The band that inspired Patti Smith to become a punk
Patti Smith is often regarded as a vital leader of the punk movement, despite her attitude and ethos being a little more complex than that. As she famously once quipped, “In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life, may you proceed with balance and stealth.” Perhaps Smith’s punk philosophy manifested more heavily in her musical sensibilities, but she became an unequalled trailblazer nonetheless.
In the 1970s, Smith embodied the punk ethos in more ways than one despite largely steering clear from the notorious, drug-infused rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle it often encouraged. As a result, she appeared calculated but effortlessly so, reaping the rewards of her unwavering resilience as she waded through various musical spaces, revolutionising the craft as she went.
While it’s easy to analyse the various aspects of punk that Smith embodied, one of the most obvious aspects was her rejection of small-town life. After leaving her world behind to embark on an enlightening journey in New York, she crossed paths with a handful of names that would forever be associated with those who significantly broke the mould, including Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, Edie Sedgwick, and others.
After becoming turned on to the sounds of The Velvet Underground, Smith realised the beauty of existing in the present. In her own words: “I loved to dance, and you could dance for hours to the music of the Velvet Underground.” Smith was on her way to discovering the key to the punk world, and the band became her gateway.
While she regarded Lou Reed as an innovator who managed to bring “the sensibilities of art and literature into his music,” one other band taught her the importance of authenticity and being unapologetically herself. While she had already discovered the poignancy of “merging poetry with electric guitar, three chords,” the 1970s saw the industry becoming rife with exploitative marketing, which urged her to pursue more honest threads of inspiration.
As a result, she found solace in Television. “Tom Verlaine and Television were for me the most inspiring: They were not glamorous, they were human,” she told New York Mag. Although the free-spirited nature of the 1960s counterculture movement had bled over into the 1970s, hangovers from immense corporate pressure to create music that sold resulted in a lot of musicians making music for the sole purpose of getting hits.
Television, on the other hand, proved to Smith that the opposite approach could still be worthwhile. And that was exactly Smith’s mantra: if it wasn’t real, it wasn’t worth doing. After all, being at the fore of the punk movement meant constantly thriving for something better while revealing the industry’s cracks and its forthcomings as you did so.