Among my assorted regrets is that I did not get to know Patti Smith when I had the chance. I’ve written before about our brief encounters when we both worked for Rock magazine … me as the art director, she as a staff writer. The span of time we interacted was short and my recollection has faded into the ether other than a vivid memory of what she looked like in 1970; some of the stories she told about writing poetry and sharing her life with (to me, at the time) an unknown photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe; tales about her hanging with revered playwright Sam Shepard; and an evening we spent strolling east from our offices on 7th Avenue and 23rd street to a concert that Rock produced at the New York Academy of Music, co-starring her friend Tim Buckley. Shortly after that, having written only two feature stories for Rock, she was let go by the publisher for reasons unknown.
Her departure was so swift, I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye. I only learned about her musical accomplishments a few years later, after the now classic album Horses was released and I saw that another Rock writer, Lenny Kaye, was involved as her guitarist and collaborator. They performed together at the Knitting Factory and St. Marks on the Bowery church. I assumed that they met at Rock, but I now believe it was Lenny who introduced Patti to our managing editor. I wish my memory was more precise, but the synapses haven’t been firing well. I do, however, recall her saying how passionately she wanted to play rock and roll.
I ran into Patti on the street two decades later. She was a legend — had already fallen in love and married Fred “Sonic” Smith of the MC5, moved to Detroit and went off the grid. By then she had become the rock star she initially wanted to be, and had had enough. After Fred died, Patti moved to Greenwich Village and enrolled her two children in the same progressive school that my son attended. When we met again by chance one morning after delivering our kids to school, I reminded her that we were once colleagues. She vaguely recalled (or was just being polite) and asked a perfunctory query as to what I was doing now. I told her I was the art director of The New York Times Book Review—and her response was, “they didn’t like my book of poems.” I dutifully apologized and we went our own ways.
Her first memoir Just Kids was published in 2010 to rave reviews, including from the Times. It was indeed a compelling read, scenes of which remained in my limited-memory brain-storage for some time. I ran into her a couple of times after that (including an SVA commencement ceremony). She didn’t remember me, even when I gave her a thumb drive containing her two Rock articles. Yet I nonetheless felt a certain connection.
Last week, I finished reading her current memoir, Bread of Angels, and all the missing pieces of her life from before and after her brief stay at Rock (although that particular episode was not mentioned at all) were revealed in beautiful, spiritually lyrical and candid prose. Where Just Kids focused mostly on her landing in New York from South Jersey and the intense relationship she had with Mapplethorpe, this new memoir (her third) addresses a enviable love for her parents and four siblings; coming of age in the East Village as a musician-poet; forming her band, writing music in collaboration with Lenny and others; being adopted by mentors, like William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg; meeting and working with Bob Dylan; and wedding Smith. Her detailed accounts of fact and feelings flowed seamlessly an soothingly.
Bread of Angels is a journey of love and loss, ambition and discovery, memory and analysis. To read it is a warming experience; it is being allowed into her inner sanctum. I had not avidly followed Smith’s discography (my musical tastes are limited to ’60s nostalgia), but reading what she said about making music as an extension of visual and literary arts—and her soul—was the push I needed to go beyond only listening to a couple of Smith’s anthems that I had heard before. Her well-composed narrative makes no pretense of being over the heads of her readers, who will be inspired and moved to listen to more. Incidentally, currently I’m listening to Gung Ho.
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