The moment Patti Smith felt she became too popular: “Time to reassess myself as a human”
While punk adopted a hard line against the classic rock of the day, in rhetoric at least, some simply sought to save it from its own lofty drift to bloviating excess. One such faithful was New Jersey vagabond and poet Patti Smith.
Harbouring a deep and spiritual relationship with the power of popular music and shaped by the counterculture that dominated the charts as the 1960s passed into the ’70s, the ‘year zero’ sentiments weren’t shared by Smith, who was rather eager to slap her beloved rock out of its complacent coma and inject some much-needed blood and teeth into the stadium cadavers long unmoored from what made rock and roll so exciting.
Not content with merely waiting for what would be labelled punk, Smith decided to hurry on rock’s kick up the arse. Drawn to the cohort of musical misfits playing Manhattan’s CBGB in the mid-1970s, a corraling of former rock journalist Lenny Kaye on guitar, Richard Sohl on piano, Jay Daugherty on drums and Ivan Král on bass formed the Patti Smith Group, a vehicle for their enigmatic singer to flex her iconoclastic yet devout lyricism about music, art, society’s fringes, and life’s intuitive beckons. It all swirled together with divine frisson on their 1975 debut Horses, produced by former Velvet Underground member John Cale and helped usher in the punk movement.
As punk ran apace, PSG soon found themselves touring across the country and into Europe. A jump into a rawer slice of garage would colour 1976’s Radio Ethiopia, followed by detours into more accessible ventures of pop-rock with follow-ups Easter and Wave, the latter the last to feature the PSG billing. While success surprisingly came smoothly enough to Smith, the seeds of a seismic rethink of her career and life trajectory were sown in January 1977, falling 15 feet from a high stage in Florida’s Curtis Hixon Convention Hall and forcing a period of rest and minor rehabilitation.
Playing their last show as PSG in 1979 at Italy’s Stadio Comunale, two factors forced Smith to reassess where her band was heading and how her artistry may be affected. Firstly, she fell in love with MC5 guitarist Fred Smith, marrying and raising two children in Detroit in the 1980s. Yet, romance also coincided with an inner rejection of growing stale.
While a commercial path was assured, Smith’s anxieties that she too could end up as stodgy as the rock dinosaurs that inspired her rock insurrection in New York compelled her to call it quits and live a life of motherhood and domesticity until the moment was ripe to jump back into music.
“We were on the edge of success, particularly in Europe,” Smith recalled to 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.”
A year after the birth of their second child Jesse, Smith released Dream of Life, before returning to the stage led by the encouragement from REM‘s Michael Stipe, tentatively playing odd shows in the early 1990s and suddenly finding herself sharing an elder kinship with the grunge crowd and American alternative scene indebted to her pioneering punk poetry.
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