Patti Smith - The High Priestess of Rock

With her furious, feverish, pained, raw-nerved voice, Patti Smith has embodied one of the most explosive female figures in rock history. Her early work, mind projected into free-form avant-garde and jazz improvisation while her feet stayed firmly planted in rock'n'roll primitivism, laid the groundwork for the emerging new wave. And her persona, somewhere between a dark priestess and a political pasionaria, has emerged as one of the most charismatic in female rock (and beyond). "I never thought of myself as a politician," she says, "but I've always wanted to communicate something. I'm American and I love the principles my country is founded on. We have freedom, but I feel I carry a great responsibility for that toward the rest of the world." After all, wasn't it her singing "I'm an American artist and I have no guilt"? And on her artistic-political trajectory, she has recently observed: "I had the privilege of growing up during a period of cultural revolution. And music was part of that. Maybe I was nothing more than a pawn, but I'm glad, in any case, to have helped change something."

Her biography (itself legendary) tells of a frail, troubled girl who cried listening to Maria Callas and who had her first sexual thrill watching a Rolling Stones show. A girl desperate to assert her freedom in the face of the whole world. But to do so, she would need an exceptional stage: that of New York.

New York Stories

Originally from Chicago but raised in Pitman, New Jersey, Patricia Lee Smith arrived in New York in 1967. She was already a young mother, and she began writing her first poems. She lived on as little as five dollars a day, sleeping in the subway or on the outdoor stairwells of buildings. With photographer Robert Mapplethorpe she had an intense love affair and friendship, which would leave behind indelible black-and-white images: the two lived together, amid passion, art and drugs, until 1972, when Mapplethorpe left their room at the Chelsea Hotel to go live with gallerist Sam Wagstaff, with whom he had fallen in love.

Drawn since adolescence to rock's great doomed spirits, from Jim Morrison to Lou Reed, from Janis Joplin to Bob Dylan, Patti met the latter backstage after a show at the Other End. And she talked big. "Are there any poets around here?" Dylan asked. "I don't like poetry anymore, poetry sucks," Smith shot back icily. But the next day, the cover of the "Village Voice" pictured them embracing. And from that day on, Patti would find in Dylan a friend as well as a mentor.

For at least eight years, in any case, she had to scrape by as a bookstore clerk, a music magazine critic, a playwright. She then managed to break into New York's intelligentsia circles, meeting influential figures such as Andy Warhol, Sam Shepard and Lou Reed, as well as Dylan himself. The Big Apple would bewitch her forever, so much so that she returned there even after the long Detroit interlude that followed her retirement from the scene in 1980. "New York fascinates me," she would recount, "it's always been friendly to me. I slept in parks, in the streets, and no one ever hurt me. Living there is like being part of one big community."

And in New York, Patti Smith made her first public appearance in 1969 (dressed as a man) in the play "Femme fatale". She then wrote lyrics for Blue Oyster Cult, led by her partner Allen Lanier (and it's her voice answering back in "The Revenge Of Vera Gemini"), had a relationship with Tom Verlaine of Television, with whom she fell madly in love (the "love triangle" with Lanier and Verlaine would be described in 1979 in the song "We Three"), and composed music for her own spoken-word performances, a New York tradition that found in her a striking interpreter, backed by the unsettling guitars of Lenny Kaye. And it was in New York's legendary underground temples, like CBGB's and the Other End, that Patti Smith made her name alongside the future fellow travelers of the scene: Television, Talking Heads, Ramones, Blondie. Her first single, "Hey Joe/Piss Factory", marked year zero for American new wave. It was Lou Reed himself who put her in touch with Clive Davis, president of Arista, which would become her label for years to come.

A Free-Form Revolution

At the dawn of punk came her first album, Horses (1975), produced by John Cale, which immediately earned her enormous fame on the American underground circuit. It's the record that brought a new musical language into rock history: a fusion of "free-form" spoken word and music, in which the text becomes the starting point but never a limit; indeed, it's often the vehicle that allows the songs to constantly expand and stretch outward.

The opening track, with all due respect to Van Morrison, is the definitive version of "Gloria." Or rather, it's an expansion with heavily reworked lyrics and an added introduction that completely upends the dedication to the girl named Gloria in the original song. Lines like "⟦Q1⟧" and "⟦Q2⟧" reveal a desire to subvert the Christian creed, stripping it of the aura of mysticism it usually requires. "Gloria" is no longer the girl who made Van Morrison swoon, but becomes the symbol of a profane sainthood: Smith's own.

Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine

Meltin’ in a pot of thieves

⟦Q1⟧

Thick heart of stone

⟦Q2⟧

⟦Q3⟧

The band built around this shaman of the punk era features the cream of 1975 New York underground: Richard Sohl (keyboards), Lenny Kaye (guitar), Ivan Kral (bass) and J.D. Daugherty (drums). The elasticity of the tapestry woven by the four of them is astonishing, molding itself to the poet's indistinct murmur, exploding into boogie and hard rock cadences when she hits the key moments, and swirling back into the background when the emphasis fades. The peak comes with the chorus screaming "Gloria" at the top of its lungs over Daugherty's stormy surge, before receding again into Kaye's sobbing riffs and the leader's deranged spelling-out of the word. These are mutations built purely on instinct and the moment: it's music made of verbs and subjects, more dependent than ever on the lyrics, which however widen its structure instead of narrowing its harmonic possibilities as usually happens in singer-songwriter fare.

"Land" — split into three parts, "Horses," a hysterical crescendo for voice and rhythm section, "Land Of Thousand Ballads," pure dreamy rock, and "La mer(de)," a whispered continuation at times — unfolds similarly to "Gloria," but crashes everything onto a scenario of nervous breakdown, packed with moments that have since entered rock mythology: Johnny slamming his head against the wardrobe, Johnny thinking he sees his double, the double beating him senseless, his head feeling as if trampled by a herd of horses.

The line between reality and dream is just as blurred during the simulated flight alongside a flock of crows: it happens in the spoken-word tour de force of "Birdland." The declamation builds in a crescendo (from whisper to roar), climbing over piano phrasing scented with gospel before being smothered in the finale by a maelstrom of distortion. The lyrics were improvised in the studio based on a story by Peter Reich: the boy sees his long-dead father aboard a spaceship, and weeps at length begging to be taken along, but all that's left for him is to lie down on the grass. Only Smith sings; the lead guitar respectfully steps aside.

The more conventional, song-oriented moments hold up just as well to scrutiny. On "Redondo Beach" Patti sings about a girl's suicide set against a jaunty reggae backing (!) complete with Caribbean keyboards, with the Group chiming in with delicate backing vocals. The psychoanalytic session of "Free Money," about the clash between love and the almighty dollar, unwinds over a sweet piano melody before evolving into a powerful charge that absorbs boogie, punk and r&b in a cascade of liquid riffs, court-martial rhythmic volleys and guttural screams. The ballad "Kimberly" is calibrated around church organ, drums and interweaving electric-acoustic guitars: a cotton-wool paradise in which to cradle the baby girl the song is dedicated to. It's a quintessentially new wave ballad, seasoned with assorted smirks and organ flourishes, with scattered echoes of Velvet Underground.

"Break It Up" is elevated by the appearance of Tom Verlaine, whose guitar pierces the eardrums almost as much as Smith's spitting delivery, while on "Elegie" it's Allen Lanier's guitar (Blue Oyster Cult) that tints everything with a ghostly, funereal air.

An album of staggering intensity, branded on its cover by Robert Mapplethorpe's famous shot of Patti in a white shirt and black tie, Horses is the least electric of the American artist's works from the '70s, but also the most convulsive, original and punk, as well as the most "ahead of its time" in attitude. Few albums have marked such a clear before-and-after as this debut: a chaotic, rasping voice spewing symbolism and free-form poetry, ultimately reducing the backing band's mighty rock&roll to an unprecedented abrasive sludge. Among its other merits, it can also claim to have struck Michael Stipe, future frontman of Rem, like a bolt of lightning on the road to rock: "I had these awful scratchy headphones of my parents' and a basket of cherries in front of me. I stayed up all night listening to it. It was like the first time you dive into the Ocean and get swept up by a wave. It tore me apart. From that moment I knew I wanted to become a singer, and I owe a lot to Patti as a performer too." Indeed, because from the stage Patti Smith has always managed to hypnotize audiences. "She's capable of generating more intensity with a single movement of her hand than most rock artists could produce over an entire show," wrote Charles Shaar Murray in New Musical Express. "Her performances are a cosmic battle between demons and angels," added John Rockwell in the New York Times. Another critic compared them to labor pains and childbirth.

In Rimbaud's Footsteps

Patti Smith's poetic universe revolves around a blend of Beat Generation, biblical mysticism, decadentism and underground existentialism. Her favorite touchstones are above all Allen Ginsberg's chants, Jack Kerouac's prose, and Williams Burroughs' lyrics. But her true maudit master is Arthur Rimbaud, "the first punk poet." He's the dedicatee of her second album, the vibrant Radio Ethiopia (1976), because the former Abyssinia was indeed Rimbaud's second homeland. Once again the cover art is a powerful icon: a black-on-silver abstract by Judy Linn.

If Horses was her roughest and most explosive record, Radio Ethiopia is perhaps her most cohesive and homogeneous, the one that best blends her two souls: the punk, fierce, anguished one, and the darker, more solemn one, which finds expression in ballads of almost liturgical intensity, further enriched by Richard Sohl's superb piano work. Two souls that often chase and merge with one another even within the same song, alternating alienated soliloquies and trance-like psychedelic hallucinations with sudden hard rock explosions.

Lanny Kaye's guitar and Smith's guttural voice brand "Ask The Angels" with fire, a (post?)punk anthem that would leave its mark on countless future new wave bands (its deranged, neurotic vocal delivery, for instance, laid the groundwork for the future exploits of Nina Hagen, Lene Lovich and Siouxsie Sioux). The track also shows how, unlike many of her disciples, Patti is also capable of hooking the listener with very direct, infectious refrains.

When Patti Smith hits the accelerator, though, the result is devilish boogies, like "Pumping My Heart," or hallucinated sarabands, dense with psychedelic moods, like the title track, where her hysterical singing is submerged in a swarm of distortion à la Hendrix, spilling over into the coda of "Abyssinia." The Group backs her without ever overwhelming her, while still showcasing all its instrumental prowess (notably, for instance, Kaye's jazzy guitar underpinning the brutal lyrics of "Poppies").

The genre of free-form litany launched on the debut album returns above all in the dark, aching gospel of "Ain't It Strange," a new stream of delirious, rambling consciousness, sung in that damnably dark and magnetic register of hers, before a fresh explosion that resolves into the final liberating scream — or in the quieter, more composed "Distant Fingers," where the reggae flashes of the debut occasionally resurface, drowned in an abyss of melancholy.

The "mystical" climax of the record, however, is the nearly five minutes of "Pissing In A River": despite the title, it's a dark, solemn elegy that unfolds over a beautiful melodic opening, with the crescendo culminating in the famous lines "What About It? What About It?", before Kaye's choruses and solos burst in menacingly to scar its edges. It's a love confession to her Fred "Sonic" Smith, into which Patti pours her whole arsenal of passion and insecurity, impulses and hesitations, also born of disappointments from previous relationships

Should I pursue a path so twisted?

Should I crawl defeated and gifted?

Should I go the length of a river

The royal, the throne, the cry me a river

Everything I've done I've done for you

Oh I give my life for you

Every move I made I move to you

And I came like a magnet for you know

What about it you’re going to leave me

What about it you don’t need me

What about it I can’t live without you

What about it I never doubted you

Despite the undeniable quality of its songs, Radio Ethiopia would be a commercial failure, and it would take time to settle into the hearts of Smith's fans, as well as in the assessments of a critical establishment still undecided about recognizing her enormous talent.

Sentimental Liturgies

The love for Fred "Sonic" Smith ("Because the night belongs to lovers/ Because the night belongs to us") is also the subject of the ballad co-written with Bruce Springsteen, which would become the lead single of the following Easter (1978). Although Patti later called it "a bit too commercial" (according to the skeptics, because it was perceived as the work of Springsteen alone), "Because The Night" is in fact a powerful, magnetic song that perfectly blends melodic flair with rock fervor. It all came about as the result of an improvised exchange of loving feelings: "That evening I had a phone date with Fred," the American singer-songwriter has recalled. "The hours went by but he didn't call, and I was getting more and more nervous. So I saw the tape Bruce had given me during the recording sessions for 'Darkness On The Edge Of Town.' I picked it up and listened. The music was magnificent. I started writing the lyrics as if in the grip of a fever, and out came all the amorous urgency that was tormenting me. Fred finally called at 2 in the morning. And the song was already finished." Climbing to No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100, "Because The Night" would remain one of her most beloved and popular songs.

But the whole of Easter marks another resounding success, the third in a row, for the visionary Chicago-born bohemian. With greater melodic care combined with more concise, yet no less vibrant, rock arrangements. The principal instrument, though, remains her raw, tortured voice, almost agonized as it declaims her abstract ravings, steeped in biblical spiritualism and beat poetry, French decadence and generational frustrations. The anarchic, free-form charge of her early work is toned down, however, in favor of a more fully realized song form, no less thrilling for it. Take, for example, the moving ballad "Ghost Dance," a mesmeric requiem on the tragedy and "resurrection" of Native Americans — "We shall live again," Smith sings over an exotic, dreamlike, disorienting backdrop; or the other profane liturgy of "We Three" (dedicated to the three-way relationship with Lanier and Verlaine), where the piano opens the door to an intimate spoken-word passage, almost a prayer (the plea "Baby, don't take my hope away from me"), underpinned by a stretched-out, atmospheric guitar.

Jimmy Iovine's production (who would later work alongside Springsteen himself and Tom Petty) helps smooth out some of the rough edges of her sound, making it more "musical" and accessible, even if, inevitably, less wild. Examples of this new direction are two tracks close to classic hard rock, the rough-hewn "Till Victory" and the lysergic ceremony of "Space Monkey". But Smith's trademark amphetamine-fueled rock'n'roll triumphs once again in the possessed declamation of "Privilege (Set Me Free)", pierced by searing new riffs from Kaye, and in the impetuous guitar charge of "Rock'n'Roll Nigger": preceded by the new spoken-word piece "Babelogue" (with the famous lines "I'm an American artist, and I have no guilt"), it's the record's tour de force, yet another torrential, gospel-like rant, steeped in Christian references and jumbled protest slogans:

Baby was a black sheep. Baby was a whore

Baby got big and baby get bigger

Baby get something. Baby get more

Baby, baby, baby was a rock-and-roll nigger (…)

Jimi Hendrix was a nigger

Jesus Christ and Grandma, too

Jackson Pollock was a nigger

Nor is there any shortage of the more barricade-storming streak of the former Cbgb pasionaria, as in the seventies generational anthem "25th Floor" and the subversive "High On Rebellion", which packs an entire season's worth of grievances into two minutes and thirty-seven seconds.

Closing things out is the restrained lament of the title track, a slow prayer to humanity in which bass and piano fuse together for a new, mournful madrigal.

The cover portrait this time is by Lynn Goldsmith, while the photos in the insert are once again the work of Mapplethorpe: standouts include the image of an American flag with a torn edge (a piece of symbolism that would stir up fierce controversy) and a childhood photo of Arthur Rimbaud, the eternal inspiration behind Patti's art.

Intense, vibrant and immediate, Easter suffers only from having been preceded by two other masterpieces, Horses and Radio Ethiopia, since it retains intact the stigmata of an extraordinary talent. This time around, the public would shower the album with enormous acclaim, definitively crowning Smith as a rock star and no longer (only) a cult artist. And Dave Marsh, in Rolling Stone, would close his review with these words: "No one else in the field of rock music has the nerve to put together Lou Reed, the Bible, Jim Morrison, Bruce Springsteen and the Mc5".

Dancing barefoot

The triumph achieved, almost as a surprise, on the third attempt would only be partially repeated a year later with Wave (1979), which sits at the crossroads between the end of punk and the rise of the (aptly named) new wave era.

At the console, after John Cale, Jack Douglas and Jimmy Iovine, it's the turn of another sacred monster: the brilliant singer-songwriter Todd Rundgren, who tries to recapture some of the rock energy of Radio Ethiopia without distorting the band's overall sound.

The result is a solid, cohesive album, slightly inferior to its three magical predecessors, yet still steeped in an aura of sacredness and magnetism, already foreshadowed by the lines from Jean Genet's poem "Le Condamné à mort", printed on the back cover:

Oh go through the walls; if you must, walk on the ledges

Of roofs, of oceans; cover yourself with light

Use menace, use prayer…

My sleepers will flee toward another America

Equally disarming is the title track, with a piano of infinite sorrow shaping the ode to Albino Luciani, aka Pope John Paul I ("Oh, Albino… Wave thou art high, Wave thou art pretty, Wave to the city… Goodbye, goodbye sir, goodbye papa"), whose brief pontificate (33 days) coincided with the album's recording sessions: his image would also appear inside the booklet. Luciani would remain a fundamental spiritual point of reference for the American artist, on her difficult journey toward faith.

To her husband Fred "Sonic", Patti instead dedicates "Frederick", a loving rock portrait with a structure and melodic line similar to the earlier "Because The Night", driven by a relentless rhythm bolstered by emphatic keyboards. Equally evocative are the psychedelic touches of the bewitching "Dancing Barefoot", dark and magnetic in its signature style (it would go on to be covered repeatedly, starting with the version by U2). And the breathless reinterpretation of the Byrds' "So You Want To Be (A Rock'n'Roll Star)" works at full throttle too.

While on tracks like "Hymn" and "Revenge" the Chicago-born singer-songwriter seems to start getting caught up in her own clichés, the overpowering organ of "Citizen Ship" steps in to raise the tension, while Patti, true to form, still manages to unsettle with the new chaotic prayer of "Seven Ways Of Going", where sudden jazz textures weave through lines steeped in joyous spirituality ("I've got seven ways of going seven where's to be, seven sweet disguises, seven ways of serving Thee, Lord, I do extol Thee, for Thou has lifted me"). A solemn, liturgical intensity, which is renewed in the vibrant rendition of "Broken Flag", recalling the story of Barbara Frietchie, who in 1862, in the town of Frederick, Maryland, took to the streets waving the Union flag with its broken staff in the face of the Confederate troops of General Stonewall Jackson: Patti turns it into another unrestrained, exhilarating anthem to freedom.

The buen retiro and the return to the stage

Having achieved major international success, Patti Smith, surprisingly, withdrew from the scene, retreating to Detroit in search of family intimacy.

In the meantime, though, her style has already carved out its place in rock history. Her caged-animal howls, her shattering high notes, her moans of a dying woman in the throes of final spasms dealt a death blow to the tradition of "beautiful singing", to the epic flights of a Grace Slick, paving the way for a new, roughly "punk" interpretation of the singer's role. But that's precisely her strength, the strength of a wild shaman who manages to lift words beyond language, through the visionary power of music. Her message, in truth, has often been garbled. She declared that her three favorite American poets were Jim Carroll, Bernadette Mayer and Mohammed Ali. She proclaimed the greatest performers of all time to be Mick Jagger, Christ and Hitler, for their ability to sway the masses. She sought comfort in post-Vatican II Christianity and in Buddhism. For a long time she preached rock as a "form of communication between souls".

At the end of the decade that saw the rise of new wave and a new generation of charismatic female icons (from Siouxsie to Chrissie Hynde), it's clear just how fertile and illuminating Patti Smith's lesson had been. So, as if to underline her status as a forerunner to the generations that followed, the poet of the New York basements gets back on her feet. With the Patti Smith Group half reassembled (Fred "Sonic" Smith in place of Lenny Kaye) and a producer from the golden years (Jimmy Iovine), she tries to win back her old devoted audience with a new album, Dream Of Life (1988), driven by a vibrant single like "People Have The Power", yet another fist-raised anthem that seems to suddenly reawaken an entire season of protest songs, propelled by Patti's urgent pace and proud battle cry. Legend has it the song was inspired by her husband Fred, who one day told her: "People have the power, write that down. People have the power to redeem the work of fools".

In the tracklist, however, there isn't much else worth noting. A graceful ballad like "Paths That Cross" at least manages to stir the ghosts of the past, those of "Ghost Dance" and all the enigmatic liturgies of the '70s. "Where Duty Calls", written by Smith after 241 American servicemen, mostly Marines, were killed by a terrorist in Beirut in 1983, also tries to reopen that diary of lost emotions, but beyond yet another spiritual invocation (“Forgive them Father/ They know not what they do”) and a solid guitar backbone (courtesy of Fred himself), the song amounts to a rather bland melodic framework.

And while tracks like "Up There Down There" and "Looking For You (I Was)" — another blend of poetry and rock — at least deliver a bit of adrenaline, "The Jackson Song" reveals Smith's sweeter, more intimate side, as she sings a delicate lullaby for her son.

A pale imitation of its predecessors though it may be, the record still gives us a performer who hasn't lost an ounce of her power as a preacher: her voice still thunders like a warning, like an irresistible call to arms.

Madrigals for Fred

The American artist's life, however, puts her through terrible trials. On March 9, 1989, her lifelong friend Robert Mapplethorpe dies in Boston from complications due to AIDS (he will be remembered in the 2016 documentary "Look At The Pictures"). On November 4, 1994, at the age of 46, Patti's husband Fred "Sonic" Smith dies of a heart attack — the man who had shared her joys and sorrows, who had saved her from the ghosts of New York and had walked hand in hand with her through the last fifteen years of her artistic journey. But he was also a great musician. In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine will rank him 93rd on its list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time. And it's from his nickname, combined with that of reggae musician Big Youth, that one of the greatest American alternative rock bands will take its name: Sonic Youth.

Together with Fred, Patti had been working on a new album. She finishes it two years later, with the telling title Gone Again (1996), a testament to her tenacity and her resilience in the face of life's traumas.

Entirely dedicated to her beloved Fred, it's inevitably a subdued, contrite work, finding its best moments in a solemn ballad like "My Madrigal" or in the free-form grace of intense pieces such as "Beneath The Southern Cross" and "Fireflies". It also holds up, without major highs, amid the country-folk textures of intimate songs like "Wing" and "Ravens". It falls short, however, when it reaches for the more fiery strings of hard rock (the title track or "Summer Cannibals"), blank-shot explosions in which Patti shows she has lost the shine of her golden years, taking refuge in a craftsmanship that fails to redeem her from banality.

Closing the circle is a heartfelt cover of Bob Dylan's "Wicked Messenger", performed with indignant fervor.

The slight, bony American singer-songwriter now bears the marks of a turbulent life. Her raven hair has turned white, framing a face that's increasingly angular and alive, yet less possessed than it once was. As if her two children and the grief of her losses had, over time, soothed her hallucinated fervor.

But what truly astonishes is Patti Smith's renewed form as a performer, also evidenced by some brilliant live performances. Always magnetic and explosive on stage, the former CBGB icon proves she has even refined her vocal approach, displaying an enviable command of phrasing and vocal harmonies.

Peace and Noise

Despite the lukewarm reception of her latest records, Patti Smith doesn't give up — if anything, she steps up her activity. Just one year after its predecessor comes Peace And Noise (1997), which manages to land a strong single, complete with a significant dedication: "1959" is a tight rock anthem inspired by the Chinese invasion of Tibet (the Dalai Lama having become Patti's new spiritual touchstone). The song works on every level and even earns a Grammy nomination.

There isn't much else worth salvaging from the grooves of this new record, though: the elegiac tone, heightened by a preference for piano ballads, is no longer backed by the poetic vein of her best years, the writing is flat and dull, and the more than ten minutes of "Memento Mori" are a threat almost greater than its title suggests.

Meanwhile, Patti Smith never shies away from taking a stand on the most burning political issues. She says that the "crucifixion of Bill Clinton" over the Lewinsky affair was the crucifixion of her generation, the generation of sexual liberation. And she stresses that she has now embraced a positive philosophy: "As a child I was so weak and sickly that I didn't think I'd live very long. Today my life is good, despite the pain I've had to overcome. It's been a great life, and I'm still here!"

So, heedless of the flops, she comes roaring back into the new millennium with the battle cry of Gung Ho (2000). "It's a Chinese expression that refers precisely to the desire to keep fighting with enthusiasm. That's the spirit of the album: I wanted to close out this century and face the new one with positive energy." But "Ho" is also a tribute to Ho Chi Minh, while the memory of her father, Grant Smith, is entrusted to the cover photo, which shows him as a soldier during World War II.

Gung Ho travels along the lines of classic rock, and at times resonates with echoes of the golden years, thanks also to the virtuoso guitar work of Tom Verlaine (former leader of Television) and Lenny Kaye (the Patti Smith Group's longtime mainstay). "One Voice" (in memory of Mother Teresa), the heart-wrenching "China Bird" and "Glitter In Their Eyes" (with Michael Stipe on backing vocals, returning the favor for the historic duet on "E-Bow The Letter", from the 1996 album "New Adventures in Hi-Fi") are the most striking moments on an album that, in any case, will hardly rank among the rock poetess's most memorable legacies.

Having reached the venerable age of 56, Patti Smith also releases her first greatest-hits collection - an anthology of tracks, unreleased material, classics from her repertoire, demos, live cuts and other rarities, titled Land (1975 - 2002). A sweeping work that gathers now-legendary songs from the priestess's catalogue, from "Gloria" to "Ghost Dance", from "Pissing In A River" to "Dancing Barefoot", from "Ask The Angels" to "Because The Night", right up to her more recent hits: "People Have The Power", "1959" and "Glitter In Their Eyes". The first disc closes with a previously unreleased cover of Prince's "When Doves Cry".

For more casual fans, a more concise summary of her career (Outside Society) would come out in 2011.

Chicago's pasionaria, however, is stubborn, and simply refuses to come to terms with age or with the end of an era of which she was undoubtedly a protagonist. The eleven tracks of Trampin' (2004), her debut for new label Sony/Columbia, slip by without leaving a mark, like an innocuous selection of Adult Oriented Rock broadcast on some generic American FM station. Faithful guitarist Lenny Kaye and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, plus Tony Shanahan on bass and keyboards and Oliver Ray also on guitar, undoubtedly form a quality line-up, complemented by careful studio work. Well-played, well-produced music, then - but without any real spark.

The most enjoyable moments are perhaps those in which Mrs. Smith tries to revive the purest roots of seventies rock: the opening "Jubilee", a political anthem in which the celebration of the Jubilee becomes a byword for both remembrance and protest; the big ballad "Mother Rose", a recollection of adolescence set to a nostalgic hammond organ; the shadowy country of "My Blakean Year"; the near-hard rock of "Stride Of The Mind", with an obsessive riff worthy of Led Zeppelin weaving between farfisa and harmonica. And if one wants to get a little sentimental, there's also the duet between Patti and her daughter Jesse Paris Smith, who accompanies her on piano on the title track "Trampin'", a subdued spiritual made famous by American contralto Marian Anderson.

But too many folk ballads ("Peaceable Kingdom", "Cartwheels", "Trespasses") risk weighing down the listener's eyelids, and too many spoken-word passages slide into rambling (the heartfelt ode of "Gandhi") or drown in a sea of rhetoric (the 12 minutes of "Radio Baghdad"). Listening to Trampin', it's almost as if we're watching a former sibyl who once hypnotized crowds with her trance-like prophecies try to recreate the experience after the trance has ended and everyone has gone home.

On March 12, 2007, Patti Smith was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the following month she released a new covers album titled Twelve, in which she reclaimed 12 legendary songs drawn from the repertoires of such titans as Jimi Hendrix, Nirvana, Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Stevie Wonder. Still, it's a negligible episode in her discography, which has by now been lacking a genuine new gem for several years.

Requiem for a Friend

In 2008 Patti Smith makes headlines again, this time as a "reader" of her own verse. Credit goes to The Coral Sea, a heartfelt posthumous requiem for her friend Robert Mapplethorpe. A harrowing work of grief and longing, in the tradition of great post-beat generation American poetry, this long poem written by Smith became a performance piece in 2005, staged by the American singer-songwriter together with Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine, who set the text's reading to guitar and keyboards. The double CD collects these performances in two editions, the first from 2005 and the second from the following year, at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, earning a five-star review from the Guardian's prestigious critic, who called the pair's performances "magical".

The Coral Sea describes the final, suffering days of Mapplethorpe's illness through visions, screams, confessions and recited eschatological reflections, relived atop oceans of sonic layers that build toward singular emotional climaxes, over which the voice seems to sail, in symbiosis with the winds and the waves.

In 2012 Patti Smith is invited as a guest to share the stage with Marlene Kuntz at the Sanremo Italian song festival.

The unlikely duo perform "Canzone per un figlio", which Marlene Kuntz enter in competition, a moving rendition of "Impressioni di settembre" (by PFM) and the famous hit "Because The Night". It turns out to be one of the most emotional moments in the history of the Sanremo festival.

In June of that same year Smith releases Banga, which marks a return to a more conventional song form. The album is a succession of tributes to figures from the present and the past: whether they are people dear to Patti or people she never knew hardly matters, since the result is always the product of brilliant, profound, illuminated writing with few equals on the contemporary music scene. Every single track has a story to tell; none is ever thrown in at random just to fill space, but each earns its reason for existing within the album's overall design.

“Amerigo” is dedicated to the adventures of Vespucci, who discovered the New World, “Fuji-San” is for the Japanese people struck by the tsunami (and the accompanying nuclear disaster), “This Is The Girl” is the heartfelt requiem for Amy Winehouse, one of the pop icons of our age, “Maria” is the elegant tribute to the recently deceased Schneider of “Ultimo Tango a Parigi”, “Tarkovsky” is dedicated to the famous Russian director, “April Fool” to his fellow countryman, the writer Gogol, “Nine” is a birthday present for Johnny Depp, and so on, right up to the closing tribute paid to Neil Young, embodied in the rendition of the evergreen “After The Gold Rush“.

From a purely musical standpoint, Banga stands out as one of Patti Smith's most listenable albums, perhaps the most accessible one overall, without that accessibility ever undermining the quality of the material on offer. It's a record that radiates strength right from its solid, effective opening trio of songs, and one that isn't afraid to venture into spoken-word psych-rock territory (“Tarkovsky” is worthy of the best Jim Morrison) as well as deliver driving rock delights, as in the case of the title track, inspired by Pontius Pilate's dog as depicted in a Bulgakov novel. Not even on the longest track (“Costantine's Dream”, inspired by a painting by Piero della Francesca and featuring spoken parts in Italian, barely approaching the ten-minute mark) does the album lose its verve, managing to keep the listener's attention fully engaged.

Banga is without question her finest collection of songs since 1979, rounded out by a thorough liner booklet and the presence of longtime loyalists Lenny Kaye and Tom Verlaine (who lays down a couple of solos on “April Fool” and “Nine”), once again preserving the thread of continuity with the past.

Even in the new millennium, Patti Smith remains an idolized figure, held in the utmost respect even by younger generations. A monument, a piece of humanity's heritage, to be loved, protected, safeguarded. The high priestess of rock doesn't coast on an admittedly glorious and significant past, and proves herself far more alive and fierce than many new voices already primed and ready for the mummification process.

Contributions by Federico Romagnoli (“Horses”), Massimo Marchini (“The Coral Sea”) and Claudio Lancia (“Banga”)

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