Posted on 09/01/2005 4:13:47 PM PDT by Kaslin
U.S. singer and musician Patti Smith attacked business and President George W. Bush at a press event in St. Petersburg on Thursday, where she received an excited response from the local journalists and fans.
“The world right now is really f***ed up,” she said addressing the 100-strong crowd that gathered at the “505” record shop on Bolshaya Konyushennaya Ulitsa.
“The world right now is being run by a**holes like George Bush and pharmaceutical companies, these greedy people who don’t care about the environment, who don’t really understand the poor, who don’t understand other cultures. We are the underground and we have to get strong, because the world is being run by business.”
Smith performs at the Music Hall on Friday.
Boldly, Smith turned the press conference into something less formal; she never took her seat or used a microphone, standing up, speaking loud. She also took an acoustic guitar and gave an emotional performance of “In My Blakean Year” from the 2004 album “Trampin’,” her most recent.
“People Have the Power,” proclaimed Smith, 58, during a brief link-up with Radio ROKS, a local station. She wore a CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) badge and a small pin representing Commandeur of the Order of Arts and Letters, France’s highest cultural decoration, that she received from the French Ministry of Culture in July.
According to Smith, who helped to change rock music as a punk singer and poet in the 1970s, major record companies are doomed to die out.
“They have been greedy and they will crumble, and I think that the independent industry is the only thing that will live,” Smith said.
“Now with today’s technology, young people don’t even need record companies. They can gather some money, make their own CDs, they can share them, they can download them. To me that’s fine,” Smith added.
“Rock and roll is not a business, it’s a voice that we can use politically, artistically, poetically. ... And hopefully new young people will infuse new blood into that idea. That’s what my band was trying to do,” Smith said.
I give Clinton full credit for common sense, he said this is no time for politics, but a time for pulling together.
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If I was that ugly, I would walk backwards --- that would cause a pit bull to turn and run!!!
At least Dowd has bodacious tatas...
Dog bones
Is that Patti standing behing the guy holding up the record?
Who or what is a Patty Smith?
Scratch 'n sniff!
Not to be confused with Patti Smyth lead singer for Scandal that had such hits as "The Warrior" and "Goodbye to You" in the 80's.
http://www.phan.org/psfc/
"she received an excited response from the local journalists"
i'm so shocked.
I demand my Legislators present Legislation to gag Liberals. I have officially, finally, reached my limit. Either gag them or administer corporal punishment in response to punishing the rest of us for their being too stupid to live.
Who is she?
Never heard of the dink.
Thanks....I almost fell for it!!
Oops - sorry for the wrong line on the post :-)
I swear I saw her pushing a grocery cart down an alley last night talking to herself.
By Greg Villepique
Nov. 9, 1999 |She was a weird icon from the start, a girl who dressed like a boy, a poet with Keith Richards' hair and a strut copied from Bob Dylan in "Don't Look Back," a white woman who called herself a nigger, a darling of the avant-garde who hit the pop charts in 1975 without modifying her vision in the slightest, then abdicated her stardom when she found better things to do. Her first album, "Horses," came out nearly a quarter-century ago and is commonly short-listed as one of the greatest rock albums of all time, but you're unlikely to hear any of it on classic-rock radio: In the mental jukebox of the populace, Patti Smith is represented, if at all, by her one hit single, "Because the Night" -- naturally, the most conventional song of all her '70s output.
Patti Smith was born in 1946 and grew up in working-class South Jersey. A bout with scarlet fever at age 7 left her with recurring hallucinations. She pursued religion for much of her childhood but never caught it -- her problem was not with God, but with the constrictions imposed by organized faith. In her teens, she instead embraced Dylan, the Rolling Stones and, pivotally, the visionary poetry of Arthur Rimbaud. She didn't know yet that she was going to be a poet, much less a singer.
After a brief stint working in a toy factory, two years in college and a timeout to have a baby, which she gave up for adoption at birth, she moved to New York in 1967, with the intention, she later said, of becoming an artist's mistress. The artist she found was Robert Mapplethorpe, also young, hungry and determined to make his mark. Following a period of Brooklyn squalor, during which she drew and painted, Smith spent a few months in Paris, then moved with Mapplethorpe into hipster central, the Chelsea Hotel.
Though she and Mapplethorpe soon broke up (his homosexuality was presumably a stumbling block), they remained close. She began writing poetry, acted in absurdist theater, collaborated on the play "Cowboy Mouth" with Sam Shepard, became increasingly well known on the downtown poetry circuit, published books, wrote swashbuckling rock criticism and, over the course of several years between 1971 and 1974, gave readings at which she was accompanied by guitarist Lenny Kaye, eventually adding pianist Richard Sohl and second guitarist Ivan Kral.
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