Patti Smith on Her Memoir “Bread of Angels,” Fifty Years After Her Début Album, “Horses”
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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine. That line, the opening to Patty Smith's album Horses, has got to be one of the best openers to an album ever.
Amazing to think that horses which still feels fresh and raw and transgressive, came out almost 50 years ago this week. Horses launched Patty Smith to musical and avant-garde stardom almost overnight. And yet being a star wasn't Patti Smith's intention at all. She was she was a poet.
She was publishing poems years before the record came out. She'd written a play with Sam Shepard. Music was a kind of afterthought, as she tells it, an accompaniment to the words. Becoming one of the founding figures of punk was something that happened almost by accident. But in recent years many people have come to know Patty Smith as a writer as well as a performer.
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