasn't brought up in a time where females even thought of things like that...
...We ate French toast and watched Jesse draw pictures of clouds...
...Allen's death was a lot like Allen's life—it was filled with people from various camps and he found a way to get along with all of them, and to try and pull everyone together...
...So I felt I had to go...
...There are so many things we could do that wouldn't hurt us at all and that would make a huge difference in all of our lives...
...Is the soul still there in rock 'n' roll...
...Being a good American isn't being a flag-waver or having idealistic parades and all of that...
...Smith: Certainly...
...I was sitting in the kitchen, literally peeling potatoes, and Fred came into the kitchen and said, "Tricia, people have the power—write it...
...But I seemed to have some kind of a natural calling to be a performer, to speak...
...Now they're just ajbig, business...
...I've always wanted to make people think...
...That is such a great thing—to speak across time...
...I've written little pieces...
...Smith: Allen, really, was filled with a lot of joyful, conspiratorial energy...
...My art didn't suffer...
...Well, I'm a mother...
...And it turned out that rock 'n' roll was the place for me to do it...
...I just couldn't understand how this could happen in Tibet...
...In 1994, as she and her husband were preparing to record new music, a wave of tragedy hit...
...Q: You recently visited the grave of Walt Whitman for the first time...
...It's the same with America...
...A lot of different things were on my mind...
...Luckily, a lot of young bands and new performers have gone the independent route...
...Q: That's what you're talking about in a sense, isn't it...
...Allen Ginsberg's Howl is extremely Whitmanesque...
...My teacher said to me, "Patti Lee, this country you've taken is so obscure...
...My work actually flourished in that period because I learned new disciplines...
...By thinking of others...
...We're constantly being warned that we're taking chances with the planet that are dangerous, or that are too extreme...
...I grew up with it...
...Q: Almost twenty years ago, you wrote a song called "Citizenship...
...Fred died of a heart attack, as did Smith's brother, Todd...
...We had children...
...What it does out in the world is not always of the artist's choosing...
...Right now, however, we're in a very quick-gratification time...
...Again, I'm not a real singer...
...We have had so many great opportunities in America to make things right, and we still have them, but we just let the opportunities go by...
...We had to take things out of the newspapers...
...We have to demand something more, something better...
...We had a house...
...This is because we have a myriad of ways to be entertained in these times...
...I'm just not a middle-class person...
...Smith: I would hope so...
...Relying on male icons—the teenaged French poet Arthur Rimbaud, American Beats Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, rock stars Keith Richards, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Bob Dylan—she fashioned a rock-star persona that made the Patti Smith Group an icon for a whole generation of young rockers...
...I'll do what I can, say what I can...
...That's how we pull together a world that is good, that seeks to achieve good...
...There's so much attention not only on material things, but on image and on the way that people look...
...But I don't think I realized that he was buried there, or I would have gone sooner...
...I wanted to be an artist and a bum-«-what Genet would call one of "the sacred bums of art...
...I always liked the idea of talking to people about things, whether it was Moby Dick or the environment or making them laugh...
...I did it in my way, which was more biblical...
...I'm not a musician...
...His grave is just beautiful...
...Q: Whitman is such a dramatic figure, yet he is so often taught in our schools today as a stodgy remnant of the nineteenth century...
...In his loft, through his dying process, coming to visit him or going in and out were all of these different tyrTes of people: young poets that none of us knew^butthat he had encouraged, the Buddhist community and his Buddhist teacher and the monks chanting, and all of his Jewish relatives who were flabbergasted at this whole monk scene, librarians from New Jersey...
...They took advantage of how powerful they could get, and how much money they could make, but what I thought might be the prime directive—communicating in a serious way—they sort of forgot about that...
...It wasn't my intention to be involved in all this...
...A handful of photographs just incensed the people so much that we just couldn't take it...
...And those statements are, in many ways, refinements of messages you have delivered throughout your career...
...But I would never again be so snooty about the middle class and middle-class struggles...
...And the people I have admired have admired Walt Whitman...
...I can do benefits and speak for things and be of some help...
...I'm not a pure artist...
...And she did what no woman had done before...
...That picture of Allen sleeping and quietly dying beneath Walt Whitman's portrait rekindled my thoughts about Whitman...
...You'll never be able to fill a scrapbook with newspaper articles about this country...
...I reJohn Nichols, an editorial writer for The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin, writes regularly for The Progressive...
...The people have got to wake up and reclaim what belongs to them...
...in the way that we dress, in the way that our house looks, in the quality of our furniture, in the quality of our Wranglers—now you have to have this type of dungaree that costs four times as much and if you don't have it you're jive or something...
...Because the example of somebody living their life in a certain way can cause a reverberation...
Vol. 61 • December 1997 • No. 12
