‘We’re catalysts of the new plague’ – from the archive, Patti Smith interviewed in 1976

She was sitting in a hotel in Notting Hill Gate, talking about her favourite subject. She was wearing a white shirt, a black tie and black trousers, and if it wasn’t for those piercing blue eyes she’d have looked like a rag doll in drag. Considering she had just got off a plane from New York, and had only been asked a simple question, the words were pouring from her in an excited and unexpected torrent. “Being into rock is like being into the most important, newest art form. I feel like an early prospector in California before the gold rush. I feel rock is going to explode and encompass everything. It’s like this fantastic plague over the universe and we’re in on it. We’re like catalysts of the new plague …”Patti Smith is New York’s latest sensation. She’s been an artist, a playwright, a poet, and a rock critic, and now – at 29 – she’s a rock’n’roller (“though we want to obliterate definitions”). The press there have called her “the wild mustang” and “the rock queen of the seventies,” and right across the country she’s beginning to win a varied and fanatical following.Just as American rock was getting more predictable, and more respectable, Patti has come crashing in with a reminder that there’s still an underground, and that the spirit of ‘67 still lives. That was the year she arrived in New York, “just a kid lurking round the Fillmore,” and when “giants walked the earth” – Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison. Along with her very greatest heroes The Rolling Stones (“Jagger is the greatest performer since Nijinsky”) these were the artists who inspired her current extraordinary style.We’ll see this weekend how it works out on stage, but on her one album, Horses (Arista ARTY 122), it is chillingly effective, a spontaneous mixture of surreal, improvised poetry and simple, earthy rock. It’s as if a sixties new-wave poet (with strong influences of Rimbaud and Baudelaire as well as Burroughs) had joined up in an improvised jam with one of the basic and muddy-sounding East Coast bands – the Velvet Underground, maybe, or the rather more hopeless New York Dolls. Patti is happy to agree “I’m not an accomplished musician, but I’m verbal – extremely verbal,” and that she performs rather than sings her way through material that ranges from the joyously sexual (or rather bi-sexual) to strange, half-spoken, part-improvised pieces that shift from frightening and bizarre fantasy to reassuring echoes of sixties rock.Continue readingPatti Smith at the RoundhouseBy Robin Denselow 20 May 1976Patti Smith had promised no half measures, that she would give a performance in which she’d either go beyond herself or totally fail. It was disappointing then to find that New York’s outrageous and much-praised rock poetess didn’t quite do either.As soon as she came on, a scruffy waif in tight jeans and layers of flapping shirts, it was clear that she was not going to reproduce the drama and excitement of her album Horses. Her personality and her harsh quavering voice were at times up to that standard, certainly, but her band was ploddingly slow and uninspired. Its style was summed up by the expression of the keyboard player, who looked like a permanently frightened zombie.With that lot behind her Ms Smith had a hard time warming the audience, even with lectures on the importance of rock, risque stage chat, and poems thrown in. There was a lot of back-to-the-sixties naiveté to it all, but a lot of sixties energy too – and that was what saved her. The spontaneity in some of her half-spoken song poems, and the way she threw herself into Gloria and My Generation, let her get away with rather more than she deserved.The Guardian, 15 May 1976.