Death and the Rebirth of Patti Smith, Steven Foehr,

["Dennis Moore" <clayboy56>]

Shambhala Sun, July 1996.
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[for the archive - see below]

Death and the Rebirth of Patti Smith
by Steven Foehr

http://www.shambhalasun.com/index.php? 
option=com_content&task=view&id=2080

A series of deaths-her husband, brother and closest friend--has
softened the heart of the once angry poet and singer. "Sorrow is like
a precious spring," says Patti Smith, and with it has come an outburst
of writing, recording and performing.


Belligerent bohemian punk poet. Street-hot rock and roll messiah.
Ultimate female rock rebel. The Queen of Piss. That was the Patti
Smith of the 1970's.
Mother of two. Widow. Poet and performer. Student of religious
imagery. Author. That is the Patti Smith of 1996.
"I feel like a very youthful and a very ancient person," Smith, 49,
says. She still has the rail-thin body of 20 years ago, but her dark
hair shows gray.
"To me, I look like I'm 12 years old but with ancient hair. I can
still taste what it's like to be a child. I can still feel the intense
pain and embarrassment of being a teenager. I still have a streak of
rebelliousness in me that is unwarranted and unnecessary. I still have
some youthful hopes. But I possess a certain amount of resignation and
weariness."
Much of that resignation and weariness comes from living with the
sorrow of death. Her husband of 18 years, Fred "Sonic" Smith, guitar
player for the hard rock band MC5, died of a heart attack in 1994 at
the age of 44. A month after her husband's death, her beloved brother
Todd died of a stroke. Robert Mapplethorpe, her best friend, died of
AIDS, as did several other close friends. Richard Sohl, the original
Patti Smith Group piano player, whom she deeply adored, died of heart
failure at age 37.
"I find that sorrow breaks the heart open, makes you more vulnerable,"
she says. "In some ways sorrow is a beautiful state. It can heighten
one's sense of humor. You can find strength and clarity in sorrow.
Sorrow is a gift. You have to treasure it. The important thing is to
honor it.
"Sorrow is like a precious spring. Every once in a while you can drink
from it, but you can't let it consume you. Sorrow, like drugs, or
love, or our own gifts, can be both dangerous and beautiful."
When I spoke to Patti Smith recently, she sat, one foot tucked under
her, in the music room of her 100-year-old house. On one side of the
room stood her husband's old upright piano. A bust of Beethoven, his
idol, sat on the piano.
Smith stepped out of the rock and roll spotlight in 1979. She moved to
this Detroit suburb, raised two children and concentrated on writing.
She stepped back on stage in 1995, performing with Bob Dylan and doing
solo gigs. Her book Coral Sea, sixteen prose poem meditations on the
death of Robert Mapplethorpe, is scheduled for release in late May,
and her new album, "Farewell Reel" (Arista), is to be released in
June.
The new album, for which she wrote all the songs, was planned with her
husband before his death. Going ahead with recording the album was
difficult, Smith acknowledged, and much of her grieving process
permeates the album.
"When I lost my husband, I felt completely desolate," she said. "From
him I learned a more compassionate view of the general populace. He
was much more compassionate about those who will inherit the earth
than I. But after he died, I did the best work I have done in fifteen
years. The quality of my singing has strengthened. That's my legacy
from my husband."
She shifts in her chair. The narrow, pointed lancet windows, the
whitewashed walls, and the dark wood ceiling give the room the mood of
a secular monastery. On one wall hangs a scroll of a seated Buddha. A
Tibetan sack containing two of her favorite books, What Remains of a
Rembrandt by Jean Genet and Painting and Guns by William Burroughs,
dangles from a nail. What appear to be rosary beads, but on closer
inspection is a rope with knots and beads, stands out starkly against
the white wall where it is displayed. Mapplethorpe, a close friend and
professional collaborator for more than twenty years, made it for her.
Out of her experience of so many deaths, Smith has discovered the
ability to commiserate and communicate with her departed loved ones.
"I feel some of their best strengths," she said. "I find myself
gifted, enhanced, a richer person, because I have magnified aspects of
them within me."
After the shock of losing her brother subsided, she felt that her
heart "if it had been a piece of coal, became a beautiful ember. I
could feel my heart going from being completely ice to going warm. I
felt joy. I knew that my brother was in my heart. I was almost
laughing because I recognized that was my brother, who was the
embodiment of brotherly love. I find now that I have a lot more
patience. I am more apt to take a breath and forgive someone for
something, or be more philosophic about the actions of others."
She began performing again after her brother's death. "It was his
great wish that I perform," she said. "Right now it's good for me, a
good test. I really wasn't sure that I was capable of performing again
or how the people would respond. I think I won't be doing it for a
long time, perhaps some months. Then I'll be ready to write again,
which is what I really want to do."
She shed no tears on the morning Robert Mapplethorpe died. Those had
been spent during his long illness. Instead, she went into a two-month
frenzy writing the prose poems that appear in Coral Sea. "That was my
way of weeping for Robert," she said. "In keeping with our friendship,
he would rather have that than tears anyway."
Although best known as a singer and performer, Patti Smith considers
herself first a poet and writer. As a child, she was inspired by
Louisa May Alcott. Robert Louis Stevenson's The Child's Garden of
Verses and the Psalms deeply affected her. William Burroughs, Arthur
Rimbaud and Federico Garcia Lorca were other literary influences. She
credits the French Surrealist painters, the sculptor Constantin
Brancusi and the French actor Jeanne Moreau with shaping her
sensibilities. The language of the Old Testament, The Tibetan Book of
the Dead, and other spiritual scriptures captivated her.
As a child Smith had the mark of an artist, if being an outsider is a
requisite for that calling. She was born in Chicago but grew up in
Pitman, New Jersey, a small industrial town not far from Philadelphia.
Her father was an intellectual and factory worker, tap dancer and
former track star. Her mother was a "talented waitress." At the age of
seven, Smith was forced to wear an eye patch as the result of scarlet
fever and tuberculosis. Scrawny, self-conscious, shy, patched, she
thought of herself as "creepy looking," as did the other kids. She was
a social outsider who learned to play a wicked game of pool.
She developed a vivid internal fantasy life fed by the Bible, UFO
magazines, and the elves and fairies in Yeats' poems. She recorded her
dreams and visions in a small notebook that she carried as
automatically as other girls carried a doll. At sixteen, she worked in
a factory before entering Glasboro State Teachers College on a
scholarship. She found college too much a strict container and fled by
bus to Manhattan, where she worked in a book store.
There she lived in the Chelsea Hotel, that infamous den of artists, in
1968 when Burroughs, Joplin, Slick, Hendrix, Reed and many of Warhol's
"Factory" crowd were in residence. She quickly became one of them.
Her first major book of poems, Seventh Heaven, was published in 1971.
By 1973 she had become a punk literary cult figure and a year later
formed her band, the Patti Smith Group. Their 1976 album "Horses" was
hailed by England's New Musical Express as "better than the first
Beatles' or Stones' albums, better than Dylan's first and as good as
The Doors and The Who and the Velvet Underground."
In the song "Rock-and-Roll Nigger," the refrain, "Outside of society
is where I want to be," staked out Smith territory.
"I had contempt for society when I was younger," Smith said,
reflecting on those early artistic years. "That's why I wanted to be
outside society, although it is not as true now. If I want to be
outside society it's merely because that's where I'm the most
comfortable and can do the most good. I'm not a social animal. I've
always felt estranged from people, but that's not putting myself above
them. I was much more serious about it when I was younger. Now I have
a lot more sense of humor about it."
The artistic condition is a mixed blessing for Patti Smith. "It is
like a gift and a plague," she said. "I experience an inner beauty and
clarity. Then it gets pulled, like a rug from beneath my feet. It's
like God talks to me and then stops talking. At a certain level, I
definitely feel I am a mouthpiece.
"The pursuit of poetry or, for lack of a better term, a worthy piece
of work, is like being on a crusade, on a mission. When I feel in my
heart that I've attained it, it almost feels like I've been knighted
by God, anointed in some way. This is, of course, followed by complete
self-doubt.
"In my creative process I build walls in order to tear them down. In
the process of tearing them down, I'm building up another piece of
work. The work goes out to the people and the artist is left
empty-handed. In that, the work is sometimes secondary. The process
can be considered ennobling only after the work is done. During the
process it is just hard work."
Smith described her cycle of creating as a "wrenching, exquisite
process. It's almost like the artist becomes a wriggling caterpillar
over and over and over, then evolves into a butterfly over and over
again. To feel that moment of emerging, to feel that beautiful moment,
the artist has to go back to the wriggling, sort of disgusting state
again.
"A true artist goes out and returns. Rimbaud talks of the derangement
of the senses and of the return. The idea is that an artist doesn't
explode his or her mind. You spin out as far as you can, but you do
return. You must return and articulate where you've been, or you're
not an artist. Without that sense of responsibility, you are a person
tripping out. An artist is, by nature of the process, going to keep
pushing to go further. But at the same time they must stay in control
or run the risk of losing contact with the work."
The 14-minute song "Radio Ethiopia" (1977) is an example of how Smith
goes out and returns with the goods to create something new. The song
has been described as a total insurrection against structure, but
Smith disagrees.
"The piece was improvised but it was structured," she explained. "It
began as a rock song, opened up into chaos, and came back with beauty.
We performed that piece with the same concentration and desire to go
out and return as Coltrane's band explored new space and returned.
Coltrane was a great guiding force for me. I studied him and had my
band study him."
The song was inspired by Rimbaud's last letter to his sister written
the day before he died. He was in the French port of Marseilles
desperate to return to Abyssinia (Ethiopia), where he had lived in the
southern town of Harare. He beseeched his sister to find stretcher
bearers to get him onto a freighter leaving for the Horn of Africa.
Yet he knew he would never see Abyssinia again.
"He wrote in that note, 'I am unable to do what I must do. The first
dog on the street can tell you that'," quoted Smith. "The song was
exploring Rimbaud's state of mind at that moment when he experienced
perhaps the last bit of excitement in his life-the hope of returning
to Abyssinia-while realizing that he wasn't going anywhere except
where God was going to take him."
As part of the continuous reexamination of her art, the ancient artist
Smith continually balances herself with the youthful artist Smith. In
the introduction to Early Works, a reprint of her work from the
1970's, she wrote, "In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In
life may you proceed with balance and stealth." The introduction was
meant as a warning sticker, without being an apology, for her
romanticizing of sex and drugs in those "early works" of the 1970's.
"Early Works had its own code but not necessarily a moral code,
especially in regard to sex," Smith said. "The work in the seventies
was done in a completely different climate than that of today. We were
exploring what we perceived as new terrain without giving thought that
those coming behind us might get hurt by following our lead.
"I feel a certain responsibility to put a balance to what we did then.
Robert and I talked about that before he died. He said that, in all
good conscience, he'd have to think about doing the same kind of work
as he did earlier, given the impact of AIDS. One has to be careful how
you impart to a new generation the lessons you've learned."
Smith admitted that when she was younger, she was very snobbish about
the artist, the monk, the priest. "To me, all beauty and honor was
reserved for them. As I've gone through life-had children of my own,
seen the sacrifices that the so-called 'common man' makes every
day-I've had a very different take on ordinary courage. I no longer
feel that I am more blessed or have a more honorable position than,
say, a person who spends his or her life in a hospice taking care of
the dying."
Smith is now slowly returning to writing after an 18-month period
during which she could neither write nor pray. "I think a lot of that
was just weariness," she explained. "When I was younger, I would have
been quite horrified to go a whole year without writing. I would have
thought that it was over, that my muse had flown, that God no longer
talked to me, that I had suddenly become ordinary. But I've learned to
accept such gaps. They're very humbling. I have to sit very quietly
and wait. Until I feel fully entered again, I won't be doing the vast
bodies of work that I did in the 1980's."
Smith, who was raised as a Jehovah's Witness, learned to pray from her
mother. "That opened for me a whole new world. The idea that there was
a higher aspect that I could pray to seemed expansive." She tries not
to overwork prayer; when she does pray, she asks for abstract things,
like strength to cope, for peace, and, occasionally, for illumination.
"I try not to petition the higher power any more," she said with a
smile. "When I do, I don't ask for miracles. When Robert was dying, I
prayed that he would be able to face death stoically. I didn't ask
that he be spared or even not suffer physically. Just that he would be
able to handle what was dealt to him in his last days."
She once prayed for Tibet to be in the news. She was 12 years old and
had been given a school assignment to report on a country throughout
the year. She chose Tibet and prayed that the country would become
newsworthy. China invaded Tibet.
"I felt tremendously guilty," she recalled. "I felt that somehow my
prayers had interfered with Tibetan history. I worried about the Dalai
Lama. It was rumored that his family had been killed by the Chinese. I
was quite relieved when he reached India safely. I vowed to always say
prayers for his safe-keeping, which I have done."
Smith met the Dalai Lama in September, 1995, at the World Peace
Conference in Berlin. "I learned quite a bit from that man," she told
me. "He had to be constantly putting things in balance, constantly
adjusting. He would stand in front of a large body of people and
project and magnify his joys and hopes so that all those people would
be smiling. He was able to make each person feel radiant. But he had
to protect himself and do what he must do."
Smith's concept of the Tibetan culture was that the people's prime
mandate was to pray for the planet, for mankind, and for the
perpetuation of life.
"The idea that they seemed to pray continuously, that there were
prayer flags, prayers written on rocks, along mountain sides, and
prayer wheels everywhere-it seemed to me that the Tibetan people's
whole life was directed by prayer. I thought that was really
beautiful. It makes me feel quite protected," she said.
In 1994, she wrote this poem for the Dalai Lama:

a small entreaty

May I be nothing
but the peeling of a lotus
papering the distance
for You underfoot
one lone skin
to lift and fashion
as a cap to cradle
Your bowing head
an ear to hear
the great horn
a slipper to mount
the temple step
one lone skin
baring this wish
May Your hands be full
of nothing
May your toys
scatter the sky
tiny yellow bundles bursting like stars
like smiles
and the laughter
of a bell

To order this copy of the Shambhala Sun, click here.


.............................
ARCHIVE SEARCH RESULT [Death and the Rebirth of Patti Smith/Foehr/ 
Shambhala]:

To: babel-list
Subject: Release Day!
From: Michael Solomon <michael.solomon>
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 1996 15:23:20 -0700
Organization: The Chronicle of Higher Education
Reply-To: babel-list
Sender: owner-babel-list

------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
--------

I am the new and very excited owner of Masters #1849 -- I played the
Greatest Hits disc at lunch and it sounded great.  If only Land had been
included...

I must also agree that I am bewitched by Summer Cannibals -- it's alot
different than I expected based on the discussion on the list.  A very
pleasant surprise.

The Chicago Tribune ran a very nice article on Patti in Monday's  
edition.
I think they have a web site for those interested in hunting it down.

And for those searching for The Shambhala Sun and its very nice (but
sometimes inaccurate) covery story of Patti, I was in a Borders Books
yesterday and they had tons of them.  The photos in the issue are quite
nice.

And speaking of photos, how about that brilliant redesign of the Radio
Ethiopia cover photo?  I love it.

Enjoy the exciting day!  Hope to meet some of you on Friday.

-- Michael