PARIS — The more Patti Smith rips her French audience, the more they love her.
She tells the crowd at the Olympia music hall, the scene of concerts by Édith Piaf, Marlene Dietrich and the Beatles, that they should show more appreciation for their beleaguered president because at least he cares about the environment.
Five hundred miles south that same day, at the Group of 7 summit in Biarritz, Emmanuel Macron had held a climate change meeting for world leaders and President Trump left his chair empty.
There were scattered boos at the mention of Mr. Macron, and Ms. Smith isn’t having it. With her South Jersey accent gloriously intact, she lets loose.
“You should have Trump as your president,” she tells the pack of Parisians. “Then you’d know what it’s like to wake up every day with a president who doesn’t give a” — and here Ms. Smith uses one of several vulgarities — “about living things, about trees, about animals, about the air we breathe or the water we drink. We have to give our leaders a chance who are trying to do something because our president in America does nothing.”
She rocks them with “People Have the Power” (“The people have the power/ To redeem the world of fools”), periodically spitting on the stage, and Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush,” her wavy silver hair hanging in her face as she fiercely plays guitar and howls, “Look at Mother Nature on the run/ In the 21st century.”
Thinking of the Amazon fires, she feels herself starting to cry as she sings and then realizes that will make her pitchy, so she gets it together.
Ms. Smith drolly informs the audience that they should be applauding more when she name checks Sly Stone. “If I was in the audience and somebody mentioned Sly, I would go out of my mind,” she says. “You know, he was with the family Stone.” (She has said she learned to spar with audiences by watching Johnny Carson.)
The next night, as she gets ready to sing “My Blakean Year,” she is disappointed by the tepid applause that greets her dedication of her song to “the great ranks of the unappreciated,” including Vincent Van Gogh.
“You know what?” she taunts. “If you’re only going to give him a lame response, don’t respond at all, because in his lifetime, he didn’t sell a painting so he doesn’t need a few accolades. Either he needs all or nothing cause that’s all he ever had.”
Wearing her tour uniform of black Ann Demeulemeester jacket and vest, old black dungarees, black Jimmy Choo motorcycle boots, an Electric Lady T-shirt and her St. Francis tau cross, Ms. Smith reminds her bewitched fans that the date of her first sold-out Paris concert, Aug. 26, is the 49th anniversary of the founding of Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village. She tells how she met Mr. Hendrix there once when he was leaving a party.
“All I can say is,” she says with a grin, “he was really cute.” The crowd goes wild, screaming “Pah-teee!!!” and sparking lighters. (Yes, they still have lighters.) She blows kisses back. The punk poet laureate is no longer scrawny and her dark hair is gray, but she is every inch the glam “gothic crow” Salvador Dalí once described her as.
She is thrilled to be in the land of her literary heroes Genet, Baudelaire and Rimbaud. At 16, working in a nonunion factory inspecting handlebars for tricycles, an experience immortalized in her protopunk song “Piss Factory,” she shoplifted a book about Rimbaud and made him her imaginary boyfriend because she felt she wasn’t attractive enough to get a real one. (Her father had warned her that she’d have to get a career because she wouldn’t be able to nab a husband.)
When a man yells “Read some poetry, Pah-tee!” Ms. Smith offers an epic hippie-chick response: “It’s all poetry, mannn!”
The Men in Her Life
When Ms. Smith strolls with her band down the Rue des Capucines to her hotel, the narrow street is filled with Parisians smoking and drinking wine at cafes, sitting outside in rattan seats. They tumble out all along the block to applaud her.
She gazes back at them with a mystical smile, looking, as Rolling Stone once described her, like “a charismatic sect leader who has convinced her followers that she alone has the secret of life.”
Jimmy Iovine, who produced her biggest hit, in 1977, “Because the Night,” a collaboration with Bruce Springsteen, says her fire still burns bright at 72.
“Patti is a magical, magical, magical woman,” he says. “What’s missing today in music is everything that she brought as a voice to the world since she burst on the scene as a younger contemporary to Dylan. Where are the young people? Where are their voices? They’re watching all this stuff go down. Why aren’t they writing powerful lyrics just speaking the truth? That’s the reason I’ve left the music business. These kids who are getting famous, going on Instagram and making money — what they’re doing doesn’t speak to me.”
“The real Renaissance woman,” as Mr. Iovine calls her, also has a book out next week: “Year of the Monkey,” a picaresque voyage through her dreams and life as she faced 70, dealing with flashes of “sorrow’s vertigo” as she remembers all the loves and rock contemporaries who are gone.
She believes that when people close to you die, you absorb what you most admire in them. “It’s like they leave a little gift,” she says.
About aging, she writes: “Seventy. Merely a number but one indicating the passing of a significant percentage of the allotted sand in an egg timer, with oneself the darn egg. The grains pour and I find myself missing the dead more than usual.” Ms. Smith has a kaleidoscope of references, from “Mr. Robot” to Marcus Aurelius to Martin Beck mysteries to Maria Callas’s Medea.
She writes of making herself a sardine and onion sandwich, and seeing her image reflected on the surface of the toaster: “I noticed I looked young and old simultaneously.” That describes her spirit perfectly, too.
In this book, Ms. Smith, who is working her way to novels, blends fiction and reality, conjured characters and actual ones. It’s not always clear when you’re in her imagination or out of it. Her prose is, as always, gorgeous. She writes poignantly about her “sense of everyone gone,” and her trips to see her old flame Sam Shepard in Kentucky and California when he was in a mortal battle with Lou Gehrig’s disease. She slept on couches and helped him edit his last two books.
We have a three-hour lunch at a bistro next to Ms. Smith’s hotel. She has no airs — she washes her clothes in the hotel sink — and is polite to everyone, including autograph hunters and servers. She gives our waitress a ticket to her concert, and later I spot the young woman sensually dancing all through the set.
Ms. Smith is “somewhat walleyed,” as she writes in her new book, with shining gray eyes. She is wearing another Electric Lady T-shirt (“I don’t like the new feeling so I keep recycling them”), this time with silk butterfly pants and some men’s black Versace sandals that her daughter, Jesse, got her.
“I don’t have to look nice for anybody,” she says. “I feel like at my age I can do whatever I want, pretty much, as long as I don’t hurt anybody and that includes dressing the way I want, everywhere I go.”
She pulls up her pant leg (“sorry about my hair today,” she says re the stubble beneath) to show me the lightning bolt tattoo on her knee that she got from an Australian artist when she was living in the Chelsea Hotel, at the same time Mr. Shepard got a crescent moon.
“I remember once in 1970 or something, I was such a scraggly thing, but I was in this bar waiting for him and he was late,” she says. “And some guy, and he was a big guy, kept bugging me, semi-hitting on me. I just told him to leave me alone. Sam walked in and he just walked up, took the guy by the scruff of the neck and the guy went right up the bar, just like in the movies. And Sam wasn’t a movie star then. He was just a guy.”
I asked why the two split, after appearing in a play they wrote about themselves called “Cowboy Mouth.”
“Well, he was married and he had a child and it was sad, but it was just the right thing to do,” she says.
I wonder if she was surprised when Mr. Shepard made it big as a leading man in Hollywood.
“No, because first of all he was a really great actor in plays and theater,” she says. “He had a magnetism. He was one of the most handsomest guys you would ever see, more even in person than in film. But that isn’t even what I liked about him, which was funny because it was so obvious that he was so handsome. People were just drawn to him. We’d walk down the street and women would come up, hit on him and they’d just say right in front of me, ‘Get rid of the kid.’”
I noted that Robert Mapplethorpe had charisma, too.
“Well, Robert was totally different,” she says. “Robert was very shy. I met Robert when he was 20 and we were both wallflowers, but he was even more awkward than me. The beautiful thing about our relationship and what saved it for all the years is, it was based more on how we believed in each other when no one else believed in us, our trust in one another and respect for one another.”
I ask about the recent New York Times essay by Arthur Lubow about a Guggenheim exhibit with the headline “Has Robert Mapplethorpe’s Moment Passed?,” suggesting that the photographer’s images, so taboo in the 1970s and ’80s, were no longer shocking and played into sexual stereotypes about black men.
At first, Ms. Smith says she has nothing to say about it. But soon, a defense of Mr. Mapplethorpe pours out:
“The idea of Robert exploiting people is ridiculous,” she says. “He wasn’t exploiting anyone, racially, physically, any more than Michelangelo was. To analyze and scrutinize him without him being able to speak for himself, I find heartbreaking. He liked that muscular kind of body as a photographer. He loved sculpture. He loved Michelangelo. He often said if he had lived in the Renaissance, he would have been a sculptor.”
Of his critics: “They’re overthinking. They’re overanalyzing. Robert was not analytical. He was all visual. And when he was taking a photograph, it was because that is what he found beauty in.”
She continues: “When he did those S-and-M pictures, he told me he refused to be voyeuristic and he had participated in certain things, which I found horrifying, frightening, but he was not a voyeuristic kind of person. I’m just saying that he got to know these people. He got to know his subjects, and I think they had mutual trust.”
Harking back to Senator Jesse Helms’s 1989 criticism of Mr. Mapplethorpe’s pictures of semi-clothed children as exploitative, Ms. Smith notes: “Robert loved children. Robert even mourned that we didn’t have children before the end of his life. And it would have killed him to see Jesse Helms say that his pictures were pedophilic or something.”
Referring to Mr. Mapplethorpe’s death of AIDS in 1989, she adds: “Robert only lived till he was 42 years old, and was a late bloomer. His work really only spanned less than two decades and not even that, because the first years, when we were together in semi-poverty, was without him having the tools to do the things he wanted to do. I’ve done my best work, really, my most important work, from the ages of maybe 57 to now.
“He had passed through photography. He had one more project he wanted to do, photographing animals, and then he wanted to go back to sculpture. He wanted to design big installations. He wanted to do film. Unfortunately, some of his work you have to look at in a context of when it was done and the fact that he had a stilted lifeline.”
I ask why she didn’t participate in the recent film “Mapplethorpe,” starring Matt Smith, who played Prince Philip in “The Crown,” even though she was a major character. “People cannot only portray you,” Ms. Smith says. “They can make stuff up.”
She has not cooperated with Mr. Shepard’s biographers and scoffs at “stories about me being carried out of Max’s Kansas City drunk and sobbing and screaming Sam’s name. I mean, first all, it just never happened. I could laugh at it because it’s so stupid but they keep repeating it.”
She is also asked about a story about another famous singer, she says, “that I walk into a dressing room, slap some singer across the face and tell them, ‘Rock ’n’ roll doesn’t have a place for both of us.’ They just keep printing this stuff. But then you get into things that personally hurt.”
She was not enamored of the famous “Saturday Night Live” impersonation, with Gilda Radner playing Candy Slice, clearly based on Ms. Smith, as a drunk and drug-addled screaming banshee with hairy armpits.
“I liked Gilda Radner,” Ms. Smith says. “The only difficult thing was, it was very heavy cocaine oriented, which I didn’t indulge in. I think I had taken acid with Robert once. It was ’77 or ’78. I had tried coke once or twice. I don’t deny. I’m just saying that, 1), who had the money for that stuff? And 2), I like being in control of myself. I’m very happy with who I am. I know it wasn’t her intent or anything like that. It’s not that I lack a sense of humor, and comedians have to have some kind of leeway.” But, she concludes, “the coke thing damaged my reputation and I still have to deal with it.”
Ms. Smith was touring Europe over the summer with her band, her incantatory voice strong, her needs simple. She doesn’t have any publicist or personal assistant or makeup artist with her. And her rock-star rider asks only for peanut butter, brown bread, ginger, lemon and honey.
She supplements that with a small plastic container of flaxseeds that her daughter has packed for her. After her show, she surfs the adrenaline, ignoring the bottle of champagne on ice by the makeup mirror. She says she has never overindulged, in part because she was a sickly kid, allergic to smoke and prone to bronchitis.
She has the occasional tequila shot or sake, and she writes in her book that she had a glass of vodka after Mr. Trump won the election.
Lenny Kaye, her guitarist who has been at her side for 48 years, from her very first night at St. Mark’s Church, fusing poetry and music, with Lou Reed and Andy Warhol in the audience, says, “I’ve never heard her sing a false note.” He says the coolest experience you can have is going into a bookstore with Patti Smith.
‘I Don’t Recant’
Her previous memoirs, both New York Times best sellers, were “Just Kids,” her luminous reminiscence about her New York romance with Mr. Mapplethorpe in the 1960s, and “M Train,” about the period after she moved back to New York from Detroit, where she dropped out just as she was breaking out, shocking the music world and offending some feminists.
She moved to St. Clair, Mich., north of Detroit, to marry the musician Fred Smith, known as “Sonic,” and spent 16 years there, raising their two children, writing some unpublished novels. She worked with her husband to make her voice less nasal; he taught her to play the clarinet and they did one album together, “Dream of Life.” The couple lived simply and supported themselves mostly on the royalties from “Because the Night.”
“It was 1979, and all I saw in my future was a series of tours, concerts, interviews, videos, fancy cars,” she recalls. “I wasn’t doing any art. I wasn’t writing.” Fame and fortune were escalating, but “it’s such a stressful life and you find yourself getting more demanding about things that you never were demanding about, like, ‘Why isn’t my car here?’
“I don’t have any aspirations to be rich. I came from a lower-middle-class background. Even when I’ve had prosperity, I just share it.”
I ask about the feminist criticism about her semiretirement.
“Yeah, they got really upset with me, like I broke some kind of bond,” she says. “I left the world of rock ’n’ roll. I left my so-called career, you know, fame and fortune. But what I did do is, I saved myself as a worker, as a writer and as an evolving human being.” (She says that even before that, she had lost out on being featured in a feminist magazine because the writer was dismayed to see her washing and folding a boyfriend’s laundry.)
After her husband died, in 1994, she returned to New York, with places in downtown Manhattan and Rockaway Beach, and picked up her career. She still wears her wedding ring and even once bought her husband a mauve iridescent Valentino shirt because she missed him so much and knew he would have loved it.
Ms. Smith did not perform her famous 1978 song with the N-word in the title during her tour. Can she still sing it?
“No,” she says simply, recalling that when she wrote it more than four decades ago, “I was fighting to take a term that was used in such a defamatory way and to take it as a badge for outsiders, artists, of any gender, any color. So, you know, a task that took a lot of hubris. But an absolutely pure heart. The real important phrase in the song is ‘outside of society, that’s where I want to be.’ I’ve been asked to recant the song and it’s like, I’m not recanting the song. I don’t recant anything that I do. I mean, I’ve done it, I believed in it. It’s still to me an awesome song.
“People want to embrace one as the godmother of punk, but her anthem? They don’t want that. They want you to go far but not too far.” She says the song has been “misconstrued” but she knows that also, “the pain that people feel because of past injustice is real.”
“I miss doing it,” she says. “But my son, he’s opposed to doing it, out of respect to people. So I look at the younger generation and I think, O.K. I’m living in their time. This is not my time. So, in terms of younger people’s time, it’s not the right song right now.”
She admits that “there’s a part of me that’s defiant. I was like that as a child. I can’t help it. I’m a punk rocker who loves Maria Callas, you know?” But, she added, “I’m not going to shove it down anybody’s throat. It’s on a record, if they want to hear it.”
She does worry about censorship in the age of cancellation, though. “We’re moving more and more back to intense censorship,” she says, citing the removal of paintings from museums. “More censorship than people like William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg and Brancusi were fighting.”
On the subject of #MeToo, she looks at the big picture: “I find myself more concerned about the terrible atrocities against women globally. I just think, again, we have to examine what is an atrocity and what is an insult and what is somebody being a pain in the ass.”
She gets emotional when I ask her about Trump turning the so-called Squad into his 2020 foils.
“I felt almost like there was a tape around my ribs and somebody pulled it off and some skin went with it,” she says. “All those girls are good people. We are a democracy, and it’s all right for them to question how we’re dealing with the Gaza Strip and how we’re treating the Palestinians. It’s not anti-American, it’s not anti-Israel. It’s the American way.”
Weirdly, she says, she encountered Mr. Trump when they were young. Mr. Mapplethorpe took her to a dinner, when they were together and she was still working at Scribner’s, where a young Mr. Trump pitched Trump Tower.
“I didn’t know who this guy was, he was with his wife, Ivana, except he was the most obnoxious person I have ever experienced in my life,” she says. “All he talked about was how it was going to be the greatest thing ever in New York City and anyone who bought into this was going to be part of the most important thing. Me and Robert left and I thought, ‘I wouldn’t live in his tower for free.’ I can’t believe that fate would let that guy. …” She shudders.
I tell her what Mr. Iovine said about his disillusionment with young musicians for not being more political. Indeed, the night before, at the Video Music Awards, Taylor Swift, whose critics have dinged her for staying mostly mum in this era of political outrage, offered some mild, oblique criticism of the president.
“She’s a pop star who’s under tremendous scrutiny all the time, and one can’t imagine what that’s like,” Ms. Smith says sympathetically. “It’s unbelievable to not be able to go anywhere, do anything, have messy hair. And I’m sure that she’s trying to do something good. She’s not trying to do something bad. And if it influences some of her avid fans to open up their thoughts, what does it matter? Are we going to start measuring who’s more authentic than who?
“I don’t agree that artists and musicians have more responsibility to speak out than anyone else. I think everybody has to be more active. Art is inspiring and art can really bring people together. A song can rally people, but it’s not going to make change.”
She says she got punished for speaking out against the Iraq invasion: “All of a sudden, no radio play, couldn’t get into festivals. People, even cool people — I’m sorry to say that, but some people that I really loved and respected and still love and respect — they were so frightened by this infusion of patriotism that they weren’t able to see the whole picture. To me, patriotism is just a few steps away from nationalism if you’re not careful.”
She is not rooting for Joe Biden to be the nominee. “I would rather see a younger person make some mistakes than to have the petrified forest come in,” she says.
She doesn’t like labels, and she doesn’t want to feel hemmed in to any movement. She doesn’t like confinement of any kind; it’s why she scorns high heels and makeup. She doesn’t want to be hailed as the godmother of younger women in rock or a feminist icon or a political activist.
“If they want to call me a writer, an artist, I’m really happy with that, or a mother,” she says. “But I don’t really need more than that because I don’t really qualify.”
After her last Paris concert, we hang out in her hotel room at midnight overlooking the Place Vendôme. Her son, Jackson, a guitarist who often plays with her, calls and she tells him how much she loves him.
In her new book, and on Instagram, she has pictures of what she calls her “treasures,” eclectic items that she travels with or gathers on her trips. I ask her to make a Polaroid picture of some now.
We sit on her bed as she spreads out her T-shirt, cross, her flaxseeds, her toothbrush, Weleda Salt toothpaste, stones she has gathered along the tour, a vintage photo of Antonin Artaud, a Nicholas Roerich postcard and a book she is reading, “The Book of Monelle” by Marcel Schwob.
We talk some more about the men she loved, all gone, and she suddenly smiled, radiantly, and says, “I’ve had some cool boyfriends.”
Bonus track!
Confirm or Deny
Maureen Dowd: You light candles in churches for your late cat.
Patti Smith: I light candles in churches for everybody.
You love “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” on “Adult Swim,” a late-night show about a milk shake, a box of French fries and a wad of meat named Meatwad, because it’s set in Jersey.
South Jersey, actually. Yes, I do. It was love at first sight. I have socks with Meatwad on them. Did you know that I did their closing song? My son is always turning me on to cool cartoons. I like all the “Ghost in the Shell” films and “Dragon Ball.”
In 1977, you had your producer drive in from Brooklyn at 2 a.m. and the first thing you asked him was to take you to a newsstand to buy Italian Vogue and go straight to C.B.G.B.
True.
You dragged your feet on doing “Because the Night” because Bruce Springsteen was from Central New Jersey, not South Jersey.
Well, there was a little of the Jersey thing. But also, I just want to write my own songs. Even when I listened to it, finally, I thought, “It’s one of those darn hits, it’s going to be a hit, and if I sing this song, it’ll probably be popular because it’s a Bruce song.” I mean, I couldn’t write a song like that.
You know you’re a good dancer.
It’s my Philly upbringing. Philly and South Jersey have the best dancers. It comes from mimicking R&B songs from when I was young. When I moved to New York and I watched Long Island people or even New York people dance, I’d go, “They aren’t even close.” Robert was from Long Island and we fought about this all the time, about who was the best dancer.
Bob Dylan called to thank after you accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature for him and sang “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”
No. I don’t have that kind of relationship with Bob. For the canon of work that he’s given us, he can do what he wants. That’s how I feel. He can conduct himself the way that he wants.
You still feel bad that you forgot the words to the song and had to start over.
I had a white-out. Ralph Fiennes told me it was called a white-out. There was an orchestra, there’s global TV, there’s the king and queen, all the Nobel people. I mean, I’ve loved Bob Dylan since I was 15, 16. The funniest thing, the next day all the Nobel winners came up to take selfies with me. And I was saying, I wish I would have been better. And they said, “No, no, don’t wish that.” They told me that they were all so nervous, too, all these great scientists and thinkers.
You don’t drive. You don’t like utensils. And you can’t tune a guitar.
They’re all true.
You can’t swim.
I don’t know how to swim. I’m a goat. I’m a Capricorn.
In the ’70s, you would refuse Novocain at the dentist on the grounds that it was un-American because they didn’t have it during the Civil War.
That’s something I would say, yeah.
You can’t smoke because of a bronchial condition.
It’s really funny, when young kids come up to me and they want to talk to me and there’s a cigarette I will say, “You can talk to me but you have to put out your cigarette.”
The night you met Jimi Hendrix, you had a ribbon in your hair with musical notes and you were wearing a polka-dot dress.
It was my “East of Eden” outfit. We talked about shyness. He said, “I’m shy, too.” He said he was going to create a new language of music. “The language of peace, you dig?”
You want to live to be 100.
Well, I’ve pushed it up to 102.
