The ultimate rock star, according to Patti Smith: “A universal language”
As the ultimate overseer of the scene, there’s no one more qualified than Patti Smith to guide you through the rhythmic pulse of New York’s past. Surrounded by an expansive circle of artists, actors, musicians, and misfits, each played a pivotal role in shaping the transcendent figure she would become. Some of them would go on to become household names, while others burned brightly but far too briefly—yet all left their mark on the city’s artistic tapestry.
Of course, the calibre of the esteemed residents of the Chelsea Hotel and its surrounding areas needs no dispelling – after all, it is perhaps the most famous and prolific collaborative creative environment that has ever existed – but there was one among them who took that to a whole new stratospheric league. Smith was lucky enough to be in the orbit of this beacon and also be trusted with a window to his electric soul, and it’s evidently a moment that has stayed with her forever.
Naturally, she could be referring to no one else in this context apart from Jimi Hendrix, whose other-worldly talent could instantly be felt the second he entered a room. Smith recalled the seminal, commanding power of this in a 2023 interview where she reflected back on half a century’s worth of greatness in the walls of the guitar virtuoso’s Electric Lady studios.
She said: “I was there. I was 22, 23 years old when Jimi Hendrix opened that studio. I mean, he came out the studio, and I was like, in the way, because I didn’t have the nerve to go in.”
But clearly sensing a sonic gift in her as much as she did him, she explained what Hendrix did next by adding: “‘He told me he wanted to travel the world, and get musicians from all over the world, and sit in a field for like a month, playing. Till they churned like butter, and they found one language.”
Smith continued: “He said: ‘You know what that language is?’ and I said, ‘What?’ and he said, ‘The universal language of peace, you dig?’” In many ways, it was this exact visionary and all-seeing approach to their space in the world that put artists like Hendrix a league above the rest, emanating their colossal status not through grand physical gestures but from the sentiments that coursed through their beings.
In turn, the effects of the environment of the Chelsea Hotel as well as those who populated it had as much of a creative influence on Smith as her own ideas. With the streets of the city that never sleeps as their endless muse, the possibilities were limitless when it came to the bounds of what they could produce – making New York’s finest artistic group of the time one of the most transcendental in all of history.
Between the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin as her everyday neighbours, it’s no surprise that Patti Smith has come to view the years of her youth that she spent alongside them as single-handedly the most crucial of her life. These were the moments in which the most forceful reckonings in all of rock first started treading the boards, and for that reason, they’re the all-time greats.
