The album Patti Smith was convinced would be her last: “We had accomplished our mission”
By 1979, Patti Smith had ridden the wave of rock and roll and, in the eyes of many, had reached the ultimate peak. Then she decided to give it all up.
Many would have undoubtedly been perplexed by the decision. It wasn’t really a case of quitting while she was ahead, either, given that she had worked for so long to reach this point, putting in years of graft around every music club and scene known to man in order to finally start making some headway. In all honesty, it seemed stupid to turn your back on the dream you had pined so hard for, in the very second that you managed to achieve it.
But by that moment in the late 1970s, Smith was awestruck and in love, and suddenly her priorities had changed into a much wider scope of the world, rather than the narrow lens of commercial success. Despite the fact that she and her band, the Patti Smith Group, were selling out stadiums and shifting thousands upon thousands of albums, those pillars of fame crumbled as she realised that in the grand scheme of the rest of her life, this was a fleeting time that meant very little.
As such, there was no question in her mind that it was high time that her music and career took a back seat in order to focus on the main orbit of her life: Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith. Of course, no dutiful artist worth their salt would just leave their fellow bandmates high and dry so they can go and chase the tail of their pursuits. Smith made sure her group went out with a bang on their final album, mainly because she thought it would be the last she would ever make.
Subsequently, by creating Wave and touring it all over the world, she was waving her greatest goodbye while knowing a quieter life beckoned. “Basically, I had fallen in love with Fred and I didn’t like being parted from him,” she later admitted, “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.”
Performing and its mental toll was one challenge, but it was clear Smith simultaneously felt that her band had reached the end of the road. “I also felt that as a band we had accomplished our mission,” she continued, “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.”
We all know that distance makes the heart grow fonder, and Smith returned just nine years later with her own solo record, Dream of Life. Even romance cannot ultimately overtake the lure of acclaim in the heart of a true musician. As such, although her final farewell turned into more of a personal hiatus, she was still overseeing the closing of a chapter. The Patti Smith Group was no more, and it was time to take on the rest of her life.
