Patti Smith
Patricia Lee Smith is an American singer, songwriter, poet, painter, author, and photographer. Her 1975 debut album Horses made her an influential member of the New York City–based punk rock movement. Smith has fused rock and poetry in her work. In 1978, her most widely known song, "Because the Night," co-written with Bruce Springsteen, reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and number five on the UK Singles Chart.
In 2005, Smith was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. In 2007, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In November 2010, Smith won the National Book Award for her memoir Just Kids, written to fulfill a promise she made to Robert Mapplethorpe, her longtime partner and friend. She is ranked 47th on Rolling Stone magazine's 100 Greatest Artists of all Time, published in 2010, and was awarded the Polar Music Prize in 2011.
Early life and education
Smith was born on December 30, 1946, at Grant Hospital in the Lincoln Park section of Chicago, to Beverly Smith, a jazz singer turned waitress, and Grant Smith, a Honeywell machinist. Her family is of partially Irish ancestry. Patti is the eldest of four children, with siblings Linda, Todd, and Kimberly.When Smith was four, the family moved from Chicago to the Germantown section of Philadelphia, then to Pitman, New Jersey, and finally settled in the Woodbury Gardens section of Deptford Township, New Jersey. At an early age, Smith was exposed to music, including the albums Shrimp Boats by Harry Belafonte, The Money Tree by Patience and Prudence, and Another Side of Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan's fourth album, released in 1964, which her mother gave her.
In 1964, Smith graduated from Deptford Township High School, and began working in a factory. She briefly attended Glassboro State College, now Rowan University, in Glassboro, New Jersey.
Career
Early performances
In 1969, Smith went to Paris with her sister, and started busking and doing performance art. When Smith returned to Manhattan, she lived at the Hotel Chelsea with Robert Mapplethorpe. They frequented Max's Kansas City on Park Avenue, and Smith provided the spoken word soundtrack for Sandy Daley's art film Robert Having His Nipple Pierced, starring Mapplethorpe. The same year, Smith appeared with Jayne County in Jackie Curtis's play Femme Fatale. She also starred in Anthony Ingrassia's play Island. As a member of the Poetry Project, she spent the early 1970s painting, writing, and performing.In 1969, Smith also performed in the one-act play Cowboy Mouth, which she co-wrote with Sam Shepard. She wrote several poems about Shepard and her relationship with him, including "for sam shepard" and "Sam Shepard: 9 Random Years ".
On February 10, 1971, Smith, accompanied by Lenny Kaye on electric guitar, opened for Gerard Malanga, which was her first public poetry performance.
Smith was briefly considered as lead singer for Blue Öyster Cult. She contributed lyrics to several Blue Öyster Cult songs, including "Debbie Denise", which was inspired by her poems "In Remembrance of Debbie Denise", "Baby Ice Dog", "Career of Evil", "Fire of Unknown Origin", "The Revenge of Vera Gemini", on which she performs duet vocals, and "Shooting Shark". At the time, she was romantically involved with Allen Lanier, Blue Öyster Cult's keyboardist. During these years, Smith was also a rock music journalist, writing periodically for Rolling Stone and Creem.
The Patti Smith Group
In 1973, Smith teamed up again with musician and rock archivist Lenny Kaye, and later added Richard Sohl on piano. The trio developed into a full band with the addition of Ivan Král on guitar and bass and Jay Dee Daugherty on drums. Financed by Sam Wagstaff, the band recorded their first single, "Hey Joe/Piss Factory" in 1974. The A-side was a version of the rock standard with the addition of a spoken word piece about Patty Hearst, a fugitive heiress. The B-side describes the helpless alienation Smith felt while working on a factory assembly line and the salvation she dreams of achieving by escaping to New York City. In a 1996 interview on artistic influences during her younger years, Smith said, "I had devoted so much of my girlish daydreams to Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud was like my boyfriend."Later the same year, she performed "I Wake Up Screaming", a poem, on The Whole Thing Started with Rock & Roll Now It's Out of Control, an album by The Doors' Ray Manzarek.
Albums
In March 1975, the Patti Smith Group began a two-month weekend set of shows at CBGB in New York City with the band Television. The Patti Smith Group was spotted by Clive Davis, who signed them to Arista Records.Later that year, the Patti Smith Group recorded their debut album, Horses, produced by John Cale amid some tension. The album fused punk rock and spoken poetry and begins with a cover of Van Morrison's "Gloria", and Smith's opening words: "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine", an excerpt from "Oath", one of Smith's early poems. The austere cover photograph by Mapplethorpe has become one of rock's classic images.
As punk rock grew in popularity, the Patti Smith Group toured the U.S. and Europe. The rawer sound of the group's second album, Radio Ethiopia, reflected this. Considerably less accessible than Horses, Radio Ethiopia initially received poor reviews. However, several songs have stood the test of time, and Smith still performs them live. She has said that Radio Ethiopia was influenced by the band MC5.
On January 23, 1977, while touring in support of Radio Ethiopia, Smith accidentally danced off a high stage in Tampa, Florida, and fell 15-feet onto a concrete orchestra pit, breaking several cervical vertebrae. The injury required a period of rest and physical therapy, during which she says she was able to reassess, reenergize, and reorganize her life.
The Patti Smith Group produced two further albums. Easter, released in 1978, was their most commercially successful record. It included the band's top single "Because the Night", co-written with Bruce Springsteen. Wave was less successful, although the songs "Frederick" and "Dancing Barefoot" received commercial airplay.
Through most of the 1980s, Patti lived with her family in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, and was semi-retired from music. She ultimately moved back to New York City.
Touring and additional albums
In June 1988, Smith released the album Dream of Life, which included the song "People Have the Power".Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and Allen Ginsberg, whom she had known since her early years in New York City, urged her return to live music and touring. She toured briefly with Bob Dylan in December 1995, which is chronicled in a book of photographs by Stipe.
In 1996, Smith worked with her long-time colleagues to record Gone Again, featuring "About a Boy", a tribute to Kurt Cobain, the former lead singer of Nirvana who died by suicide in 1994.
The same year, she collaborated with Stipe on "E-Bow the Letter", a song on R.E.M.'s New Adventures in Hi-Fi, which she performed live with the band. After the release of Gone Again, Smith recorded two further albums, Peace and Noise in 1997, which included the single "1959" about China's invasion of Tibet, and Gung Ho in 2000, which included songs about Ho Chi Minh and Smith's late father. Smith was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance for two songs, "1959" and "Glitter in Their Eyes". The release of her comeback record was followed by publication of a box set of Smith's work remastered and packaged as The Patti Smith Masters.
In 2002, Smith released Land, a two-CD compilation that includes a cover of Prince's "When Doves Cry". Smith's solo art exhibition Strange Messenger was hosted at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh on September 28, 2002.
On April 27, 2004, Smith released Trampin', which included several songs about motherhood, partly in tribute to Smith's mother, who died two years earlier. It was her first album on Columbia Records, which later became a sister label to her Arista Records, her previous label. Smith curated the Meltdown festival in London on June 25, 2005, in which she performed Horses live in its entirety for the first time. This live performance was released later in 2004 as Horses/Horses.
On October 15, 2006, Smith performed a 3½-hour tour de force show to close out at CBGB, which was an immensely influential New York City live music venue for much of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. At the CBGB show, Smith took the stage at 9:30 p.m. and closed her show a few minutes after 1:00 am. Her final song was "Elegie", after which she read a list of punk rock musicians and advocates who had died in the previous years, representing the last public song and words performed at the iconic venue.
In April 2007, Smith's cover of "Gimme Shelter" appeared on her tenth album, Twelve, an all-covers album released by Columbia Records.
In July 2008, a live album by Smith and Kevin Shields, The Coral Sea, was released.
On September 10, 2009, after a week of smaller events and exhibitions in Florence, Smith played an open-air concert at Piazza Santa Croce, commemorating her performance in the same city 30 years earlier.
Smith recorded a cover of Buddy Holly's "Words of Love" for the CD Rave on Buddy Holly, a tribute album tied to Holly's 75th birthday, which was released June 28, 2011.
She also recorded the song "Capitol Letter" for the official soundtrack of the second film of the Hunger Games series The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.
Smith's 11th studio album, Banga, was released in June 2012. American Songwriter wrote that, "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. It's not an easy listen—the vast majority of her music never has been—but if you're a fan and/or prepared for the challenge, this is as potent, heady and uncompromising as she has ever gotten, and with Smith's storied history as a musical maverick, that's saying plenty." Metacritic awarded the album a score of 81, indicating "universal acclaim".
Also in 2012, Smith recorded a cover of Io come persona by Italian singer-songwriter Giorgio Gaber.
In 2015, Smith wrote "Aqua Teen Dream" to commemorate the series finale of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. The vocal track was recorded in a hotel overlooking Lerici's Bay of Poets. On September 26, 2015, Smith performed at the American Museum of Tort Law convocation ceremony.
On December 6, 2015, she made an appearance at the Paris show of U2's Innocence + Experience Tour, performing "Bad" and "People Have the Power" with U2.
In 2016, Smith performed "People Have the Power" at Riverside Church in Manhattan to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Democracy Now, where she was joined by Michael Stipe. On December 10, 2016, Smith attended the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in Stockholm on behalf of Bob Dylan, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, who could not be present due to prior commitments.
After the official presentation speech for the literary prize by Horace Engdahl, the perpetual secretary of the Swedish Academy, Smith sang the Dylan song "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall". She incorrectly sung one verse, singing, "I saw the babe that was just bleedin'," and was momentarily unable to continue. After a brief apology, saying that she was nervous, she resumed the song and earned jubilant applause at its end.
In August 2025, Smith announced the rerelease of her debut album Horses, slated to be released in October 2025 to celebrate the album’s 50th anniversary. The album features unreleased tracks, remasters, and original recordings of several songs from the original track list.