Revisiting Patti Smith

Smith was never a traditional pop star. She had only one big hit, the song "Because the Night," which she wrote with Bruce Springsteen. But beginning with her debut album, "Horses," released in 1975, she created a raw, stripped-down garage sound that combined spoken words, screamed words and three chords per song. Her downtown music -- and her style as the androgynous boho in a Bob Dylan pose -- has been cited as an influence by bands such as U2 and R.E.M.

She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year, the organization praising "the delirious release of an inspired amateur who knew her voice conveyed more honest passion than any note-perfect rock professional." The French minister of culture named her a Commander of the Order of Arts and Literature.

Smith has had a reputation for self-indulgence and self-regard that some of her critics found off-putting. You can read that in old articles about her, where Smith compares herself to Dylan, Hendrix, the Stones. Back then, she would demand that reporters run tape recorders to keep up with her spontaneous font of wisdom.

"She is reminiscent of a charismatic sect leader who has convinced her followers that she alone has the secret of life," wrote a skeptical Charles M. Young in Rolling Stone in 1978. "The secret is so heavy, of course, that it can only be revealed through the leader's interpretation of Das Kapital/visions of the Scripture/mumbo jumbo about the creative process. And like the best of sect leaders, Smith believes her own line and has constructed an imposing edifice of egomania to protect her mediocre ideas from doubt."

Smith appears to have an on/off switch. "When I saw her perform I was completely blown away, because she wasn't the person I had met," wrote Sebring in an introduction to his film. "She had been this really sweet, almost innocent, interesting woman, then she was raging, spitting music and spewing poetry."

When you sit down with Smith for an interview, she worries about your sniffles and makes sure you get a nice cup of hot tea. And then Patti Smith is revealed as this -- this what? This English major type. This complete romantic. And an inveterate name-dropper.

The film was made by Sebring, but it is all Patti Smith, who narrates it and reveals what she wants to reveal -- and what Smith reveals are the influences of poets on her life and work: The ache of Sylvia Plath. The religious ecstasies of William Blake. "Walt Whitman, I'm thinking of you," she says. Smith quotes T.S. Eliot. The intimate journals of Baudelaire. And the painters de Kooning, Modigliani and Jackson Pollock, who damns Picasso for having done it all before him. And oh, how she loves the French poet Arthur Rimbaud and his "Illuminations," a book she says she shoplifted as a teen because the young, doomed Rimbaud looked like Dylan.

In the film, Smith is shown visiting graves. She is quite the tourist of the dead. "It is something I do, not just for the film," Smith says. "Steven was in Detroit and I was visiting my husband's grave and we had finally put the stones up, which were old ship markers from Ireland. And Steven was there. When I'm in London, I always go visit William Blake. When I'm in Paris, I go to Charleville and visit Rimbaud. In New York, I'll go out to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx and visit Herman Melville. I find comfort in it. I often take photographs of people's resting places. I mean, their spirit has gone, but the part of them that is physical, their bone and ash, is right under your feet. I find something beautiful in that."

When Smith was a teenager she worked in a factory and dropped out of college. She was like Juno before the movie "Juno," a pregnant teenager who gave up her baby for adoption. She made enough money to move to New York and found her home in the Chelsea Hotel, which in 1970 housed William S. Burroughs, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Sam Shepard and some of the Warhol crowd.

"So many of my mentors were quite a bit older than me," Smith says. "In my early 20s, I met Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Gregory Corso, and I was very privileged to meet these people and learn from them. You forget about age if you're creatively engaged. My parents: My father was reading the Bible and Plato to the end of his life. My mother was reading the latest Bette Davis biography. I learned by example. William Blake, doing his work, poverty-stricken, ridiculed, misunderstood and really poor and on his deathbed, still drawing, still illustrating Dante's 'Inferno.' The aging process can start very young if you stop living. A lot of it is being engaged. It can be manual labor. Charting the stars, sweeping the streets, it doesn't have to be the arts."

At Sundance, Smith performed a short set at a music lounge, where the packed crowd was a mix of young scenesters and cinema grayheads. Smith came out and shouted, "Old people in the house!" and then performed from her repertoire, "Because the Night" and "People Have the Power," and did a cover of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." At one point she instructed the band, "Bring it down, I need to breathe," and explained, "If I seem a little wasted, it's not the drugs, it's the altitude, especially if you're 92." Smith sounded good. She sounded strong. She sounded like Patti Smith.

Later, Smith says, "If you live long enough, you're a little old lady with your memories." We mention that we like the idea of revisiting our aging pop stars, if they still have something to say. Is it possible they may even grow more interesting as they age?

Smith says, "Well, I'm always looking forward. As a mother, you hope for a good future, a good future for your children. And as an artist, always looking toward the next poem, the next song, the next film, the next idea. It's what the imagination is for. I remember talking to Gregory Corso before he died." Corso was a founding member of the Beat generation of writers. "Because he was so fearless. I asked, 'Gregory, aren't you afraid?' 'Only one thing,' he said. 'I'm afraid of the collapse of the imagination.' That's something I think about every single day."