A rock love story: How romance and an intense creative spell made Patti Smith quit playing live
When you’ve had a half-decade as good as the one Patti Smith had at the back end of the 1970s, you would think that nothing would be able to get in the way of her ascent.
Releasing four albums between 1975 and 1979 with her group, and going from playing dank basements in New York clubs to performing in stadiums around the world, things seemed to be on the up for her, and that was seemingly the only way she could go. Of course, her debut album, Horses, remains perhaps her finest achievement, but that shouldn’t get in the way of praise for Radio Ethiopia, Easter or Wave, as all of them demonstrated different sides to a truly unique artist.
With a bold and brash display of female empowerment in the form of punk poetry, nothing else that came before Smith had really explored the same ground, and she paved the way for so much in the years after this quartet of influential records.
However, this intense spell of rigorous work meant that something would surely have to give eventually, and while it was partly down to exhaustion from non-stop writing, recording and touring, something else happened in Smith’s life that would alter her perception of what was most important to her. While her music and creative pursuits had been everything to her over the last decade, a seismic shift was about to take place, and she’d end up putting a hold on touring as a result.
She would meet MC5 guitarist Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith in 1979 and find her world turning on its head, discovering not only someone she felt she couldn’t be separated from, but also someone who she saw as her muse. Reluctant to continue touring with this newfound love in the air, she found herself retiring from the public eye for a period of time, which she revealed her full reasons for to the New York Times in 1996.
“Basically, I had fallen in love with Fred and I didn’t like being parted from him,” Smith claimed. “When I had the band and we started performing, I really gave everything to it. I gave my time, my energy, my love. But my feelings for Fred were so strong that when I was on tour and away from him, it didn’t mean anything, and I felt extremely false being on stage.”
This would mark a nine-year absence from recording until 1988’s Dream of Life, and it would take the encouragement of Michael Stipe and Allen Ginsberg to get her back on stage in the 1990s after over a decade away.
While this burning desire to spend more time around someone who completed her was hard to ignore, Smith also acknowledged that over the course of those four albums with the Patti Smith Group, they’d been far more successful than she could have ever imagined. “I also felt that as a band we had accomplished our mission,” she explained.
Concluding, “I had said everything that I could say at that point. We did what we set out to do. There was a new guard; rock and roll wasn’t going to die. I felt like it was a discreet time to leave. I never regretted that, ever, not for a moment.”
