Patti Smith on Her Memoir “Bread of Angels,” Fifty Years After Her Début Album, “Horses”

0:02This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

0:15This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

0:21Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine. That line, the opening to Patti Smith's album Horses, has got to be one of the best openers to an album ever. Amazing to think that Horses, which still feels fresh and raw and transgressive, came out almost 50 years ago this week. Horses launched Patti Smith to musical and avant-garde stardom almost overnight.

0:54And yet being a star wasn't Patti Smith's intention at all. She was a poet. She was publishing poems years before the record came out. She'd written a play with Sam Shepard. Music was a kind of afterthought, as she tells it, an accompaniment to the words. Becoming one of the founding figures of punk was something that happened almost by accident. But in recent years, many people have come to know Patti Smith as a writer, as well as a performer. Her memoir, Just Kids, about her friendship with the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, won the National Book Award. M-Train reflected on her withdrawal from music as she raised a family.

1:32And in Bread of Angels, which was just excerpted in The New Yorker, Smith writes intimately about her life in music, and also her personal life, particularly her marriage to Fred Sonic Smith and his early death. At times, she shares deep revelations about her past, and it's nothing if not a book of tremendous honesty.

1:55You say somewhere in the book that this book took you 10 years to write. Is that because life is just so busy? or the act of memory and the act of writing is difficult? Well, I mean, I was writing about difficult things, but also certain things in my life and things that came to pass, as you see in the book, things that were revealed to me, made me, I had to stop for a couple of years and process. You know, I kept having to process things that were happening in real time or really make certain that I was, you know, articulating fact properly, especially when I'm talking about other people. The same thing with just kids.

2:44It took me a very long time. I mean, I write profusely fiction, fairy tales, all kinds of things that aren't even published without a care. But writing a memoir, writing, bringing other people into it, one has to really be prudent and search themselves and make sure that they're presenting the right picture. What was the most difficult thing to encounter? You obviously write about the death of your husband, but toward the end of the book, you write about a revelation about your own family, and that seems particularly complicated, no? That was the most difficult part. Tell the story of that. The most difficult part of the writing process and just my process as a human being was the revelation that my father, who I pretty much worshipped and modeled myself after and who I had spent a lot of time in the earlier part of the book bringing to life, was actually not my blood father.

4:03I never knew this, of course. And although there was always a little speculation because I am a bit different than my siblings, I never resembled my father physically, though I modeled myself after him. And in learning this, it took me a long time to process. I wasn't angry. I didn't feel any bitterness or anything of my mother. I, you know, admired her stoicness. if my, you know, my mother knew that I, how I felt about my father. In fact, I often showed more love for my father than my mother. But instead of being resentful, I think she did everything she could to protect me. How did the revelation come to pass and when?

4:56How did you specifically find out about it? Specifically through a test. After my mother died, my sister and I, we got curious. And just out of curiosity, which I thought really would not come up with anything, we did a test. But we didn't do a paternal test. We did a sibling test, a blood test, because we didn't know the difference. And so when we did the blood test, it showed that we were only half siblings, which was heartbreaking. It was heartbreaking only because I love my sister so much. I love my father so much. It was just the romance of blood. You know, really, she was still my sister a million percent.

5:53my father was still my father. So that produced a certain amount of pain. But also, I had to, in terms of the book, I had worked so hard for this book to be a monument to truth and to be exactly as it was. And suddenly, I didn't know where I stood. I didn't know how to, I didn't know if I had to rewrite the book. I didn't know. And I really put it away for a couple of years until I figured all of this out. And my sister and I together reconciled this. She was so helpful because we talked about it endlessly. And one day she said she had an epiphany, and it was that she loved me so much, and she realized that the person she loved only existed because of the union between my mother and my blood father.

7:04and when she realized that she suddenly felt immense gratitude to him and so that is how we proceeded and um and i feel the same way i mean he's in my prayers he's in my thoughts it turned out i was his only child um so he died young so i you know i keep him with me My father will always be my father, and he is the one I aspired to be like. You write of him that my father lived in his own world. He left the new world to my mother. Yes. My father was, well, he studied all the time. He read, my father worked in a factory, but he was reading Socrates and Plato and Jung and UFOlogy and the Bible. He was hungry for knowledge, and I aspired to be like that.

8:11He was hoping after the world wars that we would have man would be, would wake up. and the inhumanity, man's inhumanity to man, his favorite line from Robert Burns. He was hoping that that's what the new time would be. And he was so, you know, disgusted with, you know, the humanity. I mean, if anything, I'm glad he's not seeing our world now. and my father loved Ralph Nader, always voted for him. Still very much with us, Ralph Nader. Yes, and a good friend. Part of the book early on is a kind of accounting for and a collection of the deep influences, almost talismans. First is the recording of Madame Butterfly, then a biography of Diego Rivera.

9:12Yes. You read Arthur Rambeau, which is not the usual thing for somebody that young. And then maybe most faithfully, your mother at a drugstore buys for less than a dollar a copy for you of Another Side of Bob Dylan, which is not the first Dylan album, but it's early on. It's a kind of transitional record. No, I had heard of him, and I had listened to whatever I could hear. On the radio. But I never had a record. And just looking at him in that picture and reading his liner notes, And I associated him so much with Rimbaud, a song like Hard Rain's Gonna Fall, very Rimbaudian. Many of his, even his face is very like the young Rimbaud.

10:01So, and he was alive. Finally, I had somebody I could. That's not unimportant. Well, I had so many, you know, I loved Robert Louis Stevenson and Louisa May Alcott and all the people I loved. You know, they were all long gone. And Rimbaud, long gone. Finally, somebody in real time that I could fantasize about or follow or, you know, learn from. And he was alive and yet a little bit out of reach, too, which added to the allure. I remember being a fanatic on this subject. We've talked about this before, but so rarely would you hear his speaking voice. And once I remember listening to WPLJ, I think it was, or any WFM, and he was being interviewed by Mary Travers, and he was answering questions.

10:51And he was irritated and the usual things. But it was something, it's very hard to explain now. Oh, I still remember. I saw him in Philadelphia in like 65, and he introduced Visions of Johanna before he recorded it. And I remember he came to the microphone, he said, this song is called Obviously Not a Freeze Out. Obviously not a freeze-out. The first words I hear from Bob Dylan, and I've never forgotten them. I can hear it in my, you know, it's just, it was amazing to hear him speak. So many artistic memoirs, including Dylan's Chronicles, have that moment where you arrive. You physically arrive.

11:45In your case, the arrival at the gates of New York, and you write this, I stepped out of board authority bus terminal with my plaid suitcase. I love that, the plaid suitcase. My greatest desire at the time was to surrender as an artist. What a word, surrender. And then you go on, perhaps I like the necessary skills, but I had the willingness to develop them, for I believed in the truth of my calling and was single-minded in my pursuit to find work. It had come to me as if struck with an ecstatic paralysis. and then the next paragraph, you're off to the races. But when did you start to get the idea of this is what I could be?

12:23You start writing poems and then you get the idea to be backed up by musicians while doing so at St. Mark's Church, an old church downtown where they have poetry readings. When does the penny start to drop and this is the path I can pursue that will fulfill the vision of who I might be and what I want to say? It was actually because it wasn't my first pursuit. I wanted to be an artist. By then, I had a feeling that I really didn't have the necessary physical skills, that I was always going to be good at what I did. I felt that I had certain gifts, but I had really embraced being a writer. and it was Sam Shepard who, you know, I did Sam Shepard.

13:17And you wrote a play together. Yes, but I had been to Poetry Readings and they seemed so boring to me and I didn't want to be boring. And I was talking to Sam and he said, well, you know, you sing little songs like little, we used to do little blues songs together. Like, why don't you get a guitar player and do a couple of songs. And I had just met Lenny Kay, and he had said that he played some guitar. So I recruited him on one poem to do a car crash. You know, he had like a really tiny little champ amp and electric guitar, and he did like a car crash to one of my long poems. But it caused quite a commotion.

14:04That I didn't expect. And the fact that we had an electric guitar in the church. This is at St. Mark's? Yeah, and a girl doing that got a lot of negativity, but also— It got negativity? Both. How was that expressed? Well, desecration of the church. And also, you know, little blasphemous poems, I suppose.

14:30And I don't know. I can't say to this day why it made such an impression on people. I mean, I was offered after that a record contract. I was offered all kinds of things, and I thought it was really stupid. Stupid? Why? All that attention over that, I thought, no, I'm not going to get involved in all of that yet. I just thought it was an awful lot, and I wasn't prepared for it. I just didn't want to be boring, you know. You just didn't want to be boring at all. No, I didn't want to be boring. Well, let me ask you, one of your first utterances, you know, recorded utterances that, you know, I remember hearing this record, is Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine.

15:22And yet you were brought up in a highly religious or religiously inflected or infused household. Your mother became a Jehovah's Witness, if I recall correctly. Yes, I mean, I... What was your relationship to God and Jesus and religion by the time you were... I mean, I was going to Bible school at two and a half. I was asking questions about prayer. I made my mother crazy asking her, you know, what is the soul? What color is the soul? Will the soul come back if it goes away while I'm sleeping? And my mother finally sent me to Bible school. And I had a very strong Bible education. My father read the Bible.

16:06My father loved to argue with all—if any religious person or any organization came to the door, he'd bring them in and usually, like, truthfully wipe them out because he knew more about the Bible than they did. But, and I was a Jehovah Witness until I was 12 or 12 years old. But I felt at 12, I was grateful for all my education, but I felt that I was not a candidate for organized religion. But were you in rebellion toward it, do you think? It wasn't rebellion. I just, I didn't rebel. I just understood that it wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't right for me. Did you become an atheist? No. No, I still love God.

16:57I still, even when I wrote. I didn't think so. I mean, people said, would say, oh, when horses came out, you don't love Jesus. You don't believe in Jesus. I said, I believe in him so much. He's the first word of my record. That was not against Jesus. It was really more my statement about organized religion with a lot of young bravado. I wrote that poem in 1968 and recorded it in 75, but I had written it quite some time before. And not long after even I recorded that in studying Jesus in a different angle, not through religion, I came actually to deeply admire him. And I still study the New Testament with my sister, or actually the whole Bible with my sister, because she's a very devout witness.

18:00And we have Bible studies because I love to talk about and interpret or think about different things in the Bible. Also, the language. I mean, the Revelations was another influence on me, aesthetically, because of the language. The King James Version, you know, it's quite poetical. But I'm still the same way. I have my own relationship with God. It might shift through the years. How would you describe that relationship? It's one of, I trust that, basically I trust that God understands my heart, knows who I am, knows, he knows my trespasses. And I never petition God. You don't. Even with all, even when Robert was sick, I never.

19:06Your friend Robert Mapplethorpe. Yeah. I prayed for him. I prayed for everyone. I pray for, you know, the hostages, for the Palestinian people. I pray for everyone. I don't have—I'm not discriminating and praying for people, but I pray for their—just as I prayed for Robert, for the strengthening of their heart to endure what they have to endure.

19:40This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm speaking with Patti Smith. We'll continue in a moment.

19:58This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I'm speaking today with Patti Smith. This is a pretty big week for Patti Smith. Her debut album, Horses, came out exactly 50 years ago, November 10, 1975. An anniversary reissue has come out this year. And Smith has also just published a third of an extraordinary series of memoirs dealing with a pretty extraordinary life. The book is called Bread of Angels. The book arguably pivots in the mid-70s. it's not not the whole of the book but there's a kind of pivotal two things happen in the mid 70s the first thing is that you record and it's now the remarkably to my mind the 50th anniversary of of horses i think in november 10th um and some of these songs you still play yeah to this day and then something personal happens you meet the man who'd become your husband and eventually you withdraw from that life that you were having as a rock star, as a public persona.

21:09Tell me about that falling in love and then this withdrawal, because it is in many ways the heart of the book and extraordinarily moving. Well, thank you. I mean, one of the reasons I wrote this book, and this book is really, You know, it's in the bread of angels is really the idea of its gratitude or gestures of kindness. And I wanted to, I wanted these people to be remembered as I knew them, not as how they're, you know, speculated upon or written about. And I wanted Fred to be remembered as the man that I loved and shared, you know, albeit brief, but very condensed and wondrous time together.

22:05What's amazing, you encounter Fred Sonic Smith in Detroit. You're on tour. Yes. And even after we get to know him in this book, there's a degree to which he's hard to penetrate as a person for you. Well, he was very private. He was very private. And there was aspects that were impenetrable. But, you know, that was part of that understanding or understanding that I'll never completely understand him was part of the mystical contract. But I never thought of myself as getting married and have a family. But, you know, it was 1976, March 10th, our first show in Detroit. We were on the horses tour. We were briefly at a party thrown at us for us.

23:07I stopped in because I don't really like parties that much, so I didn't want to be there too long. But everyone was so nice. But then I wanted to leave. And just as I was about to leave, I saw him. He was standing there in a dark blue overcoat by a white radiator right at the door. And we looked at each other. And it was like in movies where everything stops and everybody dissipates. And it's only a second, but it feels like it could be several minutes. And I knew instinctively with all my being that that was the fella I was going to marry. And, you know, we developed a long-distance relationship for a few years.

24:07And all that parting became increasingly difficult. Sometimes months. And back then, you didn't have cell phones. You didn't have Zooms. You couldn't see the person. Long-distance calls were really expensive. I remember gathering every piece of change in, I think it was Ireland, found a phone booth and filled the phone booth with like, you know, so much change to talk to him for two minutes. And finally, it was just too difficult and the conflict was difficult. And also, I wasn't really growing as an artist. I wasn't really writing. I neglected my notebooks. I wasn't studying. And finally, in 1980, exactly four years later, we did marry.

25:07You made a decision to stop. I threw it all away. Love is all there is. Well, it wasn't just for love. That was yet at the heart of it, but it was also for self-preservation because I could see my future and I could see that I would get bigger, most likely. I don't know what kind of music we'd produce, but because I didn't even know if I had more, you know, records in me or anything. I just, as a performer, we were so, we were quite big in Europe, but I wasn't evolving at all. And I was getting, I thought, I think, more high strung and just, I wasn't happy. But you were not, as I understand it, you weren't, you know, self-destructive.

26:07No. Drugs were not your thing. No, I was never, I mean, I was such a sickly kid. I mean, my mother had to, I had to be nursed through bronchial pneumonia at birth and tuberculosis and scarlet fever and the pandemic flu of 1958. And then, you know, mononucleosis. I was so, plus all the measles, monks, chickenpox. I had to struggle so much to live. And then when I came to New York, and when Robert and I moved to the Chelsea in 1969. Your friend Robert Mapplethorpe. I saw a lot of great people destroying themselves and who never made it past 27 or other people who did make it for a while but had so, you know, damaged themselves.

27:01I never wanted to be like that. In fact, at the Chelsea, because I didn't do anything, I didn't even smoke pot, there was rumors for a while that I was a narc. Patti Smith, narcotics agent. I like that. I swear to you. And Robert even told me, he said, you know, some people are saying that you're a narc. We thought it was funny, but, you know, they were suspicious of me. So let's go to your time at home with Fred. How did you experience life after this unbelievably tumultuous time, an exciting time? You're at home. And how did you live your life and how long did that last and your experience of kind of domestic happiness, if that's what it was?

27:50I missed my brother. I missed being on the I'm an East Coast person. I missed the ocean. I missed all the cafes. I missed the camaraderie of my band. I missed traveling. But I'm very lucky because I have other outlets of creative expression. I wasn't wanting. I wasn't suffering because I wasn't on stage. I didn't depend on adulation for my self-worth. so I didn't those kind of things didn't come into play one of the things I missed the most was cafes just to be able to walk out my door and go to a cafe but this is something we share you're also a coffee freak yeah I like my coffee but but I liked our life and you know we had And Fred, like me, was always studying.

29:03You know, he studied to be a pilot, and he got his pilot's license. He was studying navigation. He studied, you know, so we both loved that aspect of learning, and we wrote music at home. And we're just, I don't know. I'm not domestically inclined. I wasn't the greatest housekeeper, but I'm good at laundry. I did the laundry, and I washed the diapers, and my kids. I love my kids. What year did Fred die? The end of 94. You were left with just this gigantic loss and hole in your life. and what was your determination to do the next days and months? Well, I had two children. They were 7 and 12. So I had, and also I had the promise from my brother when he died that he would help me raise the kids.

30:15And just unexpectedly he had a massive stroke a month later and died at 42. So it wasn't just the loss of Fred that I had to deal with. It was the loss of my brother Todd. Did you think you could come back from all of that? Well, I had to. A mother. You came back to music with a record called Gone Again. Yes. What did that moment feel like for you? It was very painful because Fred and I had worked on a record toward the end of his life. He wanted to call it Going West. We did a lot of work on the record, and I had to take that work and sort of transform it and write new work for a new record. and it was very necessary because we had lived so frugally and simply and there were many doctor bills and all kinds of things and I was really obliged to return to work.

31:31And, of course, I have very good friends that all help me get my feet back on the ground. And even though, yes, it was wonderful to record with them, it was great. But I think I said in the book, I had to take the photographs without Robert, play music without Richard Soule, my beloved pianist who also died of heart failure at 37, without my brother at the helm. without Fred by my side. So it was something that I had to navigate, and I was very lucky to have all kinds of people helped with that record. I got through it with the help of friends. And eventually, in returning, The idea of returning to performing was really daunting.

32:37But it was Allen Ginsberg, another friend who kept entreating me to go back to public life and go back on stage. And I believe it was Allen that talked to Bob Dylan. And then Bob Dylan offered us an East Coast tour. And it was my first tour in 16 years. Patty, there's a remarkable passage that opens the last chapter, I believe. I wonder if you could read that for us.

33:29calling, a blood vine circling the ankle of a 12-year-old girl, a messenger attaching his wing and bruising her heel. I felt blessed with the aspiration to produce worthy work. But recently, I've sensed a pulling away, macrurial droplets tapping my skull as I fitfully seek sleep, My ears press against the pillow A repeating phrase pulsating We who no longer believe When did I write that? And why? It disturbs me Have I really felt that for more than a few sullen moments? Patty, tell me about that feeling of no longer believing. It still shocks me that I'm even reading it now because I haven't, I was just, I actually, if I really deeply think about it, think it's part of the aging process and going through so much loss, so much experience, and maybe fatigue, almost losing motivation, like why am I creating, what is the point?