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| Patti Smith |
Every time that you lose a loved person, you cannot consider that that year has been a good one but you must have enough force to continue with your own life because living is the best present that you can offer to all those people who have said us goodbye.
It has been a difficult year for The Grandma but she is a person who grows up with difficulties and she always looks at the future with passion, trust and hope. Yes. She is an optimistic person and she thinks that the best is always coming.
Prepare you for this New Year. It will be a year full of new emotions and hard moments, but it will be the beginning of a new age of freedom because as Patti Smith says, People have the Power, and we are going to use it to work for a better society with a fair justice and hope for the hopeless.
December, 30 is the anniversary of one of the most amazing singers and activist, Patti Smith, an artist who was born on a day like today in 1946 and who The Grandma admires a lot. She wants to talk about her, her music, her activism and her interest in Catalan Literature.
Before talking about Patti Smith, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Grammar 58).
More information: Order of Adjectives-Adjectives with -ed or -ing
Patricia Lee Smith, born December 30, 1946, is an American singer-songwriter, poet, and visual artist who became an influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses.
Called the punk poet laureate, Smith fused rock and poetry in her work. Her most widely known song is Because the Night, which was co-written with Bruce Springsteen. It reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1978 and number five in the UK.
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| Patti Smith & Bruce Springsteen |
Patricia Lee Smith was born in Chicago to Beverly Smith, a jazz singer turned waitress, and Grant Smith, who worked as a machinist at a Honeywell plant. The family was of part-Irish ancestry and Patti was the eldest of four children. At the age of 4, Smith's family moved from Chicago to the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, before her family moved to Pitman, New Jersey and later to The Woodbury Gardens section of Deptford Township, New Jersey.
At this early age Smith was exposed to her first records, including Shrimp Boats by Harry Belafonte, Patience and Prudence's The Money Tree, and Another Side of Bob Dylan, which her mother gave to her. Smith graduated from Deptford Township High School in 1964 and went to work in a factory. She gave birth to her first child, a daughter, on April 26, 1967, and chose to place her for adoption.
More information: Patti Smith
In 1967, she left Glassboro State College, now Rowan University, and moved to Manhattan. She met photographer Robert Mapplethorpe there while working at a bookstore with friend and poet Janet Hamill. She and Mapplethorpe had an intense romantic relationship.
By 1974, Patti Smith was performing rock music, initially with guitarist, bassist and rock archivist Lenny Kaye, and later with a full band comprising Kaye, Ivan Kral on guitar and bass, Jay Dee Daugherty on drums and Richard Sohl on piano.
Patti Smith Group produced two further albums before the end of the 1970s. Easter (1978) was her most commercially successful record, containing the single Because the Night co-written with Bruce Springsteen. Wave (1979) was less successful, although the songs Frederick and Dancing Barefoot both received commercial airplay.
Through most of the 1980s Smith was in semi-retirement from music, living with her family north of Detroit in St. Clair Shores, Michigan. In June 1988, she released the album Dream of Life, which included the song People Have the Power.
In 1993, Smith
contributed Memorial Tribute (Live) to the AIDS-Benefit Album No
Alternative produced by the Red Hot Organization.
In 1996, Smith worked with her long-time colleagues to record Gone Again, featuring About a Boy, a tribute to Kurt Cobain. That same year she collaborated with Stipe on E-Bow the Letter, a song on R.E.M.'s New Adventures in Hi-Fi, which she has also performed live with the band.
After the release of Gone Again, Patti Smith recorded two new albums: Peace and Noise in 1997, with the single 1959, about the invasion of Tibet, and Gung Ho in 2000, with songs about Ho Chi Minh and Smith's late father. Songs 1959 and Glitter in Their Eyes were nominated for Grammy Award for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance.
On July 10, 2005, Smith was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. In addition to Smith's influence on rock music, the Minister also noted her appreciation of Arthur Rimbaud. In August 2005, Smith gave a literary lecture about the poems of Arthur Rimbaud and William Blake.
More information: Poetry Foundation
Smith is the subject of a 2008 documentary film by Steven Sebring titled Patti Smith: Dream of Life. A live album by Patti Smith and Kevin Shields, The Coral Sea was released in July 2008.
On September 10, 2009, after a week of smaller events and exhibitions in the city, Smith played an open-air concert in Florence's Piazza Santa Croce, commemorating her performance in the same city 30 years earlier. In the meantime, she contributed with a special introduction to Jessica Lange's book 50 Photographs (2009).
Patti Smith was one of the winners of the 2011 Polar Music Prize. She made her television acting debut at the age of 64 on the TV series Law & Order: Criminal Intent, appearing in an episode called Icarus. In 2011 Smith is working on a crime novel set in London. I've been working on a detective story that starts at the St Giles in the Fields church in London for the last two years, she told NME adding that she loved detective stories having been a fan of British fictional detective Sherlock Holmes.
More information: Faena
In 2016 Smith performed People Have the Power at Riverside Church, Manhattan, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Democracy Now. She was joined by Michael Stipe. On December 10, 2016, Smith attended the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in Stockholm on behalf of Bob Dylan, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Furthermore, Smith has been a supporter of the Green Party and backed Ralph Nader in the 2000 United States presidential election.
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| Smith, Reed & Anderson in Made in Catalunya |
Bruce Springsteen continued performing her People Have the Power at Vote for Change campaign events. In the winter of 2004/2005, Smith toured again with Nader in a series of rallies against the Iraq War and called for the impeachment of George W. Bush.
Smith premiered two new protest songs in London in September 2006. Louise Jury, writing in The Independent, characterized them as an emotional indictment of American and Israeli foreign policy. The song Qana was about the Israeli airstrike on the Lebanese village of Qana. Without Chains is about Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen who was born and raised in Germany, held at Guantanamo Bay detainment camp for four years.
In 2007, Smith participated with Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson in Made in Catalunya a cultural Catalan festival in New York City where she read some fragments of Catalan poetry written by the most admired Catalan poets.
More information: Institut Ramon Llull
In 2015, Smith appeared with Ralph Nader, spoke and performed the songs Wing and People Have the Power during the American Museum of Tort Law convocation ceremony in Winsted, Connecticut. She performed Wing again in 2016 in homage to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks during the First they came for Assange... event at Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, to mark the 4th year of Julian Assange's attempt to avoid prosecution by taking refuge at the Ecuadorean embassy in London.
Smith was raised a Jehovah's Witness and had a strong religious upbringing and a Bible education. She left organized religion as a teenager because she felt it was too confining. In response to this experience, she wrote the line Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine in her cover version of Gloria by Them.
She has described having an avid interest in Tibetan Buddhism around the age of eleven or twelve, saying I fell in love with Tibet because their essential mission was to keep a continual stream of prayer, but that as an adult she sees clear parallels between different forms of religion, and has come to the conclusion that religious dogmas are ...man-made laws that you can either decide to abide by or not.
More information: Patti Smith Interview-Advice to the Young
It was always my belief that rock and roll belonged
in the hands of the people, not rock stars.
Patti Smith
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