The world has not scrutinized Patti Smith for a long time. For the past 17 years she has been living far from public view in the quiet lakefront community of St. Clair Shores, raising a family, still writing poems and prose, but working for herself, in private. The last time the world checked on her was in 1988, when she released her only album of the ’80s, ““Dream of Life.’’ It was heralded as a comeback, but fans and critics were baffled by its slickly produced songs about the earth and spiritual love. Motherhood rock was not an accepted genre. No, the last time that people really looked closely was in the ’70s. And back then, they liked what they saw. Smith was young and brave, a poet and punk revolutionary, the author of such ground-breaking albums as 1975’s ““Horses’’ and 1978’s ““Easter.’’ She was the voice behind a top 20 hit, ““Because the Night.’’ And she was beautiful. Her friend, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, captured her for the cover of ““Horses’’: demure yet tough, wearing a white shirt and loosened black tie, standing with her head thrown back, a look of impenetrable dignity in her eyes.
A lot has happened since then. At 49, Smith is still proud and brave, but she’s not the feral punk ravager you might expect; neither aloof nor intimidating, in person she’s warm, sweet, even kidlike. The years have affected her. In 1994, her husband of 14 years, Fred ““Sonic’’ Smith, former guitarist for the MC5, died suddenly of heart failure. He was 45. In a powerful sense, Fred was Patti’s life. In 1979, she had walked away from New York and her career to be with Fred in Detroit. They had raised a family: son Jackson is now 13, daughter Jesse is 9. They had collaborated on ““Dream of Life.’’ They were one of those rare, weirdly destined couples that were so much alike they even looked alike.
Patti has rebounded in the only way she knows how: through her work. On June 18, she releases ““Gone Again,’’ a magnificent tribute to the love affair and life that consumed her for so long. Arista is reissuing her four ’70s albums, a body of work that inspired legions of today’s alternative bands, from R.E.M. to Nirvana. Bands can’t copy her revelatory rants and singular, strident voice, but they’ve copped her attitude: confrontational, iconoclastic, fiercely individualistic. ““I found out about her when I was 15, through an article I found under a chair in study hall,’’ says R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe. ““And I’ve maintained my respect for her since then. I bought “Horses’ the day it came out, and that was the end of one chapter of my life and the beginning of another.''
““Gone Again’’ is the most powerful rock album of the year. Boisterous and transcendent in some places, gently elegaic in others, it attains the incantatory heights of ““Horses’’ while firmly re-establishing her for today. Some songs, like ““About a Boy’’ (inspired by another death, Kurt Cobain’s), have the poetic fervor of her early work. Others, like ““Summer Cannibals’’ and ““Gone Again,’’ are punk-edged rockers that were started by Fred and posthumously finished by Smith with Lenny Kaye, her longtime guitarist. The rest are delicate ballads written by Smith. ““We waltzed beneath motionless skies/All heaven’s glory turned in your eyes,’’ she sings in ““My Madrigal.’’ ““For the last six months of his life, I asked Fred if he would teach me guitar,’’ she says. ““So when Jack and Jesse went to bed he’d give me a lesson. He had a beautiful way of teaching. I wrote a lot of songs for Fred. All in waltz time. Because we were on waltz time when he passed away. That’s the only time I can play.''
Yet through all the sadness and grief, the album’s ultimate message is one of hope and resilience. ““The intent of the album isn’t to make people sad,’’ she says. ““I’ve experienced some difficult times – the most difficult times of my life. But I wanted people to know that a person can go through these things and still love life, and be able to do their work, and not be ashamed to feel some joy. To put it simply, I just wanted people to know I’m all right.''
After lunch, Smith heads back to her house. She doesn’t drive; it’s one of the most persistent vestiges of her New York self. Heading down her quiet street, you pass one tidy frame house after another, and one neatly mowed lawn after another. You pass a parade of satellite dishes and painted wooden porches. Then, at the end of the block, comes the Addams Family house. Smith lives in a miniature Gothic castle obscured by tall, draping willows and clamoring forsythias. Leafless vines choke the brick walls and thread the ironwork on the tiny pointed windows and turret. When she pulls into the driveway, a group of kids across the street stop on their bikes and wave. ““Patti! Patti!’’ they yell. ““Hi Patti!’’ Smith smiles and waves back. You can see why they adore her. She’s one of them. Her hair lies in loosely twisted, girlish braids on her shoulders. She wears a rumpled, untucked tan linen shirt and dungarees rolled up at the cuffs. The shoelaces of her Doc Martens are untied. You could almost trip on them, walking behind her.
Inside, the house is a similar jumble of happy overgrowth. A quilt-wrapped mattress on the floor serves as a couch. Trinkets, mementos and photos adorn the walls, the shelves, the top of an old piano. A bow and arrow belonging to Fred have been arranged into a cross above the mantle. Books poke out of every crevice. Children’s art work decorates the walls; sometimes it’s painted and hand-printed right on the walls. ““We really live in this house,’’ Smith says. ““It’s not like it’s my house, and the kids live here. We live in it together. So it sometimes looks a little unruly.''
Patti and Fred bought the house together after they married. Yet as much as she loves it, in the fall she plans to move the family back to New York City. ““I’ve always loved New York, and I have friends there,’’ she says. ““But I’ve lived here now for 17 years. I don’t feel like I’m leaving Michigan – more like I’m leaving a part of Fred. So that’s difficult. But we’re keeping the house, and we’ll come visit it.''
Smith spent most of her youth in southern New Jersey, between Philadelphia and the shore. Her dad was a factory worker; her mom was a waitress who once sang standards in clubs like the Log Cabin in Atlantic City. ““Our house was filled with diverse music,’’ Smith says. ““Duke Ellington, Eydie Gorme, June Christy. Thanks to the Columbia Record Club.’’ Smith always wanted to be an artist. She didn’t really care what kind. ““When I was 18, I went down to Wildwood and got a job in a fish market near the ocean,’’ she says. ““I got a little bit of money, and a room right above the fish market. I wanted to be a sculptor then. I had like this five-foot block of plaster and all these mallets and things – I was going to be like Brancusi – and the smell of fresh fish. I thought, “This is great! I’m suffering!’''
In the late ’60s, she migrated to New York, where she hooked up with the rock scene through poetry. The Patti Smith Group started with Lenny Kaye backing her as she read her wild, Rimbaud-via-Bob Dylan verse. As the music expanded, Smith felt she was on a mission. Her performances were legendary: she went onstage hellbent to shake, terrify, transfigure and amaze anyone with the nerve to get within earshot. ““I thought rock and roll was losing its point,’’ she says. ““I didn’t think it should become a big arena of stars entertaining people. So we were trying to strip it down and remind people of its basic beauty.’’ But because Smith never strictly defined herself as a musician, she found it easy to leave the rock world. ““I always wrote,’’ she says. ““I probably worked more in the ’80s than I did in the ’70s. I just didn’t depend on the adulation of the people for my self-image as a worker. Fred and I weren’t rock-and-roll parents. We were parents.''
Smith gets up from the floor-couch and rummages through some papers. She locates an article from the time of ““Dream of Life,’’ with a full-page color picture of her and Fred. They’re standing on a street in front of a small white church, resting their heads on each other’s shoulders. ““Isn’t that a nice picture,’’ Smith says softly. ““That’s where we were married. Oh, we had our ups and downs. But we were quite a pair. We still are, in our own way.’’ She gazes at the picture, and the happiness of that moment shines on her face all over again. She’s radiant. Standing in that that old house, reflecting all its glow, she’s as beautiful as any woman could be.
title: “Alive And Kicking” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-03” author: “Katherine Botto”
Don’t get them wrong. Depeche Mode is happy to be on the BBC. They’re proud to have a new album, “Ultra,” their first in four years and the most luminous of their 17-year career. In fact, Gahan, Fletcher and Gore are thankful to be anywhere at all. In May 1996, Gahan suffered a near-fatal overdose of heroin and cocaine in an L.A. hotel room. After two minutes without a pulse, he was revived by paramedics, sent to a hospital and then arrested on charges of drug possession. He entered a court-mandated treatment program; he says he has been clean ever since. (Charges will be dropped when he completes treatment.) “I created this monster, and it just overtook what I was about,” Gahan says now. “It was almost like I wanted to kill it off, like in a movie. Some sad, tragic ending. I really fed into that drama.”
But the band’s problems didn’t begin and end with its lead singer. Four years ago, in the midst of a 14-month world tour to support their 1993 album “Songs of Faith and Devotion,” Fletcher had a nervous breakdown and checked himself into a hospital in England. Gore suffered seizures brought on by stress and alcohol abuse and was also hospitalized. Oasis’s Gallagher brothers may have achieved status as the reigning bad boys of Britpop, but behind the scenes Depeche Mode has been making them look like amateurs.
“Ultra” is so sad and lovely and pure that it’s almost worth the agony. The band has dropped the hokey Gothic gloom of early albums like “Black Celebration” in favor of a more reflective, sophisticated approach. Instruments like pedal steel guitar, bass and percussion sensuously mingle with eerie synthesizer melodies and sullen mechanized beats. Gahan’s singing is less studiously dramatic than before: when he sings “Love will be the death of my lonely soul brothers,” in the lush ballad “The Love Thieves,” it carries the weight of experience. The album debuted at No. 5 in Billboard, but the guys aren’t pushing themselves too hard to promote it. The BBC is just about their speed. “We all came to the decision that we don’t want to tour,” says Fletcher. “Not just for David. We’ve all had our problems, and all of us aren’t fit enough to do a tour. You can’t get around the loneliness. To be in a hotel room for a whole year, you have to be mentally and physically very tough. Otherwise you get back into the situation you were in before.”
Gahan, Fletcher and Gore know each other’s situations well. All three grew up in Basildon, a working-class British town that rose up after World War II to replace London neighborhoods that had been bombed out. “Basildon’s a bit of a joke,” says Fletcher. “There’s nothing to do, high crime, bad schools. Once you’re out of there, you want to stay out. That’s part of what keeps us going.” Depeche Mode got together in 1980 as a conventional band, with guitar and bass, but they quickly abandoned those instruments for electronic toys like synthesizers and samplers. Every one of their 10 studio albums has landed in the British top 10; in 1990 they broke through commercially in the United States with the album “Violator.” “For a long time we were virtually ignored by the American press,” says Gore. “We couldn’t be making “real’ music because we weren’t using real instruments. Now that’s turned around. Everyone knows the guitar is an emotive instrument. I think people have come to accept that synthesizers and samplers can be, too.”
Which brings him around to the cheeriest thought he’s had all day. “After 17 years in a successful band, we all experience some problems,” Gore says. “I think it’s natural. It may be we’ve all done remarkably well. Maybe most people in our position would be doing a lot worse.” He brightens considerably. Attitudes are hard to change, but Depeche Mode’s are getting healthier every day.
