Mother On A Mission

04/07/2000 2:00 AM, LAUNCH
Mac Randall

If you were feeling less than charitable toward Patti Smith, you might be tempted to call her a horrible name-dropper. In the course of a half-hour conversation at the Radisson Hotel in Austin--where she's preparing for an outdoor concert, her first live appearance in the Texas capital in two decades--she manages to toss in passing references to, among others, Bob Dylan, Michael Stipe, Beat authors Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, guitarist/ critic/ Nuggets compiler Lenny Kaye, and Fred "Sonic" Smith of Detroit's legendary MC5. There are two reasons why this is not annoying. First, Smith actually knows all these people very well. Dylan and Stipe are close friends; so were Ginsberg and Burroughs. Mapplethorpe took the photograph that adorns the front cover of her classic 1975 debut album, Horses. Kaye played with her in the '70s and is also in the current lineup of her band. Fred Smith was her husband and the father of her two children. Patti Smith doesn't talk about these folks to win debate points. This is, simply, her life.

Second, it's pretty hard to feel less than charitable toward Patti Smith. Well-weathered but still youthful in spirit at 53, she doesn't just talk a lot about positive energy, she exudes it--this in spite of the untimely deaths of so many of the people mentioned in the preceding paragraph, including her husband. And that survivor's energy leaps rudely out of the grooves of her latest album, the aptly named Gung Ho, a compelling slab of art-garage-folk-punk that marks another peak in an illustrious career now approaching its third decade. "As a human being, I've been through a lot of things," she says. "Been through some rough times, but I feel really strong, really healthy. I feel there's a lot of things to address, and I can contribute. And the [new] record comes from a position of strength. In that way, it's a continuation of my life stream and my ideas, but it's also a milestone for me because it's a time in my life where my skills, my band, all the people I'm collaborating with, and my own abilities and feelings are positive and strong. I think it reflects the best of all, really."

Making records and playing in a rock band isn't what Smith thought she'd be doing at this stage of her life. After releasing four albums of varying quality between 1975 and 1979, she left the music business at the dawn of the 1980s, got married, and focused on building a family. In her own words: "I felt I'd accomplished my mission." It was her husband that eventually coaxed her back into active duty, on 1988's Dream Of Life. "That was more of his mission," she recalls, "because he wrote all of the music and really wanted people to hear me sing. It was his gift to me to produce that record. After he passed away, I put out [1996's] Gone Again in remembrance of him. I really didn't think I was going to do any more records [after that]." But friends and acquaintances encouraged her to continue, and so she brought several of the Gone Again players--Kaye, guitarist Oliver Ray, bassist/ keyboardist Tony Shanahan, and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty--back together to cut 1997's Peace And Noise; all four appear again on Gung Ho.

Smith describes the last five years as a process of "getting back on my feet. Being I hadn't really performed much in 16 years between the '70s and the '90s, I had to learn how to perform again, get reacquainted in the studio. The struggles were street struggles. But now we've worked on three albums together, toured the world together, and this album reflects our gelling as a band." Rip-roaring tracks like "Persuasion" and "Glitter In Their Eyes" testify to that nicely. The choice of producer Gil Norton (Pixies, Catherine Wheel, Belly, Counting Crows) proves to have been an inspired one.

"I don't usually like producers who meddle," Smith says, "but I wanted someone to oversee the technical aspects of the production. Lenny recommended [Norton] and Oliver was knowledgeable about his work with the Pixies. I decided to go with him and it was a really happy, joyous thing. He understood us as a band, was totally respectful toward me and the improvisational aspect of our band, and was poetry-friendly. Gil and his engineer became essentially band members, and I feel we all did this record together. Which is perfect, because 'gung ho' is an old Chinese character that represents working together. I always thought 'gung ho' meant to attack something with high spirits and good heart. And actually, that's sort of the American translation, slang. During World War II, there was this elite branch of the Marine Corps called the Raiders and they took the expression as their own. It spread like wildfire amongst American soldiers, and they were all working together for a righteous cause, so when they brought the phrase back to America, that spirit came with it."

The cover photo of Gung Ho makes pointed reference to this period of history, but it also has a greater personal significance for Smith; the young G.I. pictured there is her father, who passed away in the summer of 1999. "I went home [after his death]," she remembers, "and my mom had found a photo of him from World War II. He was stationed in Australia, on the way to New Guinea. He was always kind of stylish. He'd had his uniform custom-made and had this black go-to-hell custom beret on. My mom said, 'Look at your father, he was so gung-ho!' And I was like, yeah, that's the picture. I'm really proud to have it on the cover of the record. He was so supportive of the work that I do...and he was very gung-ho."

In much the same way as Smith was encouraged by her father, so Smith herself has encouraged, and sometimes audibly influenced, many of the most important and successful rock bands of the last 20 years. (R.E.M., anyone? How about U2?) "I always take it as a compliment when people get inspired by anything we do and then do their own work," Smith observes. "That was my essential mission in the '70s: to inspire people to do work. I didn't perceive myself to have any special gifts. I'm not a singer or a musician, didn't know how to perform or record. I did it to, hopefully, incite others. Though I've never been really commercially successful--'Because The Night' [1978] did pretty good, but I've never had a gold record--when one talks about succeeding or failing, what is one talking about? If one's talking commercially, I'm at the bottom of that barrel, but I feel successful because I've done the work I wanted to do, people treat me well, and I feel good about myself and my work."

And though that work has evolved over the years, make no mistake: Patti Smith is still on a mission. "When I did Horses," she says, "I was focusing on people like myself: people that were outside society, the maverick people who were the misfits, or the miscast, but also productive. This time in my life, I still feel like one of these people, but my mission is to address all people about global concerns or national concerns. I know that I'm a fringe player. Artists are always fringe players. But the things that concern me now, they don't just concern the fringe, but all people: the destruction of our environment, the morale of our children, the rampant misuse of firearms. I've always cherished rock 'n' roll as a way to express the things that are important to the people. Unfortunately, in these times the idea of a concerned citizen is almost like...instead of the concerned citizen being the grass root or the mainstream, the concerned citizen is the fringe player. People don't seem to care about our world; as long as the economic situation is good and they have the material things they want, it's all good. And it's not. People will find that if one measures their worth by material things, they will have a very lonely existence along the road. As one evolves as a human being, these things become less and less satisfying. And I think it's important for us to develop some kind of spiritual, political, and revolutionary sense of ourselves, and then we'll be happier human beings."