Patti Smith on the One Desire That Lasts Forever

It wasn't my goal in life to become a rich and famous rock star or, you know, become like an arrogant asshole. You know, I just like I wanted to do something important, hopefully, or something of worth. So back in 2010, I picked up this book that everyone seemed to be reading that year. Just Kids by Patti Smith. I vaguely know who Patti Smith was. Musician and artist, sometimes called the godmother of punk. But I didn't really know her. So I picked up the book without any real expectations, and man, did I love that book. One of the few I've read many times since. Just Kids is this memoir of Smith's early years in New York and her relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe. This is the New York art scene of the 60s and the 70s. Smith is living in the Chelsea Hotel, bumping into Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg and Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and Andy Warhol. It's this moment of ferment that I wish I could have seen or touched like just for a day, for an hour. But just kids, the beauty of it, the reason I think it worked for so many people won the National Book Award that year, is it's one of those rare books that makes you feel what a moment must have been like. And feeling to me is the startling quality of Patti Smith's music and her writing. She makes you feel what she felt. She channels moments rather than describing them. And reading her makes me interested in what life must feel like to her. What is it like to go around in Patti Smith's mind to be that open to experience and energy and intuition? What is the texture of the world that she lives in? Smith's latest book is Bread of Angels, which, like just kids, is a memoir, but spans a much wider range of her life. And it's much more personal in a way, much more experiential. I loved this one, too. Smith also writes a substack these days, and she's on tour right now, celebrating the 50th anniversary of her iconic album, Horses. She's someone who has stayed vibrant across many different eras of American art. And so I think she's someone to learn from. As always, my email is a client show at NYTimes.com. Patti Smith, welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. So you seem like you were a wonderfully unusual child. And I want to begin by having you tell me about the time you spent a morning talking to a tortoise. Well, I suppose I was unusual. And when you're yourself as a child, you don't really understand that. You're just who you are. But I think when I saw Pan's Labyrinth, the girl in Pan's Labyrinth reminded me very much of myself because she freely spoke to nature, whimsical characters, elves, fairies. And I was much like that. I was very much in contact with other worlds because I was completely open to them. And once when I was about five or six years old, I was on the way to school and took a shortcut through the forest, and there was a little pond. And I sat there for a moment, and a huge snapping turtle crawled out of the water, and he was, to me, giant, the king of tortoises. And we looked at each other for a long time and just communed. And it wasn't unnatural to me because I communed with my siblings that way, without words. And as a child, it seemed totally natural to commune with an animal, a dog, a massive snapping turtle, your brother and sister, without words. but I must have like been there a long time in tortoise consciousness because when I finally got to school, everyone was in an uproar. They thought I had been kidnapped because three or four hours had gone by. So I can't tell you what we talked about. It's always been a mystery, but I can say for absolute certainty that we did have quite a journey together. What did that feeling, be it with tortoises or siblings or others, what does that feeling of communion feel like to you? And are you still able to access it now? Yes. I mean, it's different now because when I was young, it was completely innocent. It was just what we did. Now I'm more aware of it. And for me, it's just a way of channeling, you know, vast consciousness or another human being, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. But it has a lot to do with even improvisation, channeling on stage, feeling the people, getting a sense of the people, getting a sense of a character that I'm building in a song, getting within them. and it's just something that I do. You know, I used to speak with William Burroughs a lot about this. He saw it as very shamanistic, but I was always embarrassed when he would say that to me because I was only 22, 23 years old and certainly didn't feel like I deserved being called shamanistic. But this kind of thing was something he avidly believed in. And also because we both had scarlet fever and suffered fevers as children, he felt that people that suffered a lot of fevers and scarlet fever when young had a more open consciousness. But I think it's also just a form of empathy, empathy, imagination. I can't really break it down. It's just, it's a blessing that I have. I'm interested that that word shamanistic just came up. When we were preparing for this episode, we talked to the music journalist Karen Rose, who's written a wonderful book about you. And she used the term shamanistic. We were trying to track down whether Bruce Springsteen had used the term shamanistic around you. Why do you think other people perceive you or something you do as shamanistic? I think it's because when I started performing publicly in the very early 70s, I wasn't a great singer. I'm not really a musician. I didn't have any real experience. I really came through performing through poetry, but I was a very fluid improviser. Whether it was CBGBs or a poetry reading, I would just go into a state where I could do long solos. I always likened it to saxophone solos. You know, you think of Coltrane or someone doing a long 14-minute solo. They go out as far as they can, talk to God if they can, and then return. And of course, I always returned. but I'm not very analytical, so I never thought about it. It was just what I did. And that's what people said. I mean, I find it flattering and sometimes, you know, undeserved, but I don't know what else to call it. That story about the tortoise leads to a story that I found very moving as a parent. People at the school are worried about you. You come very late. You get in trouble. Your parents are called. Your mom is worried. She asks you where you'd been. You say that you'd been nowhere. It was a big fight. And eventually your father asks you to show him you're nowhere. Tell me about what you showed him and how he sort of knew to ask that. That's a beautiful move as a parent. Well, my mother was very reactive, and she was traumatized when young over the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. She was haunted by that, and she was always afraid we'd be kidnapped. She worried about things like that. and she worried about me because I was always wandering off, always going where I wasn't supposed to. And my father was more open to my ways. But he understood my mother's concerns, so he took me for a walk. I just took him to the pond and we sat on the rock and I told him exactly what happened and told him I was talking to the tortoise. but without words for a long time. And he said, oh, and I said, maybe he'll come out again. And we waited for a while, like 45 minutes, but the tortoise didn't come out. So we just sat there and we didn't even talk. We just, it was such a pretty place. He held my hand. My father was also quite the dreamer. And I think that my father didn't find that very strange. He was a very interesting man, and he had a very flexible mind. And we just walked back, and he said, All right, I'll just tell your mother that you were just daydreaming and lost track of time. And I said, Will you tell her about, you know, the tortoise? And he said, No, let's keep that to ourselves. And we never spoke about it again. You gave an interview some years ago where you said something about your father and his mind that I found quite beautiful. You said that he believed that the mind was a country and you had to develop it. You had to build and build and build the mind. That was his whole philosophy, the development of the mind. What did he mean by that or what did you take him to mean by that? Well, my father studied everything. He read the Bible, the Old Testament, the New Testament. He read books on ufology. He read Plato and Aristotle. He read Jung. and he was a factory worker. He didn't finish high school, but he was always searching and asking, you know, what is the meaning of life and asking different people and wanting to spar with, if any religious organizations came to the house, he loved to talk to them, spar with them, see what their ideas were. You know, it's learning. It wasn't basically building like palaces and his country of the mind was after answers, answers to very unanswerable questions. And he was always probing. Why are we here? Who put us here? What is our purpose? I developed a love of study, a love of personal evolution. Even if my goals were different, that idea always stayed with me. And you write in your book that you were a very inquisitive kid, which was, you know, inquisitive kids can be a lot for a busy parent to deal with. And that you found your mom having written down some of the questions you ask and just scrawled in the margins of something where you're asking, what is the soul and what color is it? Yeah, I was one and a half. I was, my mother found, because I was a bit precocious, she got me in Bible school very quickly. But they couldn't answer the questions either. So even I was like three years old and understanding that I wasn't going to get these questions from other people. I was going to have to figure out the answers myself. You tell a story in Bread of Angels about a family trip to the Museum of Art in Philadelphia. and the way it evoked in you, the realization that you wanted to be an artist. What did you feel that day? What is the recognition of that calling feel like? I mean, it's one of the great mysteries of my life. I mean, I was 12. I saw art in books, mostly religious art. And it was the first time I saw art in person. And it was just such an experience, but it was more like appreciating beauty at first, looking at the John Singer sergeants and Modigliani's. But then I went down to this one hallway where there were Picassos. I don't know what happened. There were some Harlequins, some pieces from the Blue Period, Rose Period, and then Cubism. more attuned to like the damsel period. Something about seeing these paintings, the Cubist paintings, struck me so deeply, as if I was struck, really struck by lightning in my heart or something. It was completely unexpected, like really love at first sight. Maybe it's because it's multidimensional or something. I don't know, but when I saw his work, that's what I wanted to do that's what I aspired I felt it and it's never diminished I mean I was just in Madrid and for the 10th time went to see Guernica just went before a concert just so I could sit with it for a little while and see it again and that's what I wanted I wanted to be in that world I wanted to do that I didn't even know what doing that was I was only 12 but it suddenly meant more to me than anything except maybe my books. What does it feel like now to see Guernica? Usually when I see it, I just feel grateful that he did it. You know, I'll look at it in different ways. I've written poems about him painting it. I've deconstructed it in my mind. When I saw it this time, it was more painful because I could liken it to all the images I've seen of the destruction of Palestine, all the pictures of Gaza, all the rubble, all the destruction, all the children dead. And so it was a lot more painful to look at it this time because it struck a raw nerve. But every time I've seen it, I feel something. It's always meaningful. What strikes me about some of these stories, and the reason I'm always fascinated to talk to artists about the feeling of being called towards art, is that was pretty natural in you. I mean, to be able to feel that at 12, you know, I, who have now read biographies of Picasso and, you know, have tried, you know, in probably the wrong way to deepen my appreciation of art over the years, still struggle with going to a museum and walking past masterful works that so many others have felt so much about and not feeling anything. Well, there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, there's books that people love. There's movies that people love that I feel nothing for. I don't think that there's any rules and regulations that way. We're drawn to what we're drawn. In life, I was drawn to books at three years old. I saw books, saw my parents reading them. That's what I wanted. I wanted to read. I begged my poor mother, who was a waitress who never finished high school, to teach me to read. But my siblings weren't like that. My friends weren't like that. There's no requirement to have to stop in front of a rebrant and feel deeply. If you don't, it's just, it doesn't speak to you. But there are other things that most likely speak to you that might not speak to me or speak to another person. I wouldn't fault anyone for not being moved by art or being moved by a certain piece of music. It's a very subjective thing. What's your first memory of reading? Well, my first memory of a book was I was fascinated with this red book my mother had. It had red silk binding and gold stamping. And I was about three, and I hid it under my pillow because I thought if I slept on it, it would come into my head what was in it. And my mother was distraught because she couldn't find it. It was my grandfather's book called Fox's Book of Martyrs. And it was a book with all stories of poor martyred saints. But, you know, I'm sure when my mother started teaching me to read, it was the normal Mother Goose or something. But I swiftly started reading books. And Uncle Wiggly and the Bobsey Twins and Pinocchio and Alice in Wonderland and all the elves and fairy books. I mean, I've read them all, really. Reading through your memoirs, you really get this beautiful biography of your life as a reader, too. and the authors who have meant so much to you. When you think about some of the books that were formative to you or some of the authors who you keep coming back to, what are they or who are they? Pinocchio was very important to me because I knew I was a wayward kid. I wasn't always doing what I was supposed to do. I wasn't evil, but I didn't always do what I was supposed to. and I could relate to his desire to explore. But it's also a story. It's a redemptive story. It gave me hope as a kid. He was a bad puppet, a bad son. But in the end, he saved his father, gave his puppet life, and was redeemed by becoming a real boy. So there's redemption, and it gives one hope, even at seven. And I love Peter Pan, of course. because I didn't want to grow up. And so that was hope of a new place, Neverland, where you didn't have to grow up. And when I wanted to write, but really wasn't sure if I could ever write, reading Little Women, of course, Jo March was an early hero, a girl who wrote. A girl like me was sort of a tomboy who didn't like the fuss and feathers of being a girl. and wanted to be a writer. So I was very lucky to have many books to help me on my path. I remember as a kid getting a book that had the fables and stories I knew, but it was an older version of them. And realizing with a thrilled delight how much darker and more menacing and more grotesque they often were. And now I find myself reading to my children. And when I read them today's books for their age group, they're very funny and they're, you know, toilet jokes. And then when I try to go back and read them the classics that I remember reading or being read, it feels somehow so culturally different. different, you know, the Greek mythology and things that I was reading. And I have to go through this constant negotiation with myself of what am I going to tell them about, you know, which parts of this am I going to sanitize? It feels like we believe children capable of absorbing a more extreme version of life and death and heroism and heartbreak and terror a couple decades ago than we do today. Yes. Like you, there was the German versions of Grimm's fairy tales that were very grim. That is literally the book I'm talking about. Very grim, very dark. But I also accepted them as what they were, fairy tales. They weren't real. And I had a sense of like the imaginative world and our social world. And I think that kids really have the ability, at least when I was young, we knew that things weren't real. I mean, you look at cartoons back then. They wrap, you know, dynamite around their head and then their head explodes. Then they're fine in the next cartoon. It wasn't like we really thought that was happening. I think that fantasy, and maybe because we were always playing outdoors and we lived a different life, but the realm of childhood was akin to imagination and fantasy. The book that really was disturbing for me was the Old Testament because I started reading it very young and the things in it were supposed to accept as real and real people. And then you become very enamored with David, the shepherd boy, and you love him, and he does all these wonderful things. And then he wants someone else's woman and sends the woman's husband to the front lines to be killed. So as a young kid, 10, 11 years old, I even asked my father, there's so many bad things in the Bible. People having 20 wives and their wife is too old to have a baby, so they have a baby with a younger person. And I said, Daddy, there's so much bad stuff. It disturbed me. It confused me. It was really when I had to face the fact that human beings, as my father would always quote Burns, man's inhumanity to man, it's a very real thing. And for now, what I think is more frightening to kids than stories or whatever books they're reading is the news. The news is terrifying. what is the news telling us what our leaders are saying is really um disturbing i'm sorry that this was such a convoluted answer but oh no i agree with you i find the news more terrifying than anything i read yeah so you know how could i explain to a child the duplicity of um you know even our present administration the hypocrisy there's so many dark things. And good luck. Blessings upon you and your children. Thank you very much. I agree with you, by the way, that the Old Testament was a very hard book for me to read. When I was, I think it was in third and fourth grade, I went to an Orthodox Hebrew school, and we read a lot of the Old Testament. And the instruction was to take it quite literally. and in being told to take it quite literally and then trying to match that up to the way I had been told to understand God and told to understand spirituality and seeing the... Yeah, and morals and seeing how little mercy there often was in that book. It honestly put me off of religion and spirituality for quite some time. And I was young, but to match those two things up was already too difficult then. It's interesting because we both suffered the same kind of, you know, questioning. And it wasn't frivolous questioning either. It wasn't rebellious. It was true thinking. Deeply earnest. Yes, deeply earnest is a good way to put it. Let me stay on not the religious side, but the fairy tale side for a minute. You read about this book of Irish fairy tales that belonged to somebody you had cared about when you were young and who passed away. Your sister returned it to you or found a version of it for you as an adult. And a passage of that book that you write about said, all desires save one are fleeting, but that one lasts forever. That was the desire for wisdom. And when that character is asked what to do with that wisdom, he says, I would make a poem. I know, I just love that so much. Well, I read that and having read your memoirs, that almost felt like your whole path. Well, that passage, that little section of that book, I used to ask a very old Irish woman, the great-grandmother of a neighbor named Aggie, I would ask her to read me that over and over, which she did. She didn't mind at all. And I had forgotten it. I'd forgotten it because after five years old, when she died, the book was disappeared and I never saw it again. And truthfully, I'm ashamed to say that I had totally forgotten the passage. And when my sister researched, found the book and sent it to me, when I read that page, I felt almost like I had been like hit in the stomach or something. It was very powerful. Like I reverberated right back to that child and remembered how it made me feel. Yet I didn't really know why. It's another one of these great mysteries. why did that particular passage strike me so much when I was like kindergarten age? But it did. And it probably, as you said, had something to do with it's one of the main stones on my path. I think so many people would hear that and think if you had all that wisdom, why of all things a poem? What can a poem contain? And my sense is that you do have a sense of why a poem. and what a poem can contain. So why a poem? It's like the bread of life, a poem. I mean, I'm not an analyst. I can't really break these things down. It's just that for me, true poetry, I think, is the hardest and the highest thing to write. There's a million poetry books and poet laureates and poetry prizes, but I'm talking about something that's so exceptional that maybe a great poet, Rimbaud or Sylvia Plath or something, Dylan Thomas only writes 10 of them. But if you get the greatest of poems, it can distill everything like a teardrop, like a drop of water that, you know, can give you, if that drop of water and you're thirsty suddenly becomes, you know, a liter of water, then you're satisfied. and that's what a poem can do. You go to New York City in the late 60s. What did New York City feel like to you when you arrived? Freedom. I mean, I had lived in rural South Jersey. It was very rural. In my area, there was no cafes, no galleries, no bookstores. I mean, you could walk to the library on a rainy day in South Jersey and see one person, you know, some cows or something or a pig that escaped the pig farm. I went to a very cool high school because it was extremely diverse and interesting. And I learned a lot from other kids. and we were listening to Coltrane and Bob Dylan, and I read a million books and all of that, but it was a rural area. There was no real culture except for the culture of rock and roll, R&B, rock and roll music that I shared with my classmates and friends. But New York, at the time, in 1967, it was filled with young people. It was really cheap to live there. It was gritty. It felt safe. It was all this activity, energy, Washington Square Park and political activists and poets and people playing bongos. And I don't know, it was action. And it wasn't like now. I mean, down the East Village and the West Village, it was mostly young people and creative people. You didn't have any fancy stores or things like that, you know. It was a place where you could evolve and grow and where nobody cared. I didn't have the look of my time, you know, beehives and lots of makeup. I had like long straight hair. I was sort of a beatnik, Joan Baez-looking kid. I just didn't fit in anywhere. And so, you know, I was always such a weirdo. But in New York, nobody cared. I was more of a hick in New York than a weirdo because, you know, my clothes were a little off. But it was free. I could just walk around and be who I was. And I didn't have any money, and I was often quite hungry until I got a job, but I was happy. I was happy because I can't say it enough. I just felt free. I like reading memoirs of artists in New York City. It's like a genre I practically love. But most of my work is in politics and policy and I practically do a lot of work on housing. And when I read them, some part of me always thinks, oh, what you are seeing are the benefits here of cheap housing, that so often these books seem to me like a memoir of what is possible when you can afford an apartment in New York City. No, but you're also seeing the benefits of less greed. It's not just cheap housing. And I mean, we could get into a very unhappy discussion because you and I are on different sides of the fence on certain aspects of that, because you might know that I've been spending quite some time with my daughter and Joseph trying to save the Elizabeth Street Gardens. So I can't get into a discussion with you about that because we have, especially the cavalier way in which it's treated as if like we're, you know, a bunch of frivolous something. It's a beautiful, beautiful place for children and people. We need, we need, I've lived in New York since 1967. I've seen all the developments in New York has been mostly corrupt. We have all this office space that's completely empty, whole empty buildings. And we just keep building in them, building them. And I know that we need housing, but that's not going to change the fact that in Greenwich Village, where it used to cost $110 or $150 for an apartment, the same apartment is $7,000. It's not going to change all the loopholes and stuff that these landlords and people have done. It's not going to change the fact that places are filled with mold, but landlords don't have to fix it. All my friends had to move out in New York who have lived there since the 60s because the rates and the rents, you have a place and your lease goes up and then they triple it. I mean, just simply building some new things for 200 people is not going to change things. What we have to change is what's going on with how much things are. And that's what I'm concerned about. Not concerned about, all right, let's get rid of these garden spaces that are, you know, taken up, valuable space that we could develop. All right, some of that might be important, but it's a way bigger issue than that. Well, let's stay, recognizing that we might see the possibilities here differently. I think we're actually on the same side of thinking something has gone terribly wrong. Yes, terribly. But what was it like finding housing when you first came to New York City? I mean, you came without a place to stay. You came without a place to live. Like, what were the places you lived in like? Well, like one, right before I recorded Horse, I think it was 74, I needed an apartment. I wanted to go to the East Village because the West Village started getting a little expensive. So I walked down East 11th Street, not far from the church, I think more like toward Avenue, between 2nd and 1st. And there's some old guy sitting in front of a building, the Super. You always knew the Super. The Supers were always there. Do you have an apartment? Yeah, I got one. So on the sixth floor, go look at it. You know, you have to walk up six floors. It has a tub and kitchen. There's cockroaches all over the place. But you could fix it up, go back down. How much? Eh, 150, but I need two months. All right, I'll come back. You shake hands. And, you know, you got an apartment. That's what it was like. And it was a shithole. But it was your shithole, and it was up to you to fix it up. And there was a lot of abandoned buildings or things and people squatted or else they would pay cheap rent and they had cold water flats. They didn't have electricity. And these artists slowly started making them better, making them nicer, making them livable. And then eventually they'd get priced out. So this is what, you know, sadly what happens. But it was great then because, you know, you got the rats and the cockroaches and the mold or whatever. But, you know, if you're resourceful, you could work with that. But you could get a job as a waitress. You could get a job in a bookstore, pay your rent, and have at least enough to eat. And, you know, I don't, I'm living in this world. I'm not fantasizing about living in my old world but there were some aspects of it I do mourn some of actually the innocence and the possibilities and right now to live in New York and whether you have some little affordable housing here and there it's not going to change the fact that you have to have a lot of money to live in New York you have to I've read Just Kids it's one of those books I've read repeatedly and I know a lot of people for whom that's true. And one of the reasons I think is that a lot of us, we sort of wish we had been there in that moment. It feels like a moment that was special. And you actually, your books sort of evoke it. They allow you to feel it. But it was a scene. It wasn't just a, you know, there are a lot of moments, but that one was a scene and you describe it as, quote, looking back, the burgeoning scene was breathtaking. art rats embracing then breaking apart a vast cultural history scurrying into the future with speedy and productive energy what to you made that moment that moment i mean we've talked here a little bit about new york at that moment but why was the artistic moment so generative and and now so legendary i think it's because it was a very pivotal time for one thing because of the feminist movement because of the gay movement I don't know what we would call that now but the fact that you could come to New York if you had new ideas you could come to New York if you were homosexual you could come like myself I was the weirdo it sort of accepted everyone it was really like the Statue of Liberty was our girl because so many kids in America were disowned by their families for being homosexual, wanting to be a poet, wanting to be an artist. That wasn't an accepted profession. You know, you could be disowned for wanting to be an artist or a poet, let alone having a sexual persuasion that was against anything they believed in. And so New York was filled with misfits, people that weren't accepted, including myself, or Robert, or Jackie Curtis. There's so many I could like, many of them dead, but so many people, so many gifted people, so many tragic people at the same time. and what had brought us together, I think it started with music. We were all listening to the same music. I mean, whether it was, you know, the Sgt. Pepper, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Janis Joplin. We were all listening to the same music, most of us against the Vietnam War, all, of course, for civil rights, human rights, gay rights, women's rights. And we were young and conscious that this was rights that we believed in and there was a kinship. So it was a very unique period. And I don't like painting things like it was the best era ever so that young people in future generations feel like they missed out. Because that's not fair. Being alive in present tense is the greatest thing you have. One thing that strikes me about that time, when I return to it, when I think about it, the way you talk about the music of it, you mentioned Robert, Robert Mapplethorpe, who is such a central figure in your life and such a central artist. It's a moment when art is taken very, very seriously. I think even compared to other times in American history, the music of Bob Dylan or the Beatles, you know, the conceptual art, Andy Warhol of that era, there is something about the culture's relationship to art right then that feels distinctive. Not just the art being produced, but the seriousness with which it was received and lived out. I don't feel like I know why it's true, but it feels true. That's really interesting. Yeah, there's truth in that when I think about it. I guess it's because it was just one of those, it's like Journey to the East. It was just one of those moments where a lot of people converged that even if we didn't always get along or there was pettiness or this or that, we still were in a certain way like minds. You know, when I was working at Scribner's, I waited on Larry Rivers. I waited on Robert Rauschenberg. You know, I delivered books to the building where Mark Rothka lived and saw him on the elevator. You saw these people. They were there. You knew where their studios were. or Jimi Hendrix's studio was across the street from where Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock painted. Art was everywhere. You know, Andy Warhol ate in the same restaurants as we did. We all commingled more. I sometimes joke that, you know, Janis Joplin was staying at the Chelsea Hotel when I lived there. We dressed similar, only she had feather boas. And we lived in the same hotel, only hers, she had a bigger room. She had a suite of rooms and I had the tiniest room. Other than that, we were all similar. We dressed similar. We listened to the same music. We had the same references. And art was like the jewel in our crown. I just had this other thought that might be far-fetched, but, you know, we were from the generation that had President Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy. I mean, when I was a kid, Eisenhower was president. And then you had the Kennedys. Well, you had President Kennedy, but his wife, very connected with the arts, opera, ballet, fashion. And they sort of elevated the idea of culture in the American consciousness and also within young peoples. That was, for a brief time, that was our world. That was our president. Behind the storm of daily conflict and crisis, the dramatic confrontations, the tumult of political struggle, the poet, the artist, the musician, continues the quiet work of centuries, building bridges of experience between peoples, reminding man of the universality of his feelings and desires and despairs, and reminding them that the forces that unite are deeper than those that divide. It did something. It did something. It was at least a subconscious influence. But I also, like I said, I sometimes, in talking about all of this, don't ever want to seem like the time that we're living in is like end time or something. New things are being done constantly. New books are being written. New films are being made. And I always pin my faith on youth. What was Andy Warhol like? I didn't particularly like him so much when I was younger. But I really appreciated him, especially when I was older. Like his Last Supper series, I thought was brilliant. But that was a world that really didn't interest me. It could be a very competitive and petty world where a lot of really interesting work came out of. It just sometimes the atmosphere felt very high school to me. You know, I was more of a Holden Caulfield kind of kid. I really was. I used to think of myself as Holden Caulfield at the Chelsea. I was just like gangling St. Bernard, jumping into the Chelsea Hotel, and there was hierarchies of people. But that's a whole other subject. Well, you come in, and you come in, as you say, a sort of Holden Caulfield figure, and you're then known by others as the poet, and you become a very famous musician, and you release records. But I've heard that you'll describe yourself as a poet and as a performer, but not so much as a musician. So I'm curious about your sense of your own identities in that period, which ones you adopt and which ones you don't. I never in my life considered myself a musician. I don't deserve to be called a musician. I don't think like a musician. I don't apply myself. I can play really good and really loud feedback. I can write a song with a few chords But I'm not a musician My kids are musicians My husband was a great musician I've been called so many names. When I was young, I was the queen of punk. Then I got too old. Then the grandmother of punk or the godmother of punk. They always have a name for you. The punk poet laureate. What do all these things mean? I always tell people, you want to call me something, call me a worker. Because that's what I do. I work every day and try to do the best work I can. I don't say I'm not a musician out of modesty. I'm just not. I'm a performer and I think I'm a good performer and a strong performer, but not a musician. What makes you a good performer? I have no fear. I just, you know, I'm being cavalier, but when I go on stage, I feel very comfortable on stage and I stay and do my best to stay in contact with the people. They're not going to get perfection and who knows what they're going to get, but they always know that I'm aware that they're there every second. I don't play at people. I play for them or with them. But that's a natural thing. So tell me about, you gave this performance at the bitter end in the 70s. It's your first performance with a drummer. Can you tell me a bit about that night? Yeah, well, that night will always be, you know, imprinted on my mind. We were four of us. We didn't have a drum. But we were playing in such a high-energy way. We had been playing CBGBs. And it was really time for us to get a drummer. And we finally got one. J.D. Daugherty, he was only with us for a couple of weeks. And we got a job at the bitter end. And it was our debut as a drummer. so it was going to be quite exciting. And, you know, we were at the club and I was ready and excited. And going on stage, I mean, we were gathering a following and, you know, I could feel the support of the people. That night, there was something extra. There was an electricity in the air that I can still access. It was like nothing that I had felt before. And I thought, oh, it's probably because people are anticipating us performing with a drummer. And it was a great night. I mean, it was like raucous. The people were so effusive and so with us. And it was a club, but it was a small triumph. It was exciting. And I was like, got off the stage and I was filled with adrenaline. And, you know, I get backstage and I hear this voice say, any poets back here? And I was like, I turned around and I went, I hate poetry. It was Bob Dylan. And I mean, I loved Bob Dylan, loved him. He was like one of my greatest influences. And there he was in front of me. and two things. One, I thought, oh, that's why it was so exciting because Bob Dylan was there. But I don't know why I said that. It was like such a teenage, I felt like a teenage boy, you know? It's like when you act mean to a girl because you like her or something. And he just laughed and we like circled around. I always said we circled around like two pit bulls, you know, circled around like sort of sizing each other up. But Bob Dylan never went to see anyone. So it was quite a privilege. But I was like, you know, I was such an upstart. I couldn't even act grateful or anything. I was like, ah, you know, so what? You're here, so what? I think that he understood. He was somewhat like that himself, you know. After that, everything just like went at 78 speed. because he really, for some reason, you know, I felt him in our corner. So that was quite a night. And it was only a few months later that we recorded horses. 1975 was one of the fastest moving years of my life, I think. And it's nice now to be celebrating it, you know, 50 years. That was half a century ago. half a century ago that that night at the bitter end and then recording horses and then going out into the world and still here what has it been like to be out playing that album again um you know I'm a person that keeps my favorite thing is the thing I haven't written the next thing but I understand what my task is when we perform it. The record has a lot of meaning to a lot of people, and we do our best to give it to them every night, not by rote, but like all over again. And it's challenging, too, because I do it basically chronologically, and I have to open with Gloria. Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine. So you have to step on the stage and start with Gloria. Gloria! Gloria! Gloria! Gloria! Gloria! Gloria! Gloria! And I feel like both grateful because people are still interested and this work that was committed, and again, half a century ago. But, you know, there's a lot of joy, and even sometimes on certain nights, it's... Sorry. I mean, so many people are gone. My pianist, who I loved, too, was the founding member with Lenny Kay of the band, and all my friends, Robert and Sam Shepard, and oh, so many people. And all these people, sometimes my brother, who is the head of our crew, and sometimes when we're doing these songs, because they were all there, then they come back, you know, like with such force. And sorry. But despite that, I feel also the joy of celebration and happy to be here, happy to be physically able to do it, to feel my voice is strong and that I can give the people, you know, each night as authentically as I can, give them the experience of the record as a new experience every night. I want everyone who comes into the night wanting a special night, leaving, feeling that it was a special night and not just another night on the road. So that's where we did Europe. And pretty soon we'll be starting in Seattle and ending in Philadelphia, where I got the bus to come to New York and where all these things. unfolded. So it's sort of fitting it should end in Philadelphia. That's beautiful. so you become big as a a touring performer i'll use the term you have these big records you're you're touring the world you have stadiums and this gets us to out of sort of the just kids book and into your newer book but you decide to leave that behind to move to michigan with your your partner and and raise a family that's a a quite rare decision to walk away from that kind of fame at that moment. And you have this line that I've been wondering about. You say that after a time, if not prudent, one reaches the point of being unrecognizable to oneself. What about you or about your life had become unrecognizable to you? Well, I was getting quite popular in Europe. You know, you play in front of 40,000 people and you get off the stage and you're like wired up. And it was exciting. I loved rock and roll. I liked being a rock and roll star for a while, but it wasn't what I aspired to. I wasn't evolving as an artist. I wasn't writing anymore. I wasn't evolving as a human being. I'm not criticizing anything. I'm just simply saying this had to do with myself. It wasn't my goal in life to become a rich and famous rock star or, you know, become like an arrogant asshole. You know, I just like, I wanted to do something important, hopefully, or something of worth. And I felt like I had to really, you know, reassess who I was, what I wanted to do. I left public life behind so I could really get a sense of who I was, what I wanted, and to evolve as a human being and to be with the person I loved. And it was a very difficult decision, very difficult, even painful, but I've never regretted it. Because in that next 16 years, I did evolve, which is also painful. because evolving, you have to shed a lot of things and you have to reassess, you know, who you are, what you have done, where you've been careless, how you can be better and get a more empathetic sense of the world, the people around you. So it was a long learning process. So you open the book Bread for Angels with these sentences you write, the pen scratches across the page, rebel hump, rebel hump, rebel hump. What do these words mean, asks the pen. I don't know, replies the wrist. Throughout the book, you keep coming back to those words, rebel hump. And it's clear from the way you do it and the way you write that, that you don't know yet what they mean, but they feel like something to you, feel like something so strong They end up being the refrain of this entire work of art. So when those words came to the wrist, what did they feel like? How did you know there was so much life in them? I didn't. I started writing it in this fairly obscure hotel in Nice, looking at the Bay of Angels. I hadn't written in a long time. I was distraught because I was having a period where I just wasn't able to write. And all of a sudden, I started writing, and they were the first, that's what I wrote. So I didn't question it. I sensed that it was something. I just knew that it had worth. And as I wrote the book, it kept revealing to me aspects of what it was. There's a passage from that book I'd love you to read. It starts, we waged the fever of disappointment. We waged the fever of disappointment, the realization that yesterday's crumbling tower was not a fantasy, that like the Prince of Aquitaine, one is hurled and drawn like a human tarot card. How can we leap back up, get back on our feet, grab a cart, and start gathering the debris, both physical and emotional? Crush it into small stones, then pulverize them, and as the dust settles, dance upon it. How do we do that? By returning to our child self, weathering our obstacles in good faith. for children operate in the perpetual present. They go on, rebuild their castles, lay down their casts and crutches, and walk again. So I love that, that crush it into small stones, pulverize them, and dance upon the dust. And it makes me think of something you did in your own life where you give up the life of a rock star. For a lot of people who do work that happens in front of an audience, whether a writer, musician, a performer, podcaster, it's very easy as you become more successful to measure how good the work is by how big the audience is. Oh, I never think like that. Tell me about not, because I'm sure you know many people who do, and I'm sure there was seduction in that for everybody, right? I mean, that's some kind of measurement the world is giving you back. How did you stay connected to the voice inside of you about whether the work was great as opposed to the voices outside telling you what was great? No, I'm really—that's not hard for me because I'm my roughest critic, really. And I've never, like, measured my worth by performing because it's a natural—it comes natural. It's my job to do a good job and, you know, connect with the people. I don't measure myself by the amount of adulation, nor discord or hatred or anything. I don't let those things affect me. I don't measure how good my work is by what a critic says. I just do my job, you know, and I perform for the people. I just want to do something of worth. I want to write a book as good as Pinocchio. I want to write one book where I can look at it and go, ah, this deserves the trees that were sacrificed for it. Do you feel that way about any of the books you've written? I think that in all my books, there's some really good things. I can't say I wrote the perfect book. I'm still trying. Oh, I think it would be horrible to know you, to know internally that you have done the best work you can do. That would be a kind of death. Yeah, you're right. So let's say, no, I haven't made it yet. I'm still trying. You write about your life in Michigan. You write, our life was obscure, perhaps not so interesting to some, but for us it was a whole life, sometimes challenging, yet I could feel my own evolution in slow but real time. It was painful, as I was scrubbing centuries of skin ash debris from an unearthed vessel coming at last into its own. Rebel hump, rebel hump. Right there in that passage, what are those rebel humps? Well, I think that's more of a cry for like, where are you? You know, because the rebel hump, it's many things. Some of the things that I found troublesome about myself were part of the rebel hump. Sometimes when I had a small victory, the rebel hump glows or shimmers. Some aspects of the rebel hump you want to shed, But the essence of it, which for me is probably one's deepest creative source, one's imagination. You know, and sometimes we feel abandoned. You know, even in the New Testament, you know, Jesus feeling abandoned by his Father. We all feel abandoned by our muse many, many different ways. And it's a very painful thing. Even if you know because you have great faith you aren't abandoned, but the feeling that you feel abandoned is painful, and it's a hump that you have to get over. What is that work like for you? If somebody's listening to this and they want to be a writer, what is the work of becoming better as a writer? Well, I always tell people it's like a muscle that you have to exercise every day. I just write every day. You know, when you're young, you think, oh, you're going to smoke some pot and write a poem. It's not like that. I learned in the 80s when I left public life, I wrote every single day. I struggled. I'd write the same paragraph 10 times because I wrote everything by hand. But I got to the point where I could not not write. That's when you know, I think, you're a writer, when you can't not write. I could imagine life not performing, not singing, not drawing, not doing many, many things in life, but not writing. I could not imagine not writing. I always think there are two sides to writing. we always focus on what gets written, right? What comes out of the person. But there's also what comes into the person. You have a lovely quote where you say, that is something I can do, sit quietly, go elsewhere, and not return empty-handed. How's a writer do you not return empty-handed? How do you create what to write with? Well, because I study a lot and I research a lot and think a lot. I want to write a mystery story about Kyoto in the 17th century, so I'll do a lot of studying. And then maybe months later, I have all of the material in order to write some type of fable or something, because I've consciously studied. But other things, like in this book, in Bread of Angels, when I was sitting in that hotel on the little balcony at the Bay of Angels, I had nothing in mind. I just like somehow was so demoralized and so tired, and I was just looking out at the bay in a sort of circular. And I was receptive, and I was given. I was given the words to start the book and then when I was struggling to finish the book I finished a tour in Paris and I had several days off I just decided to go there again and I went there again all the burdens and all the beauty sort of like, you know, floating in that water and I just wrote it out and I finished the book. But this was one of those rare moments where I began and ended something in the same place. And it was just for me, you know, just even thinking about it makes me feel very privileged. Those things can't be planned, nor can they be pushed. So the way you said it was very nice. How does it come to you? Some things come to you, other things you labor for, you study for. But this other magical realm, you can't really summon it. You can't demand it. You know, it will come to you. It's like you cannot petition the Lord with prayer. You know, it's like Jim Morrison was right. You can't petition it. You can't say, great, mighty Bay of Angels, give me the words. It just, I was just given. I was generously given a gift. There is a mystery to the process. I said a second ago that I always think there are two pieces to it, the what comes in and what goes out. And that's actually not entirely true because there's this thing that happens in between those two. But some kind of processing of it all has to happen in the middle. And I don't understand that process in myself. Something happens and then there is what to work with. But it's not exactly what came in, right? I'm not a camera. That's the part that I find the strangest. I've become much more respectful of it over the years, but I still would not say I understand it. That's beautiful, and it's the same thing. It's sort of alchemy, that sort of miracle area, that unspoken thing. That's our alchemical, I don't know how else to say it, because in alchemy, you take all of these elements and produce something else. It could be gold, but it could also be some wisdom or some enlightenment or just understanding of your own material. But that realm, you know, that's a precious realm. And you've articulated it perfectly. But it also has to be nourished. You know, and that's, you know, years of what you do, years of what I've done. And we have to develop certain disciplines. And those disciplines come to hand. You know, it's all the magic in creation. My mother. My mother could transform a bag of potatoes when we're, you know, my father was on strike and there was no food and just a big bag of potatoes. is my mother would look at that bag of potatoes and think about it in tears because that's all she had to give us. And by the end of the evening, she had created like, you know, a mystical mountain of the best French fries ever, the best potato pancakes ever, you know, and put it all on the newspaper on the floor and let us watch Frankenstein. And then you weren't conscious at all of the fact that they were struggling and that we were sort of hungry or, you know, the cupboards were bare. All we knew was the magic that she had created for us. I both love that story as a parent who needs to do a better job of finding that magic for my children sometimes. But one thing that I hear in that is there has to be space to hear the voices. And when you said she would get quiet and look at the batting of potatoes, right? Everybody throw this chaos all around her. Smoke a cigarette and tears. Yeah, or, you know, you talk in your book about moving to Michigan and being away from the noise of the audience, away from the noise of fame, away from the... I actually do think this is very important when you're talking about nourishing that internal voice. I often think of it as listening to it and it gets drowned out, right? You can both become a more sensitive listener or a less sensitive listener. But also, even if you're a sensitive listener, if you're not listening, right, if you're listening to everything around you and outside of you, it's very, very hard to hear. So what do you think, what are the conditions for you in which it's easier for you to listen? You know, at this time in my life, I mean, I'm going to be 79. I've been through all kinds of things, and I don't really require anything. I can be in a noisy cafe or in the back of a taxi cab or sitting on a park bench. I just have a lot of faith now. I know what I want out of this next stretch of life. I know what I want to do. And I am just grateful for anything that I can do. I know what I want and I know how I want to spend the lion's share of my time. We have to, despite everything that's happening in the world and everything around us and any kind of frustration or helplessness we feel or betrayal we feel, we have to remember it's also all right to feel the joy of being alive and feel the joy of your own possibilities, even in the face of the suffering of so many people around us. I have to hold on to the fact that I have a life and I have duties that I have to perform. I have family to take care of, but I have also the same calling as I did when I was young to nourish and to do the work that I believe I was given the possibility to do. And I'm not going to let anything shake that faith, no matter what kind of rubble or debris of our time I have to walk through. I believe in my rebel hump, so I'm not going to let anyone destroy it. And I'm just going to keep doing my work. Before I ask for your book recommendations, which is how we always end the show, I want to go back to the beginning, to the questions you asked your mom when you were little, and you realized you had to figure out the answers yourself. Now, three quarters of a century later, what is a soul, and what color is it? I believe it's the color of water. That's what I think. I think the soul is the color of water. and you know what is the soul it's not important to me to know it's many things but I believe in it I believe in the soul I believe it's an energy that I like to believe will keep traveling even you know when breath is gone I'm hoping to keep traveling I'm hoping to see Fred somewhere I'm hoping you know I don't have any system my system has no system at all when I think about the first moment I saw Fred and how I knew he was the person. I can still access that. I can still access what it felt like to look at Picasso at 12 and still access how I felt hearing Bob Dylan for the first time. They remain within me. And I guess it's I can still access joy. and then always our final question what are three books you'd recommend to the audience oh my gosh well my head is swirling so much with a million books but just for like little continuity I would say read Pinocchio and Frankenstein there's two creators who have created life Geppetto creates the naughty puppet who redeems himself. And then Mary Shelley writes Frankenstein, truly a masterpiece. Two different takes on creating, being as almost a God figure and creating life. And I would say, read some poetry of Sylvia Plath. Read 2666 because I think it was our first 21st century masterpiece. By Roberto Bolaño. Yeah, I think it's just brilliant. But I love so many books. It's a terrible question to ask me. But Pinocchio is my go-to book. I've read it a hundred times. That was always my dream. If I could write a book as good as Pinocchio, then I could say, okay, I did my job. So I'm still working on it. Patti Smith, thank you so much. You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Samalewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Pending Audio is Annie Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Karen Rose and Annika Robbins. Thank you.