Patti Smith

“I love life. I’ve always fought to live. I am happy every day that I have an opportunity to do new work or find new work or experience something, even nature. I’ve often quoted one of my favorite Jimi Hendrix lines: Hooray, I wake from yesterday. I actually feel that.”

–Patti Smith, episode 442 of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso

Patti Smith has been hailed as the Godmother of Punk, the people’s poet, a defining voice of her generation. She’s been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. She won a National Book Award for Just Kids. Last fall, she published her most intimate memoir to date, Bread of Angels.

Act I: In Sickness and In Health

We discuss Patti’s early creative awakenings in South Jersey (7:50), discovering Bob Dylan at sixteen (18:00), and the summer job that inspired her infamous poem, Piss Factory (21:20). 

Act II: Coming to New York

Then, we walk through her nomadic years with Robert Mapplethorpe in-and-out-of the Chelsea Hotel (32:30), her run-in with the Rolling Thunder Revue (39:58), the whirlwind of making her debut album Horses (45:28), and why she left it all behind (50:24).

Act III: Curtain Call

To close, she talks about giving voice to those whose time was cut short (53:00), her tireless desire and commitment to evolve as an artist (59:23), and the protests and politics that have shaped some of her best and most urgent work to date (1:01:37).