As the foremost punk poet of our times, Patti Smith looks exactly as you would want and expect her to look.
She walks in and announces, "I’m Patti Smith." As if you couldn’t tell. She’s dressed in jeans, boots, a loosely billowing white shirt and a long, black jacket that looks like a frock-coat. She’s not wearing make-up and her unkempt black hair hangs l
oosely over her shoulders. She’s made no attempt to disguise its rapidly multiplying grey strands. If she was serving you at the deli counter or waiting on your restaurant table, you’d have to say she looked a mess. But as the foremost punk poet of our times, Patti Smith looks exactly as you would want and expect her to look. As she moves closer, you notice there are two badges on her lapel. One bears the familiar CND symbol. The other says ‘VOTE FOR NADER’.
"My daughter gave it to me. It’s left over from the last election - the one Bush stole," she says. No, it really couldn’t be anyone else.
She appears stern and a little nervous and warns that she hates interviews because she’s uncomfortable talking about herself. As if to prove it, she fires off a set of questions in a reversal of the normal roles of interviewer and interviewee.
"Where are you from?" she demands before she has even sat down, disconcertingly making you feel she is as interested in you as you are in her. And you begin to see what she means. When the tables are turned, being interrogated is an uncomfortable experience.
"I’ve always found interviews embarrassing," she explains. "People say, ‘How does it feel to be a rock icon?’ I’ve probably just walked to the interview after doing the laundry. The cat has thrown up on the carpet and I’ve had to clear that up. Then I get the rock icon question. It seems so conceited."
We meet in London, in the gloomy basement of a club in Soho, on a sunlit spring afternoon, and she immediately suggests that we recast our meeting not as an interview but as a conversation. Once these parameters have been defined, she visibly relaxes. Smith may be a reluctant interviewee but she is an engaging conversationalist with forthright views on any subject you care to mention, from George Bush’s policies to Baudelaire’s poetry via the questionable state of the music industry.
Carefully avoiding the rock icon question, we begin with her new album, Trampin’. If she is reluctant to talk about herself, her reticence doesn’t extend to talking about her art. "I think the lyrics on the new album are the best I’ve ever written," she enthuses. Fearful of sounding arrogant, she qualifies this by confessing she is not much of a musician and relies heavily on her band for the musical input. "The way I wrote these songs is the same as always. I write the words and the band comes up with the riffs and ideas and musical themes, because I’m a very bad guitar player who still only knows three or four chords." She’s been playing for 30 years and she still hasn’t mastered F, she jokes.
Yet she takes her role as a lyricist very seriously indeed. "There’s a deep responsibility in writing words," she says. "When I was writing these songs I was thinking about the disenfranchised. And I realised that what has happened is that the disenfranchised have become a majority, not a minority. It is really those global concerns - rather than any personal ones - that I wanted to express on this album."
Patti Smith is not the only one to believe that her first album since 2000’s Gung Ho contains some of her most potent writing ever. Rave reviews in the music monthlies have included a five-star Album of the Month accolade in Mojo, which praised the record as "a call for a new American revolution".
Certainly, the politics of the album are cut from flag-burning cloth. "They’re robbing the cradle of civilisation," she howls repeatedly at the insurrectionary climax of the 12-minute anti-war tirade that is ‘Radio Baghdad’. Then, on ‘Gandhi’, she can be heard yelling, "Long live the revolution!"
Smith is proud to be an unfashionable and unreconstructed 1960s radical. "Rock’n’roll was revolutionary for me," she says. "It always was. Songs were weapons. People were afraid of rock music - they called it the devil’s music. And they were right. It was the music of the revolution. Rock’s spiritual, political and emotional content was stirring and important, and it gave us strength. That’s the history of rock’n’roll."
Yet her description seems to bear little relation to the music scene today. What went wrong? She refuses to take the easy option of blaming the greed of corporate record companies. Indeed, as her new album is released on Sony, she would court accusations of hypocrisy if she did. Instead, she spreads the blame out. "That rock’n’roll has evolved into something else is everybody’s fault," she rails. "It’s the artists’ fault. It’s MTV’s fault. We’re all guilty of forgetting what a great and powerful weapon rock’n’roll is."
So is rock music dead as a life-changing force? Is it now just another branch of the entertainment industry, lulling the masses into docility? "People are always asking me if rock’n’roll is finished," she thunders. "Well, my answer is that only people can change that. We all have to take responsibility. You can’t blame some mysterious middle man. We can’t say, ‘I had to do that, because the marketing people told me to’."
Spoken like the last of the true rock militants. Her poetic vision has remained intact over 30 years, which is some achievement. But to have continued to marry her art to an uncompromisingly punk attitude over that length of time is probably unique - at least, now that Joe Strummer has gone and Bob Dylan has sold his soul to Victoria’s Secret. At 57, Smith still sees her records as calls to arms, a series of morale-raising messages to the foot soldiers of the New American Revolution.
"Well, I don’t make records for myself, if that’s what you mean," she concedes. "I make them for other people. If I want music, I listen to John Coltrane. If I want to write purely for me, I write poetry. The records are different. They’re something else. They’re like..." She pauses and her voice trails off as she searches for the right phrase. "They’re like a public service."
From the lips of Madonna or Dido or Norah Jones, you’d laugh at the sheer pretension of such a notion. With Patti Smith, you know she means it for real. It’s far more than entertainment. "I still have a calling," she says. "In 1975, if you’d said I’d be making rock’n’roll records into the next century, I wouldn’t have believed it. But the energy doesn’t go away."
So where does the energy continue to come from when so many other artists of her vintage long ago abandoned the struggle and are content to coast comfortably on their superannuated celebrity? "It’s an attitude," she insists. "I’m not an entertainer. I’m not a lounge act. But I am a performer. And that’s about more than just being a singer."
Listening to some of the roaring, semi-improvised epics that make up Trampin’, it seems unlikely that anybody could ever accuse Smith of being "just a singer". Indeed, when she first emerged on the New York art scene in the early 1970s, it was not as a musician at all but as a performance artist, reading her stream-of-consciousness verse heavily influenced by the Beats and Dylan over the decidedly amateurish guitar backing of rock critic Lenny Kaye. "People would heckle, ‘Get back into the kitchen where you belong!’ and ‘Comb your bloody hair!’" she recalls.
But ridicule only strengthened her resolve. By the time of ‘Piss Factory’, her first single made for her boyfriend Robert Mapplethorpe’s label in 1974, she had already published three books of poetry. ‘Piss Factory’ was an extraordinary hybrid of rock and poetry that remains a live favourite to this day. In it she described the bleak lives of the workers in the grim New Jersey factory where she worked during a break from her studies at university.
"I can still feel that place," she says. "I wrote about it with some authenticity. I read Rimbaud in French and to the workers there that meant I was a communist. The building is still there, but the jobs are all gone. The factory was condemned. I hated it. It was shit. But at least I had an escape. For those people it was their life. I hated them but I’m a lot more sympathetic now. I realise what it must have been like for them. They had no way out."
Gradually she was drawn into the New York punk scene around the club CBGBs and bands such as Television and The Ramones. Recruiting her own band, she released her debut album, Horses, in 1975. It opened with her speaking the words, "Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine."
The impact was immediate. Horses became the first album from the new underground to break through into the American Top 50 and Smith was crowned as the high priestess of the alternative punk scene. Recognising the voice of a fellow poet, Bob Dylan became a regular at her New York shows in the summer of 1975 and invited her to join his Rolling Thunder Revue. Smith declined, all too aware that she had her own path to follow.
Next came 1976’s Radio Ethiopia, the title track of which was a visceral, free-jazz exploration echoed in ‘Radio Baghdad’ on her new album. After a long gap due to a broken neck sustained when she fell from the stage, she released her third album, Easter, in 1978 and enjoyed a hit with ‘Because the Night’, co-written with Bruce Springsteen. A fourth album, Wave, followed in 1979. Then, as suddenly as she had burst upon the scene, she disappeared. Typically, her final gig featured her reading her poetry against an improvised mélange of saxophone and feedback played to a backdrop of a film about Jackson Pollock.
She stopped, she says, because "making records wasn’t how I received personal confidence". That came through her poetry. She retreated to Detroit with her husband, Fred "Sonic" Smith, former guitarist with the MC5, and reverted to writing books of verse and raising their two children, now both in their late teens (fittingly, her daughter played piano on the new album’s cover track and her son is also in a band).
It was only when her life was shattered following her husband’s death from heart failure in 1994 that Smith eventually returned to recording.
Although she insists that she never discusses her private life, Smith talks movingly about her feelings after Fred’s death and what brought her back to music. "I wasn’t dealing with life. Everything troubled me. I was worried about ageing, and I looked in the mirror and I was worried about grey hairs," she recalls. "Then I remember Jerry Garcia flashing me a big smile, his face surrounded by all this white hair and beard. That was ten years ago. And I wrote a song out of that moment called ‘Grateful’, about rebuilding as a human being."
Since then, she has made four albums and returned to performing with a band. The 1996 comeback, Gone Again, was an expression of her grief, a harrowing portrait of a soul lost in the wilderness and not "dealing with life". Peace and Noise of the following year was still cathartic, but more poetic and less painful. And 2000’s Gung Ho found her painting on a more political canvas.
Trampin’ explores both the political and the personal in the wake of the death of her mother, whose presence can be detected in the title track, a cover of an old gospel number by Marian Anderson. "I found it comforting after she died," Smith explains. "It’s just a little song but it touched my heart and it became my theme tune. It’s hopeful and full of resilience. The person in the song who’s trampin’ isn’t shooting low. They’re aiming high and going for gold."
Pain and suffering have always been at the core of her art, she confesses. "It’s like life. As soon as you think you’re there, something comes along and hits you. Artists are never satisfied." The unspoken implication is that once you become satisfied, you stop being a meaningful artist. This makes for resonant music, but you can’t help thinking that it must be an exhausting way to live your life.
Her heroes today are long-dead poets rather than contemporary rock’n’roll icons. She drops names such as Baudelaire and Apollinaire into her conversation and quotes Walt Whitman’s ‘I contain multitudes’ approvingly. "Sometimes I feel I’m seven. And sometimes I feel like I’m a hundred. I’m all ages," she says.
One of the themes of the new album appears to be endurance, I suggest. "The idea is like The Pilgrim’s Progress or something," she concurs. Asked to nominate a key song, she singles out not the anti-Bush rant of ‘Radio Baghdad’ or the tribute to her mother, but the highly personal expression of the poetic ideal contained in ‘My Blakean Year’.
"William Blake was always a great inspiration - not just his poetry but his life. He was ridiculed and never made any money from his art. But he never let go of his vision," she says earnestly. Then she cracks a rare smile. "That makes him a great person to access when you’re feeling sorry for yourself because you’ve lost your cell phone."
Trampin’ is released tomorrow on Columbia Records. Patti Smith tours Britain in June.
