Eric Wendell - Patti Smith: Americas Punk Rock Rhapsodist

America's Punk Rock Rhapsodist

Eric Wendell

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham Boulder New York London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wendell, Eric, 1984.

Patti Smith : America's punk rock rhapsodist / Eric Wendell.

pages cm. (Tempo : a Rowman & Littlefield music series on rock, pop, and culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8108-8690-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8108-8691-9 (ebook : alk. paper)

1. Smith, Patti. 2. Rock musiciansUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.

ML420.S672W46 2015

782.42166092dc23 [B]

2014023315

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

In the pages that follow is a portrait of the many ways that Patti Smith shook up a baby boomer world by crashing through conventions left and right. What emerged in the wake of her iconoclasm was the creation of the American punk-poet aesthetic and a fresh take on the female pop icon. Smoldering with ideas and arguments, Smith was a red-hot poker forged on the cool streets of New York City. Her form followed the future... or might have been from another planet; hers was certainly not the feminine physique that had historically held center stage in American culture.

Speaking of form, later in life Smith would defy conventions again by embracing motherhood and domestic life but on her terms and only after she had successfully, for herself, liberated rock and roll of the male archetype. Smiths sense of style, though, neither indicated nor negated the feminine any more than the masculine. She was an explorer, and she found a welcoming place in an avant-garde community of art and fashion mavericks looking to challenge classical forms, not to mention cultural taste and morality.

Smith absorbed books, poetry, and her parents Christian religion as a childsickly, for most of her young years, she had plenty of bedridden time to readand she released in song and poetry and art what inspired her back into the world, without much regard for the traditional audiences, who for so long relied on a certain stability that all those words and ideas had heretofore provided. She perceived the crucial role that the history of explorers and nonconformers just a few blocks off Main Street played in the story of any great society. She merged traffic, bringing the energy of Americas side street and alleyway cultures onto its thoroughfares.

The tensions between the popular and the radical are often where the most potent critiques of institutional carelessness arise, and Smith seemed right at home in the contradictions that she herself embodied and created. In those tensions, she has made her most effective stands for the agency of the American individual to be whoever she or he wants to be. How one might best know that the iconoclast is actually working to build a better future for her society, rather than just for herself, is by how much care she devotes to creating the new to replace the old. Smithjudging by the quality of her artistic career and the inspiration that she has been to many after herhas cared deeply and has created lovingly.

Scott Calhoun

Series Editor