How Bob Dylan shaped Patti Smith into punk’s poet laureate
“Are there any poets around here?” Bob Dylan called out as he wandered backstage at The Bitter End club in New York, where a young Patti Smith had just played an early show. “I hate poetry!” she retorted, like a teenager trying to be cold or coy with a love interest they’re desperately trying to impress. They say never meet your idols, and in that moment, Smith probably agreed.
That wasn’t even the last time that seeing Dylan had that effect on Smith. In the Rolling Thunder Revue documentary, she recalled getting up on a stage in front of a cast of her icons: Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, and Joan Baez. Under the pressure of their influence, she cracked as she recalled, “Now, I don’t play anything — I don’t [really] play guitar, and I had nothing prepared, so I just went up and took a breath and did what I did. And right in the middle of it I lost the thread of my improvisation – which I found again – and I went, ‘Oh what a mess it is!’”
The same thing happened again in 2016 when she sang a Dylan song after he won the Nobel Prize for literature. Performing a track she’d loved forever and known for years, the supreme weight of desperately wanting to do right by her biggest inspiration got to her. That’s how much she values the freewheeling troubadour.
It’s a strange thing to think about Patti Smith getting starstruck. Her position in music and culture is an almost godlike one, as she’s heralded as a supreme talent with a sharp and enduring vision. The same thing is said about Dylan. By now, the two artists are peers, even friends, but back at the start, Smith’s entire artistry was shaped by the folk leader.
There appear to be three major pillars when it comes to Smith. Her work is built on a solid foundation of inspiration as she spent her early life obsessively reading books, listening to records, and writing ceaselessly. One pillar is poetry, specifically the great French poets like Arthur Rimbaud and later the Beat Generation leaders like Allen Ginsberg. The third pillar would become punk as Smith cemented herself in the CBGB scene and because she was one of its wildest leaders. In the middle of the two, bridging the gap and balancing it all, is Bob Dylan.
Dylan’s influence was there long before Smith even considered becoming a musician. In 1969, she and Sam Shepard wrote a play called Cowboy Mouth, borrowing a line from Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. In 1971, Smith penned a poem called ‘Dylan’s Dog’ after dreaming about her idol. She had always been a fan of his, but it wasn’t until he appeared like a kind of spiritual apparition at one of her shows that she made the link between the music she loved and the words she was beginning to put to an instrumental.
Smith remembers the moment vividly when she first saw Dylan in the crowd at one of her shows. “Somebody told us he was there. My heart was pounding,” she recalled. Horses was out, and the Patti Smith Group was in full swing, but even then, she was still somewhat unsure what it was she was doing, whether she was a poet or a musician. Dylan’s appearance seemed to grant her the answer; she could be both.
After the awkward first meeting, where Smith tried desperately to play it cool and ended up looking like a fool, the pair struck up a friendship as Dylan clearly always saw something special in the punk poet. “I related completely to him. His arrogance, his humour,” she said, but mostly, “his mergence of poetry and performance.”
Dylan’s life-long influence and then his personal seal of approval made Smith realise she was doing exactly the same. She could sing the roaring rock songs and throw herself around the stage, but it would all still be poetry because she wrote it and wanted it to be. Just as Dylan merged the sound and style of country and folk with his own rich lyricism on love, politics and beyond, Smith realised she could do it too. As her own music career rolled on and her friendship with Dylan grew, that central pillar of influence morphed into a kind of career blueprint that helped bring her poetic heart and punk spirit together.
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