Starting as a poet in New York’s underground in the early 1970s, Patti Smith brought the new wave into the mainstream with her 1975 debut album, Horses. Over the last half of the 1970s, she merged poetry with forceful rock and charismatic live performance. Emerging after about a decade of retirement near the end of the 1980s, she became a best-selling author with her 2010 memoir Just Kids, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. This 2.5 hour mini-course will celebrate her unlikely journey with audio and video clips, some rare, of Smith from the 1970s to the present.
This mini-course will start with Patti Smith’s work as a poet in the early-1970s New York underground, bolstered by her close relationship with top photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and as an habitué of the city’s nexus for alternative artists, Max’s Kansas City. With guitarist Lenny Kaye, she transitioned from performing spoken-word poetry to merging poetry into live rock with a full band. Her 1975 debut album Horses, produced by John Cale, is regarded as the record that did more than any other to ignite American punk and new wave. Over the course of the next few years, she expanded her success with the Patti Smith Group, landing a hit single co-written with Bruce Springsteen, “Because the Night.”
Retiring to family life for most of the 1980s, she resumed her recording and performing career near the end of the decade and continues it to the present, often injecting social consciousness into her songs and onstage concerts with songs like “People Have the Power.” Her 2010 memoir Just Kids, focusing on the first decade of her career and close personal and professional relationship with Mapplethorpe, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. She’s written other books since then, as well as accepting the Nobel Prize on behalf of Bob Dylan.
