The song Patti Smith wanted played at her wedding: “I married my rebel”
Patti Smith is known as the Godmother of Punk, but under the tough exterior of her music, there is a soft side. Smith is a romantic in the grandest sense, a student of classic poetry, an adventurer who ran off to Paris whenever she could during her youth, and a devotional lover and mother. Despite her countercultural presence, her views on love have always been traditional, celebrating the union of two people. So her taste in love songs is traditional too.
In her own discography, Smith wrote several love songs for the various men in her life. But no one received tracks as devotional and romantic as Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, her husband and creative partner. When Bruce Springsteen struggled to find the words for ‘Because The Night’, Smith had no problem as she yearned for her partner while he was away on tour. She wrote ‘Frederick’ for him, singing “Frederick, you’re the one” to the man she would later marry in 1980.
Little is known about the Smiths’ marriage, as from the moment they said “I do”, they settled into a private life. They moved from New York to Michigan and had their first child, Jackson, in 1982 and their daughter, Jesse, in 1987. For a decade, Patti Smith essentially retired from public life to indulge in the beauty of her home life as a wife and a mother. But still, even in her private life, she wrote daily, and with her husband, they crafted some of her best work.
It was only after Fred Smith’s tragically young death that Smith came back to the public sphere, encouraged by her oldest friends like Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg, to continue working, get back on the road and rejoin her musical peers on the world’s stage.
But ever since, the spirit of her husband has played a major role in each and every show as the musician plays their songs and dedicates tracks to his memory, like her recent romantic covers of Lana Del Rey’s ‘Summertime Sadness’ which she sends up to him.
It’s clear that she still holds space and love for him in everything she does. In her memoir, The M Train, she said that her husband “just kept entering”. Even in a playlist built for Shortlist, his memory was right there when she considered her all-time favourite wedding song, hearing every word of love and romance through the eyes of their union.
She admitted that at their real-life wedding, their music choices were dramatic. She said, “I was thinking about that and I could say something more esoteric…at my wedding we played very classical things like the music to Tristan and Isolde”. But in the years since, there is a different song that reminds her of her marriage.
She continued: “‘Today I Met The Boy I’m Gonna Marry’ is such a great song – I think Darlene Love sings it…[sings]…it’s such a nice little song.”
The story in the lyrics seems to suit as Smith explained: “When I think about it, those are the kind of songs…all those Darlene Love songs or a song like ‘He’s a Rebel’. Because for me, when I think of my husband, when he was young, when we first met, that song suited him.”
Thinking about her husband, the rockstar, she said romantically, “He’s a rebel – and I would just as much like to hear that at my wedding because I married my rebel.”
