Patti Smith biography
Punk rock's poet laureate Patti
Smith ranks among the most influential female rock & rollers of
all time. Ambitious, unconventional, and challenging, Smith's music
was hailed as the most exciting fusion of rock and poetry since Bob Dylan's
heyday. If that hybrid remained distinctly uncommercial
for much of her career, it wasn't a statement against accessibility so much as
the simple fact that Smith followed her own muse wherever it
took her: from structured rock songs to free-form experimentalism, or even
completely out of music at times. Her most avant-garde outings drew a sense of
improvisation and interplay from free jazz, though they remained firmly rooted
in noisy, primitive, three-chord rock & roll.
Born in Chicago and raised in Philadelphia
and nearby New Jersey, Smith eventually made her way to New
York City, where she spent the early part of the '70s immersed in the New York
art scene, living with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe at the
Chelsea Hotel and developing herself in a variety of creative mediums from
poetry to painting to playwriting. By 1974, she'd begun to establish herself as
a rock musician, playing shows with guitarist/bassist Lenny Kaye,
then assembling what would soon become the Patti Smith Group. After Kaye,
pianist Richard Sohl was the first to come on board, followed
shortly after by Czechoslovakian-born guitarist/bassist Ivan Král and
drummer Jay Dee Daugherty.
Released in December 1974, Horses fused Smith's
unconventional post-beat poet lyrical style with a primitive rock minimalism
that was striking and wholly unique. Though the album was credited solely
to Smith, the collective force of Smith, Kaye, Sohl, Král,
and Daugherty together signified the stark power of the
burgeoning punk movement, and by the time 1976's Radio Ethiopia arrived,
it was attributed to Patti Smith Group. During a January 1977 tour date in
As the '70s came to a close, so
would the tenure of the original Patti Smith Group. Following the 1979 release
of their fourth album, Wave, Smith and her
newlywed husband, Fred "Sonic" Smith relocated to
Detroit, where she would spend most of the decade in semi-retirement while
raising a family. Král would go on to work with Iggy Pop, compose music for a number of
independent films, and record a number of solo works in his native