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.