Patti Smith
Based on Wikipedia: Patti Smith
In the winter of 1977, Patti Smith danced herself off the edge of a stage in Tampa, Florida. She fell fifteen feet onto a concrete orchestra pit and broke several vertebrae in her neck. Most performers would have seen this as a catastrophe. Smith saw it as an opportunity to reassess, reenergize, and reorganize her entire life.
That stubborn refusal to be defeated by circumstance tells you everything you need to know about the woman who would become the godmother of punk rock.
A Poet Who Picked Up a Guitar
Patricia Lee Smith was born on December 30, 1946, in Chicago. Her mother Beverly had been a jazz singer before becoming a waitress. Her father Grant worked as a machinist at Honeywell, the industrial conglomerate. In a revelation that came late in life, Smith discovered at age seventy that Grant was not her biological father—her actual patrilineal heritage was Ashkenazi Jewish, information she shared in her 2025 memoir Bread of Angels.
The family moved frequently during Patti's childhood. From Chicago to Philadelphia's Germantown section, then to Pitman, New Jersey, and finally to Deptford Township. This rootlessness may have planted the seeds of her restless artistic spirit.
Her mother introduced her to music early, giving her albums that would shape her sensibilities: Harry Belafonte's Shrimp Boats, The Money Tree by the sister duo Patience and Prudence, and most importantly, Bob Dylan's fourth album Another Side of Bob Dylan. That Dylan record, released in 1964—the same year Smith graduated from Deptford Township High School—showed her that popular music could be poetry.
After high school, Smith worked in a factory. She briefly attended what was then called Glassboro State College (now Rowan University). Neither experience satisfied her hunger for something more.
The Chelsea Hotel and the New York Underground
In 1969, Smith made the pilgrimage that countless young artists have made before and since: she moved to New York City. But first, she and her sister traveled to Paris, where she busked on the streets and experimented with performance art.
When she returned to Manhattan, she took up residence at the Hotel Chelsea on West 23rd Street. The Chelsea was legendary—a crumbling, eccentric building that had housed Mark Twain, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, and countless other writers and artists. It was there that Smith met the person who would become the defining relationship of her young life: the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
They became inseparable. They were lovers, then friends, then something harder to categorize—creative partners bound by a devotion that transcended conventional labels. Smith would later immortalize their relationship in her memoir Just Kids, which won the National Book Award in 2010. She wrote the book to fulfill a promise she made to Mapplethorpe before his death from AIDS-related complications in 1989.
Together they haunted Max's Kansas City, the legendary nightclub on Park Avenue where the Velvet Underground played their final shows and Andy Warhol's superstars held court. Smith provided spoken word for Sandy Daley's provocative art film Robert Having His Nipple Pierced, which starred Mapplethorpe. She acted in plays by Jackie Curtis and Anthony Ingrassia. She performed in Cowboy Mouth, a one-act play she co-wrote with the playwright Sam Shepard, with whom she had a passionate affair. The stage directions called for "a man who looks like a coyote and a woman who looks like a crow."
She was everywhere in the downtown scene, but she hadn't yet found her medium.
Rock and Roll Poetry
On February 10, 1971, something clicked into place. Smith gave her first public poetry performance, opening for the poet Gerard Malanga at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery. Accompanying her was a guitarist named Lenny Kaye, who would become her longtime musical collaborator and the keeper of the flame for the group's artistic vision.
What made Smith different from other poets was that she understood the electrical charge of rock and roll. She didn't just want to read her poems—she wanted to blast them through amplifiers.
During this period, she was briefly considered as the lead singer for Blue Öyster Cult, the Long Island heavy metal band known for songs like "Don't Fear the Reaper." She never joined as a vocalist, but she contributed lyrics to several of their songs, including "Career of Evil" and "Fire of Unknown Origin." She was romantically involved with their keyboardist Allen Lanier. She also worked as a rock journalist, writing for Rolling Stone and Creem, the irreverent Detroit-based magazine that would later coin the term "punk rock."
By 1973, Smith had assembled what would become the Patti Smith Group. Lenny Kaye played guitar. Richard Sohl played piano with a classical touch that gave their sound unexpected elegance. Ivan Král added guitar and bass. Jay Dee Daugherty drummed.
In 1974, financed by the art collector Sam Wagstaff (who was also Mapplethorpe's patron and lover), they recorded their first single. The A-side was a version of "Hey Joe," the rock standard made famous by Jimi Hendrix, but Smith added a spoken word piece about Patty Hearst, the newspaper heiress who had been kidnapped by a revolutionary group and subsequently joined their cause. The B-side, "Piss Factory," described Smith's miserable experience working on a factory assembly line in New Jersey and her desperate dream of escaping to New York City.
When asked about her artistic influences during these formative years, Smith had a surprising answer. "I had devoted so much of my girlish daydreams to Rimbaud," she told an interviewer in 1996. "Rimbaud was like my boyfriend."
Arthur Rimbaud was the French poet who revolutionized literature in the 1870s before abandoning writing entirely at age twenty-one to become a gun runner in Africa. He died at thirty-seven. His complete works could fit in a single volume, yet they changed poetry forever. Smith saw in Rimbaud a kindred spirit: someone who refused to play by the rules, who fused raw emotion with technical innovation, who burned bright and didn't care if he burned out.
Horses
In March 1975, the Patti Smith Group began a two-month weekend residency at CBGB, a dingy club on the Bowery that would become the cradle of American punk rock. They shared the stage with Television, another band forging a new sound from the wreckage of sixties idealism. The record executive Clive Davis saw them perform and signed them to Arista Records.
Later that year, they recorded their debut album Horses.
The album was produced by John Cale, the Welsh musician who had been a founding member of the Velvet Underground. The sessions were tense—Cale had a very different personality from Smith, and their visions sometimes clashed—but the friction produced something remarkable.
Horses opens with a cover of Van Morrison's garage rock anthem "Gloria," but Smith transforms it entirely. Before the familiar guitar riff kicks in, she declares: "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine." The line came from "Oath," one of her early poems. It was a statement of intent. She was announcing that she would not be absolved or forgiven. She would take responsibility for her own soul.
The album cover, shot by Mapplethorpe, became one of the most iconic images in rock history. Smith stands against a white wall, wearing a white shirt and suspenders, a jacket slung over her shoulder like a Sinatra album cover. Her face is androgynous, defiant, beautiful in an unconventional way. She looks like neither a rock star nor a poet but something entirely new.
Horses fused punk rock with spoken word poetry in a way no one had done before. It was raw and literary, aggressive and tender. Rolling Stone would later rank Smith as the 47th greatest artist of all time, and Horses was a major reason why.
The Rise and the Fall
As punk rock exploded in popularity—the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Clash—the Patti Smith Group toured constantly across America and Europe. Their second album, Radio Ethiopia, released in 1976, had a rawer, more abrasive sound. Smith has said it was influenced by MC5, the Detroit proto-punk band known for their confrontational politics and ear-splitting volume. Critics were initially unkind to the record, finding it less accessible than Horses, but time has been gentler to it.
Then came Tampa.
On January 23, 1977, while touring in support of Radio Ethiopia, Smith was performing at a concert venue in Florida. She was dancing near the edge of the stage, caught up in the music, when she stepped into empty air. She fell fifteen feet and landed on the concrete floor of the orchestra pit.
The fall broke several cervical vertebrae—the bones in her neck that protect the spinal cord. She was lucky not to be paralyzed, lucky to be alive at all. The injury required months of rest and intensive physical therapy.
But Smith has never been one to view setbacks as purely negative. During her recovery, she says she was able to step back and reconsider everything: her life, her art, her direction. She reenergized. She reorganized. She came back stronger.
Because the Night
The Patti Smith Group's third album, Easter, released in 1978, was their commercial breakthrough. It included a song called "Because the Night," co-written with another New Jersey artist: Bruce Springsteen.
Springsteen had been working on the song for his own album Darkness on the Edge of Town but couldn't get the lyrics right. When producer Jimmy Iovine, who was working with both artists, played Springsteen's track for Smith, she rewrote the words. The result was a passionate anthem about desire and connection that reached number thirteen on the Billboard Hot 100 and number five on the United Kingdom Singles Chart.
It remains Smith's most widely known song—the one that radio still plays, the one that casual fans recognize. Some purists felt it was too commercial, a sellout. But the song's success brought Smith's voice to millions of people who might never have heard her otherwise.
The group's fourth album, Wave, came out in 1979. It was less successful commercially, though songs like "Frederick" and "Dancing Barefoot" received regular airplay. Then Smith did something unexpected.
She disappeared.
The Quiet Years
In 1980, Patti Smith married Fred "Sonic" Smith, the guitarist from MC5—the same band that had influenced Radio Ethiopia. She moved to St. Clair Shores, Michigan, a quiet suburb of Detroit, and spent most of the next decade raising her two children: Jackson and Jesse.
For someone who had been at the white-hot center of the New York underground, this retreat into domesticity surprised many observers. But Smith has always done exactly what she wanted, regardless of expectations. She wanted to be a mother. She wanted a quieter life. She took it.
She wasn't entirely absent from music. In 1988, she released Dream of Life, which included "People Have the Power," an anthemic song about collective action and hope that would become one of her signature pieces. But she wasn't touring, wasn't a constant presence in the rock world.
Then tragedy struck. Fred Smith died in 1994 of heart failure. He was only forty-five. That same year, Smith's brother Todd died. The following year, her longtime keyboard player Richard Sohl died.
Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and the poet Allen Ginsberg, both of whom had known Smith since her early days in New York, urged her to return to live performance. She toured briefly with Bob Dylan in December 1995. The photographer Michael Stipe documented the tour in a book of photographs.
In 1996, Smith released Gone Again, an album suffused with grief but also with resilience. It included "About a Boy," a tribute to Kurt Cobain, the Nirvana frontman who had died by suicide in 1994. Cobain had been an admirer of Smith's work, and his death at twenty-seven—the same age at which so many rock stars have died, from Jimi Hendrix to Janis Joplin to Jim Morrison—resonated with themes Smith had been exploring for decades.
The Elder Stateswoman
Smith's return to active recording and touring continued through the late 1990s and into the new millennium. Peace and Noise arrived in 1997, featuring "1959," a song about China's invasion of Tibet. Gung Ho followed in 2000, including songs about the Vietnamese revolutionary Ho Chi Minh and about Smith's late father.
The honors accumulated. In 2005, France named her a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (the Order of Arts and Letters), one of that country's highest cultural distinctions. In 2007, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2011, she received the Polar Music Prize, Sweden's most prestigious music award.
On October 15, 2006, Smith performed at CBGB one last time. The legendary club was closing after more than three decades, and Smith was asked to play the final show. She took the stage at 9:30 in the evening and didn't stop until after 1:00 in the morning—a three-and-a-half-hour marathon performance. Her final song was "Elegie," after which she read aloud the names of punk rock musicians and advocates who had died in recent years. She was performing last rites for an era.
Just Kids
In 2010, Smith published Just Kids, her memoir of life with Robert Mapplethorpe in late 1960s and early 1970s New York. The book was a love letter to a vanished world—to the cheap rents and dangerous streets, the artistic ferment and chemical experimentation, the sense that anything was possible if you were young and talented and unafraid.
Mapplethorpe had asked her to write their story before he died in 1989, and she had promised to do so. It took her more than two decades to fulfill that promise, but when she did, the result was extraordinary. Just Kids won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, placing Smith in the company of literary giants.
The book succeeded because Smith wrote not as a rock star but as a poet. Her prose is precise and evocative, capturing specific sensory details—the smell of incense, the texture of fabric, the particular quality of afternoon light in a Chelsea Hotel room—while also conveying larger truths about art and devotion and the passage of time.
The Photographer and the Painter
Music was never Smith's only medium. She has always painted and drawn. But starting in 1994, she began devoting serious attention to what she calls "pure photography"—capturing still objects without using a flash.
Her photographs are intimate and elegiac. She has exhibited polaroid prints at galleries in London and Paris. In 2011, she announced her first museum photography exhibition in the United States, titled Camera Solo. The name came from a sign she saw in the room of Pope Celestine V, the medieval pope who famously resigned his office. The phrase translates roughly as "a room of one's own," and Smith felt it captured her solitary approach to image-making.
The Camera Solo exhibition featured photographs of artifacts connected to artists Smith admires: Rimbaud, the French poet Charles Baudelaire, the English Romantic poet John Keats, and the visionary artist and poet William Blake. Smith photographs the physical traces that creative lives leave behind—handwritten manuscripts, worn books, personal objects—finding poetry in the mundane.
A Voice That Carries
In December 2016, Smith was invited to the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in Stockholm. Bob Dylan had won the Nobel Prize in Literature—a controversial choice that delighted some and infuriated others—but he could not attend due to prior commitments. Dylan asked Smith to perform on his behalf.
She chose to sing "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall," Dylan's apocalyptic 1963 ballad about nuclear annihilation and moral collapse. It was an ambitious choice. The song is long and complex, with verses that spiral and repeat.
Partway through the performance, Smith made a mistake. She sang an incorrect line—"I saw the babe that was just bleedin'"—and then stopped. She couldn't remember what came next. She apologized to the audience, saying she was nervous.
Then she started the verse again and finished the song.
The audience erupted in applause. What could have been an embarrassing failure became a moment of humanity. Smith's vulnerability, her willingness to acknowledge her mistake and push forward anyway, reminded everyone that she was not some untouchable icon but a human being, as prone to nervousness and error as anyone else.
It was, in its way, the most punk rock thing she could have done.
Still Creating
Smith continues to record, perform, and create. Her 2012 album Banga received what the review aggregator Metacritic called "universal acclaim," with critics praising its uncompromising vision. As American Songwriter noted, "These songs aren't as loud or frantic as those of her late 70s heyday, but they resonate just as boldly as she moans, chants, speaks and spits out lyrics with the grace and determination of Muhammad Ali in his prime."
She has collaborated with musicians ranging from U2 to the experimental group Soundwalk Collective, with whom she created Correspondences, an ongoing project spanning more than a decade. She wrote a song for the series finale of the animated show Aqua Teen Hunger Force. She has worked on a detective novel set in London, inspired by her love of Sherlock Holmes and the hard-boiled American crime writer Mickey Spillane.
In August 2025, she announced a rerelease of Horses to celebrate the album's fiftieth anniversary. The reissue includes unreleased tracks, remastered versions, and original recordings—a chance for new listeners to discover why that album changed rock and roll, and for old fans to remember why they fell in love with it in the first place.
The Indissoluble Filament
Patti Smith has always resisted easy categorization. She is a rocker who writes poetry, a poet who plays rock, a photographer who paints, a painter who photographs, a memoirist who performs, a performer who remembers. She has outlived many of her contemporaries—Mapplethorpe, Fred Smith, her brother Todd, Richard Sohl, so many others—but she has never stopped creating.
What connects all her work is a commitment to authenticity that borders on the religious. She does not make art to please audiences or critics or record labels. She makes art because she must, because the alternative—silence, conformity, the factory assembly line she escaped at nineteen—is unthinkable.
"Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine," she declared on that first album, and she has spent fifty years proving she meant it. She takes responsibility for her own soul. She makes her own salvation.
In the Substack article that prompted this exploration, Smith is described as embodying a "resounding yes to life"—to the truth of her own experience, to the demanding restlessness of the creative spirit, to both the beauty and brutality of being alive. That yes is made of countless nos: no to the way things are commonly done, no to the standard models of what is possible for a person, no to the banality of seeking approval.
At seventy-eight, Patti Smith remains what she was at twenty-three: a crow-woman, a poet with an electric guitar, a voice crying out in the wilderness. She fell off a stage once and broke her neck. She got back up. She always gets back up.
That's what artists do.