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Patti Smith
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Patti Smith is musical Marmite. To devotees, she is the gimlet-eyed North Star for every woman in rock, blazing a radical, intellectual trail for everyone from Courtney to Beth Ditto. For dissenters, she has been a joyless harpie trading on her reputation for a generation. Still, as a poet, performer and radical she was punk before punk was punk. And she played the last ever show in CBGB, her spiritual home. While an album of covers might suggest that the grand dame has nothing left to say, Smith actually makes every track her own.
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Patti Smith is a poet and rock singer who first gained notice when reading her poetry at gatherings in New York City in the early '70s. By 1974 Smith had edged toward music by reading with the backup of electric guitarist and rock critic Lenny Kaye, notably on her independent-label single, "Piss Factory." By 1975 Smith had organized a band that was playing in such clubs as the punk birthplace in New York, CBGB's, and she earned a contract with Arista Records. This resulted in the release of Horses, a critically acclaimed album that featured her songs, sometimes melded to dramatic readings, and such rock oldies as "Land of 1, 000 Dances."
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Patti Smith has a long history of spectacular album releases beginning with her essential Horses. Horses was an album that gave direction to an emerging scene of smart lyrical music that included the likes of Television and The Talking Heads with many more unnamed that is just as deserving of mention.
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On April 27, 2004 Patti Smith released Trampin' which included several songs about motherhood, partly in tribute to Smith's mother who died two years before. Smith curated the Meltdown festival in London on June 25, 2005, the penultimate event being the first live performance of Horses in its entirety.[17] Guitarist Tom Verlaine took Oliver Ray's place. This live performance was released later in the year as Horses/Horses. In August 2005 Smith gave a literary lecture about the poems of Arthur Rimbaud and William Blake. On July 10, 2005, Smith was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.[2] In addition to her influence on rock music, Minister ... noted Smith's appreciation of Arthur Rimbaud. On October 15, 2006, Patti Smith performed at CBGB nightclub, with a 3½-hour tour de force to close out Manhattan's music venue.
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Patti Smith began to take photographs in 1967 for use in collages. In 1995, she returned to photography using a vintage Polaroid Land 250: "The immediacy of the process was a relief from the long involved process of drawing, recording, or writing a poem." Many of Smith's photographs embody significant personal meaning: Robert Mapplethorpe's slippers, Virginia Woolf's bed, Hermann Hesse's typewriter and Arthur Rimbaud's utensils. Others serve as a visual record of her well-traveled life. The exhibition ... features a selection of the artist's drawings, several of which are borrowed from prestigious institutions such as the MoMA and the Centre Pompidou or from private collections.
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Patti Smith was acclaimed by a few esteemed critics as being "The core of punk." She had been wholly obsessed with Rimbaud, exhibited as a painter, began her performing career by reading poetry in Saint Mark's Church, NY and was a muse to Robert Mapplethorpe (who took the cover shot of her in a man's suit). But wasn't punk supposed to be dumb? Simplistic? Hence The Ramones, who emerged from exactly the same tiny New York scene. Yet Smith started a scene with a seven-week stint at CBGB's club on The Bowery in 1975 that attracted the bright, the brilliant and the debauched -- and the Warhol crowd.
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Patti Smith