https://medium.com/cuepoint/patti-smiths-eternal-flame-fcadf12a8417
"“No matter what anybody thinks about any of them,” said Patti Smith, “every
record I’ve done has been done with the same amount of care, anguish, pain,
suffering, and joy. We never threw a record together. Each record was done
really seriously, as if our life depended on it.”
In 1975, when Smith released her astonishing first album,
Horses, she became
the first member of the nascent CBGB crew to make it to vinyl, helping set a
global revolution in motion. Her sinuous, searing poetry—first unleashed on the
influential. independent single “Hey Joe” / “Piss Factory,” which actually
predates the album—didn’t fit any simple definition of “punk,” but its defiant
outsider attitude sure did.
In 2007, I spoke at length to Smith on the occasion of her tenth record,
Twelve, on which she covered some of her favorite songs by a wide range of
artists, from Stevie Wonder to Nirvana to the Allman Brothers. She sat calm and
still on a sofa in a Sony Music conference room; listening back to the tapes,
we were both fighting colds. Our discussion of the album ran as a news story,
but we also got into an examination of her full body of recorded work, none of
which has ever been published.
She talked about her ambitions for
Horses, and of her pain when
Dream of
Life — her 1988 return to the public eye after spending most of a decade
living quietly in Michigan with her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, a former
member of the MC5 — was met with bad reviews. Since this interview, Smith has
released only one new studio album, 2012’s
Banga, but she also wrote the
magnificent
Just Kids, a loving reminiscence of her early days in New York
City, which won the National Book Award in 2010.
This year marks Patti Smith’s fortieth anniversary as a recording artist.
Though she’s never had a huge-selling album and her only hit single was 1978’s
“Because the Night,” co-written by Bruce Springsteen, she has become an
international icon, an influence on artists from U2 to Madonna, an activist and
author and, at age 68, a living, breathing, working connection to the fading
spirit of a transformative era of music and poetry and commitment."
Via Muse.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
