Book review #8: Why Patti Smith Matters
Journalist's justification of punk poet rocker is a smart, if somewhat florid, tribute: Rose shares blooms aplenty but few thorns
Why Patti Smith Matters by Caryn Rose (Faber, 2022)
IN THE LAST few years, I’ve been drawn to a couple of books which substantially share the thrust of this new release from Faber, both titles that fall very much in the terrain of Beat/rock history: Why Kerouac Matters (2007), by that master of counterculture reportage John Leland, and Why Dylan Matters (2017), by Harvard English professor Richard F Thomas, the latter of which curiously didn’t mention Kerouac at all.
It is pleasing now here to have a woman – that is, Patti Smith – taking centre stage in this sharply written and very readable volume and to have a woman conducting the investigation – music journalist Caryn Rose, contributor to Salon, Pitchfork and the Village Voice – the first biography of this artist from that gender perspective. Plus, it’s probably worth noting also that the paperback Smith portrait is the latest in a series that has so far featured Solange, Marianne Faithfull and Karen Carpenter. So, hurray – female influencers are finally getting their deserved moments in the spotlight.
Yet, there is one key social ghetto into which Patti Smith has never wanted to be herded: her woman-ness, her femaleness, are characteristics she has never played on and she has often gone out of the way to separate herself from the feminist pack. She has spent a life declaring herself an artist and not a member, in any sense, of the so-called second sex. This has sometimes been a problem for those who would like to see her as emblematic of a movement towards equality for the genders, but, in typically dogmatic style, she has determinedly ploughed her own unique course.
But, while the push and pull of sexual politics can be fascinating – particularly in the field of popular music where women have been historically derided, even denigrated, even if they have, from Adele to Beyoncé, Taylor Swift to St Vincent and Cardi B, slowly begun to establish some quite impressive purchase in the business post-millennium – I would like to apply different criteria here.
Patti Smith is not going to matter much in the field of sex equality activism clearly, but in what ways does this American artist of multiple talents – poet, author, artist, photographer and filmmaker, oh, and singer – hold true muster, have substantial presence, in the wider creative setting after a singular 50-year career?
I’ve only seen this woman twice in concert and even then relatively late in her performing arc – Sheffield in 2007 and then Brussels in 2015. But one thing I think on which Caryn Rose and I can definitely agree is the near-mystical force, the shamanic majesty, of Smith in live action.
The chemistry of poetry, song and anecdote set against the gut-thumping eruption of tremorous rock power is captivating, something to savour in the flesh and something that certainly stays with you. She might sometimes come across like a sister from another planet but her near-messianic stage persona is unquestionably mesmerising.
Yet it is the work of decades that underpins this electric Elektra, the scaffolding from which she declaims her worldview. That word work seems pivotal in Smith’s life and a central plank in Rose’s celebration of an ever-industrious street bard. Patti plays down her starry qualities or special talents; instead she emphasises ordinariness, the toil, the almost blue-collar striving of her art-making. Perspiration swamps inspiration in her universe.
And the part of our universe that interests me most is her connection to the Beat Generation scene which preceded her and to which she has paid regular tribute over the years: cultivating a friendship Burroughs, appearing live with Ginsberg, rubbing shoulders with Corso, even contributing to Kerouac tributes on record and on film.
When she made her live debut as a poet in 1971, it is significant that it was the St Mark’s Poetry Project, under the directorship of Anne Waldman, which hosted her landmark appearance, supporting Warhol acolyte Gerard Malanga and with Corso present in the stalls that evening. Launching herself on that tough New York City audience, with her long-time musical compadre Lenny Kaye on hand, she generated enough sparky charisma to permanently seal an association with that downtown writing crowd.
In my own book Text and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll, I explored her motives, in attaching at least some of her colours to the Beat flag, in interviews with poets, academics and journalists. Victor Bockris, an earlier Smith biographer, told me then: ‘Her poetry is not Beat poetry. Her prose is not Beat prose, but when she sings “the boy looked at Johnny” she’s channelling Burroughs.’
Rock critic Bart Bull was more divisive and derisive. ‘Patti Smith is the single biggest name-dropper in the history of rock’n’roll. Bar none […] You’d have to use a scale and a yardstick and a snow-shovel to see whether or not she was the single biggest name-dropper in the history of poetry, or whether that would be Allen Ginsberg.’
Yet Waldman, established writer in her own right and one-time St Mark’s boss, took a cooler and more rational view. ‘She was not inside the Beat literary movement or culture in the early days, except thru encounters at the Chelsea […] that were not particularly literary. But yes, she’s in the post-Beat pantheon. She takes what she can use (like Dylan too). Like all of us poets she’s a magpie scholar.’
Why Patti Matters is richly riddled with tales of that magpie tendency – whether it’s the rock influence of Dylan or Hendrix or John Cale or the poetic catalysts of the previous decades and even century. And with respect to those literary antecedents, although many of the key Beats earn mentions, fairly fleeting ones, in this Rose garden, it is interesting that it is the French Symbolists – Rimbaud, Baudelaire – who make the more significant appearances.
But those attention-catching references aside, there is plenty of other rewarding content to be chomped upon and digested. The biographer is strong on descriptions of Smith’s recorded output and she has certainly put in the groundwork – either first-hand experience at many live appearances or second-hand sleuthing via much reading and viewing of existing materials – to synthesise an effective portrait of Smith in her various phases, from the Chelsea to CBGB, from motherhood and domesticity in Detroit and her later dynamic return to the stage, the studio and the writing garret.
I was particularly drawn to the stories surrounding the emergence of ‘Because the Night’, her 1978 collaboration with Bruce Springsteen, which brought Smith a significant transatlantic chart hit. The sexist tensions surrounding the media perception of that co-operative act are astutely explored. Rose writes, ‘There was some rockist partisanship at the time of the single’s release, with detractors muttering that Smith didn’t actually do anything, that it was Bruce’s song, and others once again charging that she “sold out”.’
And that sidebar takes us back to that pertinent question of gender disadvantage in rock and art more generally, one that Smith has deliberately sidestepped. Rose remarks: ‘As someone who came of age as second-wave feminism transitioned into third-wave feminism, I like to believe that I understand some of Patti’s reluctance to identify with feminist ideology, especially in the seventies.’ But the journalist later adds: ‘She is not in charge of fighting all our battles. I just wish she would join in on some of them when it feels like she could make a real difference.’
Yet, to counter that suggestion she tends to let her outsider status isolate her from the fisticuffs of the societal barricades, let us not forget the inspiring and heartfelt testimony that Zach de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine, arch campaigners themselves, provided on the night that Smith was finally, some felt belatedly, inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007.
He stated: ‘The movement she helped define explained why people like me related more to the Bad Brains than the Eagles, why we championed the Clash and hated Ronald Reagan, why we dropped our text-books and picked up Sonia Sanchez, Allen Ginsberg and Langston Hughes, expanding rock’s boundaries. Patti Smith the poet revealed truth, regardless of the political and social consequences.’
This book is a highly personal, markedly anecdotal, response to Smith which is not to say it lacks research substance (though there could have been more on her literary ventures over her musical projects). We are told on the cover that it from is not a hagiography, but I think it is, in some ways, a love letter, affectionate and impassioned, to the singer-poet. I don’t mind that so much because I actually like reading love letters to Patti Smith.
If, however, you are seeking a full-length edition that is more critical – not in the adversarial or antagonistic sense but one which engages less subjectively and more challengingly with its core subject – this is probably not the go-to text. This particular inquiry is as much muscular memoir, nostalgic recollection, a kind of meta-biography, and I rather enjoyed its original and opinionated approach.
Notes: The chapter ‘Feeling the bohemian pulse: Locating Patti Smith within a post-Beat tradition’ can be found in Text and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture by Simon Warner (Bloomsbury, 2013) and also Patti Smith: Outside, edited by Claude Chastagner (Presses Universitaires de La Méditerranée, 2015)