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Patti Smith
Patty Smith, born 30 Dec 1946, 06.01am,
Chicago, IL (US)
patti's official arista biography,
june '96
"Three chord rock merged with the
power of the word"
So Patti Smith described her music on the 1975 release of
Horses, her celebrated debut album; and so she has continued
to blend the spoken and sung arts in incantatory fashion with
her latest work, Gone Again. Impossible to categorize, moving
easily between the literary and musical worlds, always unpredictable
and impassioned, she is an idiosyncratically unique performer
who has always remained true to her artistic vision.
Born in Chicago and raised in Woodbury,
New Jersey, just across the state line from Philadelphia,
Patti's mother, Beverly,
was a jazz singer cum waitress. Her father, Grant, worked at
the Honeywell plant; she was the oldest of four siblings: her
sisters Linda and Kimberly (the latter plays mandolin on Gone
Again's "Ravens,"), and brother Todd. Unable to find
her place in high school society, she took refuge in the images
of Rimbaud, Bob Dylan, James Brown, and the Rolling Stones.
Dropping out of Glassboro State Teacher's College, she headed
for the bright -lights-big-city of New York.
When she arrived in town, she met an art student named Robert
Mapplethorpe and they moved in together. Patti found a job
as a bookstore clerk at the Strand and Scribner's. In 1969,
she traveled to Paris with her sister Linda, working on the
street as a performance artist, and making her first forays
into the visual arts. Returning to New York as the seventies
got underway, she rebounded between the back room at Max's
Kansas City and the Hotel Chelsea. Encouraged by such as Dylan
cohort Bobby Neuwirth and blues virtuoso Johnny Winter, Patti
made a name for herself in underground theatre (starring in
such plays as Jackie Curtis' Vain Victory at the Cafe La Mama),
and collaborating with the playwright Sam Shepherd, with whom
she co-authored Cowboy Mouth. She was also writing poetry.
On February 10, 1971, she opened for Gerard
Malanga at a Poetry Project weekly reading at St. Mark's
Church on the Lower East
Side. She was joined for three songs by Lenny Kaye, a rock
writer and record store clerk whom she had met through an article
he'd written for Jazz and Pop magazine about "Accapella" music,
the unaccompanied doo-wop of the Philly-New York corridor.
Discovering they liked the same type of obscure records, and
knowing that he played guitar, she added his rhythmic chording
to her chant-sung poetry, though there was little sense of
where it might be heading.
Patti continued performing as a poet/actress
over the next two years, opening for the New York Dolls at
the Mercer Arts
Center, writing songs for The Blue Oyster Cult, "reviewing" records
for Creem and Rock magazines, and publishing her first volumes
of poetry, Seventh Heaven and Witt. In November of 1973, she
and Kaye reunited for a "Rock 'n' Rimbaud" performance
at Le Jardin off New York's Times Square, and the seeds for
a band were sown. They were accompanied by a succession of
piano players, culminating in the arrival of Richard "DNV" Sohl
in the Spring of 1974. As a trio, they began to play more regularly,
a curious blend centered on Patti's improvised wordplay, between
free rock and free jazz, original songs mingling with strange
cover versions that were used as counterpoint and segue.
One of these, Patti's version of "Hey Joe," taking
as its backdrop the Patty Hearst kidnapping, became her first
recorded work. Going into Electric Ladyland Studio on the evening
of June 5, 1974, the group attempted to see if the electricity
they were generating live could be translated to vinyl. Helped
out by Tom Verlaine (of the new band, Television) on lead guitar,
funded by Robert Mapplethorpe, and released on their own Mer
Records, the result was one of the first indie-rock DIY singles.
The b-side was the prophetic "Piss Factory," which
told of Patti's stint as an assembly line worker and her vow
to travel to New York: "Watch me now!"
Buoyed by an energetic New Band scene
centered around CBGB's in New York, the group—Patti, Lenny, and DNV—traveled
to California in the fall of '74, playing the Whiskey in L.A.
and the Fillmore (on audition night) in S.F. When they returned
east, they felt their sound needed filling out, and recruited
guitarist Ivan Kral, a Czech refugee. It was this combination
that played CBGB's for eight weeks in the spring of 1975, honing
their concept and ultimately attracting the attention of Clive
Davis, who signed them to his fledgling Arista label that summer.
Drummer Jay Dee Daugherty had overseen
their sound at CBGB's and had sat in with them several times.
He joined the band
in time to record their debut album, with John Cale at the
producer's helm. Recorded at Electric Ladyland, Horses was
released in November 1975. It contained Patti's incantatory
reworkings of rock classics like "Gloria" and "Land
(Of A Thousand Dances)", more traditional song forms (the
reggae "Redondo Beach," "Free Money"),
and streams-of -unconscious poetry ("Birdland").
It cracked the American Top 50, paving the way for a new generation
of art-rat punk.
After successfully touring America and
Europe, sounding a "wake-up
call" to the legions of aspiring guitarists waiting in
the wings, the Group returned to the studio in the summer of
1976 to record Radio Ethiopia with producer Jack Douglas. Featuring
a more rock-based sound—as in "Ask The Angels" and "Pumping"—even
as the title cut heralded a field where anything could and
should happen. The band's touring was cut short when Patti
fell from a stage in Tampa, Florida, during "Ain't It
Strange," cracking two vertebrae in her neck and taking
an enforced convalescence.
The time off was spent preparing a volume
of poetry, Babel, and Easter, the 1978 release which not
only gave the Group
its first Top 20 hit—"Because The Night," a
collaboration between Patti and Bruce Springsteen—but
its most succinct statements of principle yet, from "Twenty
Fifth Floor" to "Rock N Roll Nigger." The maiden
production of Jimmy Iovine, the album became a worldwide hit,
and Patti and the band toured America & Europe throughout
much of that year.
But with so many of their artistic and
idealistic goals accomplished, the end was inevitably in
sight. In 1979, Patti released Wave,
produced by Todd Rundgren, which seemed to complete her seventies'
saga. Even while the band's cover of "(So You Want To
Be A) Rock And Roll Star" spoke of her disenchantment
with the trapping of rock stardom, "Dancing Barefoot" and "Frederick" were
inspired by the new love in her life, Fred "Sonic" Smith,
ex-MC5 guitarist and leader of Detroit's Sonic Rendezvous Band.
In the fall of 1979, after performing what would be a farewell
concert before 70,000 fans in a Florence, Italy soccer stadium,
Patti waved "bye, bye, hey hey" to her Group persona
and moved to the Motor City. She married Fred on March 1, 1980.
They lived a quiet, private life in a
Detroit suburb, with their children Jackson (now 14) and
Jesse (9), concentrating
their energies on raising a family and following their musical
muse. In 1988, they released Dream of Life as a symbol of their
creative work together. It featured "People Have The Power" and "Paths
That Cross," the Smiths' tribute to the infinite positive
possibilities within us all, as well as a lullaby to children
everywhere in "The Jackson Song."
Patti continued to write, releasing a compendium of her seventies'
poetry in Early Work (Norton); Woolgathering (Hanuman); and
beginning a novel. She and Fred created songs together, with
an eye to recording in the summer of 1995, until Fred's death
of heart failure on November 4, 1994; among his last accomplishments
was to teach Patti her guitar chords. The passing of her brother,
Todd, of a heart attack a month later, further brought home
to her how slight is our time on this earth. She worked through
her grief with song, as singers have done immemorial, in memorium.
She had given a handful of performances,
mostly poetry—her
summer, 1993, reading in Central Park attracted several thousand
fans—over the years. Yet increasingly she felt the need
to perform, to reconnect with her audience not only for them
but herself, and she began appearing in out of the way venues,
from Ann Arbor to Toronto, to understand how to present her
music in a modern setting. She gathered her longtime collaborator
Lenny Kaye, and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, and added bassist
Tony Shanahan, a New Jersey musician who had worked with both
Kaye and John Cale, to provide live backing. Another Central
Park reading in 1995, an impromptu appearance at New York's
Lollapalooza on the second stage, and tour of the west coast
both in poetry and full rock mode—all helped her find
her stage presence again. She contributed tracks to the Ain't
Nothin' But A She Thing album (a version of Nina Simone's "Don't
Smoke In Bed") and the Dead Man Walking soundtrack (Oliver
Ray's "Walkin' Blind").
In the summer of 1995, she entered New York's Electric Lady
land studios to begin recording her sixth album. Produced by
Malcolm Burn and Lenny Kaye, Gone Again features old friends
like Tom Verlaine and John Cale, new friends like keyboardist
Luis Resto and guitarist Oliver Ray, guest appearances by singer
Jeff Buckley, cellist Jane Scarpantoni, and mandolin player
Kimberly Smith; and the inimitable Smith magic of song and
the spoken word.
A meditation on passage and mortality,
Gone Again celebrates life's illumination, and our place
in the celestial heavens.
As the poet Allen Ginsberg says, "Light a candle, and
continue the dance."
More
about Patti Smith
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These text extracts are taken from "Psychological Horoscope
Analysis" by Liz Greene. Many aspects of the horoscope
report are only relevant for the person concerned. Therefore
we have decided to limit the publication to those aspects which
are of interest to the wider public. You can find unabridged
versions of other celebrity horoscope reports on our sample
horoscopes.
Text: Liz Greene
Programming: Alois Treindl
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| The struggle
against banality and mundane limits
If you attempt to live entirely in your imagination, you may
run the risk of losing your connection with ordinary life - and
with it, the capacity for contentment.  Because of your resentment
of boredom and routine, you may secretly yearn for an alternative
life which is more glamourous, exciting or meaningful - without
actually doing anything concrete about your craving for wider horizons.
You also dislike having to select one thing to which you must apply
yourself, preferring to live in a kind of provisional world - the "one
day when I grow up..." syndrome, where all possibilities remain
open to you. Yet if you pursue this approach to life exclusively,
you will, with the passing of the years, feel increasingly unreal,
as though you have somehow wasted your potentials and accomplished
nothing solid in the end. Another manifestation of your conflict
between the romantic, mystic realm and the hard world of facts
and objects is your complex relationship with your own body, which
often seems mysterious and frightening and which you may periodically
neglect. You may resent having to fill your time with tasks like
servicing the car and doing the monthly accounts, not to mention
the dentist and the doctor; but your lack of attention to worldly
and instinctual matters can result in constant irritations with
mechanical objects breaking down, and also in problems with your
health - not because you are intrinsically unhealthy, but because
you tend to be sporadic in your care of your own body. You tend
to swing between excessive and punishing diets and exercise routines
to "master" the body, and times when you are not even aware that
it exists.
Sensitivity
to others combines with a creative imagination
Your imaginative abilities are supported by a deep instinctive
insight into human behaviour and motives. You have a profound response
to the world of symbols, myths and images, and may excel in one
of the arts, such as music, painting, dance or theatre, where your
ability to intuit character and mimic it in plastic forms may give
you exceptional talents.  Or you may combine your imagination and
your sensitivity to the handling of others' problems, offering
much sympathy and vision to loved ones or to those whom you might
choose to counsel or help. Your grasp of the potentials of a situation
combines with sensitivity and compassion for the needs and problems
of others, and this lends a human touch to the strange and often
uncanny abilities of your intuition...
...Your deepest challenge in life, however, still remains the
problem of earthing your vision and sense of human potential within
the confines of material reality; and here your dependency upon
human contact may make it even
more difficult for you to cope with the restrictions and responsibilities that
the world imposes upon you. Life sometimes requires a tough survival
instinct and a capacity to cope alone if necessary. Your need to
express your creative
imagination through relationships with others may cause you to fear the cold
self-sufficiency that situations sometimes demand of you. Occasionally
too empathetic and idealistic for your own good, you have difficulty
in drawing
boundaries around yourself, and perpetually take on the burden of others' problems
- not only because you are compassionate, but also because you
do not know how to be firm about your own limits...
A
determination to hold the centre of the stage
Nothing is as fascinating, as irresistibly exciting, or as endlessly
interesting as you.  You have made a career out of your own style
and image, and although this may seem selfish and egocentric to
some, there is a highly creative dimension to your eternal self-preoccupation.
You possess great quantities of sheer unadulterated vitality, and
serve as a vivid example to others of the importance and value
of living out one's own desires and fantasies regardless of whether
they fit into conventional ideas of proper behaviour. You spend
considerable time working to improve your image - which includes
things like your personal appearance, your manner of speech and
movement, and the impression you are trying to make on others in
any social or professional situation - and you are also likely
to spend a lot of money on it as well. It is natural for you to
put energy into yourself, although this may not be mutually exclusive
of a strong dedication to your profession, your loved ones, or
your philosophical or ideological beliefs. But if all the world
is a stage and all the men and women merely players, then you intend
to be the star - or, at the very least, the villain, if you cannot
obtain the hero's or heroine's role. You would rather be disliked
and thought badly of than pass through life unnoticed. You have
no intention of leaving an epitaph that reads, "Here lies a nice
person, pity we can't remember the name or face."
...
The
craving to be first, best and incomparable
However much you try, you do not make a good follower or minister
to others' needs; and you are not particularly talented at being
one of the group either,  for you possess a rather fierce competitive
instinct which demands that you be first, best, and unquestionably
on top. Committees, group discussions and cooperative planning can
irritate you enormously, for your mind is quick and intuitive and
you can see farther than most people; and moreover, you are usually
convinced that you know best how to do things, and are impatient
with slower people. Also, you bitterly resent not being able to have
your own way. You are not a true democrat, whatever political philosophy
you espouse, for you have the aristocrat's natural sense of superiority;
and even if you take up the role of championing the underdog, you
enjoy it because you are the champion and not because you would ever
consider yourself one of the underdogs you go to such great lengths
to protect....
Life as grand theatre and love of the impossible
You perceive everything, including yourself, in grand, highly
coloured and theatrical terms. Your imagination is perpetually
active, injecting into ordinary life a sublime vision of a bigger
and more exciting world; and you find it hard to be imprisoned
in what others call reality without some hope of an adventure around
the next corner. You have a penchant for stirring up trouble, but
this does not frighten you as long as you can ride through the
crisis without losing face. Danger carries a certain excitement
for you, and often it is when you feel most alive - whether the
danger is physical or emotional....
... At heart you are an actor or actress, preferring Shakespearean
tragedy to a more subdued comedy of manners, and you would love
your life to read like a novel. The chances are that it will, at
least for a time. You believe that you
should be exempt from life's more boring confines so that you can pursue your
grand destiny unimpeded. There is an inherent inflation or secret
arrogance in this attitude. But the odd thing is that you seem
to have plenty of luck, and
your liveliness and magnetism and vivid imagination attract you loyal friends,
so that you stand a very good chance of achieving your desired
exemption from the monotony which enslaves so many lives. You fear
being trapped and having
your spirit stifled, and thus have a certain difficulty in committing yourself
- both to relationships and to a profession - unless some quality
of unobtainability is inherent in both the person and the job.
For if you can never wholly possess
and dominate something or someone, then you might possibly stay around.
A humbler and more selfless character lies in the shadow
In contrast to the rather flamboyantly energetic personality which you habitually
show the world, there is another protagonist in your inner psychic drama;  and
this more shadowy side of you contains all those qualities which you have excluded
from your conscious goals and behaviour in order to preserve the theatrical
ambience of your lifestyle. Your shadow-side is a good deal more humble, more
ordinary and more rooted in the affairs of mundane life than it might seem;
and it might be summarised by the image of the good person (good in the sense
of nice, decent, and the hardworking servant of others). Naturally all this
goodness and decency is offensive and demeaning to your more colourful image
of yourself, for you have a deep fear of being boring and therefore cling to
a certain naughty panache.....
The
importance of finding inner values without audience applause
Thus your shadow-side is rooted in ordinary mundane life, mortal
rather than godlike, humble rather than arrogant, and deeply dependent
on the love and validation of others.  More
importantly, it is also deeply dependent on validation from an inner,
rather than an outer,
source; and this is really what is meant by a spiritual or mystical
aspiration. The sense that you serve something higher, and that the
world's notice is a by-product rather than the source of your value
in life, is the gift that your shadow-side can provide - if you are
able to face and accept it. You are both more ordinary and more extraordinary
than you realise. The nice, decent, boring dimension of your shadow
is really your link with common humanity, and the antidote to your
chronic hidden feelings of loneliness, emptiness and isolation; and
it is also a link with that sense of a higher purpose which can offer
your life value even when you are not performing. If you can find
the inner experience of being a vessel for something, then some of
your surface arrogance may peel away, for with such an experience
comes the knowledge that one's talents are not one's own, but rather,
the property of an Other. They are on loan, and it is up to you to
discover why and from whom. And the vessel is worthy in itself, even
when not producing.....
Hidden
sensuality and materialism
In contrast to the bright light of your mystical aspiration,
there is dark figure in your inner psychic drama.  This
hidden dimension of your personality contains all that
you have excluded from your conscious values and behaviour
in order to pursue your higher ideals; it encompasses the
domain of your body, your sensual nature and the repressed
materialism which you prefer not to acknowledge. This shadow-side
can be an inner enemy if you deny it value, working against
you through difficulties with health, money and mundane
circumstances. This inner enemy, because you turn your
back on it within yourself, may appear to belong to others
in the world outside - individuals who make life hard for
you because of their physical demands, their lack of appreciation
for finer values, and their coarseness or brutality, emotional
or physical. What a person cannot deal with in himself
or herself inevitably is attracted from the environment.
Domestic
intimacy is not enough
You have the gift of offering real friendship to those
you love; and ultimately this may mean more to you and
them, and endure longer, than more conventional or sentimental
declarations of affection.  You know how to let your man
exist as a separate individual independent of your need
of him, which means that you are deeply tolerant - even
when you are feeling angry or offended. Your partner's
idiosyncrasies do not surprise you, for you know that it
takes all kinds to make a world; and whether or not you
are in an established relationship or marriage, you are
not likely to limit your human contacts to one person alone.
If you have a partner who is by nature more emotionally
dependent or domestically focussed than you, this open
and friendly quality can cause some problems; and you need
to be very clear and honest with yourself about just what
kind of relationship arrangements you need, for you are
not a good liar and would be happiest not having to resort
to deception. But it is not sexual promiscuity that drives
you; rather, you are truly interested in people of both
sexes and all social backgrounds, and if your work and
your personal life can include enough interesting contacts
to feed your need to be a citizen of the world, you can
be happy in a stable and enduring relationship.
More
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