Fans of popular music who were teenagers in the 1960s will remember the first time they saw the album covers of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Led Zeppelin 1, Cream’s Disraeli Gears or Joni Mitchell’s Clouds.
For people of my own vintage, one of the unforgettable such moments was our first encounter with Robert Mapplethorpe’s cover photograph for Patti Smith’s Horses (1975), an album which, 50 years later, still makes the heart soar with its high-octane mix of 16-wheeler hardcore rhythm-and-blues-tinged punk and nuanced, evocative Lower East Side poetry.
The image of a raffish, androgynous Smith, jacket thrown over the shoulder like a discarded memory, has something of Keith Richards about to head out on a night whose pleasures will be expensive, painful and legally actionable. The voice is unique, able to swoop from a whisper to a scream and back again in half a phrase. John Lydon might not have liked to admit it but something of his own brilliant vocal style on God Save the Queen and Pretty Vacant was surely influenced by Smith’s voice on Horses. The first line – “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine” – open this magnificent record the way dynamite opens a safe.
Easy and perhaps unwanted laurels such as “high priestess of punk” or “godmother of grunge” have been festooned about Smith by devotees of alliteration ever since, but she has always been so much more than her labels. She continues to resist imprisonment by categorisation, as this well-written memoir, a sort of sequel to her US National Book Award-winning Just Kids (2010), makes clear. A gifted writer, diarist and photographer as well as a peerless songwriter and performer, she embodies one of John McGahern’s dictums, that what the artist needs first, before craft, style or even art form, is “a way of seeing”. Simply put, no one else of the era had her depth and breadth of vision.
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This book does a good job of revealing where the worldview came from. A “talkative and rambunctious” child, daughter of a factory worker and a waitress, she read Irish fairy tales, contracted TB in infancy and went to live with her maternal grandfather, Daddy Frank, who was “handsome, good natured and played ragtime-style piano”. A keen reader, young Patti got into Rimbaud, Dickens, Blake, Verlaine, Wilde, Yeats and The Catcher in the Rye and “did not want to grow up”. Aged 10, she was listening to Puccini. Her heroes included Joan of Arc, Sacagawea, Madame Curie and Davy Crockett.
Her twenties saw her move to Manhattan, living in the Chelsea Hotel, hanging out on Bleeker Street with Allen Ginsberg and reading her poems at St Mark’s church in-the-Bowery, accompanied by guitarist and nailed-on ledge-bag Lenny Kaye. An accomplished and edgy wordsmith before she was a musician, perhaps she took to music, which she had always loved, as a means of adding rocket fuel to language. No matter the chosen art, you feel she would have excelled. If James Joyce had been born in the era of the recording studio, he’d have been Brian Eno. I feel that, had Smith been around during the Renaissance in Italy, she’d have been a painter or sculptor but wouldn’t have got a lot of commissions from popes. She is haunted by “the eyes of Pasolini and his view of Jesus as a revolutionary”.
Bob Dylan was another totemic figure, “my model”, she writes. “There was no one I identified with more: his language, his way of walking, his Tarantula look, snap tab collar shirt ... But I never once felt like him; I always felt like myself.” It would not be true to say that her 2007 cover of Dylan’s Changing of the Guard (a song about which Colm Tóibín writes beautifully in his current bestseller Ship in Full Sail) is better than the magnificent original. But it’s damn close. Equally, it would be a bit much to claim that Bread of Angels is a finer work than Just Kids, which rivals Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One for best memoir ever written by a musician. But it’s close. Her winding, lush paragraphs and sharp insights are a great pleasure. “That spring, the lilacs bloomed, the longhair branches of our ancient willows swayed.”
There is a sort of clarity and calm in the writing, a tone perfectly balanced between coolness and passion. “We lived in every time zone,” she writes of her romance with her late husband, Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith. “In my room with the black felt floor was a table and my seven volumes, bound in navy silk, of Richard Burton’s translation of A Thousand and One Nights.” These are sentences wearing shades and sipping absinthe.
The purview is as broad as you’d expect in any book or other work by Smith. Since there is mystery at the heart of creative practice, all autobiographies of artists are attempting to do something impossible, but anyone reading Bread of Angels will know a great deal more about the truly remarkable seer who wrote it by the end. And she may know more about herself having written it.
Buoyed by her storming recent live performances of Horses on a 50th anniversary world tour, Smith’s legion of fans will treasure this lucid and likable self-reflection from one of the greatest living artists of our time. If you’re a hardcore devotee, you’ll also want to feast your haunted, hungering eyes and get your slender black-lace-mittened hands on Claude Gassian’s exquisite Patti Smith: Horses, Paris 1976, a beautiful collection of photographs, all of which are like stills from a cool French existentialist movie. God save the queen. Vive la reine.
Joseph O’Connor’s novel The Ghosts of Rome is published by Penguin Random House. It has been shortlisted for Novel of the Year and the Listeners’ Choice Award at the An Post Irish Book Awards 2025
