Patti Smith

Poems and the first records

Patricia Lee Smith was born on December 30, 1946 in Chicago and became a poet, writing the play Cowboy Mouth (1971) with Sam Shepard and the books Seventh Heaven (1972) and Babel (1978). Her first single, "Hey Joe" with "Piss Factory" (1974), was financed by Sam Wagstaff. After shows at CBGB she signed to Arista in 1975. The band of the Horses era was Smith, the drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, the guitarist Lenny Kaye, Ivan Kral on guitar and bass and Richard Sohl on piano; the group is now Smith, Kaye, Daugherty, Tony Shanahan, and her son Jackson Smith on guitar since 2016.

Horses was recorded between September 2 and 18, 1975 at Electric Lady Studios in New York with John Cale producing, and released on November 10, 1975; it runs 43:10. Arista first planned Tom Dowd, whose Atlantic ties stalled it, and Smith chose Cale after his solo album Fear. Cale wanted a more arranged record and the band wanted spontaneity; Smith opposed his idea of strings. Allen Lanier played guitar on "Elegie" and Tom Verlaine on "Break It Up"; Robert Mapplethorpe took the cover photograph. It reached 47 on the Billboard 200, went gold in Australia and the UK and came second in the 1975 Pazz and Jop poll. Simon Reynolds called it the spark that ignited the punk explosion; the Grammy Hall of Fame inducted it in 2021.

Later work and honors

Radio Ethiopia (1976) was followed by Easter (1978), the group's most commercially successful record, and Wave (1979), after which she was in semi-retirement for most of the 1980s. She returned with the solo album Dream of Life (1988) and Gone Again (1996), made "E-Bow the Letter" with Michael Stipe in 1996, and wrote lyrics for several Blue Oyster Cult songs. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, won the National Book Award for nonfiction for Just Kids in 2010, shared the Polar Music Prize in 2011 with the Kronos Quartet, and sang at the Nobel ceremony in 2016. The documentary Patti Smith: Dream of Life appeared in 2008.