Patti Smith’s insane battle to recruit a band in the 1970s: “They’d come in, see it was with a girl, and just leave”
One of Patti Smith‘s most eye-opening moments was when Bob Dylan came to see her show in 1975. Getting to perform in front of someone who “didn’t really go to see anyone” opened up a world of two kindred spirits to come together, arrogance merely a joint personality trait during conversations about poetry and the disconnect from a life in the spotlight.
But being enigmatic wasn’t the only game Smith played, nor was it the only thing that drew Dylan to her, for that matter. Falling into the flames of New York’s CBGB, Smith didn’t wait around for something to happen; she created the moment, building the Patti Smith Group with others who shared a similar fervour in the face of contention, sparking a movement she would forever be defined by, for better or worse.
Around this time, Smith’s job wasn’t an easy one. It was one she embraced with unwavering angst, yes, but only because she knew art was the ultimate disruptor, like revelation hinged on the outskirts of societal disorder, in the shadows waiting to be brought into the light in all its disarrayed ugliness. There’s a reason many women of the era claim there to have been a lack of female idols at the time, and it’s because most of them were scrutinised into the abyss, cast aside before they’d even taken the first step leading up to the stage.
But Smith already knew this, too. She didn’t gain popularity only to be faced with the hard truths of a sexist industry; she knew what it looked like every step of the way, and worked harder to get people to listen, her motivation already strong and sturdy from countless unrelenting experiences she’d had along the way. It was hard growing up, when you’d been taught to be so fundamentally different, but it wasn’t to be a block so much as a learning curve about an industry distraught by its fears and trivialities.
“When I grew up in the early ’60s, girls were supposed to be mothers, secretaries, maybe hairdressers,” she explained to The Guardian. “Even in the early 1970s, when I started playing rock and roll, there weren’t a lot of girls taking an aggressive stance, playing feedback, you know. I had trouble recruiting guitarists to play with me. They’d come in, see it was with a girl, and just leave.”
Banding together Lenny Kaye, Richard Sohl, Jay Daugherty and Ivan Král, the Patti Smith Group soared unapologetically from the moment their Horses debut landed, showing what a female-fronted band could and should be when everything they existed within pushed the opposite. It’s an unimaginable feat, being able to recruit an entire band that good as a woman in the ’70s without at least the backing of another well-established male musician. But one push soon bled into a fully fledged tour, the chase looking to capture the bullish nature of a vision of pure rebellion.
But it also meant facing a new beast entirely: popularity. Like Dylan and any other aloof figure Smith sought comfort in, part of the game also meant reckoning with the harsh odours of commercialism, and the moment things started to enter that pesky territory, Smith had to reassess. Suddenly, it wasn’t just about being herself to the nth degree, it was about figuring out what that meant when others actually enjoyed it and wanted to join in, when suddenly she was the torchbearer for an unsuspecting subculture longing to break free.
“We were on the edge of success, particularly in Europe,” Smith told The Australian in 1997. “I could smell it. We were getting into the area where people accept anything you do, and it was time to reassess myself as a human being and an artist.” But Smith’s foray into unknown arenas wound up being merely a dismissed add-on, particularly in the years that followed, when she made it clear she never lost sight of what it meant to stand tall to begin with.
