http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=5891&IssueNum=216
She doesn’t seem to hear the motorcycle. Or to even know it’s there, roaring and coughing and rumbling only a few yards away. Patti Smith is immune to it, sitting calmly on a commissary patio outside NBC’s Studio 3, where she’ll soon be taping an appearance on The Tonight Show for a quick burst of stormy weather and her version of the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” The other guests tonight? Dr. Phil and “the Jay Leno of Australia.” But it could just as easily be Leno himself on top of that rumbling motorbike, revving up another one of his custom hogs, and she wouldn’t know the difference. Smith makes her own noise.
“I guess it’s an interesting time for me,” she says, staring straight ahead, concentrating on her own words, maybe visualizing them right in front of her. “I never dreamed that I would still be performing at this time in my life, but I am. And I still think I have something to contribute.”
Her latest contribution is Twelve, a collection of new interpretations of old tunes, from Jimi Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced?” to a vaguely bluegrass take on Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Covering the songs of other artists has always been a part-time pastime for Smith, whose eruption from the New York rock underground essentially began with her stretched-out, free-verse explosion of Van Morrison’s “Gloria,” which Smith began cryptically with the words “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine … .”
When “Gloria” appeared on her 1975 debut album, Horses, she was nearly as old as Mick Jagger, but it still represented a clear generational break from the classic rock past, a rebellion against the overkill of the corporate rock machine. Smith would become the “punk priestess,” a singer-poet-sage, a South Jersey girl feeding off her obsession with the Stones, Dylan, and the great poets of France and the Beat Generation. She helped reinvent rock as a setting for bold, even literary revolt that can still be heard in much that has followed. Her 1979 “retirement” was a devastating loss for fans and the punk genre she helped create. But after the 1994 death of her husband, the MC5’s Fred “Sonic” Smith, she returned to action just in time for the ’90s alt-rock movement. Now 60, Smith’s renewed career proves that age is no hurdle as she approaches the BIG themes (death, love, war, politics, etc.) with an astonishing blend of ease and fire.
That original punk revolution turned in on itself, as all revolutions do, becoming just another pop niche, another clique and fashion statement for kids in mohawks and piercings picked out with mom. In 2007, Patti Smith’s deeply personal music wouldn’t qualify on the punk-rock corporate scale. It’s too raw, too intimate.
Locals can see for themselves when Smith and her band perform the songs of Twelve, and others from her three decades of recordings, in a free August 16 concert at Santa Monica Pier’s Twilight Dance Series. (Info at Twilightdance.org.)
CityBeat: You’ve always included material by other songwriters in your work. What led you to record an entire album like this?
Patti Smith: I always wanted to. I just never felt qualified in the past to do a wide range of cover songs. I’ve tried all kinds of songs, and I always sing ’em bad or I can’t hit the notes. I’m no Christina Aguilera, that’s for sure. I just feel like at this point, I know everything I’m going to know about my voice, and as a human being I’ve gone through a lot of different things and I just felt ready to tackle challenging songs.
How did you choose the tracks?
It took a couple of years for “Gloria” to evolve into what it was. And in this instance, you know, you go into the studio and we have like a Vulcan Mind-Meld and see where we go with the song. Most of these songs happened organically in the studio. We didn’t work on them for two years live.