Patti Smith froze mid-song at the Nobel ceremony, apologised, and finished
Standing in for Bob Dylan in Stockholm in 2016, Patti Smith lost her place in A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall, admitted she was nervous and started again to roaring applause. It fitted a career built on raw nerve, from factory work in New Jersey to reciting the names of dead punks as CBGB closed for good.
Born in Chicago on December 30, 1946, Smith grew up mostly in southern New Jersey, where her mother gave her Another Side of Bob Dylan. After high school she took a factory job, a misery she later poured into the song Piss Factory. In 1969 she busked in Paris with her sister, then moved into the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. As a teenager she had daydreamed about the poet Arthur Rimbaud as if he were her boyfriend.
Poetry came first. She co-wrote the play Cowboy Mouth with Sam Shepard, gave her first public reading in February 1971 with Lenny Kaye on electric guitar, wrote lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult and reviewed records for Rolling Stone and Creem. Kaye's guitar and her verse grew into the Patti Smith Group, which played weekend shows at CBGB alongside Television in 1975 and was signed by Clive Davis to Arista.
Horses, produced by John Cale, opened with her rewrite of Van Morrison's Gloria and the line announcing that Jesus died for somebody else's sins. Mapplethorpe's stark cover photo became iconic, and the album earned her the title Godmother of Punk. In January 1977 she tumbled 15 feet off a stage in Tampa and broke vertebrae in her neck, using the recovery to reset her life. Easter, the next year, carried Because the Night, written with Bruce Springsteen, which climbed to number 13 in America.
She spent most of the 1980s raising a family in Michigan, far from the stage, before Michael Stipe and Allen Ginsberg coaxed her back. In 2010 her memoir Just Kids, written to honour a promise to Mapplethorpe, won the National Book Award. Her 2025 memoir Bread of Angels carried a late surprise: at 70 she had learned the man who raised her was not her biological father.
Source: Patti Smith
