NOVEMBER – PATTI SMITH
Patti
Smith is a woman on a mission. She's been on it for over forty years,
although there was a decade-long public hiatus when she retired to
Detroit to raise a family. In the early 1970s, the mission was to save
rock and roll from pop drivel. Smith's ecstatic, charismatic, poetic
performances inspired a generation of musicians.
She was a seminal
figure in New York clubs of the time, particularly Max's Kansas City and
CBGB. Her first album, Horses (1975), with the haunting black-and-white
cover photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe, is one of the most influential
records of the rock era. The image of Smith, insolent in her man's
white shirt and skinny tie, a black jacket draped over one shoulder,
still inspires men, women, and fashion designers. She herself was
inspired by Rimbaud, William Burroughs, Jimi Hendrix, William Blake, and
an extensive pantheon of visionaries and romantics—not to mention
Johnny Carson.
She
had a Top Forty hit, 'Because the Night', on her third album, Easter
(1978), but her emblematic work is more along the lines of 'Birdland,' a
lengthy poem/song about Wilhelm Reich's son waiting at his father's
funeral for a UFO to take him away. And then there is her enduring
'People Have the Power,' which has become the anthem of populist
movements in several countries. Smith's passion, commitment, and utter
lack of cynicism have been lent in support of environmentalists,
progressive politicians, Tibetans, artists, and radicals of many
stripes. In the summer of 2015, when she was making her way through an
annual tour of European music festivals, she galvanized audiences of
thousands of people. Smith has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall
of Fame and she won the National Book Award for Just Kids (2010), a
memoir of her relationship with Mapplethorpe, but her mission is not a
nostalgia trip.
Patti Smith's ecstatic, charismatic, poetic performances inspired a generation of musicians
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