The artist Patti Smith called a musical prophet: “Ambition to create a new language through music”
Alongside being a musician, a poet, a writer and an all-round idol, Patti Smith is a historian.
Having been there through it all, witnessing the New York scene from her post inside the beast, she was there when some of the most important moments in culture were going down, brushing shoulders with the most important characters.
In any interview or in her memoirs, Patti Smith makes it clear that she truly sees this as a vital cornerstone of her work. “Many would not make it,” she wrote in Just Kids, reflecting on her crowd in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. “I would rather have seen them all succeed, catch the brass ring. As it turned out, it was I who got one of the best horses,” she continued, and from that horse, she’s made it her mission to tell their stories and celebrate their work.
Robert Maplethorpe, Fred Smith, Allen Ginsberg, Lou Reed, Sam Shepherd, Tom Verlaine – the list goes on. Smith feels like the custodian of so many lives and legacies as she routines talks about them. But amongst them, as one of the names she brings up most in any discussion about the musical world she got to witness, there is always Jimi Hendrix.
On the stairs outside the new Electric Lady Studios, a young Patti Smith was too scared to go in. That’s when Hendrix appeared. “When I told him I was too chicken to go in, he laughed softly and said that contrary to what people might think, he was shy and parties made him nervous,” she recalled, remembering how they spoke for a while about music and Hendrix’s dream to host a second Woodstock.
But Hendrix was far more than just a man Smith met during her youth. Before that, he appeared to her as a kind of god. “He was everything you would want in your rock and roll star. He was beautiful, intelligent, hungry,” she said once, as she had always been a fan, seeing him at the epitome of a star.
After his death, she truly never stopped grieving the loss of what the world would now be missing out on. “He was going to evolve in magnificent places,” she said, “His ambition to create a new language through music and to work with all kinds of musicians from all over the world, and just develop a language of peace, as he called it.”
The loss of Hendrix darkened the world, and she believes that because, to her, Hendrix wasn’t just a good artist or even just a talented man. He seemed like a figure sent from above, put here for a purpose.
“I don’t know what Hendrix was — he was like some prophet madman,” she said to Hit Parader. It was as if his fade was foretold.
“He was like a rock and roll Artaud, because he had some kind of demon within him and he was trying to express it, or find a forum for it, but it just swallowed him up like it did to Artaud,” she said, likening him to the French artist, as if Hendrix was destined to arrive, change everything and then ultimately be sacrificed to the wild world of art.
