Patti Smith on Patti Smith by Aidan Levy

Author:Aidan Levy
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2021-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

PATTI SMITH RETURNS TO GROUND ZERO

Fred Mills | January 30, 1998 | Goldmine

If all of Patti Smith’s records are remembrances, as she has said, sometimes the albums—and her interviews about them—become remembrances for the lost loved ones of the listener. Such was the case when Fred Mills called Smith on the phone in 1997 for a cover story in Goldmine.

“That’s one of my favorite interviews I ever did,” Mills told me. “At the time of the interview, in the fall of ’97, I had moved for a few months into my mom’s house after her death in order to clean it out and prepare it for sale. I told Patti a story about how the final time I was able to spend extended quality time with my mom before she died was during a beach vacation when I was also obsessing over Gone Again and working on a review of it—and how I will always associate that album with Mom. Patti genuinely seemed moved by the story, and somehow Patti became, at that moment, a shoulder I could lean on, while surrounded by memories of my mother in her house.”

Mills was a longtime fan. He first met Smith on January 21, 1977, when he snuck backstage the night the Patti Smith Group played Memorial Hall at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The show constituted a “turning point in my musical consciousness,” Mills tells her here. It was a high-water mark for the band as well.

Mills was struck by the group’s dynamism on stage in 1977, and as a testament to the Patti Smith Group as a collective, he interviewed Lenny Kaye and Jay Dee Daugherty alongside Smith for the ’98 article, though only the discussion with Smith is included here. They touched on the group’s first single, “Piss Factory”—an “experiment to see if that intensity we were generating live could be transferred to a disc,” Kaye said—in addition to the influence of Albert Ayler, the missing Horses masters, and the serendipity that brought the group together at a specific time and place. The result gives a compelling portrait of an iconic group at the outset of an unlikely second act. —Ed.

The one-of-a-kind rock poet and her longtime sidemen tell their story in their own words

Leave it to one of Patti Smith’s musical progeny to sum up perfectly the punk doyenne’s impact.

“Patti Smith was, and is, pure experience,” wrote Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore, in a ’96 article for Britain’s Vox. “Her reign during the ’70s as a street-hot rock ’n’ roll messiah seemed to exist from a void, no past, no future,” continued Moore, then concluding with severe certainty, “The strongest and most original force in the music’s history had been a woman.”

Not only original and influential—just ask Michael Stipe, Bono, Courtney Love or P.J. Harvey—but remarkably consistent of vision over the years. Consider:

In 1978, Smith told Rolling Stone, “Solidarity is not a myth, not some pathetic dream. The important thing [is to] wake up kids and inspire them to action.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.