How did Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen first cross paths?
In a lot of ways, Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen feel like complete polar opposites. Yes, ‘The Boss’ is revered for his lyricism, but his music is known for being accessible; it’s music for the people. On the other hand, Smith’s punk-poetry, or poetic punk, has always been much more niche. Smith is rougher, darker, and more fueled by high art, while big choruses and rock and roll fuel Springsteen. But still, the two are inseparably connected through their co-written hit, ‘Because The Night’.
The track was a rare and beautiful happening, an actual moment of fate. The story goes thus: Springsteen had a song, or the start of a song, and he couldn’t finish it. On June 1st, 1977, he was in the studio, growing frustrated with it and unable to find the right words. So, he made a tape that was merely the melody with some scraps of lyrics, but largely just mumbling.
Jimmy Iovine was the engineer, but his mind was elsewhere, stuck on a project he was working on with Smith; he was producing Easter, her third album. Despite the two artists being worlds away in terms of sound, Iovine had an idea. He wanted to get the mumbling tape of Springsteen’s scrappy demo to Smith and see what she might do with it.
“I told Bruce I desperately wanted a hit with Patti, that she deserved one. He agreed. As he had no immediate plans to put ‘Because the Night’ on an album, I said, ‘Why not give it to Patti?’” Iovine recalled of the moment he launched the suggestion. Springsteen, knowing what a hit could do for both Smith and Iovine, but also somewhat doubting that they’d be able to finish the song he was struggling so greatly with, said, “If she can do it, she can have it”. And as we know, she could definitely do it.
Smith made the track her own. It still has a big booming Springsteen chorus that made the song a global anthem, but the verses have all the marks of her creative mind as they’re richly poetic and full of imagery. Inspired by her then long-distance love with Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, who would soon be her husband, she wrote a “yearning, burning” ode to desperate desire, and Springsteen loved it.
And so, together, they had a hit. Springsteen helped Smith earn the biggest moment of her career up to that point, but that wasn’t their first encounter.
So, when did Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen meet?
While ‘Because The Night’ connected and helped bond them, it wasn’t their first time crossing paths. That came years prior, in 1975, at The Bottom Line, a beloved Greenwich Village venue for the scene.
Springsteen was an outsider to New York’s new punk scene, but he was keen to check it out. So, after doing a live radio broadcast for the venue, he went along to watch another, Patti Smith’s. But given his outsider status, Smith didn’t really care. “He’s never really entered my consciousness,” she said, continuing, “That night at the Bottom Line, all anyone was whispering was that Bruce Springsteen was there. So what? If John Lennon was there, I might have a heart attack.”
There were a few run-ins like this, given that New York really is a small village of a city and that both were working and playing music in the same town. But still, Smith was never all that fussed with Springsteen. He simply wasn’t of her world, until he was, and that collaboration formed a life-long friendship between the two.
