My imagination is always fertile. I’m either thinking of my own things, or constantly engaged by the things that other people do.
—Patti Smith, salon.com interview with Peter Machen, 2015
Patti Smith is a sinuous talent whose abilities flow from one magical project to another. Her uncompromisingly artistic approach to life has meant that she has been creating and collaborating organically for more than sixty years. Her dress code reflects the essence of her individuality. She vibrates with an authenticity that is unmatched, and to listen to her sing or recite one of her poems is to feel the texture of life.
Born in Chicago, Smith grew up poor. She spent her first few years in Philadelphia and then New Jersey. It was there that, bereft of culture, her elegant intelligence spurred on a searching spirit as a teen. After a couple of soul-destroying jobs in factories and an unplanned pregnancy, she left for New York in 1967: “At twenty years old, I boarded the bus. I wore my dungarees, black turtleneck, and the old gray raincoat I had bought in Camden. My small suitcase, yellow-and-red plaid, held some drawing pencils, a notebook, Illuminations, a few pieces of clothing, and pictures of my siblings. . . . Everything awaited me,” she wrote in her 2010 memoir, Just Kids.
Getty Images: Goldsmith, Lynn
Patti Smith, mid-1970s.
Smith’s striking androgyny today seems a well-worn, comfortable characteristic. However, growing up, she found her appearance inexplicable until she discovered art. As detailed in Victor Bockris’s unauthorized biography, she says: “Art totally freed me. I found Modigliani, I discovered Picasso’s blue period, and I thought, ‘Look at this, these are great masters, and the women are all built like I am.’ I started ripping pictures out of the books and taking them home to pose in front of the mirror.”
Smith’s favorite books as a child were fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen and the Raggedy Ann stories.
When she was a teenager, she imagined that Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan were her boyfriends.
In August 2014 she performed a cameo role in Season 4, episode 1 of the TV crime drama The Killing, playing a neurosurgeon.
Smith wrote the song “Nine” that appeared on her 2012 album, Banga, for Johnny Depp instead of giving him a birthday present.
Equally, the femininity expected of her growing up unnerved her. In a 2010 interview with the New York Times she remarked: “Even as a child, I knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to wear red lipstick. When my mother would say, ‘You should shave your legs,’ I would ask, ‘Why?’ I didn’t understand why we had to present a different picture of ourselves to the outside world.” The photographer Robert Mapplethorpe famously shot the mesmerizing cover of her debut album, Horses, in 1975. The image shows her wearing a white shirt and black suit, and it’s a look that encapsulates her stylish attitude even now. This was, she admits, no big deal: “It was just the way I always dressed,” she said in an interview with Greg Kot for the Chicago Tribune in 2014.
No big deal to Smith was a signature style that has bathed sartorial sensitivities with freedom, grace, and inspiration ever since. Smith had not founded her look easily, though, and it didn’t crystallize into confidence until she hit the Big Apple. She reflected in an interview with PBS: “I had been made fun of a lot growing up, because I was a skinny kid with long greasy braids who dressed like a beatnik. I didn’t really fit in where I grew up; I didn’t look like the other girls—I didn’t have a beehive. And in New York, suddenly I just blended in with everybody else. Nobody cared. I didn’t get stopped by the cops. I wasn’t yelled at from cars. I was just free. And I think that’s what New York represented to me more than anything—freedom.”
I decided I wanted to be a writer when I read Little Women. Jo was so great. I really related to her. She was a tomboy, yet guys liked her and she had a lot of boyfriends. She was a real big influence on me, as much an influence as Bob Dylan was later. She was so strong and yet she was feminine. She loved guys, she wasn’t a bull or nothing. So I wanted to write. I had always been a daydreamer.
—Patti Smith, from “Patti Smith: A Baby Wolf with Neon Bones,” by Nick Tosches, 1976
Getty Images: Kisby, Roger
Patti Smith backstage at Lollapalooza, Grant Park, Chicago, 2007.
Smith’s poetry in the early 1970s felt unconventional. Mapplethorpe encouraged her to both write and perform her verses, and, significantly, some of her later writing would celebrate and serve as a memorial to his character and brilliance. Today her written work seems effortlessly modern.
Smith is number twenty-three of the twenty-seven members of the Continental Drift Society, a club dedicated to the German geophysicist Alfred Wegener.
Smith’s literary wellspring was vented from a uniquely imaginative dedication to art. She synthesized mediums in a way that has become customary now but used to be extraordinary. She goes on to explain in the PBS interview: “as a very young girl, I learned that William Blake painted, wrote songs, was an activist, wrote these poems, had a philosophy and was a visionary. Leonardo da Vinci was a scientist and an artist. Lewis Carroll was a photographer, a writer and a poet. I was very comfortable with this idea at an early age.”
I’m not a musician. I drew and wrote poetry for ten years before I wrote Horses. I published books. Why do people want to know exactly who I am? Am I a poet? Am I this or that? I’ve always made people wary. First they called me a rock poet. Then I was a poet that dabbled in rock. Then I was a rock person who dabbled in art. But for me, working in different forms seemed like a very organic process.
—Patti Smith, from “The SPIN Interview: Patti Smith,” by David Marchese, 2008