New York (AP) – The story of Patti Smith, it is one of unbridled artistic urge during one of the wildest times in one of the most electrifying cities in the world.
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The New York author and musician has long since gone from being an American cult figure to a global cultural icon. The people she loved most died early. Smith is still on stage, however, next time for her 75th birthday on Thursday (December 30th).
“Today was Monday; I was born on a Monday. It was a good day to arrive in New York. Nobody was waiting for me. Everything was waiting for me,” writes Smith in her autobiographical bestseller “Just Kids” about her arrival in New York in 1967. She had just given birth to a child in New Jersey, put it up for adoption, and got on a bus to the metropolis to seek her fortune as a young writer.
The first great love
Born in Chicago in 1946, she got by with odd jobs and met her first great love, whose name is still pronounced in the same breath today: Robert Mapplethorpe. She met the artist by chance when she was knocking on an apartment looking for friends, Smith recalls.
“I went into a room and there was a boy sleeping on a little iron bed with a mass of dark curls. When I walked in he woke up and smiled at me.” The two become a couple until Mapplethorpe turns to men. Nevertheless, the two remained inseparable until he died of AIDS in 1989.
In “Just Kids”, Smith’s hymn of her friendship with Mapplethorpe, she paints a different picture of everyday life at the subsistence level in New York than the clichés of Woodstock and hippieism might suggest. And yet it is a world out of a modern fairy tale when Smith talks about her time – so much dominated by men – at the famous Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan, where writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg went in and out. A life in uncertainty. But a life in freedom.
Breakthrough with “Horses”
During this time Smith tried by all means to advance her career as an artist, wrote tirelessly and gave readings. Music was added to the performances more by chance, and in 1975 Smith achieved the breakthrough with the album “Horses” – also because of the now world-famous cover photo that the now recognized photo artist Mapplethorpe takes of her.
In the same year she even got a visit from Bob Dylan at a concert, as she recently told the Guardian: “It was a big deal because Bob Dylan didn’t actually go to anyone, he was pretty puzzling.” The two became friends and regularly went for walks together. Decades later, Smith even accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature for him.
“I am a performer”
Smith’s performances in the 70s and after were considered legendary energetic – soon she became known as the “Godmother of Punk”. Although she released a few more albums, she never saw herself as a musician. “I sing, but almost everyone does that. I’m a performer and if I don’t appear, then I’m a mother, I have a cat, I’m a loner, I write every day. I see myself as a writer,” she once said.
In the 80s and 90s things got quieter around Smith when she and the musician Fred Smith started a family with two children in Detroit. He died of heart failure in 1994 at the age of 45. She has a close bond with her children – and learned her climate protection awareness from daughter Jesse, as Smith told the Guardian: “She even taught me to recycle. I’m 75 this year, I’ve made a lot of changes in my life See areas that were once beautiful. Much has been destroyed – and young people are born into it, they are angry. “
And it is part of Smith that she continues to grow and get involved in new things. She is now active on Instagram. In her very own way she documents her writing process in verse form: “This is / just an awakening. I am trying / to grasp the threads of a dream / and
write everything down. Without / coffee or hairbrush. “
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