Raw poetry: Patti Smith at 61

By William Booth
The Washington Post
May 03, 2008 6:00 AM

What happens when rockers grow old? The short answer is, they become ridiculous. Or that is how they are usually cast — trapped in reruns of VH1's "Behind the Music," or endless reunion tours, all the sex and rebellion and talent spent, like royalty checks, ages ago.

But what if the rocker were Patti Smith, the godmother of punk, once all spatter and spit, and the documentary were a different project: not a nostalgia act, but an exploration of real things, like art and family and loss — and not the romantic death found in a rock-and-roll lyric, but the literal kind, the kind that took Smith's husband away.

If you or your mom don't know Patti Smith from Patti LaBelle, you could show her this movie and she might enjoy it. "I'm really glad you say that," says Patti Smith, who still talks like South Jersey, where she grew up, eldest daughter of a jazz-singing waitress and a factory-working father who studied the Bible, Plato and UFO magazines.

"I feel the same way. If my mother were still alive, I feel like I could take the film to her and she would happily watch it. But she would probably say ... " Here Smith does her mom imitation. " 'I could skip all the poetry.' My mother liked the rock and roll."

Says Sebring, giggling, "She liked to clean to it."

Clean, indeed. There is no sex or drugs, and very little music, in the film — though there are lots of visits to the moody graves of long-gone poets, and a scene in which Smith and Flea, the bass player for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, discuss bladder control. We also spend a little time with Patti's mom, who enjoyed collecting ceramic cows. (She died in 2002.) It all kind of works.

Smith and Sebring were sitting together recently in a dungeonlike bar in Park City, Utah, in the morning off-hours. They look like brother and sister troll dolls. Smith is still as slim as a guitar's neck, dressed in black velvet jacket, white shirt, with a head of woolly-bear hair that would give a Hollywood stylist a panic attack. She still looks like the combination of "a man who looks like a coyote and a woman who looks like a crow," the character she played on stage in "Cowboy Mouth," which Smith wrote in 1971 with the actor-playwright Sam Shepard, an old flame, who makes an appearance in the film. The two talk about her days as the "it" girl of the New York rock scene.

"I was never interested in a rockumentary or a behind-the-scenes thing. I have no interest in that," says Smith of the film, which premiered at Sundance in January and will air on PBS next year.

Smith met Sebring for a photo shoot for Spin magazine in 1995, just as Smith was coming back into the public sphere after a long hiatus from performing. During the years of her retreat to the suburbs of Detroit, she saw the deaths of her close friend and muse, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe; her pianist, Richard Sohl; her husband, the musician Fred "Sonic" Smith of MC5; and her brother Todd. "Just year after year, month after month, of loss," Smith says. "I was pretty shattered as a human being and I had the responsibility of two young children and I had to really start over again. The movie is really about experiencing joy in life in the saddest of times."

Sebring, alone, without a crew, filmed Smith for 11 years, using available light, and the photography is often quite beautiful by itself, a lovely home movie. The result is a collage — intimate, arty, pretentious, and a very respectful work by a documentarian who is open about his enthusiasms. "They call her the punk poet prophet," Sebring says. "I feel like one of her soldiers, one of her messengers."

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.

"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."

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: "Walt Whitman, I'm thinking of you," she says. 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 teen-ager she worked in a factory and dropped out of college. She was like Juno before the movie "Juno," a pregnant teen-ager 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. ... 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."

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."