“I feel embarrassed when people call me a musician, because I can’t play anything,” Patti Smith told the crowd late in her talk at the New Yorker Festival on Saturday night.
David Remnick, editor-in-chief of the magazine and her interviewer, began to make noises of protest.
“I didn’t have any musical aspirations,” Smith said. “I liked being in front of people.”
She would prefer, she said, that we call her a “performer”.
Smith proceeded to prove the point by singing Because the Night, with Remnick accompanying her on the electric guitar.
“I may regret this,” Remnick said, as he set himself up on the instrument. But once they started playing the spell was cast, the packed audience singing along in places, and at the end the audience were on their feet and clapping. Smith’s performances just have that effect on people.
Smith told the crowd that when she began giving her famous poetry readings at St Mark’s Church and elsewhere, she thought poetry readings were “snoresville”. This changed, gradually, as she watched Allen Ginsburg, William Burroughs and Jim Carroll captivate audiences.
She saw that poetry readings could be more lively. She spoke of attending quite a few with the poet Gregory Corso, who was “the biggest heckler I ever saw. He would yell at the poets, mid-composition, things like ‘Get a blood transfusion!’”
When she got up herself, she wanted to avoid her friend’s heckles.
“I didn’t have any game plan,” Smith said. “It was just to make poetry a little more visceral.”
Both the crowd’s adoration of Smith and her low-key charisma made for a visceral experience here. As always, Smith was dressed simply, her long grey hair parted down the middle, a perfectly-fitting blazer worn over jeans. When she speaks, especially as she is getting comfortable, she drops her Gs. She had the warm, welcoming presence of someone quite used to an adulating crowd.
When one young woman, evidently overcome by the occasion, got up to the microphone and babbled, Smith interrupted her with a direct but not unkind: “What’s your question?”
Smith said her new book, M Train, was meant to be a freer work than her bestselling and National Book Award-winning memoir Just Kids. She wrote Just Kids because, she said, “Robert [Mapplethorpe] asked me to write it the day before he died.”
It was something she felt a great deal of responsibility about writing. Smith said she was not generally a fan of memoir, and that her major writing interest was really Jean Genet.
M Train, which focuses more on her life in the past few years, is weighted down with another loss: that of her husband, the guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith. But as Patti Smith read from M Train, a passage about her husband’s ambitions for her to have a public television show of her own, she appeared on the verge of giggles.
She looked up at one point, reading a line about a now-forgotten B-movie actor her husband really wanted as a guest on the show, and grinned.
“Really?” she asked the audience.
Smith spoke of several future projects: a detective novel, a novel for young women and a companion to Just Kids, which she says will be focused on music. She was sanguine about the way Just Kids has brought her work to a new audience, even saying that she was pleased that at her concerts young people show up with copies of Just Kids in the way that they once showed up with records or CDs.
Remnick asked her about a relationship that was key to her work: her love of the city of New York. While she refrained from getting too fiery on the subject, Smith’s tone was elegaic.
“It was ours,” she said. “It felt like everyone was creative, struggling … everyone was striving for something.”
There was less then of what she called “the suburbs” in the city. She still loves New York, she said, but it’s different.
In response to an audience question, Smith also said that while she herself is not too technologically adept – she told a story of being unable to use an iPhone for three months because she didn’t know she had to slide the icon to answer a call – she has watched the technological developments of the last few years warily.
“I think we’re in a pioneering time,” she said. But “the way that [technology] has developed and really magnified the cult of celebrity is really poisonous”.
She wanted to remind young people, she said, that “it’s all about the work”, and she wanted that work to last: “Not to lose their individual worth. Not to assess themselves by their social-media grades.”
And asked about her connection to her breakthrough album, Horses, which has certainly lasted, Smith grinned. She played that album at more than 50 concerts this summer, she said.
“If I didn’t feel connected, I’d never do it.”
- This article was amended on 4 October 2015 to reflect that David Remnick was playing the electric guitar, not the electric bass, while accompanying Smith.
