Episode 1167 - Patti Smith
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fucksters what's happening i'm mark maron this is my podcast wtf welcome to it how's it going what are we in month seven of this shit
Marc:How are you?
Marc:Good morning, good afternoon, good evening.
Marc:How's the exercise going?
Marc:How's the walk?
Marc:How's your dog?
Marc:How's your kid?
Marc:How's your leg?
Marc:How's your hand?
Marc:How's your fucking head?
Marc:Are you using whatever options you have at your disposal to maintain your sanity without hurting yourself or others?
Marc:Are you trying to mind your mind so they don't mine your mind?
Marc:Do you know what a mark is?
Marc:Do you know what a mark is?
Marc:Not me.
Marc:A mark.
Marc:The intended victim of a swindler, hustler, or the like.
Marc:A mark.
Marc:An object of derision, scorn, manipulation, or the like.
Marc:Example, he was an easy mark for this Trumpian bullshit.
Marc:Marks.
Marc:A nation of marks.
Marc:Why am I bringing that up?
Marc:Why am I bringing that up?
Marc:I tell you, man.
Marc:President alluded to leaving the country if he loses.
Marc:Good riddance.
Marc:if he can't maintain power and continue to degrade the nature of the rule of law as we drift further into authoritarianism, don't email me, you know, the three fucking Trump supporters who listen to me.
Marc:Don't email me with your fucking delusional bullshit about what's really happening.
Marc:Don't do it.
Marc:It's not my fault that you're a mark, that you didn't mind your mind, or that you're so myopic that your ability to contextualize or see through the veil of garbage is muted or destroyed.
Marc:Wouldn't it be beautiful if he loses and then moves the entire operation and family to Russia where he can be protected?
Marc:Wouldn't it be the best thing in the world if this motherfucker lived in exile in Moscow?
Marc:He's got a lot of debt.
Marc:He's got a lot of charges hanging over his head.
Marc:I would just, I love that story.
Marc:That's the best possible ending as the world ends.
Marc:Patti Smith is on the show today.
Marc:Patti fucking Smith is on the show today.
Marc:Patti Smith.
Marc:Are you fucking kidding me?
Marc:When was the last time you listened to her first three albums in a row?
Marc:She's got her latest book out, Year of the Monkey.
Marc:It's now available in paperback.
Marc:Might have read some of her other stuff, Just Kids and Devotion and a few other books.
Marc:But she's here and I've been wanting to talk to her for a while.
Marc:And she's here.
Marc:I am her first Zoom interview.
Marc:I was her first Zoom call.
Marc:Patti Smith was a Zoom virgin before me.
Marc:And I'm thrilled to have had that honor.
Marc:And you'll hear me talking to Patti.
Marc:I just love her.
Marc:She's the real fucking deal.
Marc:She is the one and only Patti Smith.
Marc:She's the raw goods, man.
Marc:All there, all the time, right up front.
Marc:Fucking love her.
Marc:True beatnik legacy.
Marc:That's what I was trying to get at.
Marc:There's no context anymore, really.
Marc:History is dissolving.
Marc:Everything is all the time.
Marc:Nothing is true.
Marc:Everything is permitted.
Marc:That's not true.
Marc:That's an old riff on a Hassan Asaba bit that Burroughs used to do.
Marc:And then Jim Carroll did it in a song.
Marc:I can't think like that, but the context of history...
Marc:is diminished when everything happens all the time and no one is educated properly.
Marc:No one is really schooled in critical thinking or civics or even American history in a proper way, global history, myself included.
Marc:It's just all there all the time.
Marc:Nobody knows who did what or what anyone's importance was in the context of history.
Marc:The big monsters and the do-gooders, nobody knows really how they fit in.
Marc:It's a generation of young people who might say, yeah, you know.
Marc:Oh, Hitler, the guy with the mustache, right?
Marc:That's the context.
Marc:But history is being diminished.
Marc:And that's why on some level, I was happy to talk to Patty because she comes directly from the New York that was still being occupied by a beatnik idea that was still being occupied by artists sort of like really pushing the envelope.
Marc:That first wave of performance artists, the first wave of punk, you know, in the sort of like the beaten up city of the early 70s.
Marc:Stuff was forming.
Marc:Things were happening.
Marc:There was no Internet.
Marc:Everything was raw and dirty.
Marc:Yeah, that history.
Marc:But she has a direct legacy.
Marc:She knew Burroughs.
Marc:She knew Ginsburg.
Marc:They both took her under their wing.
Marc:She was friends with Mapplethorpe.
Marc:She dated Sam Shepard, Tom Verlaine.
Marc:But she was there in the cauldron of that stuff in the 70s when those old timers were kind of fading out a bit, but still had some wisdom to share.
Marc:Because I wanted to be part of the Beatnik legacy.
Marc:I respected that history.
Marc:I was a hero worshiper, even though I didn't quite understand it.
Marc:And I don't think any of those people exist anymore.
Marc:The people that sort of worship these times.
Marc:Is it nostalgia?
Marc:Is it wanting to live in the past?
Marc:Or is it honoring the arc of history and where you land in it and where you come from?
Marc:When I was in college, I was like all up in it, reading the books about the beatniks, reading the beatnik books, reading the beatnik heroes.
Marc:Arthur Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Blake.
Marc:Ginsburg was a Blake guy, a Rimbaud guy.
Marc:They were all Rimbaud guys.
Marc:Patti Smith's a Rimbaud woman, a Blake woman.
Marc:That poetic legacy, the poetic journey of that particular type of poetry was
Marc:Shatter your senses, man.
Marc:Break it all down.
Marc:Like I got some quotes here from these people.
Marc:From Rimbaud, the poet, therefore, is truly the thief of fire.
Marc:He is responsible for humanity, for animals even.
Marc:He will have to make sure his visions can be smelled, fondled, listened to.
Marc:If what he brings back from beyond has form, he gives it form.
Marc:If it has none, he gives it none.
Marc:A language must be found of the soul for the soul and will include everything.
Marc:Perfumes, sounds, colors, thought grappling with thought.
Marc:Arthur Rimbaud, hero of Patti Smith, hero of the beats, hero of Ginsburg.
Marc:I always feel like I don't get it.
Marc:I always thought there was more there that I didn't understand it.
Marc:How do I crack this fucking code?
Marc:And then you kind of lighten up with it.
Marc:Just take it in.
Marc:Take what you can get.
Marc:The beats.
Marc:The mark.
Marc:Burroughs was a great comedian and great philosopher.
Marc:And I think he said something very relevant.
Marc:My favorite Burroughs quotes apply directly to what we're living through.
Marc:Like this one from Naked Lunch, I think.
Marc:The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer.
Marc:He sells the consumer to his product.
Marc:He does not improve and simplify his merchandise.
Marc:He degrades and simplifies the client.
Marc:God bless America.
Marc:Here's a direct message to the piece of shit president of the United States we have currently.
Marc:Quote, hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat.
Marc:The mark inside.
Marc:End quote.
Marc:The mark, the intended victim of a swindler, hustler, or the like.
Marc:That's from the dictionary.
Marc:My point being, there was a progression.
Marc:There was a progression from the beatnik idea through the poetry of Patti Smith, through the playwriting of Sam Shepard, on into punk rock.
Marc:And Burroughs was dug in in New York for a while.
Marc:But, you know, Patty broke out.
Marc:There was nobody like Patty Smith.
Marc:But she was shaped and molded in the cauldron of fucking poetic art.
Marc:The vision of Rimbaud.
Marc:I remember when I walked, I came home from college one year.
Marc:I went into the Living Batch bookstore where my mentor Gus Blaisdell presided.
Marc:He was the proprietor.
Marc:There was a poster on the wall for some sort of big shindig up in Naropa.
Marc:This must have been in the 80s, the early 80s at that beatnik school.
Marc:Yeah, I think it was the Naropa Institute.
Marc:I remember seeing this poster and they were all going to be there.
Marc:All the living beats at that time.
Marc:You know, Burroughs, Ginsburg, Gary Snyder, maybe Creeley.
Marc:I don't know who was there.
Marc:Ann Waldman.
Marc:They were all going to be there.
Marc:And I was such a fucking fanboy, man.
Marc:I said to Gus, I said, I got to get up there.
Marc:and see that he goes what do you want to hang around with those geriatrics for do your own thing man
Marc:And I'm like, yeah, but they were great.
Marc:I knew those guys.
Marc:And then he made a joke.
Marc:I didn't want to believe it was a joke.
Marc:Maybe it wasn't a joke.
Marc:But he said, yeah, I met Kerouac once at a party in San Francisco.
Marc:He was sitting on the floor in the corner, drunk, with vomit on his shirt, talking to Neil Cassidy, saying, live like a tree, Neil.
Marc:Live like a tree.
Marc:But that was Gus, man.
Marc:He was a funny motherfucker.
Marc:Changed my head, changed my mind, changed my heart.
Marc:But I've been to the places.
Marc:I've been to the graves.
Marc:I've worshipped at the altars.
Marc:And I come out, here I am.
Marc:This is it.
Marc:So now I got Patti Smith here.
Marc:Just so fucking excited about it.
Marc:Seriously.
Marc:I was your first Zoom.
Marc:I hope it went well.
Marc:I hope she enjoyed it.
Marc:Right?
Marc:Huh?
Marc:Her third and latest memoir is called Year of the Monkey.
Marc:It's now available in paperback wherever you get books.
Marc:And this is me and Patti Smith doing her first Zoom.
Marc:Dig it.
Marc:What's your cat's name?
Guest:Cairo.
Marc:Oh, look at that.
Guest:She's 19 years old and she's...
Guest:She's a bit infirmed and she doesn't like to be separated from me.
Guest:So I'm going to do that a bit here.
Marc:Oh, no.
Marc:No, it's great.
Marc:I just had to put down a 16-year-old.
Guest:I'm sorry.
Marc:It's terrible.
Marc:Jeez.
Marc:And his sister went about six months ago.
Marc:And then I have this other one who's about four.
Marc:So I got one left.
Guest:Well, she's the last of three we had.
Guest:So but she she's a little Abyssinian runt.
Guest:She was born really small, kicked out of the litter box and kicked out of the mama's box.
Guest:And they didn't think she'd last very long.
Guest:And she's 19.
Marc:So the runts are tough.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:I wasn't a runt, but I was pretty scruffy.
Guest:I was a scrawny thing.
Marc:You seem pretty tough pretty early on.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I was people would say I was sickly because I was sick all the time.
Guest:But in the 50s, you had everything.
Guest:Measles, chickenpox, scarlet fever, monk mumps.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Tuberculosis as a toddler.
Guest:I mean, back then you got everything and two kinds of measles.
Guest:But it didn't necessarily mean that you were a sickly child.
Guest:It just meant that you were negotiating all of the things that came out out at you.
Guest:So I'm pretty good at negotiating those type of things.
Guest:So, you know, I'm hoping that that will give me extra strength in our present situation.
Marc:What a situation it is, huh?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, you know, just, you know, having been through so many different kinds of illnesses, I know.
Guest:And this one seems extremely troublesome, unpredictable, potentially dangerous.
Guest:So I've been respecting it.
Guest:I've had my talk with it and said, all right, I respect you.
Guest:I'm 73.
Guest:I have a little bronchial condition.
Guest:I'll be prudent.
Guest:And even though I'm restless and agitated, I'll be prudent and I do what I'm supposed to be doing.
Guest:So that's all I can do.
Marc:That's good.
Marc:Well, I like this.
Marc:You said in one of these epilogues, you said a psychic nausea that we were obliged to work off in every way available.
Marc:A psychic nausea that we have.
Marc:That's every day.
Guest:Well, the psychic nausea that I was speaking of then, because I wrote that very early, was our situation in terms of our government.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I was really talking about our political situation and what we have to deal with daily.
Guest:But I, you know, of course, that melded with, as you said, you know, now we're dealing with a pandemic that makes us deal with things not only
Guest:mentally, but physically.
Marc:Yeah, no, it's all combined.
Guest:But I do try to keep busy.
Marc:I try to keep busy as possible.
Marc:I've been saying use whatever option you have at your disposal to maintain your sanity without hurting yourself or others.
Guest:Yes, I like that.
Guest:That's good.
Guest:And also do things that benefit you.
Guest:I mean, it benefits me being alone in my house.
Guest:I'm quite messy.
Guest:So it benefits me to
Guest:become more disciplined, to be neater, to clean up after myself, to shed things.
Guest:It has benefited me to be more domestically aware, even though I didn't really want to.
Guest:And I don't like staying put.
Guest:But I feel better.
Guest:I feel like my surroundings are healthier.
Guest:They give me more space to think.
Guest:So something like that.
Guest:We all have to do whatever we can to survive emotionally, physically, and psychologically.
Guest:Yeah, psychologically.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, and I think it's been interesting for me because spending this type of time with yourself, I guess it's not really challenging, but it is revealing.
Marc:You know, I mean, in the book and in some of your other work, I mean, as a poet or as an artist, you know, you're sort of your job.
Marc:Part of your job is to to to reflect and spend time meditating on life and whoever you are in relation to the world and your expression.
Marc:But like but now you really find out what you're made of in terms of emotional survival, psychological survival.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:what's important to you.
Marc:And it's amazing how that list of things that you think are important to you gets smaller when you spend this type of frightened time alone.
Guest:Yeah, well put.
Guest:I mean, really, I am used to being on my own.
Guest:I'm used to traveling and being on my own all over Europe or while I'm working or away from my band.
Guest:I like my solitude.
Guest:I'm not that social person.
Guest:I like to write on my own, but that's in motion.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Being stationary alone is a lot different.
Guest:And I have found that challenging.
Guest:So as you said, I've had to really go into myself and get to know what I'm like in this particular scenario.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It has been challenging, but I've learned a lot.
Guest:I feel healthier.
Guest:I'm healthy.
Guest:I'm attending to myself.
Guest:I'm doing my own cooking.
Guest:and trying to develop new disciplines.
Guest:But I find that I pace a lot, talk to myself more than usual.
Marc:Well, I mean, it seems like when I look at your life, I mean, like there's this idea, you know, that there's some precedent for the type of chaos or for how bad this country can get.
Marc:But it seems to me that you grew up in the 50s, but you got to New York, what, in the late 60s, right?
Guest:Yes.
Marc:So it must have been insane, right?
Guest:Well, I mean, for me, it was exciting because I lived in a very rural area of South Jersey.
Guest:And just to see people on the streets was exciting, you know, to see all these stores, to see so many bookstores, so many possibilities for work.
Guest:That was one of the exciting things.
Guest:There was no work for a 20 year old in South Jersey or in Philadelphia because there was a huge shutdown of the New York shipyard in Camden.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:30,000 people lost their jobs and there were no real jobs for young people.
Guest:So New York was for me.
Yeah.
Guest:you know, it was like a goldmine.
Guest:It was a down and out city like myself at the time, 1967.
Guest:The city was nearly bankrupt.
Guest:It was very cheap to live in New York City then.
Guest:There were hundreds, it seemed, of bookstores, places to get a job.
Guest:People on the streets were, you know, didn't bother it.
Guest:There was things to see everywhere, museums.
Guest:It
Guest:It was amazing to me.
Marc:So it didn't feel like it.
Marc:Like I watched I saw some documentary footage of you not with with Robert, but also in, you know, I don't know what the interview was.
Marc:I think it was an Adam Curtis documentary, you know, about New York.
Marc:But I always get the feeling that, you know, which is maybe wrong, that it felt chaotic and frightening.
Marc:But but that wasn't the sense you got.
Guest:Oh, no, I was never frightened in New York.
Guest:Yeah, I was excited.
Guest:I mean, because I mean, New York had its dangerous areas.
Guest:There are areas back then that you just didn't go into.
Guest:You didn't go down all the way down Avenue C in the East Village.
Guest:Right.
Guest:There were certain areas that you stayed out of.
Guest:But I.
Guest:I found all of the action exciting.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:People on the streets.
Guest:I mean, in the parks, there were all these people protesting and singing and playing chess.
Guest:And you didn't see it.
Guest:that where I came from.
Guest:It was exciting.
Guest:I mean, I never was harmed.
Guest:In fact, it was a lot scarier walking down a dirt road at night and passing the pig farms in South Jersey in 1967 than walking through the East Village.
Guest:That's for sure.
Marc:Well, I always felt that, too.
Marc:I always felt the safest in New York because at any point and any time, you could walk outside and there would be people.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Right?
Marc:And there'd be people that if something went down, someone was going to step in and go, whoa, whoa, whoa, no, you can't do that.
Marc:Someone was going to help out.
Guest:Yeah, I really felt I've never been harmed in New York City.
Guest:Never been harmed by another person.
Guest:And
Guest:You know, I flourished here.
Guest:I mean, I'm.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:New York has much changed and it's not the New York that I knew when I was young, but I feel very grateful to it.
Marc:Well, it seems like you're I was thinking about like, you know, how to frame a conversation or to think about your work or or, you know, how you kind of became who you are, is that you're kind of like there's your generation, this sort of beatnik legacies.
Marc:And the people that sort of came like the type of of environment that created the art that that your generation came from, that you came from.
Marc:It was really the last one like that.
Marc:I mean, it just there was such a creative kind of.
Marc:newness to things there was like risks to be taken and there was a a sort of rock and roll slash beatnik ethic to it all and and a sort of desire to push buttons even further that and it was also earnest and it seemed like a a small community and you still had some of the old guys around well we were all um
Guest:That's so nicely said.
Guest:I feel like I should just be listening to you.
Guest:You're much more articulate than I've been lately.
Guest:Well, I think also we were all bred on rock and roll.
Guest:We were post-war kids.
Guest:We wanted new things.
Guest:We didn't want the same...
Guest:We didn't want the things our parents desired, which was safety, security, or their little house.
Guest:And nothing wrong with the things that they wanted.
Guest:We wanted something different.
Guest:I wanted to be free of all of that.
Guest:I didn't want to have things set up for me.
Guest:I didn't want to be a secretary or a hairdresser or a homemaker.
Guest:I wanted to see what else was out there.
Guest:And the nice thing about New York at that time, there were kids from all over all over America who came like minded.
Guest:We were all listening to the same music.
Guest:We all you know, our causes were the same, you know, whether it was, you know, human rights, gay rights, civil rights, the the war in Vietnam.
Guest:We we had our causes and our and our loves were very were in tandem.
Guest:So
Guest:you felt kinship wherever you went.
Guest:And even the people that were more well-known, when I lived at the Chelsea, you know, any given moment, Janis Joplin or the Allman Brothers or Jimi Hendrix and all these people would walk in.
Guest:And the only thing that separated us all was they had bigger rooms or they had more money to spend at the bar.
Guest:We all dressed the same.
Guest:You know, we had similar cadence in our speech.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We all would get to know each other.
Guest:It wasn't the cult of celebrity the way that it is now.
Guest:It was more like, ah, that's such and such, and he's done this.
Guest:He's created these songs that we're singing or that has really inspired us.
Guest:People weren't taking people's pictures and asking for autographs.
Guest:We all sort of lived together.
Yeah.
Marc:There's a community of creative people pushing the envelope.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And I don't know, like, because I'm 50, I just turned 57.
Marc:So, like, you know, a lot of this stuff for me coming into it and being in college and, you know, kind of being obsessed with the beats and then getting obsessed with the next generation of artists that you were part of.
Marc:And, you know, by the time I, you know, spent any time at the Chelsea, you know, it was not, it was just a mythological place almost, you know.
Guest:Well, that's funny because it was almost when I went there in 69 with Robert, people were saying that about it then.
Guest:Oh, it was over?
Guest:Because you didn't have people like Bob Dylan and Edie Cedric and Dylan Thomas and the people before us had left or died.
Guest:But the people that were still there were pretty good.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We were more of the...
Guest:early rock.
Guest:We were the rock and roll generation.
Marc:Who was there?
Guest:I mean, well, Shirley Clark lived there.
Guest:Harry Smith was there.
Guest:You'd see Arthur C. Clark.
Guest:Salvador Dali came in and out.
Guest:Janis Joplin lived there for a while and Leonard Cohen and all kinds of
Guest:musicians stayed there you go into the the bar next door and you'd see whoever was playing would would be at the El Coyote but they were just there and I lived there so they were in my house and William Burroughs and I remember sitting at the bar at the El Coyote bar because we're working on a project with William Burroughs and it was
Guest:William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg and Carl Solomon and Dennis Hopper.
Guest:And then Sam Shepard came in and it was just another night.
Guest:You know, Terry Southern, he was writing a script for William.
Guest:We were going to do a version of Junkie.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:And I was going to play Mary.
Guest:But it all fell apart.
Guest:But for a while, just hanging out with them was pretty great.
Marc:I can't imagine.
Marc:I just like when I read this book, you know, the new or the one that's coming out in paperback now, You're the Monkey.
Marc:I mean, it seems like.
Marc:You were sort of straddling some of the stuff that Burroughs did, you know, moving between reality, not reality, dream, not dream.
Marc:You having guides, you know, and and because like when when all this shit started to go down, for some reason, I went back to Burroughs to try to decode some stuff because in my life, I always feel like it's all in there somewhere that, you know, all the answers are within Burroughs somewhere.
Marc:You just have to figure out how to find them and sort it out from some of the other science fiction and weirdness.
Guest:He believed it was all out there, was all out there.
Guest:And he believed also, if you were lucky enough to have suffered scarlet fever, which both him and I had, you had an open channel for all of these things to come from this great pool of,
Guest:So he what you were getting from William, he was a good portal because William got all of those things from everywhere else.
Guest:He believed in that.
Guest:So he was the right guide for you.
Marc:So so the scarlet fever created the the the the the the ability.
Guest:Well, he believed that it didn't create the ability, but that it opened the portal wider.
Guest:In the Wild Boys, Gianni and the Wild Boys had scarlet fever.
Guest:We had a club, me and William, called the Scarlet Fever Club.
Guest:But he really believed that if you had suffered a really deep fever at a very young age, it opened your portal forever.
Marc:That's interesting.
Marc:Yeah, I went I for some reason I started to plow into the the Western lands, you know, which it seemed to me that I and I think that maybe you're dealing with a bit of it, too, that like he had to somehow.
Marc:Reckon with mortality in a very sort of a practical way for himself.
Marc:And it seemed like, you know, his interpretation of the Book of the Dead was how he was going to go about it.
Marc:Is that true?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I suppose I don't I've never analyzed.
Guest:I never thought about it.
Guest:I mean, to me, I mean, that's the kind of thing you'd have to talk.
Guest:I just read his stuff.
Marc:Yeah, me too.
Marc:But like I wanted answers somehow.
Marc:And like I had to keep going back because structurally he's a little tricky for me.
Marc:But like, you know, when I started to see that he was dealing with all these different levels that once the person dies, goes through, and he created characters with names for each of those levels that were very Burroughs-y characters, I was sort of able to figure out, oh, this is the journey, man.
Guest:You know, so it was a little... You think deeper than I do.
Guest:I mean, to me, Williams sometimes...
Guest:Reading William or reading certain writers is like listening to Coltrane or something or a saxophone solo.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I never analyze it.
Guest:I just I'm just there and I just go with them and I go all the way as far as they're going to take me.
Guest:And by and then I come back and don't even remember where we've been because I'm so immersed in the going.
Right.
Marc:I think that's right.
Marc:I think that's the best way to do it.
Marc:I always assume like I'm missing something.
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:He's got so many blanks there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He wants you to fill in.
Guest:I mean, you have to be the third mind with with William.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because I remember one of William's great disappointment in himself was that he couldn't write a straight laced detective story.
Guest:or a straight lace novel.
Guest:And we talked about this.
Guest:All of these books, if you think about it, they start very conventionally.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You're going with this old guy sitting there with his shotgun on a barrel or something.
Guest:You're going to go straight through some plot with him.
Guest:And then he starts cutting things up and going into several layers of worlds.
Guest:And he told me he just couldn't help it.
Guest:That's that's the way his mind works.
Guest:And that's his process.
Guest:He would have loved to have written even a two bit detective novel.
Guest:That's for sure.
Marc:I've read his essays and it's interesting when he writes with that type of clarity or you read the interviews.
Marc:But like, yeah, and I get it.
Marc:There's a magic to it.
Marc:You guys I mean, you're a magician as well.
Marc:There is a magic to this idea of of transcending space and time, you know, through cut ups and through, you know, I mean, I get it and I like it.
Marc:So you were able to spend time with Burroughs early on, you know, before you started singing or as a poet?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I met him in 1970, I think.
Guest:I met him.
Guest:I had a big crush on him.
Guest:So I was always.
Guest:You know how to pick him.
Guest:He would come into the Chelsea Hotel and he was so handsome and he was always so well dressed and beautiful.
Guest:I just had the biggest crush on him and I would try to, you know, I would talk to him and I think he was amused by me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But also he got to trust me.
Guest:He I don't know.
Guest:We became friends, but also sometimes in the course of a night, William would get extremely disheveled because he come into the Chelsea and you had to come through the lobby and then go through this door into the bar.
Yeah.
Guest:He would start out with his, you know, perfect tie and suit and overcoat.
Guest:And then when he left, he was a bit stumbly.
Guest:He'd get a bit intoxicated and I would wait.
Guest:And then I would get him a cab and make sure that, you know, he didn't leave anything behind and just, you know, be as like little...
Guest:guardian angel girl oh that's sweet we just got to be friends and friends throughout his whole life and um right to the end of his life and he was a very kind and very principled man i know people know all different aspects of william yeah and he was many things and
Guest:And but to me, he was very good to me.
Guest:He was a good teacher.
Guest:When my husband died, he was so supportive.
Guest:He was kind to my children.
Guest:You know, I love I loved him.
Marc:Well, I feel a lot.
Marc:I mean, that's one thing that comes through the writing and your life is that like the.
Marc:The sort of amazing, deep and, you know, lasting friendships is really it's like enviable.
Marc:I mean, you know, when the way you talk about William and the way you talk about Sam Shepard in the book, just these, you know, this real appreciation of friends and people you love and other artists that you respect.
Marc:It's just it really struck me because I don't.
Marc:I think things have become kind of chaotic and odd, and I guess people still do it, but when I look at my life, I have a few friends, but there's such... Because you, the generation and the people that you guys, the crew of you, are so daunting in your output and who you were in the world, I just love that not only are you friends, but you stay together until the end.
Marc:I mean, it's really...
Marc:kind of amazing, and it really is what life is about.
Marc:I mean, at least half of it, right?
Guest:Well, you find a few people that you really trust, who you feel, you know, understand you.
Guest:I was just lucky.
Guest:The people that I...
Guest:Was close to as a young girl and remain close till, you know, their passing.
Guest:We had all of us had work centric relationships as well as sometimes romantic relationships.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Maybe it was my boyfriend.
Guest:And but when we.
Guest:you know, had to, you know, transition our relationship.
Guest:We had so much to salvage our, you know, our mutual respect for each other, the work that we did with each other, how we trusted each other's opinion, how comforted we felt by each other.
Guest:And so there was no reason to
Guest:You know, tear our friendship apart.
Guest:We had to work very hard, but we saved it.
Guest:And the same with Sam and I. Sam was my boyfriend when I was young.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That was quite an exciting period, but we also worked together, but we had a great trust and great communication and the friendship that we had and that aspects of that working relationship and that trust were way more important than communication.
Guest:you know, a romantic relationship.
Guest:If that's not what you're destined to have, there's often even a greater jewel there if you recognize it and work to keep it alive.
Guest:And we did.
Marc:Yeah, it's beautiful.
Marc:Early on, the only way I could picture you two at that time was by actually reading or seeing a production of Cowboy Mouth.
Marc:And I was like, wow, that seemed exhausting.
Yeah.
Guest:Writing that with Sam was the easiest thing.
Guest:Sam and I decided mutually that we would part.
Guest:He didn't have a family and it was the right thing to do, but we were sad.
Guest:one night he just said we were in the Chelsea hotel and he said, let's write a play.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Let's not sit and weep.
Guest:Let's write a play.
Guest:And I, I said, I don't know how to write a play.
Guest:It was like, you know, doing zoom.
Guest:I don't know how to do that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, um, so he said, well, I'll set up a scenario and, um,
Guest:You be your character and I'll be my character.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So he set up a scenario and then he started writing.
Guest:And when it was my time to talk, he would just hand me the typewriter.
Guest:We were sitting on a bed and he would slide over the typewriter and then I would write my part.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then I would slide it back and we wrote a play.
Guest:And it was just, it had...
Guest:A naturalness to it.
Guest:But both of us being, you know, lovers of language, you know, a lot of language in it, too.
Marc:It's just so like, you know, these reflections in this book, you know, particularly like I don't I don't know all the books specifically, but, you know, I've kind of immersed myself in the music.
Marc:You know, yesterday I listened to the the last album you did, which was great.
Marc:And I, you know, I was I listened to the first four and kind of in the middle and picking up pieces here and there and then looking at the gaps.
Marc:And I'm like, what was going on there?
Marc:I just do a lot of thinking before I talk.
Guest:No kidding.
Guest:You would like stop me in my tracks a couple of times.
Marc:I did in a bad way.
Guest:No, in a good way.
Guest:I was like, you know, especially when you were talking about William and and where the different layers and levels you were going.
Guest:I was just like, again, I just went with you, and then you asked me a question about what you said, and I was like, huh?
Guest:I was off with you, man.
Guest:I wasn't analyzing what you were saying.
Marc:I can do that with jazz, man.
Marc:I can do it with jazz.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:That's what it's all about.
Guest:Improvisation.
Guest:It's the miracle of improvisation.
Marc:I can lock into that stuff, but I think there's some part of me that...
Marc:I guess it's not about craving answers, but it is sort of about making sense.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:And I'm looking to him to make sense.
Marc:Control needs control to survive.
Marc:I'm like, what does that mean?
Marc:But that's me, man.
Guest:He was a lover of Rambo, too.
Guest:And it's like the whole idea was to explode the senses.
Guest:I mean, think about it.
Guest:With doing cut-ups and all of the things he was doing, he was always looking for new things.
Guest:William was looking for like a new language, a new alphabet, you know, some new aspect of the psyche.
Guest:But he wasn't really looking to make sense.
Guest:A part of him did crave to write the straight detective story.
Guest:But when he was writing, he was looking for things.
Guest:He was looking.
Guest:He was looking for something that no one had.
Marc:had said before no one had seen before because that to william was what an artist did right that makes sense so like yeah rambo is another one like you know the the championing of rambo that you do and like jim carroll like there are people that do it the beats do it like that brought me to rambo and again like i was like do i just take this stuff at face value and you you you do because the images are mind-blowing that's what you're looking for right
Guest:I've never been an analytical person, but things do speak to us.
Guest:I mean, I was like 11 years old when I saw Cubism for the first time.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Art for the first time.
Guest:Cubism spoke to me at 11 years old.
Guest:Jackson Pollock spoke to me at 11 years old.
Guest:I can't say why.
Guest:I mean, one, because, well, it's the time of rock and roll.
Guest:Maybe it was the, you know, that 50s energy.
Guest:But yeah.
Guest:I've never really been able or even sought to analyze why things have spoken to me, why Rimbaud spoke to me.
Guest:I didn't even understand his poems when I was like 15, but their beauty just captivated me.
Guest:I didn't care what they meant.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:Now, it's not so difficult to comprehend what he's laying out.
Guest:But back then, it was like, you know, reading Wittgenstein.
Guest:The world is everything that is the case.
Guest:You know, what does that mean?
Guest:Well, I don't know, but I'm there.
Guest:You know, I'm there with you, man.
Guest:I don't know what you're talking about, but I'm right with you.
Marc:Yeah, I wrote something down once that said, you know, I don't know what it means, but when I'm reading it, it feels like I'm thinking it.
Guest:yeah yeah who said that me oh well see there you go again that that is a cool statement and i know exactly what you're talking about i like that yeah it's just like it's like feeding it you know and then you know something will something reconfigure something in your brain whether you understand it or not well and and sometimes why do we understand music you know you listen to you know hendrix or beethoven or something and
Guest:you know, you don't need to break it down if it like speaks to you or makes you weep or just makes you feel, you know, uh,
Marc:you know like you could conquer the universe there's you know what's to analyze it's it's yeah no yeah you got to let it happen yeah there's no i i'm no i'm not great at analyzing things but when i feel i just always assume that i don't like understand certain things but you know as you get older those things become fewer and less important that's for fucking sure
Guest:Well, there's another way to look at that.
Guest:How great it is that there's still stuff out there we don't understand.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:It's just more exciting, more adventure.
Guest:If we understood everything, you know, then it would...
Guest:Might get get a little boring, but I I love when things beguile me.
Guest:I can look at like one of the things I love to do is look at like geometry books or higher math books that have.
Guest:or that have all kinds of diagrams in them i don't know what it is but it's so beautiful and the language of mathematics is so beautiful i've never been able to figure it out but i'm endlessly entertained by it yeah i am no i am no good at math either
Marc:Yeah, what is it?
Guest:What's going on out there?
Guest:It's a thing they're doing now.
Guest:People put their car radios up to as loud as possible and open the windows and sing.
Marc:Oh, well, you know, people are kind of crawling out of their skin.
Marc:They need some relief.
Guest:It's becoming a thing.
Guest:I know it's becoming a thing because I sometimes see the same cars circling.
Guest:Oh, doing it?
Guest:think they're you know hoping they'll be discovered oh but oh that'll really by me just being in the ass but you know happy that they're having a good time what about ginsburg once you meet ginsburg i met alan again right near the chelsea hotel um
Guest:And I had written about this in Just Kids.
Guest:I met Alan.
Guest:I knew who Alan Ginsberg was, of course.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I actually think I learned about Alan Ginsberg through Bob Dylan, it seems to me.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I had never met him.
Guest:And then I think probably early 1971 or somewhere in 1970, I was going to the Automat to get a sandwich.
Guest:And I was really hungry.
Guest:And Robert and I had hardly any money.
Guest:And I didn't have enough money.
Guest:I just had enough money for a sandwich.
Guest:So I put the money in and I went to get my sandwich out and it wouldn't open because they had upped the price from like 55 cents for this cheese and mustard sandwich to 65 cents.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I was like devastated because I was so hungry.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I hear this voice behind me and I was dressed like I had a long overcoat on and like a Mayakovsky cap, you know?
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:It's kind of cool looking.
Guest:I mean, I was like 22 or something.
Guest:And this guy says, can I can I help?
Guest:And I I turned around and it's Allen Ginsberg.
Guest:And I just I was like, wow.
Guest:And I just like this.
Guest:And he put a dime in.
Guest:I got my my sandwich and then he went and got me a cup of coffee.
Guest:And then he sat with me and I was like speechless.
Guest:I thought, geez, Allen Ginsberg is like getting me food and coffee.
Guest:And then he starts talking away to me.
Guest:And then finally I answer him.
Guest:He was talking about Camden and I'm from that general area.
Guest:So I started talking about Walt Whitman.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he looked and he goes, are you a girl?
Yeah.
Guest:And I was I've already read this, but since you're asking me and I said, it's a true story.
Guest:And I said, yeah, is that a problem?
Guest:And he went, oh, no, no, no, no.
Guest:I'm sorry.
Guest:I thought you were a very pretty boy.
Guest:And yeah.
Guest:And I figured it out.
Guest:So I asked him, I said, well, do I have to give you back the sandwich or, you know, can I keep the coffee?
Guest:And he started laughing.
Guest:He said, no, it was my mistake.
Guest:We just hit it off.
Guest:We kept talking about Walt Whitman, but he had come to my rescue because he thought I was often mistaken because I didn't wear makeup or anything like that.
Guest:I just had an androgynous look, I suppose.
Guest:So that's how Alan and I met.
Guest:And it's funny because I met William because I was trying to pick him up, which was equally fruitless.
Guest:Because when William realized I was trying to pick him up, he said, my dear, I'm a homosexual.
Guest:I don't care.
Guest:That's okay.
Yeah.
Guest:But both of these men really were such, for me, great teachers and great friends.
Guest:I mean, really, again, when my husband died in 94 and I had two small children, had to come back to New York.
Yeah.
Guest:I was really at the lowest point in my life.
Guest:It was Alan who came.
Guest:Alan came right to my rescue, drew me back into working again, actually talked to Bob Dylan to ask Bob to maybe take me on a tour, help me get work.
Guest:So these men, you know, I met these men both in 1978.
Guest:in humorous circumstances, but they were lifelong friends.
Marc:So when, when you started to do, like, it seemed like you landed on poetry.
Marc:Like you, it seemed like you were doing a lot of stuff and you continue to do a lot of stuff, but poetry seemed to be the thing.
Marc:Was that a decision you made at some point?
Marc:Like, this is it.
Guest:You know, I w I wanted to be an artist.
Guest:That's what I wanted to be an artist was the whole spectrum.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And, uh, you know, I dreamed of being a painter and,
Guest:I always wrote and I always, I wrote poetry since I was about 14.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, um, but when I first came to New York working at a bookstore, Robert and I lived in a little apartment and I did little drawings, but it was really, uh, the lion's share of my energy went into poetry.
Guest:And, um, that's really how I wound up, uh, performing or, um,
Guest:and and recording later it's all the poetry was the genesis like even horses the first lines of horses right is you know gloria is from a poem i wrote in 1970 right and uh and redondo beach came from a poem uh a lot of the and the idea of improvising uh came from the way i wrote and performed poems so um
Guest:I guess I've always been,
Guest:poetry-centric when it comes to my work.
Guest:Even now when I write a lot less poetry, I still feel it invading my books.
Guest:Like in Year of the Monkey, any of these books that I write, I'll read something and I'll think, you know, that's three-quarters poem.
Marc:Oh, definitely.
Marc:Yeah, I ended up like last night, I don't know, I was listening to like Tangerine Dream, you know, reading the...
Marc:that's so awesome reading the rest of your book and like you know i'd read like over half of it already but i've got tangerine dream on i'm reading your book and all of a sudden i'm like underlying and shit i'm like this is poetry yeah there's definitely like i definitely see parts where you know if you just spaced it differently they just they'd be poetry a lot of the poetry i wrote when i was younger was um
Guest:love-centric or relationship-centric or, you know, and it's just as I got older, I've written books
Guest:I don't write so much of that anymore.
Guest:So I'm, I find myself gravitating almost completely to prose.
Marc:Well, yeah.
Marc:I mean, I was thinking about that.
Marc:Like, you know, what you just said about, you know, the, you wanted to be an artist and an artist is all of it.
Marc:And I, and I think it seems to me like, even in that, this being your first zoom and I, I mean, I'm very excited to be part of a Patti Smith first, um,
Guest:It is.
Guest:And it's not so bad.
Guest:I mean, I have to say I was a little worried about it.
Guest:I thought, well, I don't know.
Guest:I just didn't know what to expect.
Guest:It's all right.
Guest:It's fun so far.
Guest:It works.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But like, yeah, when you talk about being a full artist in that, you know, that you did you had to do all these things, whatever it was that there is this general sense of the artist and art.
Marc:I was talking to my buddy Sam Lipsight last night.
Marc:He's a writer, a genius.
Marc:I love him.
Marc:And, you know, it struck me that, you know, even, you know, that you don't Zoom, you don't have the headphones, and you live the life of an artist.
Marc:But you also, it seems to me in reading the books, that you look to art to resolve all the fundamental questions of...
Marc:of existence you look to art for relief you look to art to make sense of the world you look to it when you're just hanging out having coffee that there's is almost a religiosity to to what it can do for somebody if they surrender to it wholly and fully and it seems that's the life you live well that's thank you that that's really a nice thing to say um but i think it's also i look at when i was very young i always looked at
Guest:being, well, that one is called to be an artist.
Guest:If you have a calling to be a poet, well, it could be anything, a calling to be
Guest:It could be a priest or a musician or a doctor.
Guest:I mean, it's, you know, one has a calling.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But, you know, I felt like it was my calling.
Guest:I've never wanted to do anything else.
Guest:I don't really, not that adept to do anything else.
Guest:It's been a part of my life, my whole life.
Guest:And even when I was very ill, anytime I've been very ill or at the, you know, at the brink of despair, it always comes.
Guest:comes to me.
Guest:It always gives me refuge or it always gives me a voice.
Guest:It always makes me feel that I have some worth, you know, that I have something, you
Guest:To offer the canon of art or offer to people or offer to the future.
Guest:And it's just, but, you know, I think of all of these things are linked together.
Guest:If one has a calling, where does the calling come from?
Guest:You know, one can say from God, from nature.
Guest:you know, from some kind of vast energy pool.
Guest:And I believe in those things.
Guest:I mean, how I believe in it shifts as I evolve, but I've always connected together.
Guest:Art for me has not been a godless pursuit.
Guest:So I always, I have it all within my work.
Guest:I have connections with everything within my work, but I've also understood that being an artist, you know, there's, there's certain amount of sacrifice and also there's a certain amount of self self,
Guest:orientation i mean self-centeredness in being uh it's not i'm not talking about being conceited i'm just talking about that you're you become a sort of work and and one's own work centric creative of course creative centric which uh can be at the detriment to how much um
Guest:uh time or how much of yourself you give to others so there is you know it's not like it's the most benevolent of all the vocations but it's the one i it's the one i got it's interesting because i feel a calling i feel like i had a calling and i felt like i had no choice but to be a stand-up comic i mean that was it like there was no there was no other thing to do so you know that's what i did and i do
Marc:There's other things we do.
Marc:I do this now, but whatever.
Marc:But it's the ability to identify the calling and then actually have it in your brain that you have no other option is some sort of strange, you know, you know, commitment.
Marc:That I can't explain it, but maybe it's a it's a God thing.
Marc:It's a spiritual thing.
Marc:But like there's literally when you have it and you honor it, you're like, there are no other choices.
Marc:And then when shit gets tough, you're like, well, I guess I'm just fucked or else it's going to get me out of this.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I have no idea.
Guest:I also think that for myself, I've been very.
Guest:Lucky because lucky or unlucky, because it's almost like I have like like I live on the on in a constant fork in the road and I'm always going up this road or that road because one great part of me as a performer.
Guest:is entrenched in collaboration, public life, collaboration with a crew, with technology, with the people, with my band.
Guest:It's entirely collaborative and it's very outgoing.
Guest:And then the other part of me
Guest:requires no one and desires no one.
Guest:The writer part of me, it really requires no technology.
Guest:I mean, I can get a notebook and a pencil.
Guest:I can be off by myself.
Guest:I don't need anything.
Guest:I don't need anyone.
Guest:And it's
Guest:And I keep vacillating or going back and forth to these two vocations, which is, again, why the first months of our lockdown was difficult because I had my bags packed.
Guest:I was going on a world tour, a whole year of touring.
Guest:I got myself ready for that.
Guest:It was my gift to my people because at 73, it's...
Guest:One can start questioning how long you're going to be doing this.
Guest:And I was ready for that.
Guest:My whole psyche was ready for that to be outgoing, to be more giving, to be more open with people.
Guest:And then suddenly lockdown in solitude and stationary, which...
Guest:I wasn't mentally or physically prepared for.
Guest:So I was quite restless to say the least, but, but I've gotten into a groove.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, I see, I see the Instagram stuff.
Marc:You seem to be kind of like at least writing daily, taking pictures.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I am right, Bailey, but the first couple of months, I didn't write as much as I wished I had to read.
Guest:The first couple of months was really getting a new mindset, reprogramming myself to suddenly being alone, to being in one place, not going anywhere, not doing anything publicly.
Guest:So it was...
Guest:I had to retune, but I'm doing my work.
Marc:You are.
Marc:Yeah, you seem good.
Marc:You can do these Zoom calls with anybody, Patty.
Marc:If you get used to this, you can hang out with people like this.
Guest:It's really funny.
Guest:I just...
Guest:I saw my kids did this once and they asked me to sit in it.
Guest:And I was like, for like three minutes, this is my first, I mean, I did that, but this is the first all by myself doing it with figuring it out and pressing the pipe thing and everything.
Guest:I lasted about four minutes and I was like, I'll be right back.
Guest:They're my kids and I love my kids, but it was like all this talking and all these faces that I was like, let me out of here.
Marc:Yeah.
Yeah.
Marc:The other thing when you were talking about art and about, you know, like, you know, about writing and about choosing writing, you know, that writing becomes the the primary as you get older.
Marc:Is that what you're able to do?
Marc:I mean, it's certainly in this book and just kids as well is, you know, you're able to take your experience with people you love and people you respect.
Marc:And then, you know, as they pass on, you know, you integrate them into the universe of your own creativity through, you know, how you represent them in these books.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:They become characters that none of us knew.
Marc:I didn't know Sandy at all.
Marc:But when I went and looked him up and I saw the work he did, I saw the records he produced, I hear what you had to say.
Marc:But you're sort of interpreting of their moving on, of their passing, it creates another world for their existence.
Marc:It's a beautiful thing.
Marc:But it seems like you are doing a lot of reckoning with this loss business.
Guest:Well, I have my whole life.
Guest:It's just, it seems to be something that, you know, and especially in the past, well, I've just had a string of losses, you know, my, my pianist, Robert Mapplethorpe, my brother, my husband, my parents, and just so many friends and Sam and Sandy.
Guest:And one year was, it was quite a blow, but I know the, I think the,
Guest:Robert asked me to write just kids.
Guest:I would have never written that book ever.
Guest:I never wanted to write nonfiction.
Guest:I just wanted to write fiction and poetry.
Guest:Robert asked me to write it the day before he died.
Guest:And I promised I would.
Guest:And it took me over 10 years to write it.
Guest:And, um,
Guest:But what I was trying to do was give people give give people Robert as a human being, you know, with his idiosyncrasies and, you know, his work ethic, the way how funny he was, how loving he was, or I think he wanted to be.
Guest:remembered uh more spectrally but he also knew he could trust me right robert and and sam was alive when i when i wrote m train sam is a car sam is in m train yeah he's in the m train as himself and he's in m train as my sort of like guardian angel cowpoke writer and he he
Guest:he, he, he loved this.
Guest:He, he saw himself in just kids and he knew that I presented him as, as we were.
Guest:And that's what he said to me.
Guest:I said, were you mad?
Guest:Was he, were you okay with what I wrote?
Guest:And he said, it was just like it was.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:I like giving people.
Guest:I like sharing my people.
Guest:with with with everyone right now I'm writing about my brother very few people knew my brother my brother was an extraordinary person he died when he was 42 and I just want people to know him and I I don't I I don't know I I don't
Guest:I don't even know what to say.
Guest:I feel like you you put a mirror up to me and I'm thinking, oh, should I be doing that or what?
Guest:But it is.
Marc:Of course, of course you should be doing it.
Marc:It's like I was sort of amazed because, you know, I recently lost somebody that that I loved tragically and quickly and reckoning with loss.
Marc:You know, I've never had to do it.
Marc:You know, this is the first time like, you know, my parents are still fucking alive, you know, and.
Marc:And this woman was my girlfriend, and she was in my house.
Marc:And I never had to deal with that, the trauma, the tragedy, and then the absence, living with the absence.
Marc:So what do you do with that?
Marc:So I felt...
Marc:Especially reading this and reading parts of Just Kids, it seems that you are integrating that absence into what life is.
Marc:There's nothing unusual about loss and about death.
Marc:It's the most common thing in the world, but it's really a lot to deal with.
Marc:But it's perfectly human.
Guest:Well, I also like I a lot of my relationships, a lot of my friendships would be long distance.
Guest:You know, we wouldn't see each other for a while.
Guest:So, you know, but I always felt them with me.
Guest:I always felt Sam with me when I traveled.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:If I didn't see him for a couple of months, I knew him for half a century.
Guest:I knew that he was in my corner.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was in his and, you know, it doesn't feel any different.
Guest:I do long to see him as I mean, he is such a beautiful man and he was so protective.
Guest:And I just his presence.
Guest:I miss his physical presence more than I could have imagined.
Guest:But but I also feel like.
Guest:You know, I'm sure I'll write something else again and he'll be back again.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I keep bringing him back.
Guest:You know, he's because he'll always be with me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I don't see why he shouldn't be with me.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Of course.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And Lenny and you have been together for a million years now, right?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:I met Lenny earlier.
Guest:Not long after I met Sam, Lenny and Sandy were very good friends as well.
Guest:We all knew each other.
Marc:Sandy was like Sandy Pearlstein, right?
Marc:Is that Pearlman?
Marc:Pearlman, yeah.
Marc:Pearlman was the manager and producer of Blue Oyster Cult for a lot of records?
Guest:Yes, and he wrote a lot of their songs.
Guest:He wrote a lot of their lyrics and the concepts.
Guest:And, you know, a lot of those songs, Astronomy, A Star.
Guest:I wrote some of the lyrics.
Guest:I wrote Career of Evil and some of the other ones.
Guest:But the night I met Sandy was my first poetry reading.
Guest:And I was with Sam.
Guest:And Lenny did a little guitar with me, played some feedback on some poems.
Yeah.
Guest:And Sandy Pearlman came up to me and told me I should be front in a band and asked me if I wanted to come and audition to sing, to be the other singer with Eric on what became Blue Oyster Cult.
Guest:They were called Stock Forest at the time.
Guest:And I just thought that was...
Guest:I thought it was really funny.
Guest:I mean, I told Sam, I said, I said, this guy said the funniest thing to me.
Guest:And he said, I don't think that's so funny.
Guest:You could do that.
Guest:You know?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, uh, but that was 19 February 71.
Guest:And I wasn't even thinking about doing anything like that.
Guest:I wanted to, you know, I, I think I had my first poetry book and, you know, I was very, um,
Marc:poetry was my vocation that i was magnifying never even occurred to me down the saint mark's poetry project is that what it was called yeah it's weird the convergence of like you know that scene and the punk rock scenes all sort of like swirling around and then it just blows up the weird thing is about about you is like i'm listening to you and
Marc:you know from from horses and the first three records it's like you know you're a fucking rock star i mean that shit holds up and like you know whatever you were doing and like with the poetry or whatever what there is you know when you sing on those songs or what i saw you perform here in la a couple years ago at that small club it was a you know remember when johnny depp came up and i think joe perry was there that was a good show you you were great you rocked hard
Marc:But like you're like, you know, when you when I see you do that or I listen to those records, I'm like, this is, you know, you're a singular force in rock and roll.
Marc:I mean, I mean, I'm sure the poetry was great, but was there a certain amount of relief when you started to do rock and roll?
Guest:Oh, absolutely.
Guest:I mean, that's that's why it happened, because I got bored really quickly.
Guest:You know, I mean, just reading poems, I had so much energy.
Guest:I had really 78 speed natural energy.
Guest:You know, it's just a wired kid.
Guest:And I couldn't really be contained easily.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I found that.
Guest:You know, it happened.
Guest:It started slow, but when it started happening and I started improvising over three chords.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I could just spew language.
Guest:And plus, I liked, you know, the physicality of it.
Guest:But, you know, I was still thinking of it as poetry.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I wasn't thinking, you know, of...
Guest:that I was like a rock and roll singer.
Guest:I didn't have any, you know, visions of me singing.
Guest:I was a performer.
Guest:I still think of myself as a performer, but when it evolved to rock and roll and we were recording and going on the road, of course, you know, I loved rock and roll.
Guest:Rock and roll saved my life when I was a kid.
Guest:Um,
Guest:You know, being part of the evolution of rock and roll was help for me.
Guest:And I wanted to be like the best.
Guest:You know, if I was going to be even a minor rock and roll star, I was going to be a good one.
Guest:I don't mean even talented.
Guest:I just mean I would put all of my everything into being like, you know.
Marc:all in the real deal yeah because you know who wants to be a mediocre rock star nobody there's a there's a lot of them around though
Guest:so when you like who were i mean it's pretty you have pretty specific rock heroes though don't you that kind of compelled you i mean i was for me i mean i loved i loved jim morrison and you know i love i mean i love bob dylan of course bob dylan was very important um and mentor from afar for me but uh
Guest:One of the people that I learned so much from was Johnny Winner.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Well, because I got a job for a while with Steve Paul.
Guest:Steve Paul wanted to sign me up to his record.
Guest:He opened up a record company in 1971 called Blue Sky Records.
Guest:And he wanted to give me a record contract.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In 1971.
Guest:And but he wanted me to he wanted to form me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, right.
Guest:And I said and he offered me a lot of money.
Guest:And I said, I ain't doing that.
Guest:I actually talked to William Burroughs about that.
Guest:I said, this guy offered me like a huge amount of money, but it's not something I want to do.
Guest:And he said, you know, you got to keep your name clean.
Guest:You've got to never do anything that, you know, isn't right for you.
Marc:Keep your name clean.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:So I but I needed I wanted to shift.
Guest:I need I wanted a different job.
Guest:So I didn't take that.
Guest:But I took a different job from him sort of shadowing Johnny winner when they went.
Guest:They had to go to England because Johnny is colorblind.
Guest:And they needed somebody with them to go, you know, walk across the streets, look at the traffic lights and roam around with him.
Guest:And Johnny liked me.
Guest:Johnny lived in Chelsea Hotel for a while and Robert designed some of his clothes.
Guest:So.
Guest:So I started going to some of Johnny's concerts.
Guest:Well, he wasn't like anybody that I would have thought I would have liked.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I was I was Jimi Hendrix, all Jimi Hendrix all the time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I saw Johnny live many times.
Guest:And I have to say 1970, 71, 72.
Guest:I never saw anybody like him.
Guest:Anyone is fierce as him.
Guest:He he would leap.
Guest:The first person I ever saw that leaped into the people leap into the people would leap right off the stage.
Guest:He commanded that whole stage.
Guest:And I the energy that that guy had and his body language was like nothing I ever saw.
Guest:He was like a wizard.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:My favorite guy.
Guest:I mean, it wasn't even like my kind of music, but his physicality.
Guest:And I learned a lot from him.
Marc:Yeah, he's a monster guitar player.
Marc:I mean, he's always, always was.
Guest:You know, he was almost bewitched.
Guest:It was like he was like bewitched.
Guest:I learned a lot from him.
Guest:I learned a lot.
Guest:Of course, you know, I modeled myself a little after Bob Dylan.
Guest:And, you know, I I was wasn't embarrassed about, you know, modeling myself after these guys.
Marc:No.
Marc:I mean, Bob Dylan modeled himself after Ramblin' Jack Elliott for years.
Yeah.
Guest:But I, you know, I just got what I, I mean, I was myself, but I got certain things from these people.
Guest:I got certain things I know from, from Jimi Hendrix, or I got certain things from Lada Lenya.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:So I just took the things from masters because I had no training.
Guest:I had no musical training.
Guest:I didn't, but I,
Guest:And I didn't replicate them.
Guest:I just absorbed what I could learn from them.
Guest:Of course.
Marc:Yeah, because like I can't like it becomes seamless.
Marc:You know, you take the magic of the heroes and you integrate them into your sense of self and confidence.
Marc:And then you kind of bloom into your own thing.
Marc:You know, you don't you know, you don't become them.
Marc:But, you know, it's definitely magic.
Marc:I like the way you characterize Johnny that you just saw that he was a vessel.
Marc:You know what it was, but it was in there, you know.
Guest:And also, he was fearless.
Guest:I saw Jim Morrison, and Jim Morrison, he was awesome, and he pushed things as far as he could, but he always seemed afraid.
Guest:Interesting.
Guest:I thought of him as a very paranoid-style performer.
Guest:He seemed...
Guest:Because he had, you could feel, I don't know what his own demons, whatever he feared.
Guest:I was a young girl.
Guest:I mean, I saw him in 1968 or something or 67.
Guest:But what I got from him wasn't the same thing I got from Johnny.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I got, you know.
Guest:He had, you know, I'm sure sometimes he might have felt like a god, Jim Morrison, but you also felt a self-loathing or something.
Guest:He had a strange... Right.
Guest:He lacked self-love, I think.
Guest:And I can't say that I understood him, but his style didn't appeal to me.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:No, I looked at him and I thought...
Guest:I didn't feel intimidated by his presence.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Well, it seems like with Johnny and even I can see that with you, that, you know, you're all, you're all in and you're, you're not afraid of the vulnerability of being all in like, this is it, you know, it's going to be awkward for some of you, but this is, this is what it is.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Well, I just, I just think all the thing that I,
Guest:wanted for our band and for myself was just that we were ourselves.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, however flawed, I don't know, even that sometimes when I was awkward or sometimes when it seemed like I was like an acted like an asshole, it didn't, it didn't matter.
Guest:It was all, you know, I hate to use the word authentic.
Guest:It's just a,
Guest:We didn't have any artifice.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yep.
Guest:And and I if I sensed artifice or because of repetition, you know, a lack of complete engagement, then I would like mentally counsel myself about that because I didn't want that.
Guest:I just wanted to.
Guest:Oh, and I just thought of another great performer, Bob Marley.
Guest:What a great performer.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Oh, my.
Guest:He was an he was an awesome performer.
Guest:He was another one that had you could feel him.
Guest:It was like shamanistic.
Guest:You could feel him entered.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Just beautiful energy.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:It's all about energy.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Well, what about some of your contemporaries?
Marc:What about what do you think of Iggy?
Guest:Well, he was he was Iggy came out before he was he's he came in the 60s.
Marc:Oh, did he?
Marc:I guess.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, I guess.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:He's younger.
Marc:And Lou Reed, too, is older, too.
Marc:You're younger than those guys.
Marc:But they were around.
Marc:Right.
Marc:They left their mark on the city.
Guest:Iggy just started younger.
Guest:He started in the 60s after the MC5.
Guest:I never even saw Iggy before until later in life.
Guest:He wasn't on my radar.
Marc:Yeah, because I guess your husband, Iggy, used to hang around their house or something, right?
Guest:Well, I mean, my husband, I didn't know about... I was from South Jersey.
Guest:I didn't even hear about the Velvet Underground there.
Guest:It was like...
Guest:i came to new york and had to learn a lot about our present culture right and i didn't know anything about the mc5 or right or yeah you know when i when i first saw fred i just saw him as a as a guy yeah you know across a crowded room and that was that you know yeah and how are your kids good
Guest:My kids, they're great.
Guest:My daughter works tirelessly for climate change awareness.
Guest:She has a nonprofit and she's a musician and she writes things.
Guest:And my son is a great guitar player and has a family.
Guest:They're awesome.
Guest:My kids are, they're just, they magnify the best of their father.
Guest:And I see myself somewhat in them.
Guest:And, you know, I love my kids.
Guest:It's great.
Guest:Sometimes we all play on stage together.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I love my kids because they're always my kids.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, my son has come up.
Guest:Once we were playing, I think we were in Spain or something.
Guest:There was like 30,000 people at a festival.
Guest:And my son was playing lead guitar that night.
Guest:And we were on some song.
Guest:I can't remember.
Guest:I'm singing the chorus.
Guest:And then there was a breakdown.
Guest:And my son is going, Mom, Mom, Mom.
Guest:And I'm going like, what is it?
Guest:And he was saying, I'm having a little rough time.
Guest:He was having a little rough time physically.
Guest:He said, I don't know what kind of solo I'll be doing, but I'll just do the best I can.
Guest:And I said, yeah, just do the best you can, Jack.
Guest:But we're like talking.
Guest:He's always my son.
Guest:I'm always his mom.
Guest:And of course, he played great.
Guest:But he's...
Guest:You know, I remember also we were touring with Bob Dylan and some reporter, you know, asked him, what's it like having your mom as your mom?
Guest:And he goes.
Guest:She's my mom.
Guest:You know, she makes dinner and she's, you know, washes the clothes.
Guest:And that was the best answer of all.
Guest:I don't want to be anything else but but mom to my kids.
Marc:Well, it seems like you had a lot of time there where you could really focus for a while, right?
Guest:Well, they were quite young when they lost their father, but six and 12.
Guest:But.
Guest:But when their father was alive, we were always with each other every day because Fred and I both left public life and we lived very simply.
Guest:And we were always together.
Guest:So we have a lot to remember.
Guest:We have all of that time together.
Guest:Good foundation.
Guest:But also, my daughter plays piano and she sounds like Fred.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:And my son, sometimes he's playing guitar and just...
Guest:sometimes the faces he makes or the tones that he draws, which are very unique, were very unique to Fred.
Guest:And I've stood on stage and actually almost burst into tears hearing my son play.
Guest:It's so much would sound just like his father.
Marc:Wow.
Guest:And he wouldn't even be conscious of it.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:I bet you some of that stuff is just in there.
Marc:It's just carried on.
Guest:Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Guest:It's been proven to me that...
Guest:You know, we you know, there's so many ways that we we become who we are, you know, from the people that nurture us and from, you know, experience and what we study and all of the the the influences that we have.
Guest:But also blood is blood can be a gift, too.
Marc:Yeah, for sure.
Marc:Yeah, I definitely believe that's true.
Marc:And another Jersey guy, Bruce, are you friends with Bruce?
Guest:Well, I mean, I know him.
Guest:I mean, I don't have we're not like we don't hang out or anything.
Guest:Nobody's the other.
Guest:We're happy to see each other.
Guest:But yeah, I mean, I'm also not I'm not really a musician.
Guest:I don't really have a musician's lifestyle or hang out with, you know, musicians.
Guest:I mean, even when Lenny and I are together, we're like.
Marc:you know we're like two bums that yeah you know writer bums that also you know yeah old friends hanging out and the deal and the dylan thing um has he is he present in your life bob yeah
Guest:Believe me, if Bob was present in my life that no one would hear about because he is the most private man you can imagine.
Guest:But no, Bob is not in my life except in the way that he is.
Guest:He's been in my life since I was 15 years old.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I I've had time when I've spent gotten to talk to him a lot or sit and listen to him play.
Guest:And, and then years not, you know, it's, I don't, we don't, I don't have any established relationship with him.
Guest:He knows I'm in his corner.
Marc:So, right.
Marc:How did the, like, I'm sure you've told this story, but I don't know.
Marc:I just watched it.
Marc:How did the, the, the, the Nobel prize gig come up?
Guest:The Nobel prize was,
Guest:job came because they asked me to, it was the Nobel people.
Guest:I play a lot in Sweden and actually sort of, you know, well liked in Sweden.
Guest:So the Nobel people asked if I would sing for whoever won the literary award.
Guest:Laura, you know, who won for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Guest:And that year, there was some talk, it might be Murakami.
Guest:And so I thought I would sing this song Wing because of the Wind Up Bird Chronicle.
Guest:Well, it wasn't.
Guest:It turned out to be Bob Dylan.
Guest:And then I thought, oh, my gosh, I'm going to be singing for Bob.
Guest:I can't sing one of my songs.
Guest:I should sing one of his.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:So I chose Hard Rain.
Guest:Hard Rain is going to fall because I felt that even though it was an early song, it encompasses everything.
Guest:His poetry, his humanity, his sense of the environment, his sense of, you know,
Guest:All of the things that he believed, you know, that we all believe in are in that song.
Guest:And I thought it was the perfect, you know.
Guest:Yes, great.
Guest:Way to introduce him.
Guest:And of course, I had this terrible episode of strange whiteout nerves, but yeah.
Marc:It is one of the greatest moments of live performing I've ever seen in my life.
Marc:It is so personal.
Marc:It's so odd the way it kind of, I know it must have been just horrible for you.
Marc:Oh, it was, I thought I would die.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I can, I really, I don't have any, when it comes to performing, I don't mind screwing up anything.
Guest:And I screw up a lot, but it's my own screw up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:another person's work, especially Bob Dylan, who has meant so much to me throughout my whole life.
Guest:It was terrible.
Marc:But the self-correction of it was beautiful because it was ultimately an act of respect.
Marc:But that moment where you make the decision to be like, wait a minute, every time I watch it, I'm like, oh my God, as a performer, it almost makes me cry.
Marc:Because it's so honest, though.
Marc:It's so honest.
Marc:And, you know, I don't know.
Marc:I thought it was great.
Marc:And everybody, it seemed like everybody kind of woke up and realized that they were seeing a human.
Marc:It was kind of an amazing moment.
Guest:Well, it all, it seemed universally to people that way.
Guest:And I'm grateful for that because at the moment with the orchestra behind me, giant, and these cameras, because they were global cameras going all over the world, you know, massive cameras and looking down and the king and queen of, of Sweden and, and,
Guest:And all of the noble lords and all of this expectation.
Guest:And then suddenly to just freeze.
Guest:I just froze.
Guest:I mean, a song that I knew backwards and forwards just suddenly escaped me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I didn't know what to do.
Guest:I've had these things happen to me on stage where I can laugh and make a joke and say, well, we'll do this and then talk to the people.
Guest:I've had paranoid moments where I had to actually talk myself down with the people and say, I don't know what's wrong with me, but I feel really self-conscious.
Guest:And people are always with you.
Guest:And I know that people, most of the time, people are with you.
Guest:If they come, they are going to be with you.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It was just so humiliating and so frightening, but...
Guest:it turned out that, you know, it made people, people seem to identify it because everybody has these moments where they're the worst moments of their life.
Guest:Everybody has these moments.
Guest:And I guess it was just, I guess I had to be the poster poster girl for the worst moment of your life.
Guest:But I, I don't know that if it, I feel about it now.
Guest:Like I feel about,
Guest:everything.
Guest:If it's served anybody, then it's okay.
Guest:Isn't it Bob that says you've got to serve someone?
Guest:It seemed to serve people.
Guest:Did he say anything about it?
Guest:Not to me directly, but I know from the family that
Guest:Everyone seemed very happy.
Guest:They seemed content with everything.
Marc:Well, it's great talking to you.
Marc:I was going to talk more about some of this line, the evidence of an awareness of the relative value of insignificant things.
Marc:It seems that...
Marc:And I see some of your photographs, too, and I have a lot of little things that really become personal magic objects, sort of like triggers of emotion and nostalgia and place and time.
Marc:I love that appreciation of that, and I like the way you look at them.
Guest:Oh, thank you, Mark.
Guest:That's so nice.
Guest:Well, I guess it's we've to mosey on, but I had this was really fun.
Guest:It was great.
Guest:I wish I would sometimes a little more articulate, but I'm just not my you know, I've become very mentally abstract in these months, but really fun to talk.
Marc:No, I thought it was great.
Marc:And I love talking to you.
Marc:And you know who is always telling me that he wanted us to talk, you know, Barry skills.
Guest:Oh, Barry.
Guest:He's one of my favorite people.
Guest:I've been blessed to have him as a crew member and a friend.
Guest:And I don't know if you know this, but he has my husband's motorcycle.
Marc:Oh, really?
Marc:I didn't know that.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:My husband had a...
Guest:um a harley uh sportster and uh um barry um and i just had it you know yeah no you know no none of us ride a motorcycle and it was you know you can't leave a motorcycle for years not right doing anything you know and barry's dream i found out was to have a harley sports sportster yeah and
Guest:And he has really taken, he has loved that.
Guest:Barry also, I have to say, reminds me of my late brother, Todd.
Guest:So I always say he gets the Toddy Award.
Guest:And Barry, my brother was the head of our crew when we performed in the 70s.
Guest:And Barry became the head of our crew.
Guest:when I went returned to performing in the nineties and, um,
Guest:He has really shepherded that motorcycle.
Guest:He goes everywhere in it.
Guest:He named it Sonic after Fred.
Marc:Oh, that's great.
Guest:He had it painted on it.
Marc:Oh, wow.
Marc:That's great.
Marc:I didn't know that.
Marc:I know him from doing Conan as a comic, and he'll work on my guitars occasionally, and we'll talk about this and that.
Marc:But he's a great guy.
Marc:But he always used to say, look, I'm going to talk to Patty.
Marc:You guys got to talk.
Guest:No, he's been the one.
Guest:He keeps saying, you have to do this, and you have to do this.
Guest:And he and talk about being in one's corner.
Guest:He is in your corner.
Guest:That's for sure.
Marc:That's sweet.
Marc:Well, I just want to acknowledge that that he's a great guy and that, you know, he was always championing this.
Marc:And I'm glad it happened.
Guest:Me, too.
Guest:Well, we'll have to do it again sometime because there's a million things we could talk.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:I can see hopefully in person, you know, like maybe we'll get back to some sense of normal.
Marc:I'll come to New York with some microphones and we'll do it.
Guest:Although I forgot that we, I mean, I'm, you know, because I'm, any interviews I've done in the past six or seven months have been on the telephone.
Guest:I haven't looked at anybody.
Guest:So actually, I almost forgot that we're not, you know.
Marc:Just talking?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, no, it's great.
Marc:I'm so happy that we got you involved in the Zoom thing and it's working out.
Marc:Yep.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Well, take care of yourself.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's officially Zoomed.
Marc:You're Zoomed.
Marc:You've been Zoomed, Patti Smith.
Guest:Thanks, Mark.
Guest:Talk to you again soon.
Marc:I love her so much.
Marc:Fatty Smith, the book is Year of the Monkey and everything else she's ever done.
Marc:Go listen to those first three or four records again, man.
Marc:Damn.
Marc:Right out of the gate.
Marc:Just fucking mind-blowing.
Marc:Dean Del Rey's got ACDC on Let There Be Talk today.
Marc:And now I'll play some guitar.
Marc:Now I'll do it.
Guest:... ... ...
Guest:guitar solo
guitar solo
Marc:Boomer lives!
Marc:Monkey.
Marc:The Fonda.
Marc:Cat Angels.