Patti Smith: "I'm a worker, and I'm a mother, and all the other stuff is just semantics."
Part Two
Patti Smith
Location: New York City
Vocation: Writer
Links: Patti Smith Substack, Website, Instagram
Last week I published Part 1 of my conversation with Patti Smith. We covered the earlier years of her motherhood, of how she adapted her life to house both children and art, using the quiet years with small children to hone her craft of writing.
The rest of our chat, today’s Part 2, moved more into the current day, when Patti’s kids are grown and doing their own thing. Among many other brilliant insights, Patti shares what she feels is one of the most important things to impart to children, one that she has managed to give to her own: how to keep it together when you make a mistake. In other words, resilience. Which is the trait that modern parents are repeatedly told is the vital one for children to have. And after the past few years, yeah, that seems like a key one for all of us.
Of course, the age-old rule for both fiction and parenting (which seems fitting to me as I often feel like I’m acting when I’m parenting) is show, don’t tell. (I am terrible at this. I don’t know how many times I have yelled at my kids to stop yelling. I’m a pathetic example of do as I say, not as I do.)
But Patti knows how to lead by example. She can not only weather a gaffe but can use it and turn it into something special. She talks about this in depth below. But I couldn’t help but think about her performance at the award ceremony for the 2016 Nobel Prizes. Bob Dylan received the Nobel Prize in Literature and, of course, declined to attend the event. Patti had been invited to sing a song at the ceremony, and when she found out that Dylan was a winner, she decided to sing her favorite Dylan song, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”
In a glittering room full of perfect flower arrangements, in front of stoic people bedecked in jewels, Patti falters. She stumbles over the lyrics a couple times, the first of which brings the song to a halt. And what does she do? She apologizes, says that she’s nervous, and asks the conductor to start over.
She handles the moment with honesty, acknowledging what is happening and showing us her vulnerability. She admits to human emotions, something people don’t tend to do when standing in front of people wearing crowns and tiaras.
But you can feel a shift in the room, even over a YouTube video. You can feel everyone rooting for her. Near the end, when the song is reaching its emotional crescendo, Patti’s chin is high, her arms are marching, and in the crowd, heads are bobbing, eyes are tearing up. I get goosebumps every single time I watch the video. We’re no longer watching a Dylan song being performed, we’re watching a human carrying the mantle of another person’s accomplishment, trying to do his song, his contribution, justice, and we’re all in it together, helping her carry that weight to the finish line.
In his memoir, Dylan said he wrote the lyrics after reading newspapers on microfiche at the New York Public Library. He said: “After a while you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, evil for evil, the common destiny of the human being getting thrown off course. It’s all one long funeral song.”
The song that is about the horrors of the world, a string of sad and cruel images, turns, in its final verse, into a call to action, to show the purpose of the artist, the mission to witness and reflect and raise up, and when Patti is singing those words, we are all being raised up together. Patti is raising us all to a level we never could have reached if she had sung the song “perfectly.”
Because great accomplishments are not born from perfection, they are born from perseverance, which requires resilience.
(She writes beautifully about the experience here.)
Now, more from Patti:
Are both of your children musicians? Is that right?
My son plays a lot of instruments, but he’s primarily a guitarist. My daughter plays piano. She composes, and she’s also a climate change activist. She has her own nonprofit and works in the field of climate change.
They obviously had the genetics for musical talent, but I’m curious to know whether you encouraged them or if they kind of found their own way into music.
My son really came into it on his own. After his father passed away, he just seemed touched by his father and came into music late. I mean, he was 13 years old and seemed born to do it. He wasn’t really that interested in it before. Maybe it was his way of connecting with his late father. But he evolved very quickly as a musician. And my daughter, she chose to play piano on her own. And she’s a writer. She writes poetry all the time. She’s very prolific. But they have their own methods, and they’re also very good performers. I love working with them.
Every once in a while, we’ve done things where it’s just the three of us. And suddenly I’m standing there and realizing I’m singing with these two people that, you know, I birthed and took care of when they were small. It’s really something. There’s a common thread or a common rhythm or something that we have. When I work with my son, just he and I, or if I’m improvising and he’s interpreting, there’s something instinctive that keeps us right in step with one another. I can’t really explain it because I’m not a musician, I don’t have musician language, but it’s the way that you simultaneously connect in performance that never ceases to amaze me. He just anticipates where I’m going. It’s so instantaneous that I can’t even explain it.
And my daughter and I have exactly the same thing. We sometimes will do performances, like we did one that was in tribute to Emily Dickinson at the Morgan Library. It was just her and I. And I was reading, and we didn’t even practice or anything. I would just say, well, we’ll do this one. We had a sort of structure. We knew what the poems were. And then she just improvised music. And we would always, without practicing, land at the same time. A lot of it is intuition and instinct, but also maybe some of it’s blood. They both have it, and we all three of us have it either together or separately.
Did your kids understand that you were a musician growing up?
People keep calling me a musician. I’ve never called myself a musician. I’ve always been a writer. I came into performance as a writer, as a poet and improvising with music. And I have written some music, I sing, but it’s all related to the word.
We didn’t have anything about our public life around the house. The kids knew us as their mother and father. They knew their father worked on music, or him and I would sometimes work on a song or something, but mostly they knew me sitting at the table writing and as their mother. I remember when we toured the first time after their father died. We were touring with Bob Dylan, and a reporter asked Jackson—Jackson was maybe 13—“What was it like having Patti Smith as a mother?” And he said, “She’s my mother. She cooks our food, and she washes the clothes and, you know, she’s my mother.” And the guy went, “OK.” I felt like, yeah, mister, fuck you. You know, what do you expect? What a question to ask a kid. If I had my way, they’d never have to deal with that. When I’m with my kids, and somebody comes up and says nice things, but they’re saying you’re an icon, you’re this or that, I wish they would stop. It’s so embarrassing. I mean, I’m a worker, and I’m a mother, and all the other stuff is just semantics.
In the end, I’m only interested in taking care of my family. And because I’m so conceited, I want to do something great. I’m not really conceited; I don’t have the ambition to sell a million books. But I have an ambition to do something that will, you know, be remembered.
And that’s what I labor over. Because you do sacrifice a lot, even in my situation where one could on paper think that I sacrificed a lot to raise a family and do my work. It’s always the opposite. There’s always ways that you’re disinterested, or you’re not picking up on your kid because I’m so occupied or preoccupied. You know, I might be in 16th century Japan. I might be in the middle of a difficult poem where I can’t get those last three lines. And I’m going over them a hundred times in my mind while one of the kids is trying to tell me something or has a problem. You know, everything comes at a cost. Everything comes at a cost. But it’s just a matter of balance. Balancing is like anything else in life. You just do the best you can.
It’s impossible to have a perfect scenario. And if I would have not had a family or not left New York, I don’t know what would have happened. Maybe I would have become a bigger rock and roll star. Maybe I would have had a hit record. I don’t know. I have no idea. But nothing that might have happened was as great as what happened. It wasn’t always an easy life, but I love my husband. I love my kids. I realize now—because we didn’t have him long here; he died when he was 45—that when he asked me to give him a son and then a little later to give him a daughter, he was actually giving me a gift because they magnify him. I see him in them and I have them. So that’s really beautiful.
My impression is that you approach your art with such confidence and a kind of courage. And I wonder if that came to you naturally.
I mean, in terms of confidence, I knew what I wanted at a very early age. I mean, really early age. After I decided I wanted to be some kind of artist, that’s what I wanted to be. I still worked. I worked in factories. I worked in bookstores for years. I’ve always worked. But I knew what I wanted as a vocation. And when I met Robert Mapplethorpe at 20, Robert, although he was terrible at making a living, he had nothing but confidence. He knew exactly what he wanted to do. He knew exactly who he was. He knew his worth far before others did. And he believed in his own self as an artist. I was more of an acolyte. And he just insisted in our relationship that I get on the level of him in terms of confidence to believe in myself and not to second guess myself and to shed self-consciousness. And that confidence never diminished. It’s like a little tree that I’ve watered all my life. I know where it came from. I know it’s mine, but he is connected with it, and I don’t let it go away. I mean, I have rough spots where it’s not a lack of confidence. It might be just exhaustion or the muse seems to… or my mind just seems to shut off or I don’t have something. Whatever we go through, when we hit our wall or whatever happens. But it’s not a loss of confidence.
The other thing is I like to work. I’m a worker. So, you know, Just Kids took me 10 years to write. I never wrote a nonfiction book. I had no idea how to approach it. All the writing I did, which wasn’t even published mostly, in the ’80s, was all fiction and poetry. And so to suddenly do this book that I never planned to, because Robert asked me on his deathbed, literally, to write it. I had to write it, rewrite it, mostly by hand because I write by hand over and over, the same things over and over, and then shelving it for two years. It was work. And I think that the reason I was able to go through that was three reasons: one, I had promised, I had vowed to Robert I would write it. So I had to. I had the confidence that I had the ability to write it, but the rest was all labor. And in the end, I know how to labor. You know, I think that’s one of the things that, as they say, separates the men from the boys. It’s like, how much are you willing to labor over something?
Maybe I’m going all over the place, but I’m writing a piece on Arthur Rimbaud for my French publisher about Season in Hell, and I was rereading it, and then I was rereading some of his drafts that were finally published. And here is Arthur Rimbaud, 19 years old, writing a masterpiece. But he didn’t just write it in a fit of frenzy. He labored over that for maybe a year. Real intense labor. And I was looking at one draft, where it’s like nine lines. And he writes nine lines, and they all seem beautiful, and a few are crossed out and then a couple are rewritten. And then in the next draft, you know, the same type of deal. But in the actual book, he had distilled all of that into one line. One line, which was almost a distillation of other lines. It was just something like, “Farewell, I know how to greet beauty. I know how to greet beauty.” He worked on that one paragraph over and over and over till he pulled that out of it. It really was heartening to see that because, you know, I’m going through that all the time. Some people write out what they’re writing, but I often have to go over it over and over. So he wasn’t afraid of labor.
Do your children look to you for guidance?
They’ll come to me sometimes. My son is very independent, and he’s also so far beyond me. He’s really like a wunderkind musically. So, you know, I learned from him, and I learn from them both. My daughter will talk to me about editing her work or poetry. But my daughter takes many, many courses and studies many, many different things of a much wider spectrum than myself. And she has a whole different set of references than I do. She always says that Thoreau is her Rimbaud.
If I’ve ever consciously tried to influence them, it’s as performers: to always have faith in yourself and keep a sense of humor and not fall apart when you don’t do well or you make a mistake. My son hates to make a mistake. He hates to do a bad solo or grab the wrong chord. And my daughter, they were both that way, you know, so devastated or feeling humiliated. But I’m the exact opposite. It’s just like whatever happens, I’ll turn it into something else. I’ll kick my way through another door or something. And in working with me, even if I had to exaggerate that, I want them to see that no matter what goes on onstage, if you stay in contact with the people, keep your sense of humor, even tell the people what’s up, they’re with you. And I think that made an effect because when they were younger, they felt the sting of a flaw, but now both of them are very much at ease onstage, whether they’re doing something on their own or with other people or with me.
But I think that’s the one way I might have inspired or influenced them is just because that’s one thing I learned early is staying in contact with the people. I’m not a performer; I don’t have a show. You know, I don’t have any lighting cues or video cues. I’m more of a natural performer. I’ve been halfway through a song, and I could feel that it was just not… And I just stop and say, “Let’s can this and do something else,” and the people will laugh, or I’ll say, “Wasn’t going anywhere, was it?” And they’ll all be laughing. Or I’ll screw up a verse really bad or somebody will make a wrong chord, and it’ll be so bad. We’ll just stop for a minute, redo the verse, and the people are happy because they can see that we’re all in this together.
So I really enjoy working with both my son and daughter individually or together because we all have really adapted this attitude. Especially my daughter, she can really improvise herself out of situations. She’s really become very good at speaking with the people and adept at going with the flow, as it’s said.
It is an important thing in life, if you apply it to other things. We think that it’s the end of the world because something happens or you’re embarrassed in the situation or you get really humiliated in a certain situation. It’s good to instill, if you can, in your kids that you can get through it, you can get through it and you can both laugh and shudder about it, and then you’ll survive and pick up and keep going.
Thank you, Patti, for sharing your story!
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This interview and article are wonderful. Many years ago I read another article/interview with you where you described the arrogance of someone from the media asking about your years or ‘doing nothing’ (I’m paraphrasing) and your response that it is utterly preposterous to assume that people who aren’t in the public eye, who are working every day and raising children, are doing ‘nothing’. As if only public life is ‘doing something’. This struck a chord with me, a young mother and musician. Your advice, then and now, about embracing whatever the moment brings, balance, being flexible, labor, and staying with the audience, are all wonderful life lessons that I use every day and have tried to pass onto my children as well. Your love and devotion to your family and your craft is such a joy to watch. Thank you again for sharing these truths and for teaching by example.