# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Patti Smith - Interview, Stockholm October 1976

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Patti Smith Interview: Advice to the Young

# data[].attributes.headline
Hear Patti Smith Read the Poetry that Would Become Horses: A Reading of 14 Poems at Columbia University, 1975

# data[].attributes.subject
Hear Patti Smith Read the Poetry that Would Become Horses: A Reading of 14 Poems at Columbia University, 1975

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Note: The first poem and others contain some offensive language.
In the context of the radical socio-political change of 1975, Patti Smith announced herself to the world with , "the first real full-length hint of the artistic ferment taking place in the mid-'70s at the juncture of Bowery and Bleecker," writes Mac Randall. Though born in an insular downtown milieu, Smith's view was vast, conducting the poetry of the past-of Rimbaud, the Beats, and rock and roll-into an uncertain future, through the nascent medium of punk rock. The album is "closely associated with the beginning of something," and yet is "so concerned with endings": the loss of Jimi Hendrix (at whose studio Smith recorded), and of "other departed counterculture heroes like Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Brian Jones."

In a way, Smith's voice defines the pivotal moment in which it arrived: anticipating an anxious age of austerity and women's liberation; mourning the loss of 60s idealism and the promise of racial equity. She was a female artist fully unconstrained by patriarchal expectations, with complete authority over her vision. "My people were trying to forge a new bridge between the people we had lost and learned from and the future," she recently remarked.

In her "fabulously grand" way, she told The Guardian's Simon Hattenstone in 2013, "I felt in the center, not quite the old generation, not quite the new generation. I felt like the human bridge." Smith was no naïf when she made , but a confident artist who, at 29, had worked in theater with her lately-departed friend Sam Shepard, become her famous lover Robert Mapplethorpe's favorite subject, joined the St. Mark's Poetry Project, and published two collections of verse.

She thought of herself as a poet who "got sidetracked" by music. "When I was young," Smith says, "all I wanted was to write books and be an artist." But poetry was always central to her work; Horses, she says, "evolved organically" from her first poetry reading, four years earlier, at St. Mark's Church, alongside Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and other luminaries. Above, you can hear her discuss that attention-grabbing first reading, and at the top of the post, listen to Smith at Columbia University in 1975, reading the poems that developed that year into the songs on Horses, including her 1971 " Oath," which begins with a variation on Horses ' opening sneer, "Christ died for somebody's sins, but not mine."

Be warned the first poem she reads contains offensive language, as do many others. No one should be shocked by this. But some who only know Smith as a singer may be surprised by her masterful literary voice and wicked sense of humor. She has always been an elegist, mourning her cultural heroes, most of whom died young, as well as a tragic string of personal losses. "When I started working with the material that became Horses," she remembers, "a lot of our great voices had died." But her intent went beyond elegy, beyond a maudlin appropriation of fading 60s heroes. Smith had a "mission," she says, of "forming a cultural voice through rock'n'roll that incorporated sex and art and poetry and performance and revolution." It sounds grandiose, but it's a mission she's largely fulfilled. At the center of her project is poetry as performance, as a means of entertaining, shocking, and seducing an audience. The reading at the top is an especially faithful record of her fearless onstage persona.

Find more poetry readings in our collection, 900 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.
Related Content: Hear Patti Smith Read 12 Poems From Seventh Heaven, Her First Collection (1972) Watch Patti Smith Read from Virginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Surviving Recording of Woolf's Voice Patti Smith's New Haunting Tribute to Nico: Hear Three Tracks is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Hear Patti Smith Read the Poetry that Would Become Horses: A Reading of 14 Poems at Columbia University, 1975

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the context of the radical socio-political change of 1975, Patti Smith announced herself to the world with Horses, "the first real full-length hint of the artistic ferment taking place in the mid-'70s at the juncture of Bowery and Bleecker," writes Mac Randall.

# data[].attributes.headline
Patti Smith Plays at CBGB In One of Her First Recorded Concerts, Joined by Seminal Punk Band Television (1975)

# data[].attributes.subject
Patti Smith Plays at CBGB In One of Her First Recorded Concerts, Joined by Seminal Punk Band Television (1975)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The picture of punk as the domain of boorish nihilists who can't play their instruments has been as much a creation of marketing (via Malcolm McLaren) as it has been a virtue-of-necessity minimalist pose and a form of avant garde DIY experimentalism. But there have always been, since the coining of the term "punk" as a musical genre, stellar musicians and thoughtful, poetic lyricists shaping the scene. Of the former, we must mention Television, with their magnificent guitar interplay between leader Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd. And, of the latter, we need look no further than the godmother of punk herself, Patti Smith, who has always commanded stage and studio with her smart, arresting lyricism and powerful set of pipes.

Years before the Sex Pistols invaded the States, these two bands played regularly at CBGBs (Television was, in fact, the very first band to play there) with a loose collection of misfits who re-invented rock and roll. In December, 1975, Smith released her first album, , a hybrid of punk and spoken word produced by the Velvet Underground's John Cale.

But before that record made her famous-in April of that year-the Patti Smith Group took the stage with Television, and two teenage fans were there to record both sets from both bands. First appearing as a bootleg CD generically titled "Early Gig '75," the disc has since been reissued as We Can't Do Anymore... Cause I'm Just Too Tired!, with another set of Smith covers tacked on from a '78 concert in Santa Monica.

We get classic tracks from both bands, such as Television's "Marquee Moon" and "Little Johnny Jewell" and Smith's cover of "Hey Joe" and Van Morrison's "Gloria" as well as her own "Horses" and "Piss Factory." At the top of the post, you can hear her do six songs from that night in 1975, the last three with Television joining her onstage: "We're Going to Have a Real Good Time Together" (Velvet Underground cover), "Redondo Beach," "Birdland," "Space Monkey," "Distant Fingers," and "Gloria." You'll also hear the two young tapers chatting it up in the first few minutes of the tape.

Smith's band, writes bootleg blog Doom & Gloom From the Tomb, "was transitioning from a cabaret-leaning trio to a fully-fledged rock band sound," and the ramshackle performances show us a talented bunch of musicians still finding their footing as a group. The following year, Smith and band would appear in Stockholm after the release of Horses. As you can see and hear above (after a brief interview) they'd become a tighter, and somewhat more conventional, rock and roll machine, but the early performances at the top-for all the lo-fi murkiness and intrusive crowd noise-have a raw appeal only heightened by the fact that they are now important documents of a now-legendary musical era. See this review of the bootleg CD reissue for a blow-by-blow description of this historic '75 concert from two seminal, and phenomenally talented, punk bands.
Related Content: The Talking Heads Play CBGB, the New York Club that Shaped Their Sound (1975) The Ramones, a New Punk Band, Play One of Their Very First Shows at CBGB (1974) Blondie Plays CBGB in the Mid-70s in Two Vintage Clips is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Patti Smith Plays at CBGB In One of Her First Recorded Concerts, Joined by Seminal Punk Band Television (1975)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The picture of punk as the domain of boorish nihilists who can't play their instruments has been as much a creation of marketing (via Malcolm McLaren) as it has been a virtue-of-necessity minimalist pose and a form of avant garde DIY experimentalism.

# data[].attributes.headline
Patti Smith on Virginia Woolf’s Cane, Charles Dickens’ Pen & Other Cherished Literary Talismans

# data[].attributes.subject
Patti Smith on Virginia Woolf’s Cane, Charles Dickens’ Pen & Other Cherished Literary Talismans

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Oh to be eulogized by Patti Smith, Godmother of Punk, poet, best-selling author.

Her memoir, Just Kids, was born of a sacred deathbed vow to her first boyfriend, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

Its follow up, M Train, started out as an exercise in writing about "nothing at all," only to wind up as an elegy to her late husband, guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith. (Their daughter suggested that her dad "was probably annoyed that Robert got so much attention in the other book.")

Cherishing the memories comes easily to Smith, as she reveals in a fascinating conversation with the New York Public Library's Paul Holdengräber, above.

She and husband Smith celebrated their first anniversary by collecting stones from the French Guiana penal colony, Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, in an effort to feel closer to Jean Genet, one of her most revered authors.

She believes in the transmutation of objects, unabashedly lobbying to liberate the walking stick that accompanied Virginia Woolf to her death from the NYPL's collection in order to commune with it further. She may turn into a gibbering fangirl in face to face meetings with the authors she admires, but interacting with relics of those who have gone before has a centering effect.

Needless to say, her fame grants her access to items the rest of us are lucky to view though the walls of a vitrine.

She has paged through Sylvia Plath's childhood notebooks and gripped Charles Dickens' surprisingly modest pen. She has ""perpetuated remembrance" by coming into close contact with Bobby Fischer's chess table, Frida Kahlo's leg braces, and a hotel room favored by Maria Callas. Her recollection of these events is both reverential and impish, the stuff of a dozen anecdotes.

"I would faint to use (sculptor Constantin) Brâncuși 's toothbrush," she quips. "I wouldn't use it though."

Where tangible souvenirs prove elusive, Smith takes photographs.

Interviewer Holdengräber is uniquely equipped to share in Smith's literary passions, egging her on with quotes recited from memory, including this beauty by Rainer Maria Rilke:

Now loss, however cruel, is powerless against possession, which it completes, or even, affirms: loss is, in fact, nothing else than a second acquisition-but now completely interiorized-and just as intense.

(The sentiment is so lovely, who can blame him for invoking it in previous conversation with NYPL guests, artist Edmund de Waal and pianist Van Cliburn.)

The topic can get heavy, but Smith is a consummate entertainer whose clownish brinkmanship leads her to cite Jimi Hendrix: "Hooray, I wake from yesterday."

The complete transcript of the conversation is available for download here, as is an audio podcast.

Note: You can download Just Kids or M Train as free audio books if you join Audible.com's 30-day free trial.
Related Content: Master Curator Paul Holdengräber Interviews Hitchens, Herzog, Gourevitch & Other Leading Thinkers Patti Smith's List of Favorite Books: From Rimbaud to Susan Sontag Patti Smith and David Lynch Talk About the Source of Their Ideas & Creative Inspiration Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Patti Smith on Virginia Woolf's Cane, Charles Dickens' Pen & Other Cherished Literary Talismans

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Oh to be eulogized by Patti Smith, Godmother of Punk, poet, best-selling author. Her memoir, Just Kids , was born of a sacred deathbed vow to her first boyfriend, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Its follow up, M Train , started out as an exercise in writing about "nothing at all," only to wind up as an elegy to her late husband, guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith.

# data[].attributes.headline
A Big Choir Sings Patti Smith’s “Because the Night”

# data[].attributes.subject
A Big Choir Sings Patti Smith’s “Because the Night”

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Five years ago, Choir!Choir!Choir!, a large amateur choir from Toronto, got a rare chance to perform with Patti Smith, joining her onstage to sing her 1978 hit "Because the Night." Still inspired by that experience, the group recently revisited the song during one of their weekly sessions. "The feeling in the room was electric, everyone was leaning in hard, and the end result is so powerful," Choir!Choir!Choir! writes on their YouTube channel. You can watch the end result above.

In case you missed it, you can also watch them perform David Bowie's "Heroes" with the great David Byrne. See the first item in the Relateds below.
Follow Open Culture on If you'd like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials. Related Content: Watch David Byrne Lead a Massive Choir in Singing David Bowie's "Heroes" Hear a Complete Chronological Discography of Patti Smith's Fiercely Poetic Rock and Roll: 13 Hours and 142 Tracks Watch Patti Smith Read from Virginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Surviving Recording of Woolf's Voice share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Big Choir Sings Patti Smith's "Because the Night"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Five years ago, Choir!Choir!Choir!, a large amateur choir from Toronto, got a rare chance to perform with Patti Smith, joining her onstage to sing her 1978 hit 'Because the Night.' Still inspired by that experience, the group recently revisited the song during one of their weekly sessions.

# data[].attributes.headline
Patti Smith Reads Oscar Wilde’s 1897 Love Letter De Profundis: See the Full Three-Hour Performance

# data[].attributes.subject
Patti Smith Reads Oscar Wilde’s 1897 Love Letter De Profundis: See the Full Three-Hour Performance

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In her landmark study The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry describes "the annihilating power of pain," which is "visible in the simple fact of experience observed by Karl Marx, 'There is only one antidote to mental suffering, and that is physical pain.'" Marx's comment defines a class distinction between types of pain: that of the overtaxed body of the worker and the mind of the bourgeois subject with the liberty for morbid self-reflection. His pronouncement, Scarry writes, is "only slightly distorted in Oscar Wilde's 'God spare me physical pain and I'll take care of the moral pain myself,'" a somewhat glib admission of the relative privilege of mental suffering in comparison to torture.

This distinction becomes even more pronounced in later reflections, such as ultra-conservative German writer and WWI war hero Ernst Jünger's Nietzschean 1934 essay " On Pain," which asks, "what role does pain play in the new race we have called the worker that is now making its appearance on the historical stage?" Physical pain, writes Jünger is one of "several great and unalterable dimensions that show a man's stature... the most difficult in a series of trials one is accustomed to call life.... Tell me your relation to pain, and I will tell you who you are!"

This idea of the sharpening effect of physical pain as an "antidote" or heroic trial distinct from mental suffering persists long into the 20th century when Freudian trauma studies, the diagnosis of PTSD in veterans, and the work of psychiatrists like Bessel Van Der Kolk begins to collapse the categories and unite the suffering of mind and body. The experiences of soldiers, prisoners, victims of abuse and assault, Holocaust survivors, enslaved people, etc. are then seen in a different light, as composed of emotional anguish as real as their physical suffering, which manifests somatically and in extreme cases even, perhaps, alters DNA.

Long before the paradigmatic shift in the recognition of trauma, Wilde, who had made light of "moral pain" in his aphorism, explored suffering in great depth in his De Profundis. Ostensibly an open letter to his lover Lord Alfred Douglass, Wilde penned the piece while imprisoned in Reading Jail from 1895-97 for "gross indecency." While there, he endured both physical and psychological torment. As Ireland's Raidió Teilifís Éireann writes:

Wilde was kept in total isolation, first in Pentonville and Wandsworth prisons. For the first month of his sentence, he was tethered to a treadmill six hours a day, with five minutes' rest after every 20 minutes. At Reading Jail, to which he was moved in November 1895, he slept on a plank bed with no mattress and he was allowed only one hour's exercise a day. He would walk in single file in the yard with other prisoners but was forbidden contact with them. Wilde slept little, was hungry all of the time, and suffered from dysentery during his incarceration.

During his two-year incarceration, his mother died. "I, once a lord of language," he wrote, "have no words in which to express my anguish and shame." Nonetheless, he found the words, a profusion of them, writes Max Nelson at The Paris Review, "petulant, vindictive, bathetic, indulgent, excessive, florid, massively arrogant, self-pitying, repetitive, showy, sentimental, and shrill," searching, as he put it, to express "that mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which Form reveals."

They were first published in 1905 in an edited version, and it is that version you can hear read-prefaced by a sung lament-above in a dolorous monotone by Patti Smith, who conveys with voice and body the tenor of Wilde's prose. The letter, writes Wilde's biographer Richard Ellmann, is "one of the greatest and the longest" love letters "ever written." (See a scan of the original manuscript at the British Library site.)

The reading took place in the former chapel of Reading Jail in 2016, opened to the public for the first time "for an exhibition of art, writing and performance," notes Artangel, sponsor of the event. We've previously featured a short excerpt of Smith's reading. Above, you can see her full 3-hour performance, complete with her own interjections and interactions with the audience. De Profundis begins with one of the most eloquent descriptions of deep depression in modern literature, an experience of paralysis that traps its sufferer in a mental prison of stuckness in time:

. . . Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change. Of seed-time or harvest, of the reapers bending over the corn, or the grape gatherers threading through the vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with broken blossoms or strewn with fallen fruit: of these we know nothing and can know nothing. For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow.

Read a later 1913 edition of Wilde's letter here. The complete, unedited text was first published in 1962.
Related Content: Patti Smith's List of Favorite Books: From Rimbaud to Susan Sontag Watch Patti Smith Read from Virginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Surviving Recording of Woolf's Voice Oscar Wilde Offers Practical Advice on the Writing Life in a Newly-Discovered Letter from 1890 900 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Patti Smith Reads Oscar Wilde's 1897 Love Letter De Profundis: See the Full Three-Hour Performance

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Karl Marx, 'There is only one antidote to mental suffering, and that is physical pain.'" Marx's comment defines a class distinction between types of pain: that of the overtaxed body of the worker and the mind of the bourgeois subject with the liberty for morbid self-reflection.

# data[].attributes.headline
Watch Patti Smith Read from Virginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Surviving Recording of Woolf’s Voice

# data[].attributes.subject
Watch Patti Smith Read from Virginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Surviving Recording of Woolf’s Voice

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In the video above, poet, artist, National Book Award winner, and "godmother of punk" Patti Smith reads a selection from Virginia Woolf's 1931 experimental novel , accompanied on piano and guitar by her daughter Jesse and son Jackson. The "reading" marked the opening of "Land 250," a 2008 exhibition of Smith's photography and artwork from 1965 to 2007, at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris.

I put the word "reading" in quotes above because Smith only reads a very short passage from Woolf's novel. The rest of the dramatic performance is Smith in her own voice, possibly improvising, possibly reciting her homage to Woolf-occasioned by the fact that the start of the exhibition fell on the 67th anniversary of Woolf's death by suicide. Of Woolf's death, Smith says, "I do not think of this as sad. I just think that it's the day that Virginia Woolf decided to say goodbye. So we are not celebrating the day, we are simply acknowledging that this is the day. If I had a title to call tonight, I would call it 'Wave.' We are waving to Virginia."

Smith's choice of a title for the evening is significant. She titled her 1979 album Wave, her last record before she went into semi-retirement in the 80s. And her exhibition includes a set of beautiful photographs taken at Woolf's Sussex retreat, Monk's House. Her performance seems like an unusual confluence of voices, but Woolf might have enjoyed it, since so much of her work explored the uniting of separate minds, over the barriers of space and time. While Smith expresses her indebtedness to Woolf, one wonders what the upper-class Bloomsbury daughter of a well-connected and artistic family would have thought of the working-class punk-poet from the Lower East Side by way of Chicago? It's impossible to say, of course, but somehow it's fitting that they meet through Woolf's The Waves.

Woolf's novel (she called it a "playpoem") blends the voices of six characters, but Woolf didn't think of them as characters at all, but as aspects of a greater, ever-shifting whole. As she once wrote in a letter:
The six characters were supposed to be one. I'm getting old myself now-I shall be fifty next year; and I come to feel more and more how difficult it is to collect oneself into one Virginia; even though the special Virginia in whose body I live for the moment is violently susceptible to all sorts of separate feelings. Therefore I wanted to give the sense of continuity.
Speculation over Woolf's mental health aside, her references to voices in her letters, diaries, and in her eloquent letter to Leonard Woolf before she died, were also statements of her craft-which embraced the inner voices of others, not letting any one voice be dominant. I like to think Woolf would have been delighted with the fierceness of Smith---in some ways, Virginia Woolf anticipated punk, and Patti Smith. In her own voice below, you can hear her describe the words of the English language as "irreclaimable vagabonds," who "if you start a Society for Pure English, they will show their resentment by starting another for impure English.... They are highly democratic."

The recording below comes from an essay published in a collection-The Death of the Moth and Other Essays-the year after Woolf's death. The talk was called "Craftsmanship," part of a BBC radio broadcast from 1937, and it is the only surviving recording of Woolf's voice.

Related Content Free Online Literature Courses Patti Smith's List of Favorite Books: From Rimbaud to Susan Sontag Patti Smith Reviews Haruki Murakami's New Novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage Josh Jones is a writer, editor, and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Watch Patti Smith Read from Virginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Surviving Recording of Woolf's Voice

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the video above, poet, artist, National Book Award winner, and "godmother of punk" Patti Smith reads a selection from Virginia Woolf's 1931 experimental novel , accompanied on piano and guitar by her daughter Jesse and son Jackson.

# data[].attributes.headline
Hear a Complete Chronological Discography of Patti Smith’s Fiercely Poetic Rock and Roll: 13 Hours and 142 Tracks

# data[].attributes.subject
Hear a Complete Chronological Discography of Patti Smith’s Fiercely Poetic Rock and Roll: 13 Hours and 142 Tracks

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Patti Smith has always aligned herself with artists who were outsiders and experimentalists in their time, but who have since moved to the center of the culture, where they are often reduced to a few biographical notes. Arthur Rimbaud, Virginia Woolf, William Blake.... As much motivated by art and poetry as by the aggression of rock and roll, Smith's 1975 debut album reached out to people on the margins of popular culture. "I was speaking to the disenfranchised, to people outside society, people like myself," she says, "I didn't know these people, but I knew they were out there. I think did what I hoped it would do. It spoke to the people who needed to hear it."

It's hard to imagine who those people were. In the process of its canonization, unfortunately, punk has come to be seen as a rejection of culture, a form of anti-art. But Smith's amalgam of loose, rangy garage rock brims with artiness, making it "the natural link between the Velvet Underground and the Ramones," writes Jillian Mapes at Pitchfork, "in the continuum of downtown New York rock." Pitchfork situates Smith's first record at the top of their "Story of Feminist Punk in 33 Songs," more "influential in its attitude" perhaps than in its particular style. "Her presence at the forefront of the scene was a statement in itself," but a statement of what, exactly?

One of the fascinating things about Smith was her subversion of gendered expectations and identities. In the epic medley "Land: Horses/Land of a Thousand Dances/La Mar (De)," her protagonist is an abused boy named Johnny. She slides into a sinuous androgynous vamp, portraying a "sweet young thing. Humping on a parking meter" with the dangerous sexual energy she appropriated from idols like Mick Jagger. Yet in her twist on the performance of a classically masculine sexuality, vulnerability becomes dangerous, survival a fierce act of defiance: "Life is filled with holes," she sings, "Johnny's laying there, his sperm coffin, angel looks down at him and says, 'Oh, pretty boy, can't you show me nothing but surrender?"

Johnny shows the angel, in a gritty West Side Story-like scene that illustrates the razor edges at the heart of Smith's musical poetry. He gets up, "takes off his leather jacket, taped to his chest there's the answer, you got pen knives and jack knives and switchblades preferred, switchblades preferred." Horses is so foundational-to punk rock, feminist punk, and a whole host of other countercultural terms that didn't exist in 1975-that it's unfair to expect Smith's subsequent albums to reach the same heights and depths with the same raw, unbridled energy. Her 1976 follow-up, Radio Ethiopia, disappointed many critics and fans, though it has since become a classic.

As William Ruhlmann writes at Allmusic, "her band encountered the same development problem the punks would-as they learned their craft and competence set in, they lost some of the unself-consciousness that had made their music so appealing." The music may have become mannered, but Smith was a profoundly self-conscious artist from the start, and would remain so, exploring in album after album her sense of herself as the product of her influences, whom she always speaks of as though they are close personal friends or even aspects of her own mind. Who is Patti Smith speaking to? Her heroes, her friends, her family, her various selves, the men and women who form a community of voices in her work.

We get to listen in on those conversations, and we find ourselves torn out of the familiar through Smith's detournment of classic rock swagger and beatnik poses. You can hear her many voices develop, refine, and sometimes stumble into creative missteps that are far more interesting than so many artists' successes in the playlist above, a complete 13-hour chronological discography (save some rarities and live albums that aren't on Spotify) of Smith's work-a lifetime of what her father called a "development of the country of the mind" as she remarked in a 1976 interview. "He believed that the mind was a country, and you had to develop it, you had to build and build and build the mind."

These are not the kinds of sentiments we might expect to hear from the so-called "Godmother of Punk." Which might speak to how little we understand about what Smith and her motley compatriots were up to amid the grime and squalor of mid-seventies downtown New York.
Related Content: 33 Songs That Document the History of Feminist Punk (1975-2015): A Playlist Curated by Pitchfork Hear Patti Smith Read the Poetry that Would Become Horses: A Reading of 14 Poems at Columbia University, 1975 Patti Smith's New Haunting Tribute to Nico: Hear Three Tracks Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Hear a Complete Chronological Discography of Patti Smith's Fiercely Poetic Rock and Roll: 13 Hours and 142 Tracks

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Patti Smith has always aligned herself with artists who were outsiders and experimentalists in their time, but who have since moved to the center of the culture, where they are often reduced to a few biographical notes. Arthur Rimbaud, Virginia Woolf, William Blake....

# data[].attributes.headline
Vintage Footage Shows a Young, Unknown Patti Smith & Robert Mapplethorpe Living at the Famed Chelsea Hotel (1970)

# data[].attributes.subject
Vintage Footage Shows a Young, Unknown Patti Smith & Robert Mapplethorpe Living at the Famed Chelsea Hotel (1970)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Here at Open Culture, we can't get enough of the Chelsea Hotel, which means we can't get enough of the Chelsea Hotel in a certain era, at the height of a certain cultural moment in New York history. Though it struggled as a business for years after it first opened as an apartment building in 1884 and changed hands left and right until the 1970s, it hit its stride as an icon when a certain critical mass of well-known (or soon to be well known) musicians, writers, artists, filmmakers, and otherwise colorful personalities had put in time there. One such musician, writer, artist in other media, and colorful personality indeed has an especially strong association with the Chelsea: Patti Smith.

You may remember our post back in 2012 featuring Smith reading her final letter to Robert Mapplethorpe, which she included in , her acclaimed memoir of her friendship with the controversial photographer.

For a time, Smith and Mapplethorpe lived in the Chelsea together, and in the footage above, shot in 1970 by a German documentary film crew, you can see them there in their natural habitat. "The Chelsea was like a doll's house in The Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe," Smith writes in Just Kids. "Everyone had something to offer and nobody seemed to have much money. Even the successful seemed to have just enough to live like extravagant bums."

These fifteen minutes of film also includes glimpses into a variety of other lives lived at the Chelsea as the 1970s began. If you'd like to see more of the place at its cultural zenith - made possible by the state of 70s New York itself, which had infamously hit something of a nadir - have a look at the clip we featured in 2013 of the Velvet Underground's Nico singing "Chelsea Girls" there. Just after the 70s had gone, BBC's Arena turned up to shoot a documentary of their own, which we featured last year. Smith has long since left the Chelsea, and Mapplethorpe has long since left this world, but even now, as the hotel undergoes extensive renovations that began in 2011, some of those "extravagant bums" remain.

via Please Kill Me
Related Content: New York's Famous Chelsea Hotel and Its Creative Residents Revisited in a 1981 Documentary Nico Sings "Chelsea Girls" in the Famous Chelsea Hotel Iggy Pop Conducts a Tour of New York's Lower East Side, Circa 1993 Patti Smith Reads Her Final Words to Her Dear Friend Robert Mapplethorpe The Life and Controversial Work of Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe Profiled in 1988 Documentary
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He's at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Vintage Footage Shows a Young, Unknown Patti Smith & Robert Mapplethorpe Living at the Famed Chelsea Hotel (1970)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Here at Open Culture, we can't get enough of the Chelsea Hotel, which means we can't get enough of the Chelsea Hotel in a certain era, at the height of a certain cultural moment in New York history.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Image of Patti Smith performing in Rio de Janeiro by Daigo Oliva
As a little girl, Patti Smith found liberation in words -- first through the bedtime prayers she made up herself, and later in books. "I was completely smitten by the book," she writes in her memoir, . "I longed to read them all, and the things I read of produced new yearnings."

Smith found a role model in Jo, the tomboy writer in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. "She gave me the courage of a new goal," writes Smith, "and soon I was crafting little stories and spinning long yarns for my brother and sister." As a teenager she discovered the French Symbolist poets Charles Baudelaire and especially Arthur Rimbaud, who inspired her and helped shape her own artistic persona as a poet and punk rocker.

Despite her fame as a rock 'n' roll musician, Smith has always described herself as essentially a bookish person. It was around the time of Smith's appearance at the 2008 Melbourne International Arts Festival, according to , that Smith released this list of her favorite books. Not surprisingly, it's an eclectic and fascinating group of books:

Smith's reading recommendations have no doubt evolved since the list was given. Earlier this year a writer for asked what books she would suggest. "I could recommend a million," Smith responded. "I would just say read anything by [Roberto] Bolaño. Re-read all the great classics. Read The Scarlet Letter, read , read [Haruki] Murakami. But Roberto Bolaño's is the first masterpiece of the 21st century."

You can find a number of the texts listed above in our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in April 2015.
Related Content: David Bowie's Top 100 Books Hayao Miyazaki Picks His 50 Favorite Children's Books 29 Lists of Recommended Books Created by Well-Known Authors, Artists & Thinkers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Image of Patti Smith performing in Rio de Janeiro by Daigo Oliva As a little girl, Patti Smith found liberation in words -- first through the bedtime prayers she made up herself, and later in books. "I was completely smitten by the book," she writes in her memoir, .