VaGUE MAGAZINE - Patti Smith Interview

It’s all inspiration . . . but at least I have no fear of danger. I’ve never had a fear of danger but now I’ve been injured. An injured wolf is a dead wolf. An injured human on the other hand can pick up a weapon, so when I’m talking to God now I have a weapon. I plug in and pray to connect and if I connect one out of ten times it’s worth it. As far as the people are concerned . . . it’s only four songs!

“Man has given God a bad reputation.”

NWR: i. w can a guitar be a weapon against God?
Patti: It’s like a priesthood. There are certain things you do in the temple alone. There are certain communications that are dangerous out in the streets. Certain things are sacred. I think guitar playing allows me to talk about forbidden things without language, and if people just link in and go where I’m going, they’ll find I’m talking to them every second.
Playing guitar at this point in my life, I’m going to get everthing out of it I can. Every sensation I’m going to store up in the memory cells of my body. I’m going to physically rape everything I can with that guitar, because when I’m finished it’s going to put me on a new level of physical creation and then I’ll start from Pollock. Like from February to now... playing guitar . . . far exceeds any growth period I’ve ever had. When I grow in one thing I grow in everything. Now when I go back to drawing it’s like I’m three years from where I
was hen I was last drawing. I approach everything the same way, intuitively
and my piano playing. . . I predict by the time I’m forty-one I’ll be doing my own compositions on a stiffactioned Steinway in a Viennese opera house.
NWR: Don’t the technical aspects of musicianship concern you, like chording and fingerings?
Patti: It’s not that they don’t concern me, it’s just that I was never good at that stuff. I was never good at learning anatomy; I wasn’t good in school. I was good in a cosmic sense, but in terms of learning grammer I had a mental block. I think what Rimbaud said about women . . . [Patti left the room briefly and returned thumbing through a volume of Rimbaud’s work entitled, Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, continuing to search while she spoke.] It’s in one of these first letters . . . [She found the page in question and asked me to read.] NWR: “These poets will exist. When the endless servitude of woman is broken, when she lives for and by herself, man—heretofore abominable— having given her her release, she too will be a poet! Woman will find some of the unknown! Will her world differ from ours? She will find strange, unfathomable, repulsive, delicious things; we will take them, we will understand them.”
Patti: Isn’t that nice? It was a very compassionate thing for his time. That was a very influential statement for me. I read it when I was sixteen and although I didn’t totally understand it,

SONG—the willingness to submit, and I must be the one who can manipulate one into submission and then withdraw. Then I have to come back and take a leap myself. I can’t do it like I used to because that’s proven dangerous, so now that leap is in my guitar playing. In “Ain’t It Strange” I ritualistically spin. I don’t spin with total abandon. Like the words in “Land” . . . “Got to lose control, got to take control.” . . . I’ve already proven I can lose control, now I must prove that I can take control of all this energy that I’ve let spin out and into obliteration. I have to prove that I can take the same energy and do something constructive with it. That statement now, though, having lived through it . . . I’d rather change it to, “Got to keep balance!” I’m a very extreme person, so for me, keeping balance is going all the way in one direction and then all the way in the other direction, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the proper program for every man. Also, I don’t think in terms of one to one creation now, like in “Ain’t It Strange.” What I consider now is the trinity, so I always think of three and that protects me. When I’m singing I think of the people: me, God and them. When I’m physically improvising it’s me, God and the band. That way the band can form a bond around me. That’s what I mean in the phrase, “bond—not bondage.” It’s like I’m held back, a bond to earth, a positive bondage. That’s why I love playing guitar, that’s when I can get back to the one-to-one communication, she provokes... because the third part of my trinity is my guitar. I have that third thing that’s keeping me balanced, but I also have freedom of exploration. When I tried to explore physically, I got hurt. It’s dangerous. Now when I try to explore verbally I just go so far back in the labyrinth that it would take a very long time . . . so the only way to say it would be to condense it, and I’d just as soon do a song as condense. So I write books now. Babe! to me is an extension of what I used to do on stage. I used to improvise a lot of poetry, but in one way it’s such a drain and I do want to have fun. My mental processes have become so complex that it would go on forever. It would be like a verbal network, or trying to say a map. NWR: Tell me more about your guitar playing. It’s your latest preoccupation. Patti: Playing the guitar lets me enter un-charted areas without fear of physical danger. Now I have fear that I won’t deliver, won’t connect or I won’t get good feed-back, lack the energy, or just go cold.	Patti hugs one of her chief supporters, Arista Records’ prez Clive Davis.
	It’s all inspiration . . . but at least I have no fear of danger. I’ve never had a fear of danger but now I’ve been injured. An injured wolf is a dead wolf. An injured human on the other hand can pick up a weapon, so when I’m talking to God now I have a weapon. I plug in and pray to connect and if I connect one out of ten times it’s worth it. As far as the people are concerned . . . it’s only four songs! “Man has given God a bad reputation.” NWR: i. w can a guitar be a weapon against God? Patti: It’s like a priesthood. There are certain things you do in the temple alone. There are certain communications that are dangerous out in the streets. Certain things are sacred. I think guitar playing allows me to talk about forbidden things without language, and if people just link in and go where I’m going, they’ll find I’m talking to them every second. Playing guitar at this point in my life, I’m going to get everthing out of it I can. Every sensation I’m going to store up in the memory cells of my body. I’m going to physically rape everything I can with that guitar, because when I’m finished it’s going to put me on a new level of physical creation and then I’ll start from Pollock. Like from February to now... playing guitar . . . far exceeds any growth period I’ve ever had. When I grow in one thing I grow in everything. Now when I go back to drawing it’s like I’m three years from where I was hen I was last drawing. I approach everything the same way, intuitively and my piano playing. . . I predict by the time I’m forty-one I’ll be doing my own compositions on a stiffactioned Steinway in a Viennese opera house. NWR: Don’t the technical aspects of musicianship concern you, like chording and fingerings? Patti: It’s not that they don’t concern me, it’s just that I was never good at that stuff. I was never good at learning anatomy; I wasn’t good in school. I was good in a cosmic sense, but in terms of learning grammer I had a mental block. I think what Rimbaud said about women . . . [Patti left the room briefly and returned thumbing through a volume of Rimbaud’s work entitled, Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, continuing to search while she spoke.] It’s in one of these first letters . . . [She found the page in question and asked me to read.] NWR: “These poets will exist. When the endless servitude of woman is broken, when she lives for and by herself, man—heretofore abominable— having given her her release, she too will be a poet! Woman will find some of the unknown! Will her world differ from ours? She will find strange, unfathomable, repulsive, delicious things; we will take them, we will understand them.” Patti: Isn’t that nice? It was a very compassionate thing for his time. That was a very influential statement for me. I read it when I was sixteen and although I didn’t totally understand it,
A teacher’s greatness is measurable, in part, by the questions

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