Rimbaud of the Lower East Side

PATTI SMITH: “I never got upset by the immediate reality, because I learned from the surrealists that there were 1,000,000 more realities out there. I knew I could always telescope myself into perfection.”

DAVE THOMPSON: “As Patti tried on different personas, she also cultivated an array of life ambitions. She would listen to Coltrane and then write poetry, trusting the freedom of one to unlock the doors to the other. She dreamed of being an actress like Jeanne Moreau or Anouk Aimee. And she looked forward to the day when she would become an artist’s mistress, the power behind the throne of creation. One day, she imagined, she would subsume herself behind the requirements of a man who would answer all of her questions, who could tell her what to say and what to think, when to laugh and when to cry. One day. But until then, she would dream – of Coltrane, of Bob Dylan, of William Burroughs. And Rimbaud. Especially Rimbaud.”

PATTI SMITH: “I really didn’t fall in love with writing as writing. I fell in love with writers’ lifestyles. Rimbaud’s lifestyle. I was in love with Rimbaud for being a mad angel and all that shit.”

PATTI SMITH: “Mama said I was born old. Sadly I suspected my origins being beyond the grip of man. Though shaped by an extremely distant sculptor I am proud to exist within the skin of an earthling. Unlike many artists I never feel a prisoner within my flesh. Rather I celebrate it. Sometimes I feel this deep and ancient pain, like a tooth ache in the back of my neck. I look up. Somewhere in that magnificent opera called the sky is a key… a clue… a hair or a thumb print that will eventually...”

PATTI SMITH: “My friend Janet Hamill and I harbored lofty dreams but also a common love of rock and roll, spending long evenings discoursing on the Beatles versus the Rolling Stones. We had stood in line for hours at Sam Goody’s to purchase ‘Blonde on Blonde,’ combing Philadelphia in search of a scarf like the one Bob Dylan wore on the cover. We lit candles for him when he had his motorcycle accident. We lay in the high grass listening to ‘Light My Fire’ wafting from the radio of Janet’s battered car parked by the side of the road with the doors open. We cut our long skirts to the mini lengths of Vanessa Redgrave’s in ‘Blow-Up’ and searched for greatcoats in thrift stores like those worn by Oscar Wilde and Baudelaire.”

DAVE THOMPSON: “Every night – or almost every night – Patti would talk Mapplethorpe to sleep. Sometimes he would request particular tales; other times he would simply tell her to begin and then drift to the cadence of her rhythm and tone. Other times he would ask her to draw what she saw when she looked back into her past, and the sound of her pencil would lull him away. And slowly, over time, her most precious childhood memories became his.”

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE: “She was on the edge of being psychotic in a schizophrenic way. She told me stories, and I didn’t know whether they were fiction or nonfiction. If she hadn’t discovered art, she would have wound up in a mental institution.”

NICO: “The first time I ever saw Patti was at Andy’s. She was skinny, like a rat, but she was from New Jersey and so was Lou, so that was all right. She didn’t speak much; she just stood and watched the people. I don’t know if we even knew her name. She was a female Leonard Cohen when she moved from writing to singing, and I liked her because she was thin and strong.”

 

PATTI SMITH: “I got off at Market Street and stopped at Nedick’s. I slipped a quarter in the jukebox, played two sides by Nina Simone, and had a farewell doughnut and coffee. I crossed over to Filbert Street to the bus terminal across from the bookstall that I had haunted for the last few years. I paused before the spot where I had pocketed my Rimbaud. In its place was a battered copy of ‘Love on the Left Bank’ with grainy black-and-white shots of Paris night life in the late fifties. The photographs of the beautiful Vali Myers, with her wild hair and kohl-rimmed eyes, dancing on the streets of the Latin Quarter deeply impressed me. I did not swipe the book, but kept her image in mind.”

PATTI SMITH: “For my twenty-first birthday, Robert made me a tambourine, tattooing the goatskin with astrological signs and tying multicolored ribbons to its base. He put on Tim Buckley singing ‘Phantasmagoria in Two,’ then he knelt down and handed me a small book on the tarot that he had rebound in black silk. Inside it he inscribed a few lines of poetry, portraying us as the gypsy and the fool, one creating silence; one listening closely to the silence.”

PATTI SMITH: “The Chelsea was like a doll’s house in the Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe… I loved this place, its shabby elegance, and the history it held so possessively. There were rumors of Oscar Wilde’s trunks languishing in the hull of the oft-flooded basement. Her e Dylan Thomas, submerged in poetry and alcohol, spent his last hours. Thomas Wolfe plowed through hundreds of pages of manuscript that formed ‘You Can’t Go Home Again.’ Bob Dylan composed ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ on our floor, and a speeding Edie Sedgwick was said to have set her room on fire while gluing on her thick false eyelashes by candlelight. So many had written, conversed and convulsed in these Victorian dollhouse rooms. So many skirts had swished these worn marble stairs. So many transient souls had espoused, make a mark, and succumbed here. I sniffed out their spirits as I silently scurried from floor to floor, longing for discourse with a gone procession of smoking caterpillars.”

PENNY ARCADE: “Patti was a girl who would wake me up at nine o’clock in the morning going, ‘Penny?’ I’d say, ‘What is it, Patti?’ ‘It’s Bobby’s birthday.’ ‘Bobby who?’ ‘Bobby Dylan.’ Patti lived her whole life pretending to be John Lennon or Paul McCartney or Brian Jones or some other rock star. I was with her the night that Brian Jones died. She was just hysterical. Just crying hysterically. I mean I was upset too, but she just kept talking about ‘Baby Brian Jones’ and ‘Baby Brian Jones’ bones.’ It was like she was involved with these people, but it was all in her head. Other people have imaginary playmates, but Patti had imaginary playmates who were Keith Richards and people like that.”

PATTI SMITH: “Easter. 1974. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones’ premiered in New York City. Someone gave me a garland of tiger lilies. Sweet and tiny flowers. I remember how they smelled and how happy and excited I felt watching the movie. It was a beautiful night. A night of promise. I remember I was dressed just like Baudelaire. It was the last breath of an old life and the beginning of a new era. I remember coming out of the theater and me and Lenny Kaye hailing a cab and making our way downtown to a place called CBGB’s. I still have the string that bound the flowers and the thrill of the fulfillment of a certain promise. A melody. A memory. And a chest of souvenirs… the string… a symbol and a silver tongue of love.”

PATTI SMITH: “I lived in a state of heightened chaos. I set the typewriter on an orange crate. The floor was littered with pages of onionskin filled with half-written songs, meditations on the death of Mayakovsky, and ruminations about Bob Dylan. The room was strewn with records for review. The wall was tacked with my heroes but my efforts seemed less than heroic. I sat on the floor and tried to write and chopped my hair instead. Things I thought would happen didn’t. Things I never anticipated unfolded.”

PATTI SMITH: “My treasured objects were mingled with the laundry. My work area was a jumble of manuscript pages, musty classics, broken toys, and talismans. I tacked pictures of Rimbaud, Bob Dylan, Lotte Lenga, Piaf, Genet and John Lennon over a makeshift desk where I arranged my quills, my inkwell, and my notebooks – my monastic mess.”

PENNY ARCADE: “Patti was a very demanding person to know because she was extremely driven. Patti wanted to look like Keith Richards, smoke like Jeanne Moreau, walk like Bob Dylan, and write like Arthur Rimbaud. She had this incredible pantheon of icons what she was patterning herself on. She really had a romantic vision of herself. Patti had gone to teacher’s college and was gonna be a teacher, but then she made the leap out of the New Jersey working-class life. At the time I didn’t realize you could do that. I didn’t realize that being an artist was better than being a home-economics teacher.”

 

 

PATTI SMITH: “I’ve always been hero-oriented. I started doing art not because I had creative instincts but because I fell in love with artists. I didn’t come to this city to become an artist, but to become an artist’s mistress. Art in the beginning for me was never a vehicle for self- expression, it was a way to ally myself with heroes, ‘cause I couldn’t make contact with God. The closest, most accessible god was a hero-god: Brian Jones, Edie Sedgwick, or Rimbaud because their works were there, their voices were there, their faces were there. I was very image-oriented.”

DAVE THOMPSON: “Sam Shepard bought Patti her first guitar, a 1931 Gibson acoustic, and she taught herself to play along to a handful of Dylan songs. Meeting new people, especially musicians, she would ask them if they wanted to see a really neat guitar, then bring it out to show them. That guitar has probably been tuned by more famous fingers than any other instrument on earth. Even Bob Dylan would get his hands on it one day.”

PATTI SMITH: “Most of my poems are written to women because women are the most inspiring. Who are most artists? Men. Who do they get inspired by? Women. The masculinity in me gets inspired by the female. I fall in love with men and they take me over. So I can’t write about a man, because I’m under his thumb, but a woman I can be male with. I can use her as my muse. I use women.”

NICO: “People didn’t know what to make of Patti and Robert at Max’s. Robert was so beautiful, he had to be gay, and Patti was so dark, she had to be beautiful. But nobody knew, because they were shy, so shy. We would watch them watching us, and everyone would look away if they thought they’d been seen. But they were fascinating, and finally Danny started talking to them, and that meant that other people could as well.”

PATTI SMITH: “An artist is somebody who enters into competition with God. The guy who built the Tower of Babel was the first artist. If I had to check out where I was in other centuries, I was his old lady. If I wasn’t the guy, I was his chick. He knew that there was more and God got jealous. Even gods get uptight. Women make gods uptight. Everyone thinks of God as a man — you can’t help it — Santa Claus was a man, therefore God has to be a man. But a man comes once. A woman never stops coming.”

PATTI SMITH: “The pursuit of style has always been a spirited part of the work process. Images that inform the work or the movement of the work. Baudelaire’s cravat. June Christie’s careless ponytail. A raincoat a la Camus. Bob Dylan’s snap tab collar. Black capris like Ava Gardner. Discarded finery from rich heaps. Italian sunglasses. Green silk stockings. Ballet slippers. Boxer shoes. A sense of style. A certain body language. A simple, intricate gesture. More often than not, bred from awkwardness, innocence, or pure survival.”

PATTI SMITH: “It wasn’t easy for a girl who fancied herself the cosmic mistress of Modigliani to sing Tex Ritter songs.”

PATTI SMITH: “Rimbaud was the first guy who ever made a big women’s liberation statement, saying that when women release themselves from the long servitude of men, they’re really gonna gush. New rhythms, new poetries, new horrors, new beauties. And I believe in that completely.”

PATTI SMITH: “Physical presentation in performing is more important than what you’re saying. Quality comes through of course but if your quality of intellect is high, and your love of the audience is evident, and you have a strong physical presence, you can get away with anything. Adolf Hitler was a fantastic performer. He was a black magician. And I learned from that. You can seduce people into mass consciousness. The other thing is that through performance, I reach such states in which my brain feels so open – so full of light, it feels huge, it feels as big as the Empire State building – and if I can develop a communication with an audience, a bunch of people, when my brain is that big and receptive, imagine the energy and the intelligence and all the things I can steal from them.”

PATTI SMITH: “I got to polish up my weapon… by Fender duo-sonic w/ a maple neck and the original pick-ups. It once belonged to Jimi Hendrix. Tom Verlaine used if for his ‘Little Johnny Jewel’ solo. But most of all it’s mine. Rock’n’Roll is royal warfare, the universe is our battleground. The Fender – all guitars – straining for the note of nobility – our weapons. The people – tender barbarians. The goal – the freedom to possess the key of the fifth battalion and release the fierce and stampeding angels of A-bad-don.”

PATTI SMITH: “’Land’ began as a carnival of fools in a city where you can’t see the stars, but I gave it a New York ballad rendition – you know, let’s keep on laughing, let’s keep on dancing. Then, as I got more confident, it was Scheherazade: ‘Welcome to the Palace of a Thousand Sensations. It hopes you will lose it here, baby.’ Then it got real sadistic… Then it was Arabia, Mexico, UFOs, razors, jackknives, horses, and in some notes I wrote last December 16 – the 701^st birthday of the great Persian mystic poet Jalaluddin Rumi – Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix. I felt the rhythms of LA and understood the Doors’ album ‘LA Woman’ for the first time. So Johnny the hero of ‘Land’ became very intimately linked with Morrison. Johnny got in trouble, I was in trouble on the stage, Morrison had some trouble on stage. Kids used to scream at Morrison wanting him to do his hits. He was very torn apart and frustrated, because he felt himself to be a blues guy and a poet, but he was promoted more as a sex star. That’s cool too, but he didn’t know how to shift from one to the other. He didn’t want to sing ‘Light My Fire,’ he wanted to sing ‘Horse Latitudes.’”

PATTI SMITH: “I thought of myself as a poet and a performer, and so how did I dress? I didn’t have much money; I liked to dress like Baudelaire. I looked at a picture of him and he was dressed, like, with this ribbon or tie and a white shirt. I wasn’t thinking that I was going to break any boundaries. I was just dressing like Baudelaire.”

DUNCAN HANNAH: “I knew of Patti Smith before I moved to New York. She was this great mix of rock chick, poet chick, and kind of a historian, a beatnik. French existentialism and rock and roll, everything that I liked. I thought, Wow! Cool. What was great about Patti was she was such a fan. Her poems were like fan letters. Like mash notes to Rimbaud. And I could identify with her because I was doing the same thing, keeping journals, writing mash notes to dead people, and here she was doing it in a much more confident way, a little older, right? And making art out of it.”

PATTI SMITH: “People like to look at me as this tough, punky shit-kicker. Well, I am like that, but I’m also very fragile. It’s important that people know that; I couldn’t stand being just some leather boy. There are masculine and feminine rhythms in me. We’re all made up of opposites and they often crucify us.”

DAVE MARSH: “I can remember when I first saw Patti Smith. She walked into that Upper West Side party like a Jersey urchin who’d just inherited Manhattan. All in black — turtleneck and tight black slacks. She seemed more frail than she really was, but not fragile, though you could have counted her ribs, and her jet black hair straggled like waterlogged yarn. Her skin so pale it was nearly translucent, cheeks drawn so tight and thin I was tempted to pull her aside and offer her a decent meal. If only her teeth had been half rotted, she would have passed for Keith Richards’ waif sister.  Taking your eyes off her wasn’t impossible. But it was pretty goddamned unlikely.  She glided across the room easy as any rock & roll queen in her beat-up Mary Janes, full of sex and innocence; every eye was pulled her way, every blabbing mouth set off in unison. All the women hated her then — the solidarity of sisterhood was not so firm in 1971 — but the men were awed.”

LESTER BANGS: “Patti just saw that it was time for literature to shake it and music to carry both some literacy and some grease that ain’t jive. The combination makes her an all American tough angel, street-bopping and snapping her fingers, yet moving with that hipshake which is so like every tease you slavered after in high school.”

PATTI SMITH: “Self-destruction is obviously negative… if you self-destruct… But the way a snake self-destructs, you know, when he takes that old skin off – he destroys the old skin, but you come out with a new skin, a more developed skin, a more illuminated skin.”

PATTI SMITH: “Right now I’ve been in this room in this city for so long I don’t see it anymore and you know I’m not being stimulated. Lately I’ve just been doing a lot of cleaning inside my brain. My eyes are not seeing anything around me. So I’ve been dreaming a lot, recording dreams and trying to look within, but I’m not worried about it. I’m just waiting for the moment when I’ll get to take a train or a plane someplace and I know I’ll spurt out because I’ve just got to see new things. I think Rimbaud said he needs new scenery and a new noise, and I need that.”