Rock 'n' roll high poet Patti Smith comes to town

By Derek Paiva
Advertiser Staff Writer

When you really think about it, it's kind of sad that the only riot grrl Generation Y has readily available to rock them away from the bubblegum brigade of Britney and Christina wannabes is the vacuous Courtney Love.

Patti Smith 8 p.m. Wednesday World Cafe $20 526-4400

As androgynous an enigma as David Bowie and as intelligently articulate a lyricist as Lou Reed, Smith was a truckful of raging punk attitude in a pageboy shag. A high priestess of carnal songwriting and poetry sent to wake up a post-Vietnam generation drowning in the bottomless morass of Blue Bayou and absently cruising Ventura Highway.

With the blasphemous opening line, "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine," Smith's debut album "Horses" introduced the bold, self-revelatory lyrics that would keep music critics and fans eagerly following the idiosyncratic singer's career through eight albums sporadically released over 25 years. Spreading her self-described "three-chord rock merged with the power of the word" seamlessly over a vinyl menu of originals such as "Redondo Beach" and "Free Money," and reworked classics of Them's "Gloria" and Wilson Pickett's "Land of 1,000 Dances," Smith's debut remains a landmark rock 'n' roll document. Classically literate, yet viciously punk.

Ronstadt and Co. would win the first bout. "Horses" barely made it into the Billboard Top 50 albums chart, and failed to launch a single Top 40 hit — not that Smith exactly had that last goal in mind. But Smith would go on to outlast them all, with future generations of inspired rockers lavishing titles such as "queen of punk" and "founding mother of alternative rock" on to her already impressive resume. She's heading for a concert in Honolulu Wednesday.

The oldest of four kids, Smith was born in Chicago in 1946, but raised in Deptford, N.J. Her mother was a former jazz singer turned waitress while her father worked at the local Honeywell plant. Smith connected to art and music early on, but her introduction to rock 'n' roll via the scratchy record player of some neighborhood kids playing Little Richard 45 rpms was revelatory.

"My dad liked the Gershwin type of music and standards, and my mom liked Artie Shaw and that type of music," Smith told Entertainment Weekly in 1999. "But there was always something about rock 'n' roll — the energy in it, and perhaps some kind of sense of abstract rebellion."

The music also played into a sense of confusion she had always felt in her suburban surroundings.

"I came into the world not happily accepting social order — that we had to dress a certain way and behave a certain way and use a knife and a fork," she told EW. "To me, it seemed too planned out. I really thought it should be my right to decide how I was going to adjust to being human. So I think there was some of that animal energy within the song that attracted me."

Though she wasn't singing or pondering a recording career, the teenage music fan genre-jumped hungrily from doo-wop to John Coltrane to opera drawn by the power of words.

"Music by '64 was starting to mean more than something to dance to," Smith told EW, of her senior year before briefly entering teachers' college. "Through (Joan) Baez, I was learning about expressing one's dissatisfaction with certain things through music, and certainly through Bob Dylan. And the next big thing for me was the Rolling Stones and the Animals. I saw rock and roll starting to express dissatisfaction. That was important to me."

Dropping out of Glassboro State Teacher's College in 1967, Smith made a beeline to New York City, where she met and briefly moved in with then-struggling art student Robert Mapplethorpe. Smith began dabbling in painting, drawing and, especially, poetry, eventually hooking up with guitarist Lenny Kaye and pianist Richard Sohl to add rhythm to her improvised chant-sung poetry. Following well-received gigs at Los Angeles' Whiskey-A-Go-Go and New York's CBGB's, and the addition of guitarist Ivan Kral and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty to the lineup, the Patti Smith Group was signed by Arista Records in 1975.

The pre-punk bombast of "Horses" was followed by 1976s more rock-based "Radio Ethiopia" and 1978s "Easter." A worldwide hit, "Easter" spawned Smith's first and only Top 20 single in "Because The Night," a writing collaboration with Bruce Springsteen that made it to No. 13.

Growing increasingly disenchanted with her unasked-for role as the female savior of rock 'n' roll, Smith abandoned the music world and concert stage in 1979 after the release of her "Wave" album. Relocating to Detroit, Smith married ex-MC5 guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith and settled down to a life of suburban motherhood.

Smith returned to recording briefly in 1988 with "Dream of Life," a collaborative effort with Smith. After his death in 1994 of heart failure (as well as the passing of former collaborators Mapplethorpe and Sohl, and brother Todd), Patti returned to performing in 1995 in support of the somber and contemplative "Gone Again." Forming a new band with Kaye, Daugherty and guitarist Oliver Ray and bassist Tony Shanahan, Smith released the grittier "Peace And Noise" in 1997, and a rootsy reminiscence of her '70s heydays in 2000's "Gung Ho."

Smith's Wednesday World Cafe show — sandwiched between concerts in Japan and Seattle — will mark the 55-year-old's Hawai'i performance debut.

Of her onstage persona circa 1999, Smith told Vanity Fair shortly before a Rome concert, "We don't perform at people. We create the night with people." Smith went on that evening to read her audience some Ginsberg poetry, spit on the stage and rip the heads off of fan-offered roses before showering petals on her front-row devotees.

If you're heading for World's next week, bring a teenager along to see the real definition of riot grrl.