The Doors gig that changed Patti Smith’s life: “The signs that mock me as I go”
One of the most beautiful and moving elements of Patti Smith’s story is the normality of it. Sure, she was in New York during a historic moment. Sure, she got to live at the Chelsea Hotel around all those other artists. But her origins were simple. She was a normal girl from a normal family. She was shy and secretly hopeful. And when it came to her rockstar dreams, she was like so many others, holding them in private, waiting for the confidence.
That’s part of why so many feel such a kinship with her. In Just Kids, Smith writes about this feeling: “I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.” Inspired by characters like Jo March in Little Women, Smith felt the deeply relatable feeling of wanting something more, wanting to be great, and worrying that maybe she didn’t know how to make that happen or how it even would happen for someone like her, living in New Jersey with no in to the art world.
Her decision to run off to New York and her first months there were a bold mission for that confidence. As fate stepped in to get her there, allowing her to not only stumble across the funds for her bus ticket but then also stumble across Robert Maplethorpe, the artist she’d then build a life with, who would be her gateway to it all, it seemed like things were working in her favour.
Slowly, the city emboldened her. Maplethorpe’s encouragement made her trust more and more that she was an artist. “I dreaded not being called,” she wrote before. But as she settled into this new work, the doubt began to fade. But fading is slow and quiet. Sometimes there needs to be a moment of realisation. Hers came at a gig as she watched The Doors, though she wouldn’t really notice it for a while.
As a gift, Maplethorpe saved to get Smith a ticket to see Jim Morrison and his band play in New York, knowing her obsession with the group. Or, more so, knowing her obsession with frontmen like him; Morrison, Jagger, Hendrix. She was always enamoured by rockstars but then that night, in front of one, she felt different.
“I had a strange reaction watching Jim Morrison,” she wrote, “Everyone around me seemed transfixed, but I observed his every move in a state of cold hyperawareness.” Usually one to fall into it too, Smith stood outside of it all that night, witnessing the now mythologised way Morrison could captivate a crowd. Instead, the feeling had changed. She no longer seemed to feel like a fan; she just wanted to know how he did it.
“I felt, watching Jim Morrison, that I could do that,” she said, the first time in Just Kids that she ever expresses any interest in being the music maker herself. Staunchly a poet up until this point, it’s the first clue of what’s to come, and the first moment she dared to dream it. “I can’t say why I thought this,” she added, “I had nothing in my experience to make me think that would ever be possible, yet I harboured the conceit.”
After a quote found her, popping into her mind after the show. Smith recalled a line written by James Joyce: “The signs that mock me as I go.” Morrison and this night would be one of those signs as Smith watched, silently believing that she could do the same thing.
They would come back again and again through other run-ins with other stars, other figures who would suggest music to her, other fateful moments that put her alongside rockers, other opportunities that aligned her with music. Each time, it was like these signs looked at her and laughed at her foolish ignorance until the moment came where she, the Patti Smith Group launched and all the stars in their long-queued up alignment made sense.
