Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are looking
at a resume that, frankly, just shouldn't exist.
It really shouldn't. It's a resume that's just
filled with contradictions. I mean, if I told
you we were profiling a rock and roll hall of
famer, you'd get one image in your head, right?
Sure. Letter jackets, guitars, the whole thing.
Exactly. Yeah. But then what if I added that
this person is also a National Book Award winner,
a distinguished photographer, a human rights
activist, and oh. The image is just completely
shattered. It creates a kind of cognitive dissonance
for sure. It does. Usually you get to be one
of those things, not all of them. We are, of
course, talking about Patti Smith. And I feel
like in pop culture, she gets flattened into
this two -dimensional cutout. The godmother of
punk. You know, the woman in the men's white
shirt on the cover of horses. But looking at
this stack of research we have, including her
new memoir, Bread of Angels, that just hit shelves
a couple of months ago, that label feels incredibly
reductive. Oh, completely. It's like calling
Leonardo da Vinci that guy who drew helicopters.
Right. That's a perfect analogy. I think to really
understand Patti Smith. Especially now that we're
sitting here in January 2026, looking back at
nearly 80 years of her life. You have to stop
thinking of her as a musician. OK, that's a bold
statement. Go on. She isn't a musician who writes
poetry. She is a poet who hijacked rock and roll
to get her words heard. And that is a fundamental,
fundamental difference. So that's our mission
for this deep dive. We want to figure out how
a factory worker from New Jersey. who literally
daydreamed that 19th century French poets were
her boyfriends, managed to bridge that gap. between
the Beat Generation and the Sex Pistols. It's
an incredible story. And I really want to dig
into her middle years, you know, the 80s and
90s, because I think that's where the real story
is, not just the loud, famous punk years. That's
where the transformation happens, from icon to,
I'd say, sage. Sage, I like that. But we have
to start at the beginning. And usually biographies
start with Born in Chicago, 1946, which is true
for her. But the real story, her emotional story,
starts in Deptford Township, New Jersey. And
we have to talk about the Bread of Angels reveal
immediately because it just completely rewrites
her origin story. It does. It's a bombshell,
really. For her entire career, Patti Smith's
mythology was built on this idea of the Irish
-American working class underdog. Blue -collar
roots. Absolutely. Her father, Grant Smith, was
a machinist at Honeywell. Her mother, Beverly,
was a jazz singer who became a waitress. There's
a very specific, you know, blue collar, slightly
mystical Irish identity there. But in Bread of
Angels, she just drops this bomb. At age 70,
she finds out Grant Smith wasn't her biological
father. Right. She discovers her biological lineage
is actually Ashkenazi Jewish. So here's my question.
Does that change the art? I mean, she spent 70
years operating under one identity. Does finding
this out so late in life, does it change the
meaning of the work she did in her 20s? Or is
it just sort of a footnote? That's the big question,
isn't it? I don't think it changes the work itself,
but I think it validates the feeling behind the
work. How so? If you look at her childhood descriptions,
she always felt like a changeling. She describes
herself as the sickly, sometimes hallucinating
child who didn't look like anyone else in her
family. Like she did Blanc. Exactly. She felt
genetically displaced. I think finding out about
her Jewish ancestry later in life seems to have
provided this click moment for her, an explanation
for that bone -deep sense of otherness she carried
all through the South Jersey suburbs. That otherness
wasn't just internal, though. It became very
externalized once she hit the workforce. We have
to talk about the piss factory. The crucible.
Right. So she graduates high school. Goes to
work in a stroller factory. And this isn't a
summer job to buy a car. This is 1960s hardcore
industrial labor. It was brutal. And it's so
important to understand why it was brutal. It
wasn't just the physical labor, you know, hosing
down baby buggies in extreme heat. No. It was
the social isolation. She was weird. She was
the girl reading a bilingual edition of Arthur
Rimbaugh's Illuminations on her lunch break.
Rimbaugh, who she literally imagined was her
boyfriend. Yes. The other women in the factory
who were, you know, trying to survive and feed
their families, they didn't get it. And they
essentially tortured her for it. Jumped their
head in a toilet. Yeah. They bullied her relentlessly.
That's the part that really interests me. Because
usually the punk ethos is associated with solidarity.
You know, us against the world. Right. The working
class hero. But her punk origin story is actually
about being rejected by the working class, not
embraced by it. That's such a key insight. Piss
Factory, the poem, and later the B -side to her
first single. It isn't a protest song in the
Woody Guthrie sense. It's not this land is your
land. Not at all. It's a song about individual
transcendence. The famous line, I'm going to
get out of here. I'm going to go to New York.
I'm going to be somebody. It was the realization
that if she stayed in that factory, her soul
would just atrophy. That hostility gave her the
armor she needed for New York. So it taught her
she didn't need to be liked. She needed to be
free. So she runs. 1967. She hits Manhattan with
almost nothing. And she's homeless, basically.
Sleeping in parks, on the subways, stealing food
from street vendors. She gets a job at Scribner's
Bookstore, which is kind of her first safe haven.
And then she meets Robert Mapplethorpe. And I
feel like we can't overstate this. Without Robert
Mapplethorpe, is there a Patti Smith? i would
argue no or at least not the patty smith we know
they were lovers yes for a time but it was so
much deeper than that they were co -conspirators
i love that phrase for them They lived in the
Hotel Chelsea, often with no money to eat, but
they had this pact. They just knew they were
artists. And Robert believed she was a star before
she did. He was the one who saw the performative
aspect of her poetry, her drawings. There's that
great line in Just Kids where she talks about
them being just kids, obviously, but the dynamic
was so intense. He was taking these incredible
photos. She was drawing and writing. But let's
talk about the transition to music. Because she
didn't start as a singer. No, not at all. She
started as a poet doing readings at St. Mark's
Church, part of the poetry project. So how do
you go from reading from a piece of paper in
a church to fronting a rock band at CBGB? It
was an evolution of delivery, a very organic
one. She found that just reading the poems wasn't
enough to capture the energy she felt inside.
She was obsessed with the rhythm of the language,
the sound of the words. The incantation. Yes.
So in February 1971, for a reading celebrating
Rimbaud's birthday, she asked Lenny Kay, who
was a record store clerk and a rock writer she
knew, to accompany her on electric guitar. But
this wasn't, here are the chords, let's sing
the melody. Absolutely not. And this is where
the punk sound is really born. It wasn't about
verse, chorus, verse. It was pure improvisation.
Lenny would play these rhythmic, cyclic chords,
almost like a drum. very velvet underground inspired.
And Patti would just chant and improvise over
them. So she was using her voice like a jazz
instrument. 100%. She would speed up. He would
speed up. It was a collision. It was jazz technique
applied to a garage rock aesthetic. And it was
electrifying. So it wasn't about learning to
sing. It was about learning to project. Exactly.
She used the guitar as a landscape to walk her
words through. And that eventually morphed into
the Patti Smith group. They added Richard Soule
on piano, who she called her Fred Astaire. because
he had this elegant classical touch. A great
contrast to the raw guitar. A perfect contrast.
And then later they filled it out with Ivan Kral
on bass and J .D. Daugherty on drums, and suddenly
it's a real rock and roll band. And they end
up at CBGB in 1975. Now we hear CBGB and we think
of... The t -shirts, the legend. But what was
the actual vibe of that residency? It was grueling.
I mean, it was a total dive bar in the Bowery,
surrounded by flop houses. It smelled horrible.
But that residency, two months, seven weeks,
playing alongside the band Television, was the
incubator. So they were sharing the bill. Night
after night. And you have to imagine the friction.
Television was very technical, all about these
intricate, dueling guitar solos. Very precise.
And Patty was the opposite. Total opposite. She
was chaotic, emotional, raw, spitting words.
And that contrast sharpened both of them. It
was night after night of winning over a crowd
that wasn't there to be polite. That's where
she learned to control an audience, how to harness
that chaos. And someone important was in that
audience. Clive Davis, the head of Arista Records.
He saw this raw power and, to his credit, didn't
try to team it. He signed her. And we get horses.
1975. Produced by John Cale of The Velvet Underground.
A very contentious production, by the way. Cale
and Smith fought constantly. He wanted a more
polished sound. She wanted it to be raw, live.
And you can hear that tension all over the record.
It's what makes it so powerful. You have to stop
on the first track. Gloria. It's a cover of a
Van Morrison song, technically. But she just
blows it apart and rebuilds it. And she opens
with, Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not
mine. One of the most famous, most confrontational
opening lines in rock history. And it's usually
read as just straight blasphemy. She hates God.
But looking at her later life, her Vatican performances,
that doesn't track. What is she actually saying
there? I think it's not atheism, it's autonomy.
You remember, she was raised as a Jehovah's Witness.
A very strict religion. Incredibly strict. She
left because the dogma was too suffocating. That
line is a declaration of spiritual independence.
She is saying, I am responsible for my own soul.
my sins are my own she isn't rejecting jesus
as a figure she's rejecting the mechanism of
salvation that requires submission and outside
absolution it's a theological statement oddly
enough yes a very profound one it's the ultimate
punk statement i am my own authority and then
there's the cover art The Mapplethorpe photo.
In 50 years, we just had the anniversary re -release
in late 2025, and that photo still stops you
in your tracks. Because it completely defied
the male days. In 1975, female rock stars were
Linda Ronstadt or Stevie Nicks, you know, flowy,
feminine, or at least sexualized in a traditional
way. Right. And Patti just stood there. In a
men's white button -down, a black ribbon for
a tie, slinging a jacket over her shoulder like
Sinatra. She wasn't trying to look like a boy,
but she wasn't trying to look like a girl either.
She looked like an artist. She looked like a
poet. She looked like Mapplethorpe's subject.
It was a signal to every outcast girl and boy
in America. You don't have to dress up to be
powerful. You just have to be yourself. So she
conquers New York. She releases the follow -up,
Radio Ethiopia. which is even more abrasive.
She's touring the world. She's the biggest thing
in the underground. She's on top of the world.
And then, January 1977, Tampa, Florida, the lights
go out. The accident. This is the moment the
whole train just derails. Paint the picture for
us. What happened? She's performing, opening
for Bob Seger. She's in a frenzy. She's dancing,
spinning around on stage, something she did every
single night. But on this particular stage, in
this arena, there was no lip. No marker to tell
her where the edge was. Oh, no. And she spins
right off the edge. And this wasn't like a small
hop off the stage? No. It was a 15 -foot drop.
What? Straight down into a concrete orchestra
pit. Cool. She landed on her head and neck. She
broke several cervical vertebrae. The doctors
told her she was incredibly lucky to be alive
and even luckier not to be paralyzed. That's
terrifying. And that physical break, it necessitated
a psychological break. She had to stop. months
of physical therapy, wearing a neck brace. She
had to completely reassess everything. It feels
like that fall knocked the star out of her and
forced the human back in. Because when she comes
back, she does have a hit. A big one. A huge
one. Easter in 1978. And the single, Because
of the Night. Co -written with Bruce Springsteen.
Right. Springsteen had the chorus and the melody
but couldn't finish the lyrics. He gave it to
her and she wrote the verses from the perspective
of waiting for her future husband, Fred, to call
her. It became her biggest commercial success,
reached number 13 on the Billboard charts. So
she's finally a mainstream rock star. And then
she does something that I think is even more
punk rock than playing CBGB. She quits. She quits.
The Great Retreat. 1979. She just walks away
from all of it. She marries Fred Sonic Smith,
the legendary guitarist from the MC5. She moves
to St. Clair Shores, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit.
And for the entirety of the 1980s, the decade
of excess of MTV, of Madonna Patti Smith is,
what, doing laundry? Effectively, yes. And this
is the part of her life that confuses so many
people, but I think it's the most fascinating.
She went from being the absolute queen of New
York cool. to a housewife in the suburbs. It's
a radical act. A truly radical act. She baked
bread. She raised her two children, Jackson and
Jesse. She didn't have a nanny. She didn't tour.
She just... Why? I mean, she had the world at
her feet. She could have been as big as anyone.
I think she recognized that fame was becoming
its own kind of cage. She wanted to live a life,
not just perform one. And there's a real discipline
in that. It takes a lot of confidence to say,
I am an artist even if no one is watching me
right now. So she was still creating. Every single
day. She wrote, she studied, she read voraciously,
she raised her kids. She jokes that she married
Fred because she didn't have to change her name,
Smith to Smith. But the reality was they had
this deep, quiet, domestic love. It was a real
partnership. It really challenges our idea of
success, doesn't it? We think success is more,
more, more. She decided success was just enough.
For a while, yes, until the 90s. And this is
where the story gets incredibly dark. The era
of loss, it's just brutal. It starts with Mapplethorpe
dying of AIDS in 1989. And that was like losing
her other half, her artistic twin, a huge blow.
But it gets worse. Much worse. In 1994, Fred
Smith, her husband, her anchor, the reason she
left New York, dies of a heart attack. He was
only 45. Unimaginable. Just completely unimaginable.
And then literally one month later, her brother
Todd dies of a massive stroke. No. Yes. So in
the span of about 30 days, she loses the two
most significant men in her daily life. She's
a widow with two young kids in Michigan. The
silence in that house must have been just deafening.
It was a total collapse of her world. And she
has said in interviews that she didn't know if
she could go on. She was in a state of profound
grief. But this is where her community, her artistic
family, saved her. Who stepped in? Allen Ginsberg,
the great beat poet, and Michael Stipe from R
.E .M. They basically staged an intervention.
What did they do? They told her, you have to
work, you have to get out. Stipe, especially,
just kind of dragged her back into the light.
He got her to perform again. Then Bob Dylan asked
her to open for him on his 1995 tour. They understood
that for Patti, creation was survival. If she
didn't get that grief out, it would kill her.
And the result of all that pain was the album
Gone Again in 1996. A masterpiece of grief. It's
not an angry punk album. It's a haunting, largely
acoustic, atmospheric record. It's the sound
of someone trying to find their footing after
the world has been pulled out from under them.
There's an incredible song about a boy, which
is a tribute to Kurt Cobain. Yes, who had also
just died. She was metabolizing all this death.
Fred, Todd, Robert, Kurt. Richard Soul, her pianist,
had also died a few years earlier, and turning
it into something beautiful and lasting. This
really marks the shift to what I call the sage
phase, because post -2000, she becomes less of
a rock star and more of a public intellectual,
a literary figure. Which culminates, of course,
in Just Kids in 2010. The National Book Award
winner. I think that book changed how a whole
new generation saw her. people who'd never even
heard horses it absolutely did it's a memoir
but it reads like a fairy tale a bohemian fairy
tale it's not a rock bio with stories about trashing
hotel rooms and doing drugs yeah it's a love
letter it's a love letter to art to youth and
to a new york city that doesn't exist anymore
she wrote it because she promised robber on his
deathbed that she would tell their story it took
her 20 years But she kept the promise. And she's
kept writing these incredible memoirs. M Train
in 2015, which is sort of this meditation on
coffee and loss. Year of the Monkey in 2019.
And now Bread of Angels. Which features another
Mapplethorpe photo on the cover, by the way.
One he took of her that she describes as capturing
a... Deeply transitional moment. It all comes
full circle. But I want to pivot for a second
to her visual art. Yeah. Because while she's
writing these bestsellers, she's also taking
photographs. And like her music, her photography
has a very specific, almost ritualistic methodology.
It's what she calls pure photography. She uses
a vintage Polaroid Lens 250 camera. Okay, for
the non -gearheads listening. What does that
actually mean? It means it's incredibly difficult.
It's an old bellows camera. You have to manually
focus it. You pull the film out. You wait for
it to develop. You have to peel it apart just
right. There is no negative. Each photo is a
unique, one -of -a -kind object. There's no fixing
it in post? None. And she refuses to use a flash.
She only uses natural light. So she's just chasing
natural light around the world. She calls it
capturing the atmosphere or the aura of the object.
She travels the world like a pilgrim, going to
the homes and graves of her heroes. She photographs
Virginia Woolf's writing desk, Rimbaud's spoon,
Mapplethorpe's slippers. Blake's life mask. It
sounds almost animistic. Like she believes the
objects have souls. I think she absolutely does.
She treats these objects as holy relics. In a
world of digital instant gratification where
we take a thousand photos a day on our phones.
And none of them mean anything. Right. She is
taking one photo, waiting minutes to see if it
even worked. And then accepting the result, flaws
and all. It's about latency. It's about respect
for the subject. It's the opposite of punk in
a way. It's slow. It's quiet. It's contemplative.
That respect extends to her activism, too. She's
never been a shut up and sing kind of artist.
Never. Not for a second. Her politics are interesting.
She's not necessarily partisan in the traditional
sense, is she? No, she's a humanist above all
else. She supported the Green Party and Ralph
Nader in 2004 and 2008, which got her some flack
from Democrats who saw it as taking votes from
their candidate. She was also fiercely against
the Iraq War. Oh, fiercely. She was calling for
the impeachment of George W. Bush very early
on. She wrote the song Kana about the Israeli
airstrikes in a Lebanese village. She wrote Without
Chains. about Murat Kirnaz, who was a detainee
at Guantanamo Bay. And more recently, she's been
very active. Very. In 2021, she signed an open
letter boycotting performances in Israel. She's
been a vocal supporter of Ukraine, even translating
their national anthem into English. And climate
change has become a huge focus. She performed
at the QP26 summit. But if you listen to her
speak about these things, it's rarely about policy
details. It's always about suffering. Exactly.
Her famous line is, I believe in human rights.
That's her entire platform. And that leads us
to the Vatican connection, which is the one that
always throws people. The godmother of punk performing
for the pope. She loves Pope Francis. She's performed
at the Vatican Christmas concert multiple times
in 2014 and 2021. But she's not Catholic, right?
Not at all. But she sees St. Francis of Assisi
as the original environmentalist, someone who
cast off his wealth to live in nature and help
the poor. She sees a kinship there with Pope
Francis. So she's not interested in the dogma?
No, she calls those man -made laws. She's interested
in the spirit of compassion and she's willing
to go wherever she finds that spirit, even if
it's inside the Vatican. It's another example.
of her refusing to be pinned down. She refuses
to be tribal. She won't hate the Pope just because
it's cool for a punk to hate the Pope. Exactly.
And it's the same reason she won't call herself
a feminist, which upsets some people. She says,
I have a son too. I believe in human rights.
She refuses any label that she feels divides
her from other people. She wants to be universal.
Let's talk about her legacy. Her influence. Because
you look at the bands that came after her. REM,
U2, The Smiths, Florence and the Machine, Courtney
Love. They all have Patty DNA. It's everywhere.
Michael Stipe has said explicitly, I started
a band because I heard horses. U2 had her perform
Mothers of the Disappeared with them on stage.
Courtney Love has said that the song Rock and
Roll Nigger is the greatest rock song ever written.
And that horses kept her out of trouble in Juvenile
Hall. Yes. And the list goes on. Madonna, Shirley
Manson from Garbage, Elliot Page. She showed
people, especially women, that you didn't have
to be a virtuoso musician to be a rock star.
You just had to have a vision and something to
say. She's gotten all the awards, too. Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. Polar Music Prize
in 2011. The French Legion of Honor. Just a couple
of years ago, the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
Medal here in New York City. But there's one
moment, fairly recently, that I think defines
her legacy better than any award. And that's
the Nobel Prize ceremony in 2016. Oh, this is
the defining moment of her late career. Absolutely.
So set the scene for us. Bob Dylan wins the Nobel
Prize in literature. In a very Dylan move, he
doesn't show up. He doesn't show up and he asks
his friend, Patti Smith, to go and accept it
for him by performing one of his songs. And she
chooses Hard Rains Are Gonna Fall. An absolutely
brutally difficult song, seven minutes long,
just dense, prophetic lyrics one after another.
And she has to perform it in the Stockholm concert
hall in front of the king and queen of Sweden,
the world's intelligentsia, broadcast live. The
pressure is immense. It's stiff, formal. You
can see it in the video. She's nervous. She's
shaking. And about two minutes in, she hits the
line. I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all
around it. And she blinks. Just total silence.
She freezes. The orchestra keeps playing for
a second, then it kind of trails off. It is the
absolute nightmare scenario for any performer.
I can't even imagine the panic. My heart is racing
just thinking about it. But watch what she does.
She doesn't run. She doesn't try to fake it or
mumble through. She stops the music. She walks
to the microphone and she just says, I'm sorry.
I apologize. I'm so nervous. And she asks the
conductor if they can start that section again.
And what's the reaction in the room? They melted.
You could physically feel the tension break.
They just started applauding her because in that
single vulnerable moment, she wasn't a star performing
perfection. She was a human being struggling
with. a massive task. She became one of them.
She became all of us. And when she restarted
and finished the song, it was triumphant because
she had fallen. It's the wabi -sabi of performance,
you know, the Japanese idea that the flaw makes
the thing beautiful. The flaw made it real. She
later wrote this beautiful essay about it in
The New Yorker. She said she felt humiliated
at first, but then she realized she had inadvertently
demonstrated the very struggle the song was about.
It's about navigating a hard rain. She stumbled.
And then she got back up. That is Patti Smith.
And that brings us to today, January 2026. She's
approaching 80 years old. She's posting on Instagram
every single day pictures of her coffee, her
cat, her books, the sky. She's still touring
constantly. She's writing these incredible memoirs.
She has not slowed down one bit. She has become
a kind of public philosopher, hasn't she? She's
modeling how to age with curiosity. Most people
calcify as they get older. You know, they stop
liking new music. They stop changing their minds.
Patty is still evolving. She's still that girl
from the factory looking for a way out, looking
for the next poem, the next photograph, the next
song. So if we look at this massive, messy, beautiful
life factory worker, punk rocker, mother, widow,
photographer, author. What is the takeaway? Why
does she matter to the person listening to this
right now who maybe doesn't even like punk rock?
She matters because she grants you permission
to be incoherent. She proves that you don't have
to pick a lane in life. You can be spiritual
and profane. You can be a mother and a rebel.
You can love the past and fight for the future.
She destroyed the binaries. She teaches us that
the only consistency you really need is authenticity
to yourself. Precisely. That's it in a nutshell.
So I want to leave you with a challenge today.
Patti Smith once said, I don't like being pinned
down and I'll do what the fuck I want. We live
in a world that is obsessed with categorization.
Social media algorithms want to know what you
buy. Politics wants to know how you vote. Everything
wants to put you in a box. And keep you there.
What part of you have you suppressed because
it didn't fit the rest of your profile? Maybe
it's time to pick up that old Polaroid camera
or write a bad poem or just go scream in a garage.
Find your inner Patty. And don't be afraid to
stumble while the world is watching. Thanks for
diving in with us. Thank you. We'll catch you
on the next deep dive.