Singer, writer, and artist Patti Smith is regarded as a pioneer and icon of the New York City punk rock scene, yet the mundane world she grew up in presented no sign of such a life. Smith is seen by many as a poet whose vision and presence shaped the dynamic medium of music forever. Smith was born on December 30, 1946, in Chicago, Illinois. The world that she was born into was no doubt ordinary. Her mother Beverly Smith, was a jazz singer turned waitress, and her father Grant Smith, was a machinist at a Honeywell plant. Smith spent the first four years of her life on the south side of Chicago, until her family moved to Philadelphia for 6 years before settling in Woodbury, New Jersey at the age of 9. As a child, she was sickly and lanky with a physical appearance and reserved demeanor that gave no implication of the star she would become. Despite such circumstances, Smith says she was a positive child with an exceptional spirit that she believed kept her going and would one day lead her to greatness. Frequent illnesses – including scarlet fever, measles, and mumps – caused her to be confined to her bed for days. This meant her only entertainment was books, records and her imagination. In high school, Smith discovered her passion for art, music, and performance. She grew fond of the music of John Coltrane, Little Richard and the Rolling Stones, and began performing in school plays and musicals.
Smith graduated high school in 1964, and instead of pursuing a journey into the arts, she began working on the assembly line at a toy factory. This “short-lived but terrible experience” would inspire Smith’s first single, “Piss Factory.” She then enrolled at Glassboro State College later that fall with the goal of becoming a high school art teacher. However, her time at Glassboro State did not last long due to her lack of academic motivation and resistance of traditional curricula. In 1967, she fled from an uneventful life to New York City, with uncertain aspirations of becoming an artist. She worked in bookstores, wrote poetry and collaborated with fellow art-boho outsiders.
The day she arrived New York City was the day she met Robert Mapplethorpe, the supernatural gift and companion who would forever change her life. It was Mapplethorpe who motivated Smith to turn her poems into lyrics, and Smith who convinced Mapplethorpe to pick up a camera. Their initial intimate relationship ended as Mapplethorpe had come to terms with his homosexuality, but their bond was everlasting. Smith and Mapplethorpe were a forceful duo from their first meeting in 1967 through to his death from AIDS in 1989.
Smith began to dedicate herself to writing and fully explore rock ‘n’ roll as an outlet for her lyric poetry. On February 10, 1971, Smith gave her first public reading at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery, with guitar accompaniment from Lenny Kaye. It was this event that introduced Smith as a rising name in the New York arts circle and led the way for the Patti Smith Group. Additionally that year, she co-authored and co-starred with Sam Shepard in his semi-autobiographical play by the name of Cowboy Mouth. In 1972, she published her first book of poetry, Seventh Heaven, which earned great reviews but sold few copies. She then published two additional collections Early Morning Dream and Witt, which received similar critical acclaim.
Smith intended to awaken and shake things up in both the dead poetry and rock and roll scenes. In 1974, she formed a band and recorded her first single “Piss Factory,”. Today, the track is widely viewed as the first true “punk” song. Mainstream glory followed her the next year when Bob Dylan attended one of her concerts and she landed a record deal with Arista Records. In 1975, Smith released her debut album, Horses. The album presented a wild energy, profound lyricism, and masterful wordplay which led to its immense commercial and critical success. The photographer behind the cover of Smith’s influential, “Horses,” was Mapplethorpe, who was about to become famous himself. In 1976, Smith released her even more innovative second album, Radio Ethiopia, and re-proclaimed her act as the Patti Smith Group to give deserved recognition to her band.
Her first obstacle on her journey presented itself in January 1977, when she fell off the stage at a Florida coliseum, suffering back, neck and facial injuries. This forced her to take a break and recover during the year that the punk rock and do-it-yourself movement she helped promote saw a breakthrough. She returned successfully in 1978 with triumph of the Patti Smith Group’s third album, Easter, which included the popular single “Because the Night,” written by Smith and Bruce Springsteen. The album aided in advancing Smith’s unlikely domination of the rock mainstream. It inspired the garage-band sound and challenged the norm of increasingly smooth rock production.
In 1979, Smith released her fourth album, Wave, which received mild reviews and sales. Around the time of the albums release, Smith had fallen in love and married the guitarist of MC5, Fred “Sonic” Smith. Over the next two decades, Smith vanished from the public eye to dedicate her time to domestic life and her family. She released only one album during this time, 1988’s Dream of Life. The album was a collaboration with her husband and Jimmy Iovine. The album flopped despite including one of Smith’s most well-known singles, “People Have the Power.” Dream of Life became Patti Smith’s final collaboration with three of her closest companions: Robert Mapplethorpe, who photographed her for the cover; Richard Sohl, who played the keyboards; and her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, who composed the music. Over the next five years, Smith lost a series of close friends and relatives. When her husband died of a heart attack in 1994, it finally provided Smith the motivation to return to the music world. In the wrongly shortened lives of her loved ones and the needs of her children, Smith continued to find her motivation to write and make music.
In 1996, with the help of old and new friends, she released the highly personal Gone Again, which dealt with the topics of time, loss and mortality. This triggered a public return for Smith, who re-formed her band and promoted her new album by opening on tour for Bob Dylan. Since then, Smith has remained a prominent in the music scene with her albums Peace and Noise, Gung Ho and, Trampin’. Her return was followed with high praise by music critics, proving that Smith could speak to a new generation of rock fans. In 2007, she released her album Twelve, which featured Smith’s covers of rock classics, such as “Gimme Shelter”and “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and in 2012 followed with her critically acclaimed Banga. After 35 years of music and 11 albums, Smith proves that she is constantly progressing.
In 2010, Patti Smith returned to writing and published her acclaimed memoir, Just Kids. The book gives its readers a personal glimpse into her relationship and adventures with Mapplethorpe in New York City during the late 1960s and ’70s. This work became a New York Times bestseller and received a National Book Award. In 2015, Smith released another book, M Train. Although she never topped the charts, Smith hurled punk rock in New York, London, Los Angeles, and throughout the world. Smith has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, named Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters by France’s Ministry of Culture, and awarded the Polar Music Prize for her contributions to music and art by the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. It seems in the case of Patti Smith, her persistent positivity and desire for bliss put this hero on her journey. Patti Smith was a trailblazer who altered the role of female rock stars and a poet who gifted the world her lyrical talent, to this day she stands out as one of the greatest names in the history of rock ‘n’ roll.