Patti Smith sat in a hotel in Notting Hill Gate, talking about her favourite subject. She wore a white shirt, a black tie and black trousers, and if not for her piercing blue eyes, she would have looked like a rag doll in drag. Having just arrived from New York, the words poured from her in an excited torrent.
"Being into rock is like being into the most important, newest art form. I feel like an early prospector in California before the gold rush. I feel rock is going to explode and encompass everything. It's like this fantastic plague over the universe and we're in on it. We're like catalysts of the new plague," she said.
At 29, Patti Smith was New York's latest sensation. She had been an artist, playwright, poet and rock critic, now a rock'n'roller. The press called her "the wild mustang" and "the rock queen of the seventies." Across America, she was winning a varied and fanatical following.
Just as American rock grew predictable and respectable, Patti crashed in with a reminder of the underground and the spirit of 1967. That year she arrived in New York, "just a kid lurking round the Fillmore," when "giants walked the earth" – Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison. Along with her heroes The Rolling Stones, these artists inspired her extraordinary style.
Album 'Horses' and musical style
On her album Horses, her style was chillingly effective: a spontaneous mix of surreal, improvised poetry and earthy rock. It sounded like a sixties new-wave poet (influenced by Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Burroughs) jamming with a basic East Coast band like the Velvet Underground or the New York Dolls. Patti agreed, "I'm not an accomplished musician, but I'm verbal – extremely verbal." She performed rather than sang, ranging from joyously sexual themes to strange, half-spoken pieces shifting from bizarre fantasy to echoes of sixties rock.
Roundhouse concert review
By Robin Denselow, 20 May 1976: Patti Smith had promised no half measures – she would either go beyond herself or totally fail. It was disappointing that she didn't quite do either. On stage, a scruffy waif in tight jeans and flapping shirts, she failed to reproduce the drama of Horses. Her personality and harsh quavering voice were at times up to standard, but her band was ploddingly slow and uninspired. The keyboard player looked like a permanently frightened zombie.
With that band, Smith struggled to warm the audience, despite lectures on rock's importance, risque chat, and poems. There was back-to-the-sixties naivety, but also sixties energy. Spontaneity in her half-spoken song poems and her energy in Gloria and My Generation let her get away with more than she deserved.
