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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Icon, me?
PAUL LESTER
LivingScotsman.com
April 7, 2007
AS PATTI SMITH SITS DOWN TO BE interviewed at London's Covent Garden Hotel, the first thing she does is offer an apology - which is not something you come to expect from a bona fide rock icon. She's sorry for keeping her sunglasses on. "I'll leave them on for a while," she says, her voice more girly than you might imagine from a battle-scarred survivor of the 1970s. "I only got in yesterday and didn't get much sleep last night."
Smith, one of the three most important women in rock'n'roll history - the others on my list are Debbie Harry and Janis Joplin - is wearing those hardy rock perennials, black jeans, black boots and white shirt, and looks as thin, wiry and raggedly androgynous as ever. I remark how strange it is that, 33 years after the release of her debut single, Piss Factory, hers is still the definitive rock'n'roll look. "I've never changed," she chuckles. "It's really funny: my daughter always laughs when she's looking at anything archival of mine. She goes, 'Mummy, this picture of you from 1973?' I say, 'What, honey?' She says, 'You're the same person!' I say, 'Well, it's the same outfit.' She can't believe I still dress the same. But that's my look."
Before the November 1975 release of Horses, the album that seemed to light the fuse that caused the punk explosion the next year, Smith published articles in rock magazines like Creem and Rolling Stone to subsidise her as a painter, writer and poet-performer.
She was almost 29 when Horses came out. Suddenly, after years of analysing other rock stars - years of slavish iconography - Smith was an icon herself. Now she was up there on a pedestal with her heroes, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Keith Richards and Jimi Hendrix. The mythologiser became mythologised: the album's front cover featured a stylised black-and-white portrait, courtesy of her close friend Robert Mapplethorpe, of Smith dressed in a man's suit, all scarecrow hair and gaunt face, the epitome of insouciant cross-gender cool. It instantly became one of the most recognisable images in rock'n'roll. KT Tunstall's song Suddenly I See was inspired by it.
Now, three decades later, she's got a new album, Twelve, featuring reinterpretations of a dozen of her favourite songs, including Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones, Within You Without You by The Beatles, Soul Kitchen by The Doors, Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana and, more unexpectedly, Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears. They're songs by artists she loves. And so Smith has gone full circle: from iconographer (to stretch the term just at little) to icon, and back to iconographer again.
"What's an iconographer?" she asks, laughing. Someone, I say, who studies and celebrates icons. "Oh, I'm still an iconographer," says Smith. "I've always been an iconographer. I don't think I qualify for icon status. I was always a big fan, so I never felt - I still don't - like a 19-year-old rock star. By the time I was enjoying a certain amount of popularity I was 29 years old and so had already tasted what it meant to be a devoted fan, a documenter or reviewer of other people's work.
"It's part of what makes life fun," she continues. "Right now I'm in London and while I'm here I want to find the old stomping ground of Coleridge, so I'm always working on somebody - he's my person of choice these days. When I was in Scotland I looked at the Burns archive. I like to go to libraries, look at original manuscripts and visit people's resting places."
Ten days after we meet, Smith is inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, alongside the Ronettes, Grandmaster Flash, R.E.M. and Van Halen. Her iconic status is now official. "The truth is, my kittie-cat vomited on the floor and partially on my coat and the phone rings and it's my lawyer, calling to tell me. And I'm cleaning it up and I'm like, that's life, that's the way of the world - you're getting honoured with this hand and cleaning vomit with the other."
Did she think it was about time? "No. I've been nominated nine times, so obviously they thought quite a lot of me. But really, I never thought I'd be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at all. It was hard to be nominated and not make it because my parents wanted to be a part of it and they were getting old and they didn't live to see it - my mother kept losing weight and buying new clothes. She was still talking about it the day she died. So I know it will mean a great deal to her. But I'm a pretty maverick artist: in America I haven't sold that many records, and there's no guarantee that a person like me is going to be asked to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, so it's an honour. It's an institution. And you have to either ignore an institution or rebel against it. But if you're going to be in it, you might as well be happy."
I ask her if she feels any resistance, since the hall of fame constructs something artificial and constraining - it's a museum in Cleveland, Ohio - around rock'n'roll, which should be untethered and free. "Well, my resistance I'd already logged by protesting the forming of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the first place. I was really opposed to it for exactly the reason you just said, but it does exist, and people that are part of it are mostly very proud. Whether it's Gladys Knight and the Pips or the Velvet Underground, whom I inducted, they're always very proud. It validates decades of work and so I decided to enter into that spirit. I'm happy to accept being part of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame next to people I admire, like Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan. But I wouldn't want an MTV Award - I haven't found any rationale to think that was anything but frivolous and disgusting."
After Horses, Smith made three more albums - Radio Ethiopia (1976), Easter (1978) and Wave (1979) - and then, aged 33, effectively took early retirement, mostly spending the next decade and a half (with the exception of 1988's Dream of Life) as a wife and mother in her home in St Clair Shores, Michigan, taking care of husband Fred "Sonic" Smith, former guitarist with Detroit proto-punks the MC5, and her children, Jesse and Jackson. It was the deaths, in fairly quick succession, of Fred Smith and her brother Todd that led Patti, urged by Michael Stipe, back on the road and back into the studio; there have been four studio albums since her re-emergence in the 1990s.
"I was in the public eye a very short time, and then I took 16 years out. And in those 16 years I worked really hard, raised children, scrubbed floors, studied and lived a completely different life, where I had the same money and laundry and children problems as anybody else. If I'd had a life on the road I don't know that I would have been the same person, because a rock'n'roll life doesn't lend itself to humanistic evolution. It's a very stressful, demanding and self-oriented lifestyle.
"You know," she says, "I never wanted to be a rock'n'roll singer. I wanted to be an artist or a poet - that's what I studied, what I knew, and even now it's hard for me to say I'm a singer. I'm intermittently good as a singer, but I know I'm a good performer. Not a musician. So my self-esteem does not rely on my participation in rock'n'roll. I'm proud to have a connection with the evolution of rock'n'roll, but when I think of myself it's as a worker and writer and mother."
And, of course, iconographer. How did she choose which songs to cover on Twelve? "Some of them were great moments I wanted to be part of, to share with people. I wanted to remind them of the lyrical power of all these artists. Some were newly discovered, like Tears for Fears - I didn't even know that song, but it's such a great line [Everybody Wants to Rule the World], I felt the political resonance of it was important."
Smith says copies have already been sent off. "The Tears for Fears guy [Curt Smith] heard it and he loved it. And I've talked to Jimi [Hendrix]" - she smiles - "and he's happy. The two people I most wanted to please were Bob Dylan and Grace Slick [of Jefferson Airplane]. If they're happy, I'll be really happy. On White Rabbit Grace Slick invented the beyond-gender vocal. I always admired that and although I couldn't do it as good as her I did it anyway, just to salute her. And Bob - because I love him and ... I just hope he likes it, that's all." And Patti Smith, rock icon and terminal fan, laughs once more.
• Twelve is released on 16 April on Columbia. Patti Smith plays the ABC, Glasgow, on 22 May.
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| fireontheplatter |
she still looks like a guy..... |
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| GotToRollMe |
Great interview, thanks TTM! |
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| gimmekeef |
quote:
fireontheplatter wrote:
she still looks like a guy.....
And shes got the balls to go with it..Gal can kick some R&R ass....but an Icon?...not sure shes up there with Janis J.....Or Chrissie Hynd even.... |
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