The one band that Patti Smith studied
Long before Patti Smith became a rock star, she was moving almost strategically, watching bands, studying their movements, and obsessing over their work, so when she finally launched, she was a tapestry of their influence.
“I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one,” Smith wrote in her memoir Just Kids. From a young age, the sense that she wanted to be in the league of the artists was alight; she just always thought it would be as a writer, until she witnessed musicians.
“I had a strange reaction watching Jim Morrison,” she said as The Doors were a formative moment leading to her realisation that maybe it was rock calling to her. “I felt, watching Jim Morrison, that I could do that,” she said, adding how she felt a strange sense of confidence that she could realise her potential akin to the frontman, but no proof as such of the possibility, “yet I harboured the conceit”.
It opened a door, and as Smith moved deeper into the New York art scene, witnessing more bands in action, the sense that she could be part of that world kept growing as she kept studying it, and then she witnessed another breakthrough: The Velvet Underground. “I was so taken with their music,” she said to Billboard. She caught them in a golden moment in the summer of 1970 at Max’s Kansas City, where the band had a kind of unofficial residency or acted as the house band for the happening venue and hangout.
Instantly, she was obsessed with Lou Reed as he seemed to embody exactly the type of rocker she was beginning to dream about being, a combination of poetry and music. “I made it my business to study him,” she said as he began a sort of blueprint, “His process completely spoke to me, the process of merging poetry with these surf rhythms, this pulsing loop. You could get into a trance listening to 12 minutes of `Sister Ray’.”
It’s easy to see the impact of Reed in Smith’s own work, especially on her debut. A song like ‘Birdland’ with its swelling poetic improvisation undeniably stems from the type of music the former and his band were making back at the start, with their own lengthy, meandering tracks.
Without those, and the lessons Reed’s work gave her, maybe she might never have figured out her own recipe for success. Luckily, she got some extra lessons as the two ended up becoming friends. Speaking after his death, Smith paid a wonderful tribute, noting, “So many of us have benefited from the work he has done… We all owe him a debt. Most of us that owe a debt are not very happy to own up to it. Sometimes you like to imagine that you did everything on your own. But I think with Lou that everyone will stand in line to say thank you, in their own way.”
