Patti Smith – protopunk, poet, writer, photographer, legend – is on her way to Skibbereen. There she will play rock'n'roll, mingle with the punters and maybe just sit in the middle of a field and play some songs. She tells TONY CLAYTON-LEAabout celebrating Robert Mapplethorpe and how she used a Liss Ard rock as her husband's headstone
FEW AND far between or just plain unique? We’d have to go for the latter in the case of Patti Smith, who, at 64, is whatever you wish to describe her as: poet, singer, songwriter, lover, visual artist, thinker, Godmother of Punk, writer, visionary, mother, political irritant, social activist, widow, artist, awardwinning memoirist, Grammy nominee, Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
“If one hopes to live a long life then one can look back and think that so many years have passed, but I’ve done so much in the past 40 years. I’ve produced work, produced children, I keep working, I keep trying to live in the present and stay healthy. I look to the future, actually.
“I don’t divide my life between past, future and present. I’m living, and all of these ages are within me. I don’t turn my back on my past. I think about it: my childhood, my family. Many of my people are dead, and every day I think about my brother, my husband and my friends who are gone. Not so much with nostalgia or sentimentality but as a living part of me.”
Smith is talking from New York, where she has lived for more than 15 years. She moved there from Detroit after her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, and her brother, Todd, died within a short space of time of each other, and as she speaks about most things art-related, you can sense that loss emanates from her like a vapour trail. Yet she is steely, this Patti Smith. It would be wrong to define her as a survivor merely because of her age, yet there is that element of a life lived amid turmoil, excitement, tragedy, adventure, art and fun. At 64, Smith remains a compelling figure, a rewarding artist, not least because she has been, throughout the decades, as much a pioneer as a participant.
Ageing, however, is one of life’s great levellers – does she feel that the time to create more work is slipping away? “No one knows how long he or she is going to live, you know,” she says in a casual why-are-you-asking-me-that? tone. “The poet Arthur Rimbaud lived to only 37. Robert Mapplethorpe lived to only 42. I’ve already outlived Jackson Pollock and John Coltrane. I think an artist can work their whole life, and if I’m lucky enough to live until I’m 90, maybe, I’ll be like Picasso and work until the very end.
“My work ethic hasn’t changed throughout my life. I work just as hard and feel that my work has strong qualities. Thinking about how little time there is left is almost a waste of time; one could get depressed about it. Fate can decide for or against you, so I think, ultimately, one should just take care of oneself and see what happens.”
From her emergence in New York (via Chicago) in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when she hooked up with struggling artist/ photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (whom in her extraordinarily elegant 2010 memoir, Just Kids, she describes as "the artist of my life"), Smith gradually made a name for herself as a willing partner to experimentation. Nothing was closed or alien to her: performance art, spoken word, painting, acting, rock journalism, singing – all these and more formed the backdrop to her virtually poverty-stricken New York life as friend, lover, co-conspirator and muse to artists such as Mapplethorpe, playwright and actor Sam Shepard and Blue Oyster Cult's Allen Lanier.
Yet it was as a singer and performer that she gained a high profile. It helped that she fitted the protopunk look like a leather glove: a whippet-thin, stringent beauty who fused scarecrow chic, Keith Richards-like androgyny and arty poetry with intelligence and wit. Over the years she has continued to fight the good fight against the dumbing-down of art as she blends rock’n’roll with poetry and vice versa. Not for nothing has she been described as “Rimbaud with Marshall amps”.
“Many people have done that beforehand,” she says. “I’m in a line of artists who have worked to infuse rock’n’roll with poetry, the most important being, probably, Jim Morrison. Whatever work I’ve done, be it in rock’n’roll or poetry or activism or motherhood, I’ve tried to do well.
“Accolades? I don’t depend on them, I don’t work to receive them. If I get one I try to accept it in the spirit that it was given. If they think I’ve been an influence, or if they think my work has been of some avail, then that’s a nice thing, and I’m happy to be acknowledged.”
As a creative person, what does she think is her defining characteristic? “I like to work, and my defining characteristic is that I carry that with me all of the time. Work isn’t a compartment for me. Some people go to church on Sunday and the rest of the week they don’t think about religion. Some people pray every day and God is with them as they walk. My creative impulses are with me always. I would do it whether or not it was accepted, desired or praised. When I was married I lived in Detroit in almost total obscurity, and I worked just as hard.”
Weaving in and out of public consciousness through the years has meant that, while revered by many heavy hitters (the list includes Michael Stipe, Bono, Johnny Depp, Lou Reed, Morrissey, Shirley Manson), there are thousands more who aren't fully aware of what Smith does or who she is. This changed somewhat last year with the US National Book Award-winning Just Kids, a graceful fusion of love story and elegy, a salute to New York and a celebration of her time with Mapplethorpe in ropy, pre-fame days when food and books were stolen to pay for various types of sustenance. Was it a therapeutic book to write?
“No, it wasn’t,” comes the straightforward reply. “It was a difficult book to write because I had to write it intermittently. I kept putting it away for very long periods of time. If I hadn’t promised Robert I’d write it, I’m not so sure I would have written it at all. So therapeutic, no, but what it did do was accomplish a mission, and when we do that we have a certain satisfaction of having kept a promise, and honouring it. The greater satisfaction, however, is that people seemed to have, through the book, a better understanding of Robert. That was my primary focus – that knowledge of him is not just filtered through other details that are either negative, exaggerated or imagined. The book gives the reader a more holistic picture of him, and that makes me happy.”
Speaking of happy, this weekend Smith returns to Liss Ard Estate, Skibbereen, Co Cork, as part of Cork X Southwest Music Arts Festival 2011. She was there in the late 1990s, when the estate hosted what were Ireland’s first ever boutique music events. She wanted – needed, she says – to return. The estate’s owner had presented her with a stone, which was a marker for nearby grounded ships. A master carver then carved the stone, and it subsequently became her husband’s headstone.
“My husband loved the sea,” she says with a hint of regret, “and I knew he would love that. His grave initially had no headstone, because I couldn’t find something that I knew would be meaningful to him. And so I arranged to have this stone shipped by boat to Detroit – it’s now in a very old cemetery and it’s now the marker of a very good man.
“So I have a strong feel for Liss Ard. What am I going to do when I’m there? Well, my band will be there so we’ll definitely do a rock concert. But I’m also going to do whatever I can. Maybe I’ll just sit in the middle of a field and play songs; some things will be announced and some things won’t. I’ll be participating, you know, interacting with people.
“One of my hopes is to walk the grounds and meet people who will be there. I’m always happy to come to Ireland. I have Irish roots, and I’m always happy to be on Irish soil. It’s really one of the most beautiful places in the world.”
* Cork X Southwest takes place at Liss Ard Estate, Skibbereen, tomorrow and Sunday. Smith headlines the main stage on Sunday
