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First Lady of Punk: Patti Smith on family, friends and her book of hope
Locked down in her Manhattan apartment, the First Lady of Punk, Patti Smith, sought solace from the pandemic by sharing her ideas and thoughts in a book of photographs – one for each day of the year. She talks with Robyn Doreian about the need to daydream.
By Robyn Doreian
“It’s a little gift,” says Patti Smith of her new photography book, A Book of Days.
Back in 2020, Patti Smith, then 73, was locked down in her Manhattan apartment. World tour cancelled, alone and claustrophobic, her socks mismatched and in the same tee from three days ago, she began writing The Melting. While longing for nomadic travels and cafes afar, global warming underpinned her prose.
Released episodically via internet subscription service Substack, her climate musings began melding with facts, and so the First Lady of Punk sought a more optimistic project: one that shared her cultural thoughts and ideas. A novel-sized hardback, A Book of Days, comprising a photograph for each day of the year, became that project.
“It’s a little gift,” she says in her gentle, considered tone. “If I can give everyone just a little bit of respite from our troubled world, and allow everyone to just daydream, and perhaps think about Picasso for a few minutes, that’s wonderful.”
Many images were selected from her Instagram account, begun two years earlier. Her first Instagram entry? Smith’s right palm bearing a platinum band with a tiny diamond on her middle finger, a 70th birthday gift from the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris, in appreciation of her work. In response to her “Hello, Everybody!” message, one million followers waved back.
Her daily postings range from the spines of Albert Camus novels on her bookshelf to the image of a porcelain dove, just one from a collection of ceramic birds belonging to her father, Grant, a World War II soldier and factory worker.
Boxes of Polaroids, taken from about 1995 onwards, as well as shots taken on her phone since 2012, were sifted through. Other pictures not taken by Smith, such as friend William Burroughs at Halloween in Kansas, were procured and credited. Then brief meditations, thoughts, anecdotes and sentences of comfort or inspiration were added.
Smith bought her first camera, a 35mm, at 21, the year after she arrived in New York. Laid off from her factory job in New Jersey and in need of income, she’d departed for the city by bus, her voyage funded by $32 found in a purse in a phone box. Illuminations, a collection of poems by French writer Arthur Rimbaud, was a treasured object in her plaid suitcase.
Patti Smith with the Polaroid Land 250 camera that was her “working companion” for 20 years.Credit: Courtesy of Patti Smith
She met soon-to-be-photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, whose artistic dreams paralleled her own. They became inseparable. She secured a job at Scribner’s Bookstore and they lived and created together, most famously at the Chelsea Hotel, where Smith was introduced to Janis Joplin as “the poet”.
Her photographs document two decades of travel as well as her friendships, loves and artistic collaborations. Yet, despite a prestigious 2012 solo exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, Smith doesn’t consider herself a photographer.
“I say the same thing in terms of being a musician,” says the lyricist and vocalist, despite her 1975 album Horses ranking 26th on Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” list.
“I didn’t study photography and I’m not very technically orientated,” she says. “I consider myself an amateur, in the best sense. I never chose photography as my vocation, just like I’ve never chosen music as my vocation. If anything, I consider myself a writer, because I’ve written since I was 12.”
Like an advent calendar that opens daily doors to Smith’s year of pandemic life, A Book of Days incorporates family, inspirations, treasured artefacts, artists, friends (including Red Hot Chili Peppers’ bassist Flea, whose favourite book is Jane Eyre) and events. There’s a 1968 Valentine’s Day card marking Smith and Mapplethorpe’s love (also the subject of her 2010 National Book Award-winning memoir, Just Kids, which she promised Mapplethorpe she would write the day before his death from HIV-AIDS in 1989.)
Smith helping her Abyssinian cat, Cairo, celebrate its 21st birthday on November 15.Credit: Courtesy of Patti Smith
“He was my first deep relationship,” she says. “When he was young he was very kind and romantic, but the thing that really kept us together, all through everything, was our work bond. We evolved as young artists together, and believed in each other. You have people in your life who support what you do, but he was the first and it ran very deep. That’s what makes him special in my memory. I always say Robert was the artist of my life.”
Further along we meet her late husband, MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith, who’s celebrated in a colour still from their wedding day on March 1, 1980. They had two children: Jackson, 40, a guitarist who tours with Patti, and grief coach and musician daughter Jesse, 35, who at times bears a startling resemblance to her mother. (Patti also had a daughter at 20 who was adopted by a couple longing for a child and is now happily part of Patti’s family.)
A striking black-and-white portrait of Todd, her younger brother and road manager, punctuates June. He died of a stroke at 42 in 1994, just one month after Fred’s death.
Smith and husband Fred Smith on their wedding day.Credit: Tony Spina
“It’s still painful,” she says of these losses. “It’s not like it goes away. I’m very fortunate to have my children, and work that I love, so I just keep going. I keep my people alive in memory, and in my work. I’ll have a rough night – all of a sudden, I’ll miss my husband so much – but I understand those nights. I understand I’ll get through them, and then continue on.”
May brings forth a chunky silver “B” keyring owned by her waitress mother, Beverly, a woman who smoked a lot, loved books and spoke with a deep voice, like a jazz singer. Smith found it in Beverly’s housecoat pocket while sorting through her possessions. It now resides on her desk.
Todd Smith, Patti’s brother, who died just after her husband, Fred, in 1994.Credit: David Gahr
“Even though I’d spent so much time with my mother, talking and having coffee, I thought, ‘Why didn’t I listen more closely to some of her stories? Why didn’t I ask her what I was like when I was little?’” she says. “I’d do anything to have another coupla hours to drink coffee with my mom.”
A photograph of Uluru at dusk, her hand pressed against the rock’s ochre sandstone, marks April 21.
It was taken on a 2017 visit to the Northern Territory: “Privileged to touch its sacred skin,” she notes.
Smith’s visit to Uluru was like “touching the stars and the planets and everything at once”.Credit: Courtesy of Patti Smith
“When my son, Jackson, was a little boy, there was a cartoon about a little girl who had a koala bear,” she says.
“I used to tell my son that some day I would take him there, and then Sam Shepard [the writer and actor, with whom Smith had a romantic relationship in the early 1970s and a cherished 50-year friendship thereafter] said he’d been and he’d take me. But then Sam got sick.
“My band had left Australia, so I went alone. I thought of Sam, I thought of my brother, and I sort of went for my son. I looked at its massive formation. I imagined what it meant, always, to Aboriginal people. I put my hand on it. It was like touching all the stars and the planets and everything at once. It was an amazing feeling. I wanted to remember that, always.”
Smith visited Australia alone. “I thought of Sam, I thought of my brother, and I sort of went for my son.”Credit: Courtesy of Patti Smith
Warrior women are dotted through A Book of Days in commemorations for birthdays, achievements over adversity, or simply blinding talent. Yoko Ono, who with John Lennon attended Smith and Mapplethorpe’s 1978 joint art show, is celebrated for her commitment to peace. Marie Curie, in 1911 the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in chemistry, is also there, as is young climate activist Greta Thunberg.
Despite Smith’s female, intellectual take on rock, first unleashed live in 1971, and activism for her beliefs – her work is banned in China, for example – she bucks the tag “brave”.
“I can’t say my artistic life has been brave because I have done what I wanted,” she says. “I made a lot of difficult choices, some of which guaranteed I would not be as successful, that my work would be marginalised. [But] I know women who’ve had handicapped children and who have had to devote the greater part of their days to helping them. These are brave undertakings.”
December 30 highlights Smith’s birthday, the singer standing with her back to an exuberant 2000-strong crowd in a Brussels concert hall.
“My bass player, Tony Shanahan, took that picture,” she says. “I was so happy I just raised my arms. It has such a nice feeling. It’s a nice way to end the book.”
A Book of Days (Bloomsbury) by Patti Smith is out now.
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