Patti Smith's punk purity

I've always felt a certain kinship with the poet/rocker/painter/activist Patti Smith because we both grew up in the South Jersey suburbs, that Raymond Carver landscape of rosebushes and mortgages.

Both of us briefly attended Glassboro State College (now Rowan University) before moving on to big cities"“ she to New York, I to Philly. I've never met her, but we know people in common"“ the writer Victor Bockris and the photographer Frank Stefanko. Yet I could always hear South Jersey in Patti Smith's voice even as she became a seminal, legendary figure in our culture.

There is grass roots America in that distinctive South Jersey accent, that slightly nasal twang that leaves the "g" off gerunds and bespeaks working-class common sense and a long view of life. It's atonal and distinctive, a Philly accent gone slightly country.

If you listen closely, it's there in the fashion photographer Steven Sebring's 2008 two-hour documentary, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, which aired on public TV on December 30, her 63rd birthday.

Dreamy and disjointed

Sebring worked for 12 years on his film (whose title is taken from the title of one of her songs); at one point in it, Patti Smith says she is going to sit in the corner of her bedroom, surrounded by books and the other necessities of her life, until it is finished.

The end result isn't a straight-ahead documentary but an almost dreamy, disjointed combing of the warp and woof of a life lived for art"“ poetry, painting, and the glorious, slam-bang tribal ritual of raw rock 'n' roll. Not for nothing is Patti Smith known as "the godmother of punk."

As with most of us of a certain age, Patti Smith has seen death go off around her like a series of cosmic hand grenades: first her beloved friend, the controversial homoerotic photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, then her treasured brother Todd, followed by her longtime pianist, Richard Sohl.

Political revolutionaries

But the deepest imprint death left on Smith's life and career was the passing of her husband, Fred "Sonic" Smith, the guitar glue of the Detroit rock band MC5 (Motor City 5). Formed by the activist-poet John Sinclair as a way to communicate political revolution to the young people he saw as crucial to any lasting change, MC5 was a group of hell-bent, kiss-my-ass musicians whose signature anthem was "Kick Out the Jams." MC5 came to Philly in the late '60s to play a benefit concert for the Philadelphia Free Press, and its musicians ended the night parked in their van in City Hall courtyard, smoking dope and fucking groupies. Oh, yeah.

His marriage to Patti made groupies superfluous. Friends joked that she married Sonic because she wouldn't have to change her name, but he and Patti were well suited: Both were cultural commandos who perceived rock 'n' roll as an engine for social change.

The Smiths had two children before Fred's death. Patti Smith: Dream of Life was originally to be a film about a single mom with two kids, although that single mom is a pop icon. In the process of its creation it became much more: a sliding, shifting, here, there, then, now, whenever portrait-in-motion of the woman and artist.

Explore the moment

What I came away with, finally, from Sebring's 12-year labor was an intense feeling of Patti Smith's purity— as an artist, a parent, a daughter, a friend and a person. There's not a dram of pretense or drama in this woman. Each moment seems to be fully explored, as if she's living in the impossibility of true real time. Smith is at once serious, joyous and, most of all, simply nice.

Four Ó propos scenes come to mind.

"¢ Patti Smith and her father chat in the backyard of the Deptford rancher where she grew up. He's stocky, balding and wearing a very large white T-shirt with a lot of printing on it. They're talking about the trees there and about the dog that's with them. There's two-way love and acceptance just in the way she calls him "Daddy"; it's as if she never left home and became an international celebrity. Later in the film, she remembers how amazed and delighted she was as a kid when out of nowhere one day her father walked on his hands and juggled. There is still that amazement and delight.

"¢ Smith and Sam Shepard play guitars and sing a country song together. Smith isn't a very good guitarist, truth be known, and she fumbles and Sam Shepard grins and asks, "How long have you been performing?" She blushes. They continue and, when the song is finished, Smith remarks to the camera that the first time she heard Shepard play and sing, she said to herself, "Listen to this hillbilly son-of-a-bitch." The way she said it was a total compliment.

"¢ Smith stands in profile at a bedroom window, softly singing what sounds like a child's lullaby and idly stroking a cream-colored cat whose purr can be heard as an accompaniment. It's a true moment of soft beauty, quiet rapture.

"¢ Patti Smith's voice-over indicts George W. Bush, cataloguing the president's every sin against humanity as the camera moves over a protest against the war in Iraq. Her voice is full and demanding, outraged at the betrayal of his country by its elected leader.

As for the singer's reaction to Patti Smith: Dream of Life, she has remarked, "I'm happy for people to get a more humanistic view. I have a really great life. I've had, for me, really great tragedy in my life. I still mourn my people that I lost. I miss my husband. But I've had great opportunities."

And she has taken great advantage of them. We are the better for it.♦


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