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Patti Smith on music, politics...and dental hygiene
Grooves travelled to theJack Daniels birthday bash in Tennessee for an intimate chat with the punk rock legend
LEGENDARY punk rocker Patti Smith spoke to Grooves before her gig at the Birthday JD Set, held at the Jack Daniels whiskey distillery in Lynchberg, Tennessee.
During that hour, she covered all bases: the importance of dental care; how she was signed after Bob Dylan went to watch her first gig; the evil of globalisation. (She took her sunglasses off after five minutes.)
What made you want to take part in the JD set?
Well I thought it was an unusual request and I was really surprised that they asked me, I thought why would they want me to come to this? But I thought it would be great for my son Jackson, a really great guitar player, so I more took it to have the pleasure of Jackson coming here. And when I've done political rallies, I've played for 40 people in the middle of nowhere.
Why did you do the covers album?
I always wanted to do one. In the 70s, I didn't start singing, I'm not a musician, I'm not a real singer or anything. When I sang Horses, I had no track record of being a singer, I didn't want to have a band, I grew up in a rural area where I never even saw a guitar for real, and girls really didn't play guitars.
Weren't you a music journalist?
I saw the trajectory of music, Little Richard, Bob Dylan, The Animals, and then the 60s, all the great music and I really felt empowered being a skinny, pimply weirdo from New Jersey. I loved rock'n'roll so much, and then in the early 70s it felt like it was going downhill, politically and sexually, it was losing its strength, it was getting glamorous and snotty, so I started writing and performing stuff. Just hoping to agitate things. To remind people where rock'n'roll was supposed to be. It was supposed to be grassroots and speak for the people. In 73. But what really happened was Bob Dylan came to see me in some shitty little club and he never did stuff like that. For me, he was like Bob Dylan, you know, I loved him. It got so much media attention that I got signed. His endorsement got me signed.
What health would you say rock'n'roll's in now?
It's in an interesting pivotal state, I don't think it's going down or up, it's like imagine if it's like a war, the people are gathering their forces, they're marshalling their energies so I find it interesting. I feel like the new guard are experimenting and becoming more independent. Record companies are in trouble and scrambling. Its such a mess that its not owned by anybody. Its being redefined. It's not a business, it's not supposed to be a business. It's a voice. It's like it's rebirthing itself. I'd rather that than corporatised.
Where do you see your role in all of it? Are you still shaking things up?
I don't know. I never even expected to be alive at 60 but since I'm here, I'm really happy, I hope I'm alive another 40 years. At this point, I know I'm worse at what I do best. I like to perform, and I like to communicate, and I think I can be trusted because I don't have any ulterior motives. I like to make people laugh, I get angry about things. I want to inspire people to get politically involved. But I'd also like to inspire people to take good care of their teeth, don't eat a lot of salt or fast food. I'm a mum, I can be very irreverent, I can still put my foot through an amp but I can help you with first aid or nutrition. I don't have an image or agenda, I've been here a long time and sadly have outlived a lot of my friends, so if I can be of help.. I will.
What's making you angry at the moment?
The illegal and immoral occupation of Iraq by the Bush administration is the number one thing. All of the exploitation of young people by corporations, and how young people are being moulded to be the consumers of the future. This constant advertising that we have everywhere is becoming people's education.
How does that sit with a corporate gig like this?
Well it's corporate, it's alcohol. I thought about this. I'm very sensitive about alcohol issues, I've got friends who've died from alcoholism, but I'm not anti alcohol, I just feel people have to be educated that too much alcohol.. that alcohol's a bad drug. But alcohol itself is not an evil thing. I always search myself when I agree to do these things but I don't perceive it as evil, if it was a pharmaceutical company I wouldn't be here, because they're evil. But in the end.. my relatives drink Jack Daniel's, I wanted my son to meet these musicians, so I was thinking about it in a different way. But truthfully I didn't agonise too much over it. But I have turned down the most money I've every been offered in my whole life because a pharmaceutical company wanted to use one of my songs. It was a lot of money – I could have bought those houses. But we live in a modern world, I'm not a purist. I just try and adapt.
Do you think musicians have a responsibility to speak out on issues of human rights?
I believe everybody has a responsibility, everybody has to. But artists are in a unique position to inspire. They can't make huge change but they can inspire people to make change, I wish more artists would come forward. But the Iraq war, trying to get people to speak out on that.. and the few people that did, we were marginalised. It wasn't reported in the media. I came to Europe to march. Couldn't march in America. I know they were afraid because of what happened on September 11th, but still, you can't forget who you are.
Why is liberal such a dirty word?
The left have been extremely weak. September 11th is one of the worst things to have happened to my country, and not because of the tragedy – yes it's a tragedy, but when you look at the tsunami that killed 100,00 people... a lot of it wasn't the amount of people that died, it was the American pride. It's as if we have this magic shield around us and all of Europe can experience tragedies – but not us. It seemed to, it struck a pall over the country and the Bush administration crafted everything, so that anything that you said that opposed what he said was unpatriotic. People got very weak, they completely lost what patriotism is – what they really meant was you are not nationalistic. The Bush administration are nationalistic and imperialistic, and most of the American people do not have the sophistication to understand the difference. The word should be humanist.
Does it feel like a success to be on the bill with diverse and strong female artists?
I'm really happy about it, I'm happy to be included. I think it's very interesting to have this idea, of three diverse females with a male band of session musicians, we're all different mix, we're all different ages and different sensibilities. I think it's going to be a successful experiment.
What new acts do you like?
I don't know anybody or anything that's going on! The way I find out what's going on is through MySpace. My daughter made me a MySpace and I felt like an intruder: 'They don't want me on the MySpace thing, that's like a secret club'. And then 200,000 people came to visit. For a person like me, who sells 40,000 records in America, to see 200,000 people listening to your music is really exciting.
I like Wagner, Maria Callis, Coldtrain and Jimmy Hendrix. I'm not really up on who's doing what.
Do you think when it becomes so egalitarian it's difficult to pick out what you like?
That's how things are right now. In the 60s we had all of these gods of the period, you look at the Rennaisance and you have Michaelangelo and Da Vinci, well every generation doesn't necessarily put out these olympian people. I think we're just in a cycle where it is more equalised. But people will rise, someone who will be extra special, have extra charisma or a special gift and they will capture a wider imagination. Right now the playing field is more people orientated. Maybe not as mystically exciting, but I think for the individual it's a good thing. Everyone is learning they can express themselves, yes I can vote, yes I can make change, I can do something for the environment.
I think of it like in sports. I always hated sports but my late husband, who is a great musician and a genius, but he also loved sports and he forced me to learn about sports including golf.
He was from Detroit and he loved his basketball team, the Detroit Pistons. This was in the 80s, which was a period we'd had so many great players, like Michael Jordan, he was like the god of basketball. But then you had the Pistons, who had no god. You had a bunch of scrappy players, each with their own personality.
You had Vinnie, the microwave, who was like 5'8 and he's a basketball player. They had Buddha, who was tall and skinny and very meditative, who would just quietly let everybody else do their thing and then all of a sudden he would just 'poomf', put it in. And then you had Joe Dumar, the good guy, the work horse, and you had Rodman, the worm, who was one of the great defence players.
But none of them were iconic. They were just all of these guys, and they wound up winning three championships, because they were such a collective force. Some might have the great one-god guy that sold all of the t-shirts, and all of America was wearing their sneakers, and nobody gave as much thought to the Pistons.
But the Pistons won three championships. And I thought there's something so metaphorically beautiful about this, and it was out of this atmosphere that my husband and I wrote the song, People Have The Power, really secretly inspired by the Detroit Pistons.
I like to think that right now, music is in its Detroit Pistons place. We'll see what happens.
Do you still watch basketball?
No.
My husband before he passed away said to me, because he loved golf, he was seeing a decline in golf, in the way that almost we're seeing a decline in music, because all the players were getting too old and it seemed like the playing field was getting too wide, and too cluttered and it was getting boring.. And right before my husband passed away he said 'Tricia we need a young black golfer with a the ability of Jack Nicklaus' and he said I predict a young black golfer is going to come and change the whole course of golf history, and then he said, 'and you're going to have something to do with it.'
So anyway, Fred passed away and never got to see the rise of Tiger Woods, who of course, did change the course of golf history. But I always wondered what I had to do with Tiger Woods, until about two weeks ago. I happened to see in some newspaper, a little article about him and his birthday, December 30, the same as mine. So my husband was never wrong.
While we're looking at my camera I will also give you my dental pitch. As a parting gift, my dental pitch is, I'm telling you something I was never told because my generation being born right after world war two, dental care was not a big issue and my generation have terrible teeth. I'm telling you, please, save your money, and get your teeth professionally cleaned once twice a year if you can afford it, because when you get older its such a pain in the ass, its so important. I never had the money, but it wasn't even the money, I just didn't know. It will save you a lot of heartache. You wouldn't think that teeth things were such a big deal but it is such a big pain in the ass.
I worry about people, I do, I want people to come to our concerts and have fun, I want people to have as much information about things, even a little thing because if the revolution comes, you don't want to be with a nerve exposed in your tooth that's so painful that you aren't ready for the revolution.
You played at the closing of CBGBs last year. Did that feel like the end of an era or is it just a place?
CBGBs, to me, is symptomatic of one of the tragedies of our modern world and that is the affluence and the corporatisation of our cities and advertising, money, condominiums... I'm sure you see it where you all live. NY city was always such a great city when I was younger, because it was so cheap, a little dangerous, not so dangerous, but you could come, get a little bookstore job, live in the east village, meet a whole bunch of other artists and poets, create a scene and exchange ideas, and get political ideas and poetic ideas and feel like you were doing something.
Now its become so affluent and expensive, and they just have come in really, at such a speed, I can't believe it, right in front of my eyes, and taken over all our neighbourhoods. Not just some of them, all of them. And these developers and these really evil people like Donald Trump, who's like another evil king, and just buy up all these areas and make condos so expensive so that none of us can live there.
So yes, CBGBs, I feel emotionally sad about losing it physically, but its not just CBGBs, its the whole thing. And it's not just the whole thing in NY, its everywhere I go this is happening, everywhere in the world I go. I was just in Istanbul and kids are saying yeah this is a cool area but the developers are moving in. It doesn't matter where it is, it's the globalisation of our world.
To me globalisation should mean everyone can afford health care, Aids drugs are available to everyone, that no one is starving. That should be globalisation. But globalisation is not that at all. It's becoming that the world is just one big playground for people with new affluence, and a lot of this affluence is made up, because it's built on credit cards. It's not really built on a real working-class sensibility where people work hard, it's more to do with how clever an entrepreneurial you are. And I think that this. I can live with the equal exploration of the arts, but this equalisation of the world for the middle classes, the upper middle classes, its such a class conscious thing. In NY city, I don't have any place left to play any more, all my band have moved out except for me. Every single place we've ever practised, they're finished, they're condos, galleries, I don't know where we're going...
Me myself I'm looking for somewhere to move because it doesn't represent me any more. I'm giving up. It doesn't matter any more. I could hold out on my little street, but for what reason? I have no community. I don't want to be around these people who are basically.. I mean we never had anything, nowadays they've got these stretch hummers and they're dressed up with cell phones hanging out of their ears C'mon – you know, do something, do something else.
You hit a sensitive nerve, but despite all of that, and despite the fact that to me, our world seems really fucked up at the moment, and my country seems in a really bad place, spiritually, socially, economically, I still believe, and I tell my kids this, we get one life, one specific life, and we have the right to navigate the dark sea of the world as well as we can, and be happy and have some kind of joy and I don't think that we need to be depressed, angry and feel defeated every day.
I know things are very bad, I know the Bush administration in some ways has defeated me, but I'm not going to crawl into hole, I'm going to be myself and I'll be a living thorn, and I'll poke him and poke him and poke him until hopefully he bleeds. And maybe that's all I can do, but in the meantime I'm also gonna be happy, and enjoy my kids, enjoy arts, enjoy nature, enjoy this moment. So for a person who's maybe the oldest in this room, I'm just telling you that life, even in its worst, is worth living. There's always something wonderful to wake up to everyday. It really is worth it. I have seen the bottom, and even seeing the bottom, I still wanted to come back up. Its great to be alive.
I don't believe that we all deserve to have a car, or all the different things that are dangled in front of us, but I do believe we have the right to be happy. So even if you feel guilty, don't be afraid to be happy.
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Patti Smith's Interview
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