Women rock stars, as opposed to female singer-songwriters, were rare when Patti Smith emerged out of New York’s Downtown arts scene in the mid-‘70s. Shy yet garrulous, she seized on every opportunity to talk—not just about herself but the meaning of herself as well as her work She was a lower-middle class factory town girl whose life was saved by rock’n’roll—and art—and taking a cue from Walt Whitman, performed an evolving “Song of Myself.”
A new anthology collects many of her signpost interviews from across half a century. Editor Aidan Levy was a schlep on the “Law and Order: Criminal Intent” set the day Smith arrived as a guest star, a comparative mythology professor tasked with unraveling a knotty crime. She actually took time with the lowliest crew members like himself. “Patti Smith was alive and she thanked me,” he recalls.
Levy proves a sympathetic editor. “No one interview captures her restless spirit,” he observes, yet the many interviews he assembles here come close. Although his habit of correcting her mistakes and mis-memories over minutia can be annoying, it also serves as a Talmudic commentary on the rush of Smith’s stream of consciousness. Each chapter was a dramatic collaboration between Smith and her interviewer. Performance of her songs and poems, Smith said, “Keeps the art of creation alive.” For her, so does talking about them.
She often came across as brash and streetwise, yet something transcendent was usually apparent. “The personal journey into some kind of light shouldn’t be denied to anyone,” she said. Smith’s work is a reminder of the power of rock’n’roll and of words—both should have rhythm and the best of both, surprising rhythms that jolt the listener from the coma of everyday life.
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