Patti Smith first rocked the world 40 years ago with her fusion of poetry and primitive three-chord rock. Her 1975 debut Horses is regularly ranked as one of the most influential rock-and-roll albums of all time, and she went on to release other acclaimed albums — and to continue to thrill audiences — throughout the decades, all the while growing as an artist.
Smith will be performing next Tuesday night at the Granada Theatre, a show presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures; tickets are available by clicking here.
Smith’s secret weapon throughout most of her musical journey has been guitarist Lenny Kaye, who provided accompaniment at her first public poetry reading in 1971, was in Smith’s band during her 1970s heyday and rejoined when Smith returned to action in the mid-1990s. In a parallel life, Kaye also put together the well-regarded Nuggets compilation, which rescued a smokin’ set of 1960s garage rock gems from obscurity.
Kaye talked to Noozhawk about the upcoming show. The full interview is available by clicking here.
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Jeff Moehlis: What can we look forward to at the upcoming show?
Lenny Kaye: [laughs] Well, that’s a question we always ask ourselves.
We try to make each show unique to where we’re playing and the mood of the crowd, and the vibrations of the night. It’s going to be a special show for us because our drummer, Jay Dee Daugherty, is from Santa Barbara, so the town has been part of our universe for the past 40 years.
We do a mixture of songs that people hope to hear — when I go to a concert I like to hear my favorite hits — but we also have some challenging songs that allow us to stretch and improvise. It’s going to be not very much Horses based, because we’ll be celebrating the 40th anniversary of our debut album later this year. So we’re going to be dipping into stranger corners of our catalog and seeing what comes. But always it’s the audience and the venue and the stars above that determine the shape of the night.
JM: I saw the show back in 2009 that Patti did here with Philip Glass, and you and Jay Dee came out for part of that show. That was a very cool evening, but I’m guessing it was very different from what we’ll be hearing next week.
LK: Oh yeah, totally. I mean, this is our first full band show in Santa Barbara. With Philip it was a little more of a special occasion, and it was acoustic-based if I’m not mistaken. This will be amps turned up and people rocking. But when we speak of a rock show, one of the things I love about our band is that we have a very wide range of how we approach our music. You know, we can go from the most tender, intimate and quiet things to full roar and rebellion. In the course of the show we will visit all these facets of our personality.
Patti is always wanting to make sure that we are not bound by definition or convention. We believe that all of music is there to be explored and understood and elevated. In the course of what we do, we try to approach it with a sense of freedom and no boundaries. It’s one of the reasons why we are so long-lived as a band — that we continually try to move forward, and not be captured by who we were in the past. This doesn’t mean that we deny where we come from, but it also means that we don’t want to be trapped. We don’t particularly feel like our music belongs to any particular era or time. We always try to point forward in our sense of creation.
JM: You said that the upcoming show isn’t going to focus on Horses, but with the 40th anniversary coming up, it’s in people’s minds. What are your reflections on that album?
LK: For me, it’s a very young band. We’re a bunch of colts straining at the bit, trying to channel all of these ideas that we had into the grooves of an actual record. For a band that was very much of the moment, all about improvisation, all about capturing the mood of the night, to make a record is a different animal. I hear us as very young, but certainly with our ideals intact, and on a mission to preserve the spirit of rock-and-roll in the same way that it inspired us when we were young.
The sense of empowerment within the music was so real to all of us who were kind of mutants in whatever social universes we came out of. We found it within the music, especially in its grand flowering in the late ’60s, which was a remarkable moment culturally, and especially with music leading the artistic charge, it was very inspirational. And in a sense what we wanted to do was provide that same sense of inspiration.
As we made our first tours around America with Horses, we would find whatever city we would get into that there would be a core of musicians waiting for a rallying cry, waiting to create their own sense of creation, their own sense of growth, and to plant the flag where ideas that were off the mainstream could flourish. I feel like we attempted to celebrate the virtues of the music that had set us free, as well.
What I’m always, of course, most happy about is that no matter how influential Horses was in terms of giving people a sense of possibility, that none of them really sounded like us. It was more a sense that, “Yes, we could find our own voice and become who we need to be.” And the artists who took notice of this — Michael Stipe of R.E.M., or Morrissey from The Smiths, or any of the artists who have come up to us over the years and said how inspirational Horses was — that they all had their own way of expression, that they didn’t become Patti. But nobody can become Patti. She’s a unique individual, and certainly has a sense of creative vision and artistic awareness that is unique to her, and yet can also inspire that same sense of creativity in those who partake of our music.
JM: Do you want to set the record straight on anything about your career, or something about Patti Smith?
LK: I always think that people look at one perspective of what we do.
In some ways, Patti is the Godmother of Punk. But what exactly does that mean? I would hope that everybody would approach our music in the same sense of expansiveness and adventurousness that we do, that we are beyond definition, that really what happens is that we are dealing with the enlightenment of the human spirit. That’s a beautiful place to be within the realm of art.
Just remember that that comes with a sense of responsibility, and that comes with a sense of obligation to one’s audience and to oneself. To keep that balance going is the trick of any artist who is not tied to a particular moment in time. Other than that, sometimes misconceptions are great because even if they don’t get it right, it gets into their world, and that’s always a good path to self-knowledge.
— Jeff Moehlis is a Noozhawk contributing writer and a professor of mechanical engineering at UC Santa Barbara. Upcoming show recommendations, advice from musicians, interviews and more are available on his web site, music-illuminati.com. The opinions expressed are his own.
