Patti Smith has been associated with New York for her entire public life.<\/p>\n
In 1971, her first poetry and music performance was at St. Mark\u2019s Church in-the-Bowery with Lenny Kaye on the guitar. Along with the Ramones, Talking Heads, Television, and Blondie, she was a vital force in the mid-1970s CBGB music scene. <\/p>\n
And in 1975, she recorded Horses at Electric Lady Studios. That galvanic debut album made her an instant punk rock and feminist hero. On Saturday, she\u2019ll celebrate its 50th anniversary at the Met Philly<\/a>, with a band that includes Kaye, drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, bassist Tony Shanahan, and her son Jackson Smith on guitar.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople think of me as a New Yorker,\u201d Smith said, in an interview with The Inquirer from her home in New York. <\/p>\n \u201cWell, I\u2019ve lived in New York. But I was pretty much formed by the time I got to New York. The places that helped form me were Philadelphia and rural South Jersey.\u201d<\/p>\n At the Met, Smith and her band will perform Horses in its entirety, starting with the take on Van Morrison\u2019s \u201cGloria\u201d that introduced her as a brash, provocative artist with one of the most memorable opening lines in rock and roll history: \u201cJesus died for somebody\u2019s sins \u2026 but not mine.\u201d<\/p>\n Two days after that Met show, she\u2019ll be at Marian Anderson Hall to promote her new memoir<\/a>, Bread of Angels, accompanied by her son on guitar and daughter, Jesse Paris Smith, on piano. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s going to be a special night, because I hardly ever get to play with my son and daughter,\u201d said Smith, who turns 79 on Dec. 30. \u201cSo I\u2019m really, really happy about that, bringing my kids to Philadelphia.\u201d <\/p>\n Bread of Angels, unlike her 2010 National Book Award-winning Just Kids, doesn\u2019t zero in on a particular episode in the storied career of the enduring punk icon. <\/p>\n Instead, Bread takes the full measure of her life. It begins in Chicago where she was born before her parents moved back to Philadelphia while she was a toddler, and turns on a late-in-life DNA revelation that shakes up her conception of her own identity.<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t plan to do this book,\u201c Smith said. \u201cTruthfully, it came to me in a dream.\u201d <\/p>\n In her dream, she had written a book telling the story of her life in four sections. She wore a white dress, just as she does on the cover of Bread of Angels, in a 1979 photo taken by Robert Mapplethorpe. <\/p>\n \u201cIt was so specific, this dream, that it sort of haunted me. And I felt like it was a sign that perhaps it was a book I should write. \u2026. It took quite a while.\u201d <\/p>\n Bread of Angels is \u201ca love letter to certain places.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cPhiladelphia when I was young,\u201d she said. \u201cI love Philly. And then down in rural South Jersey, and the places in Michigan I lived with my husband.\u201d <\/p>\n That\u2019s the late Fred \u201cSonic\u201d Smith, the former MC5 guitarist who died in 1994 at 46. <\/a><\/p>\n Summaries of Smith\u2019s life typically cite that she lived in Germantown<\/a> before moving first to Pitman and then Deptford Heights in South Jersey, before moving to New York in 1967. <\/p>\n But Smith\u2019s childhood was actually much more peripatetic. <\/p>\n \u201cI think we moved nine times while we were in Philly,\u201d she recalled, including stops in Upper Darby<\/a> and South Philadelphia<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cMy mother had three of us in rapid succession,\u201d said Smith. It was after the war, and a lot of the rooming houses we stayed in absolutely didn\u2019t allow infants, so my mother was always hiding the pregnancy or hiding the baby. And then we\u2019d get found out and have to move again.\u201d<\/p>\n Her coming of age Philadelphia stories in the book evoke a happy, lower middle class childhood. <\/p>\n Living in a converted soldier\u2019s barracks in Germantown she calls \u201cthe Patch,\u201d she once beat all the boys and girls in a running race, but tripped and landed on a piece of glass, leaving blood rushing down her face. She was treated at Children\u2019s Hospital, and rode a bicycle for the first time the following week. <\/p>\n \u201cI left the perimeter of the Patch, pedaled up toward Wayne<\/a> Avenue,\u201d she writes. \u201cI was six and half years old with seven stitches, and for that one hour, on that two-wheeler, I was a champion.\u201d <\/p>\n On her seventh birthday, her mother, who then worked at the Strawbridge & Clothier department store at Eighth and Market, took her to Leary\u2019s, the Center City bookshop that closed in 1968. <\/a><\/p>\n \u201cOh my gosh it was a wonderful bookshop,\u201d she said. \u201cOn your birthday, you had to show your birth certificate and pay $1, and you could fill your shopping bag.\u201d <\/p>\n Her bag, she said, was filled \u201cwith some very good books that I still own.\u201d <\/p>\n A copy each of Pinocchio, The Little Lame Prince, an Uncle Wiggily book. <\/p>\n As a Jersey teenager in the early 1960s, she had a crush on a South Philly boy named Butchy Magic. She once got stung by a hornet outside a dance, she writes in the book, and he looked deep into her eyes and pulled the stinger out from her neck. <\/p>\n \u201cThis is what the writer craves,\u201d she writes. \u201cA sudden shaft of brightness containing the vibration of a particular moment \u2026 Butchy Magic\u2019s fingers extracting the stinger. The unsullied memory of unpremeditated gestures of kindness. These are the bread of angels.\u201d<\/p>\n As in the book, Philadelphia loomed large over Smith\u2019s childhood, well after the family moved to Gloucester County<\/a>. <\/p>\n \u201cIt was our big city. It was where I discovered rock and roll,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n She bought her first Bob Dylan records at Woolworth\u2019s in Center City. <\/a><\/p>\n She discovered art when her father Grant and mother Beverly took her and her younger siblings Linda, Kimberly, and Todd to the Philadelphia Museum of Art (now Philadelphia Art Museum<\/a>). There, she fell for Pablo Picasso, John Singer Sargent<\/a>, and Amedeo Modigliani<\/a>. <\/p>\n \u201cCulturally, it was the city that helped form me,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n A new expanded edition of Horses, Smith\u2019s most beloved album, was released this fall.<\/a> <\/p>\n \u201cIt amazes me that half a century has gone by and people are still greatly interested in the material,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s a culmination of a period in my life.\u201d <\/p>\n In 2012, when Smith and her sister Linda took DNA tests, Smith had already begun writing Bread of Angels. The result of the test was a shock: Grant Smith was not her biological father. <\/p>\n Her birth was actually the result of a relationship between Beverly Smith and a handsome Jewish pilot named Sidney who had returned to Philadelphia from World War II. <\/p>\n At the time, Beverly Smith was working as a waitress, hat check girl, and sometimes singer at Philly clubs like the Midway Musical Bar on 15th and Sansom. <\/a><\/p>\n \u201cIt was completely unexpected,\u201d Smith said. \u201cMy mother was a great oral storyteller, but none of her stories gave any indication that I was fathered by a different man. \u2026 She certainly kept that a secret from everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n Of the emotions Smith felt, one was \u201csome sorrow,\u201d she said. \u201cBecause I loved and admired my father. I felt sad because I didn\u2019t have his blood. But I modeled myself after him so much. All of those things remain.\u201d<\/p>\n She stopped work on Bread of Angels for two years. <\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t know how to deal with it. Is this book false? Do I have to rewrite everything? And then I realized I didn\u2019t have to rewrite anything. My father is still my father. But you can also show gratitude to the man who conceived with my mother. Who gave me life. So I figured it out. I have two fathers.\u201d <\/p>\n Her mother, father, and biological father had all died by the time she learned the news of her parentage. <\/p>\n Some of Smith\u2019s self-confidence \u2014 evident in the way she spells out \u201cG-L-O-R-I-A!\u201d \u2014 \u201cmight have come from the biological father I never knew,\u201d she said. \u201cHe was a pilot. When he was young, he had this tough job. I\u2019ve met a few people who knew him. They said he was very kind and good-hearted. He loved art, he loved to travel. He had not a conceited, but a self-confident air.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve always had that, and wondered where it came from,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ve always possessed that kind of self-confidence. I\u2019ve never had trouble going on stage. So I think I have to salute my blood father, right?\u201d<\/p>\n In Bread of Angels, Smith recalls her early life in Philly, and writes: \u201cI did not want to grow up. I wanted to be free to roam, to construct room by room the architecture of my own world.\u201d <\/p>\n Seven decades later, she\u2019s still doing that, as she continues to create and perform for adoring audiences around the world. <\/p>\n \u201cI have stayed in contact with my 10-year-old self, always,\u201d she said. \u201cI still carry around the girl that had her dog, and slept in the forest, and read [her] books, and got in trouble, and didn\u2019t want to grow up.\u201d<\/p>\n She turns 80 next year. <\/p>\n \u201cMy hair is gray to platinum. I understand my age. I\u2019ve had my children, and have gone through a lot of different things. But I still know where my 10-year-old self is. I still know how to find her.\u201d<\/p>\n Patti Smith and Her Band perform \u201cHorses\u201d on its 50th anniversary at the Met Philly, 858 N. Broad St. at 8 p.m. Saturday, themetphilly.com.<\/a> <\/p>\n