This is Alec Baldwin and you were listening to Here is the Thing Today. We're live from the Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown, New Jersey, where I sat down recently with musician, poet and artist Patti Smith. Thank you for coming. We're here at at the Mayo. My guest for the show this evening as somebody who is you know, a very uh unique person in the world of music.
You know, a true poet, performance artists. I mean, so many things you could apply to her, but I think most people know her as a as a great and kind of iconic musician. So please join me in welcoming Patti Smith. Hi. We were talking backstage about how I wonder what it would be like if you and I we're kind of starting in our respective businesses. Now do you think that you're of your time and you came right when you should have come, and and if you were to come onto the scene now with what you
think the music scene is like? Now, well, what would you do? I forgot to ask it? What age like? My age? I came on? Now? Oh god, no, no visits applies to me too, No, no, no, no, I'd be agreed or at a Vegas Hotel. If I was starting at my age, I actually I have no idea because I didn't really come into the music business. I was. I came. I wound up in music by mistake. I'm not really a musician. I didn't really want to be
a musician or a singer. I just wanted to I wanted to be a poet and a writer, and it was accidental. So would it accidentally happen now? I don't think so. I think I would have to be more focused on what I wanted. But also because I'm so on technological and things, I mean, I'm just not really suited for right now. So probably I would have to be like a physicist the band in the game. You don't even drive. No, I don't know how to drive, so I couldn't do that. That's true. She doesn't have
a license. I said, you ever live in l A. She said, no, I don't swim and I don't drive. That's true. But if you came in now, you'd be a scientist, you said, Well, I I don't know what I would be, but I don't think I would have a problem no matter where I came in. You know, I would figure out something I'm pretty scrappy now. But when you say that you weren't a musician, how did that begin for you? Well, I mean I came to New York in Sevan wanted to be an artist, and
I also wrote poetry. And after I I just started writing more poetry. And then uh was shepherded by people like Alan Ginsberg and and William Burrows and Gregory Corso, and they all read their poetry. So I wanted to read poetry, but I didn't want to be boring because I went to a lot of poetry readings and they were snoresville. You know, they were like, sorry, but really boring. So I just started like, at least have good wine. Wine. I didn't even drink, and I don't do anything interesting really,
but I mean, I'll have a shot at to kill everybody. No, I mean no, I never had a drug problem. Um. Minutes on that I had a drug problem was no. Actually, I was such a sickly kid, um that my parents worked so hard to keep me alive that you know when I when I came out into the world, the last thing I was going to do is fuck that up. You know, I just I'm not I don't have a
self destructive vent. But also when I was a kid, my mother was a chain smoker, and she I mean real true chain smoker, and when she ran out of cigarettes and she didn't have money, she would pace all night long. I get up at midnight and see my poor mom pacing because she didn't have a cigarette. And I thought, then I'm never going to be dependent on anything, because I thought, what would happen if you got stranded on a desert island you didn't have cigarettes, You'd like
fall apart. So it was like an early lesson in uh, what I didn't wanting a desert cigarettes have to grow to back end. And then but I feel like somehow I didn't answer one of some question. Oh I know, because you're yeah, it doesn't matter. You do whatever you want to do. How I wound up singing. I just wound up singing, like to make up little singing, little songs acapella between poems to make it a little more interesting, and then sort of wrapping poems. And it was just organic.
Somebody just did it on your own. You didn't see anybody else doing that, No, I mean I saw like be poets or I mean just I think of everybody that I was influenced by at that time of my life. Johnny Carson was the one I just thought, like, you didn't have drug problem either. Yeah, I'm not surprised, but I mean, but just the fact that Johnny Carson his his his ability to improvise or to get himself out of any situation, that was always what I was looking for.
If I was on stage, gotten a bad situation, find my way out of it. You grew up in South Jersey, and you're kind of tough. The way you grew up. Your dad. What did your dad do for a living? He was worked in a factory. She's waitress. And how many kids in your family? For for how many boys? How many girls? Three girls? One boy? And I was the oldest. And it was tough, Well yeah, I mean it was financially tough. We had. It was in those ways very tough. But in another way we had it
was very magical because I had really great siblings. I had a great imagination, read hundreds of books. My parents. We knew that they had a lot of strife and stress, but you know, it was just the world seems so magical. It wasn't so bad for us. Books were my salvation and so I I didn't think of things. The only bad thing was when I'd be hungry. I mean truthfully, I like to eat. I was really skinny and a real I was always hungry and that was my big problem.
Skinny back then, Yeah, really skinny. What do you mean You don't believe me? I was. I really were very skinny. People think he was being a very thin woman. But but but you're saying that, So there was. It was tough. Like I remember, I got a I wrote a memoir it's coming out in April, and I talked about that. Like my dad was a school teacher or six kids and they didn't have any money either. It was really there was a lot of stress man. Really well, you
didn't have credit cards and stuff like that. I mean it was all like you had cash and you got you know, if you didn't have money you didn't need. It wasn't like you know, sometimes you could get you know, like uh, you know a little credit card at Sears or something. You know, but um, it was like you said, you have to use your imagination and reading was for me,
it was like such a huge thing. Your TV back then, every don't realize who are young here like TV back then, you know, they show a TV on TV, they show a movie on like NBC. They had like the Sunday Night Movie and they're sure a movie that was you know, you've everybody's seen a hundred times. You know, they'd say the sound of Music Sunday and like, oh my god, We're like run to the TV to watch the sound of music on TV, which you know, they didn't have Netflix.
Three three channels that went off at like either ten o'clock or midnight, and uh, you know, and then cartoons on Saturday. I I love being a kid. It was awesome. And then when you left home, where'd you go? New York? I left when I was twenty, and basically I left to get a job because in South Jersey and Philadelphia, the New York Shipyard closed down and there were like thirty thousand jobs overnight were lost and there wasn't any work, no matter how low a factory job, nothing, And there
was no more work, and I needed a job. So I went to New York City to get a job. And where'd you get a job? Um in a bookstore. I got a a series of bookstores until I really landed a great bookstore job in Scribner's Bookstore, and I worked there for about five years. Doesn't it really tells a lot about you? That really pretty much sums it up your home in Jersey. You can't get a job, You're starving. You're going to New York to get a job.
I thought you were gonna say in a restaurant. Well, no idea, soon as you go to a bookstore a different kind of food. But no, you know what happened. My mother was a waitress and she tried to give me a job at her counter, but I was so clumsy and such a day dreamer, and she fired me. And uh so then she was upset that I was leaving home, but she got She let me take my white uniform and my wedgies. So the first day I got, I'm one Time Square, and of course Time Square was
all different than you know. And uh I got a little a job immediately because they needed a waitress at a place a little at town in Plays called Joe's Um on Times Square. And within like two hours I dumped one of the I had a giant tray as tripped and the whole tray of veal parmesan as went on This woman's tweed suit. Not only was I fired, but my three hours pay went to her cleaning bill. So I went back to Port authority, left the waitress uniform and the wedgies in the girl's bathroom and thought
maybe somebody can use them. And then I looked around for a better job. How does art, poetry, music come into your life when you're in New York when you're twenty years old, Well, first it was just getting a job. I didn't get a job the first or second day. I mean I was sleeping in the subway, sleeping in uh Central Park, sleeping at the cemetery and Flushing or Greenwood or wherever it was and near where Herman Melville
was buried. And uh, it took a little while. And truthfully it wasn't really until I met I met Robert Maplethorpe, and uh we met a couple of times. But I was in a bit of a jam because a grown up asked me to go out to eat. He was probably forty, but I was like twenty. To me, seemed like, you know, he was a grown up, you know, And uh, I was really afraid that my mother used to say, don't go out with a stranger because you know, they
just want one thing. And I thought, I was so hungry, and he said he would take me to dinner, and he took me to the Empire State Building diner, and I remembered to this day he ordered, uh, we ordered. He ordered me swordfish and it was five dollars, and I thought, he's going to want everything for five dollars. And I was petrified, and so I I ate that I couldn't even eat it. And I'm so angry I'm gonna eat Maybe I should leave now, Yeah, exactly, we're
not that door. But these potatoes are so good. Of just a couple of more potatoes that I'm going to write out that door. He'll never know. No, I didn't know what to do. Then when we walked, No, we didn't. We didn't have any dessert. We walked all the way down to uh Tompkins Square Park and we were sitting there and then all of a sudden, he said, uh, I have an apartment right around here. Would and he asked me if I wanted to see It was really creepy.
He actually had like it's like like a turtleneck, a white turtleneck I remember, and a medallion. I mean it was really powers. That's so funny. No, he was supposed to be a science fiction writer, but I was. And when he said that, I thought, oh my god, this is the moment, you know, and everything my mother ever told me for like ten years of my life. And I was sitting there, paralyzed, figuring out what to do. And I looked, and I see Robert Maplethorpe coming, you know,
up through it just coming. It's almost like a cloud parted and here he comes, with like long curly hair and a sheepskin vest and you know, and his dungarees. And I had only met him once or twice, and I didn't even know his name, and I just met him sort of. And so I ran up to him and I said, uh, do you remember me? And he goes yeah. And I said, will you pretend you're my boyfriend? And he says okay. So I bring him to the science fiction guy and I said, this is my boyfriend.
He's really mad. I gotta go goodbye. And then I said to Robert, this is so stupid, but I didn't. I said run and Robert and I ran. We ran, we ran, we ran a way, and uh and now the guy on the turtleneck with the medallion on is the president elect of the United States? Boy, did you play your cards wrong? You know? And then my life began. Life began that night because Robert and I just roamed around. We roamed around the East Village and everywhere all night
long till two in the morning, just talking away. And finally, almost simultaneously, we both said, do you have a place to stay? Neither one of us had anywhere to live, We didn't have any money. But the differences Robert had knew some kids of Pratt and he knew he knew how to get the key to this one guy's apartment where his art was stored. So we went there, and we went to his place, and he showed me all his drawings and what he was doing. And after that
night we became inseparable. And that set us, at least me on a path, you know where of drawling and painting and evolving and writing poetry. And yeah, we've we've yes through through many things. Yeah, well I was going to get into that, but you're with him for a long long time. And then things changed for you as well, in terms of your career. Well, I mean, at first, I mean, the thing is is that I never cared about a career. I have to say, none of those things,
um being in a business, music, business, career, money. What what I always wanted, no matter how conceded it sounds, is I wanted to do something great. I wanted to write something as great as Pinocchio or The Scarlet Letter, or you know, just do something wonderful, write a wonderful book. I didn't really care about and don't I don't care about having a career or any of that stuff. I do my work and in the process, I've had some great successes. I've had things that have had me banned
from the world. I've had you know, I've I've been in trouble, I've done you know, I've left it all behind. It's not important to me. It's always important to me. Is really just to do something good, to do something that's uh endoran So when you started to have success, was that something that was because it was so unfamiliar to you? There are those people who I'm not going
to say the word failure. They're more comfortable and anonymity than they are being successful and famous because it's familiar. Did you find that when you were becoming famous as a musician, because primarily you became famous as a musician as well. At first in the beginning in eight I had my first big success with this song I wrote with Bruce Springsteen. Because the night I thought it was thank you, I thought it was I thought it was exciting to have a song on the radio. I didn't
think of it in terms of success or failure. It was just really cool to be on the radio. And back then, you know, having a single and meant, you know, your records were in the window and and you could, you know, you played bigger places and met more people. But by nine seventy nine, truthfully, I could see that success was to keep going. You I was doing less work, less meaningful work, evolving less as a person and an artist, and just get more successful. And I thought, that's that's
not why I was put on the planet. I wasn't put on the planet to you know, climb the ladder of success. I was here to do certain kind of work, and so um I left. I left the music business. In seventy nine. You separated from Maplethorpe point in well. Robert and I separated as a couple in like seventy two, but never is we were just the same, only we weren't you know, doing it anymore, you know, but we didn't change how we were. We were always just the same.
We were just you know, had different physical partners. So we never quite really separated until I got married. And you, I would think I read it in an interview where you said it was difficult for him to admit to his sexuality when he was first Well, I think you know, it's people. It was a different time. I mean, Robert
was brought up Catholic. His mother wanted him to be an altar boy, as father wanted him to be in the military, and he wanted to be an artist, but he was suppressed that to try to at least please his father. And Robert got a full scholarship. He was very smart. He got a full scholarship to Pratt, a military scholar ship. But right before I met him, he just decided that that's not what he wanted. He wanted to be an artist. He didn't want to be in
the military. He didn't want to be a commercial artist, which is what his father wanted him to do. And his um his scholarship was based on on on that pursuit and in in saying that he didn't want to do that, that he wanted to be an artist. His father sort of disowned him. He lost a scholarship, lost his dorm, lost his stipend, like overnight. But he wouldn't he wouldn't back down. He really, he really believed he was He knew he was an artist and that's what
he wanted to do. And that's at the moment we met, he was like he had shed his family, his career, um, any financial aid that he had, and to you know, to devote himself to art. And I had left my family, you know, um my home and come to New York to pursue to get a job, but also to pursue my path. And we met at a very perfect time, and they were with him and still connected to him even when he was very second, when he was and when he died. Oh yeah, I mean we you know,
I'm still connected with him. I still think about him every day, and the things that I learned from him or that we we did together inform the work that I do. I mean, we we bonded so young through art. I mean, of course, you know, we were boyfriend and girlfriend. We did all the things young people do but I think that is as he felt freer and freer as an artist in a human being his nature. First he
had to come out as an artist. Then the next thing that happened is he blossomed and felt his sexual nature. We had to weather that. We had to, you know, try to navigate what this meant, what it meant to our relationship, what it meant and and it was difficult, and it took a few years because neither one of us wanted to part, But eventually we had to part as boyfriend and girlfriend because he had to be who he needed to be. When did you meet your husband
you eventually got married. I met my husband in ninety six in Detroit, and I was on the road and I met him in Detroit and I saw him. It was it's like a it's really like a song. I saw him across a crowded room. He was just standing there and it blew overcoat. I didn't know who he was, and I thought, that's the boy I'm gonna marry. I swear to you that's true. How old I was about seventy six, I was about twenty. I don't know. Did you walk up and tell him that right? No? No, no,
not at all. But Lenny Kay actually introduced us and he said, Fred Smith, Patti Smith. We just looked at each other and I don't know, and we finally, Um, we had a long distance relationship, in fact, because the night we had a long distant relationship, and neither one of us had a whole lot of money, and to make phone calls was expensive, long distance calls I always did.
This day, I hear people my boyfriend only called me three times today, and I think, Jesus, you know, it's like I'd have to wait all week to get one phone call from from Fred. And um, actually, am I going off the course too? There was no core, is no course. Yeah, you're my kind of guy. I'm your kind of passage. I'm your kind of passenger too, because the autopilot about thirty minutes ago. Now, I mean we're not going anywhere in particular because I don't know how
to drive and I have no sense of direction. I'm a really good passenger because I can never tell if anybody's lost, you know, And I apply that to all every part of life. But when you met your husband, and what did he do? Was he a musician? He's a he was a musician. He played with the MC five. He was a master guitarist. He was really one of our great guitarist and uh and he's just such a
beautiful man. You know. We just decided, you know, we we wanted to evolve as human beings, and he wanted children, and we just we just decided to withdrawal from public life and really know each other and when when we had children, they would really know who we were. And and so we did. How long until his he passed away and the end of ninety four, so sixteen years, so sixteen years. You go off the grid. I hate
that phrase, but that's that's okay. You go off the grid and just what you do come like blowing out of you, like in like weird moments like are you looking the check outline? And carrots carrots. Actually they didn't care who I was, in fact, because I had no driver's license. If I wanted to write a check, they always hassled me because I didn't have the right idea. I'd have to bring my passport everywhere. So that was Detroit sixteen years. What was it like, did you paint?
I know I didn't paint, because um, it was just the way are living quarters were I didn't really have the space to do something like that, but I wrote every day. I could have never written just kids or the books that I'm writing now had I not had sixteen years of enforced discipline, because I've always been very undisciplined. And then unless I had a job or something, but then having a children, um I had. I had to learn to wake up at five in the morning and
from five to eight was my writing time. Everybody was asleep, it was my time. And it was really hard at first, but then after a while I got in a groove and I still right early in the morning, and I really learned how to develop my craft. And uh, it was hard because there's no cafes around, there was no bookstores. A lot of things, the biggest, the most hardest thing is in New York. You can walk out the door and get a cup of coffee and a out two
minutes practically anywhere. But where I was, the closest thing was seven eleven, which was about, you know, half a mile away, so I'd have to every Saturday, I'd walked to seven eleven my cafe, get a glazed donut and the coffee, and I was I was in town, you know. But but I love my life. It wasn't easy because you know, I had to do all the we we did everything. We didn't have nannie's or housekeepers or even babysitters. We did everything. And I'm not the most adept at stuff.
You know, some of my poor kids, you know, their school uniforms and stuff. My daughter's little pleaded, you know, Jumper was like always a little jagged e and their blouses in their shirts were a little dingier than the other because I didn't like using bleach and things like that. But but I I love my kids, I love my husband, you know. And it was a lot of certain amount of sacrifice and and uh, you know, but I was talking about you because I just find this so interesting.
Was there much talk about you, like getting back, getting back in there and getting back into your life to make money as a breadwinner for everybody's been well, when we really really need I always I always feel like I got to work all the time. Well, when we really needed money, we lived so simply. I mean, we never went to Europe. We never went you know, we drove anywhere, um that we went when we really needed money. In eighty six, we did one record together and that
kept us going. And but it's just, you know, I I I liked my life. I never I didn't expect to be on the great stages of your you know. To me, it was really fantastic that I got the opportunity. I never thought I would do a record, But in doing so, I got to travel, which in I never thought I would ever have the money to travel and go to Finland, you know. But uh, but I mean all the places. I'm just joking, but I did get to go to Finland, even though I had never dreamed
of going to Finland. But I mean I got to all the places. I saw Paris and Rome and Vienna and all these places because I had a band and sang and did records. But it wasn't it wasn't my focus in life. It wasn't my great great vision. And so when I didn't do it, I was grateful that I got the opportunity. But I wasn't mourning the situation that I wasn't doing it. You know, I wasn't missing the applause. It wasn't like a Judy Garland movie or something.
I just, you know, I felt you know, really happy writing, you know, watching my kids grow. I did what I needed to do. I was happy. Oh yeah, I love my kids are awesome. And the funny thing is, I mean, I'm not embarrassed to say this because my kids know. I never wanted kids. I just wanted to be an artist. I didn't want to have kids. And I came from a big family and I helped raise my siblings, and
I just wanted to be free. And it was Fred who wanted children, and I loved him so much, and I thought, well, I can do that, you know I But I never expected to just love my kids so much and just love being a mother. And since Fred died when he was forty five, you know, I have them. I have them. I see so much of him in them, not just in the way they look or certain gestures, but even in their music. The tones of my son's tar. He'll be playing a guitar solo. He never heard his
father play guitar because they were quite young. It's Fred's tones. Jesse at the piano, she is just his feel and she never heard him play piano, but she has his feel, and it's it's awesome to have them as individuals, but also how they magnify their father coming up. More from my live conversation with Patti Smith explore the Here's the Thing Archives, where I talked with another musician, one who
was transformed by the music of Patti Smith. She represented something other and something to me alien, and part of that was this this um uh openness is fluidity about sexuality that I think certainly resonated with me and with with millions of other people who are questioning their sexuality or or or emerging into something that they weren't familiar with, or it's something that wasn't at the time quite accepted or acceptable. Take a listen to my conversation with R. E. M.
Frontman Michael Stipe at Here's the Thing dot org. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing today live from the Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown, New Jersey, where I sat down with musician and poet Patti Smith. Now, when you uh was writing songs for you difficult and incredib laborious, did they come to you?
Were both well, I mean, writing songs isn't my first vocation and I I it's I'm not as fast sole at writing songs as other things also since I don't really only I play a few chords on the guitar, so I can figure out some things. But sometimes songs come. Songs are so strange. Sometimes they just come as a gift. I've woke up in the morning and there's a song there and I quick write it down. It just comes
full with the music and the words. And then there's other songs that have taken three years too, you know, have a piece of music and write words, but it's it's labor songwriting, and there's a lot of responsibility, um responsibility to the composer because most of my songs, the music was written by a band member or Fred and and and so you want to please them. But it also has to be something that I can sing. But the easiest, one of the easiest things was to write
um too. Because the night because Bruce, I had a cassette with a it was a demo, and I really didn't want to listen to it. You know. It was given to me by my producer, Jimmy Ivan, and he coax Bruce into let me finish it. Bruce couldn't figure out he was having trouble writing verses to the song. He had the chorus and Jimmy gave it to me and I didn't want to listen to it because I thought, um, I wanted to write. I wanted my band to write
their own songs. And uh and Bruce is from like a different part of New Jersey than me, and he's sort of in the middle, and I'm from South Jersey and it's like, I really I just didn't want, you know, and sort of a middle and which don't bring that Middle Jersey. I know I'm from New Jersey. It's just I'm from like the cooler part of Jersey. But I was this is what I was saying before. But one night I was waiting. Jimmy had given me this tape.
We were doing this album Easter, and every night Jimmy would say, hey, listen to the tape, to listen to the tape, to listen to the tape, and I said, uh, not yet, and he called me up to listen to the tape, to listen to the tape. Uh not yet. So you know, it was just sitting there in my little apartment on McDougall Street, and uh So, anyway, Fred was supposed to call me and it was like seven and I got already I look cool. And I'm sitting there and the phone sitting there, and I'm waiting for
Fred to call, and seven goes by seven thirty. No Fred, you know, say eight o'clock. I'm pacing around, and you know, I was like obsessive, you know, I wanted, you know, the phone call, and I couldn't. I was just pasting and pasting, couldn't figure out what to do with myself. And I noticed this the darn tape, and I thought,
listen to that darn tape. So I put it on my cassette machine and put it on and I listened to it, and it's in my key, perfectly arranged anthemic has a really great chorus, and I thought it's one of those darn hits. It's just yeah, yeah. So I listened to it and it was, you know, it was captivating, and I'm waiting for Fred and waiting for Fred. Finally he calls me up like eleven o'clock at night. But when he called me because it took so long, um,
I had finished all the lyrics to the song. And uh, that's why in the second verse that says Lisie, have I doubt when I'm alone Love is a ring the telephone. I was waiting for Fred to call so and uh, so I wrote the words and uh and and thanks to Bruce, I had my uh my first hit. Um now um writing books when you did Us Kids and m Train was quite a gap in between those two books, But I was writing books difficult for you as well. Well.
Just Kids was really difficult because I'm basically wrote fiction and uh and even though it wasn't in poetry. And the day before it, literally the day before Robert died, he asked me too if I would write our story. And our story was something that we cherished. It was. He used to like me to tell him our stories. Sometimes we didn't have enough food or we were hungry and we couldn't go anywhere, and he'd say, tell me
our story. And so I would start, like a little fairy tale, tell the story of how I came to New York and how we met. And so I promised him I would write it, having no idea how I would do that, And it took me a really long time because also so many things happened. My Fred passed away, then my brother passed away, and I had two young children, and so it took a long time for me to fulfill this promise. But all the discipline, all what I had learned in all those years in Michigan really taught
me how to sustain writing. Finally I got it done, and it was it was so exhausting. When I was done, I I could hardly write another thing for a while. Two things I want to ask you, and then we're gonna take some questions I think from the audience. But you seem like somebody like I read interviews with you, and I I saw clips of you talking to people, and and I think the one thing we have in common is an appreciation of people that you admire and
people you worked with and that you liked. And and I was wondering when you look back and when you've had such a long career and you work around people who were these amazing, unique people and during unique times, you know, in the sixties and the seventies and so forth, and if you can mention just one or two people who when you look back now, people you think, man, I can't believe I got to know that person, I
got to hang out with that person. Well, I think that just having Alan Ginsberg, William Burrows and Gregory Corso as mentors at a very young age, and they really did shepherd me. Um and I mean Alan speaking of of activism and performance and and serving the people. And UH and William in In taught me so many other things. How to conduct myself, how to protect my work, um,
how to try to have a good name. I mean, they all had their their advice for me, and UH and Gregory was so irreverent, you know, just no bullshit and both both a romantic poet and UH completely unbridled. I just learned so much from these three men. They were so different, and they were so unique and their work. Um, all did such great work. And UM, when I looked back, I just sort of went with the flow when I was a kid, you know, I just thought, you know,
they were cool and and they were so helpful. But when I when I look back now, it's really with a sense of wonder that I came from truly such a rural area where you know, there was a pig you know, we lived in this little house and there was a field and then a big pig farm. Across the street was a peach orchard, and down the road there was a little skate and rink and up the road was a little armory where there was school, where there were dances with a disc jockey like once a month,
and there was like nothing there. And how I went from there and found these guys is uh, you know magical. You can't imagine your child and your brothers and they're gone, like it's Saturday afternoon. They're like, what do you want to do? An the other brothers like, I don't know, you want to throw dirt bombs at the pig? Actually, we would like want to go skating. I want to go get some peaches from the orchard and throw them at the pig. Let's do that. Let's do that. Actually
we we. I was taken to court when I was levin because I still we we. My dad was on strike and there was like no food in the house and my mother could make really good pie. So we snuck over to old man Baker's field and he had a peach orchard and they were on watch. My sister and brother and I climbed up the tree and I
was getting peaches and just filling up a basket. An old man Baker comes and he comes after us with salt rock and a gun, and you know, salt rock and boy Bernie butt One would have but they got away. But he caught me. Then I had to go to court. He had a lawyer and he said, you know, I was a ring leader of the gang. He was up there saying that I was a ring leader of the gang.
I was there with like so skinny, with these long straggly braids and my little, you know, blue checker dress, sitting there like this, and like he's talking about this ring leader you know that did thousands of dollars worth of damage, and on and on, and then they had me come up in front of and when I had to walk up and everyone looked at me, the whole courtyard burst out laughing. It's like a little house on the prairie. No, it's just like I was a kid.
He used to golf on a local golf course next door to our house. We'd sneak out in the summer at seven o'clock and all the golfers were gone, and we take a pitching wedge and a seven iron and a putter and we hit on this hole that was right near our house. And then and then you're here to get them. Go get off of that green boom. When you hear all the salt and shoots salt. It's hard. It's hard when that's I mean, it doesn't care kill you or anything, but it is. Bernie. Yeah, he used
to shoot us with a salt. Now. The last thing I want to ask you is because I think a lot about this too, do I have any scars on my butt? Put it in the book the next book, Um, to talk to people. I I you know, a big a piece in my book, not a big piece, but an important piece is me talking to people. Is talking to myself as a young person, to a young person who goes into the arts or goes into theater specifically.
But you really have to develop a muscle to not care what other people tell you about what you want to do if you have a really burning passion to do something. Because life is so short, I think people don't read learned growing up how to be happy and how to enjoy themselves enough in a healthy way and in a reasonable way. That's so nice, you know, because my my father, he was a factory worker, but he was really really intelligent, really intelligent, and once I asked him, um,
I think I don't know. I was probably in my early twenties, what is the greatest thing a person could strive for? And I imagined he would give me some lofty answer because he was reading Carl Young, and he was reading Shakespeare and Aristotle and all these guys in the Bible, and he said, you know, the greatest thing to pursue his happiness. And it's just when I was young, I thought, really, yeah, And now now I do I
I do get it, you know. And it's like, even in these times, in these times, it's seems like the most terrible of times, I still try to hold onto that and remember that that no matter what we have, the right, the pursuit of happiness just is our is is a right we're born with that. We're gonna take some questions. What do we Uh? Are you right here? Your hand is raised, Patty. What women inspired you throughout your career? Well, that's a simple time. I go all
the way back. I could start with I loved Madam Curie when I was little. I loved Louisa May Outcott. I loved Joan of arc I love Dava Gardner, Peggy Ann Gardner. Peggy Ann Gardner in In a Tree Grows in Brooklyn. She was awesome and uh and I loved Grace Slick, and I loved John Bayaz, and I love Nina Simone, and I love my daughter. And uh, there's a million women. I mean, you know, there's all kinds of I mean now, lots of really great movie stars.
You know, Emily or Emma Blunt or Emily Blunt or Emma Stone and Kristen Stewart and and all the girl actresses. I like them all. You know. I enjoy being a girl and I enjoy uh, I enjoy the great things that girls do. But um, I am partial to Fyllis. I mean, thank God for that. Must say. I've had a million we have we have fifty hands up here. We try to go boy girl, boy girl, balcony. Um you did. You just sang at the Nobel Prize and it was really just a beaut of moving performance. Um.
And I'm as nervous now as you were then. Um. But but I was thinking about singing that great Bob Dylan song. And I know from reading about Bob Dylan that, um, Alan Ginsburg, that was the song where but where Alan Ginsburg started to say, this guy really has something. And I'm wondering if you connected your your friendship with Alec Alan Ginsburg with the performance of that song heart Reign is Gonna Fall. Well, it would have been a nice thought,
but truthfully I didn't and I didn't really know that. Um. The thing that I connected, a small personal thing, is I do have a blue eyed son, and so singing those words where have you been my blue eyed son? Takes me right to my blue eyed son. Also, I heard it when I was fifteen years old, and when I heard that song, I thought, this fella is a poet. So I perhaps it's the song that brings those thoughts
that it Um. It resonated with Alan Ginsburg, but it also resonated with me, a fifteen year old school girl. It was like a rombo poem or something. But in I chose the song because I thought he's winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was the first song I heard of his that I felt that this was a poet singing to us. So I went all the way back um and chose chose it. From there, we got time for one more. We have somebody with the mic now hold on. Please Thank you so much, uh Ms Smith.
It's an honor to speak with you. As an artist and art educator. I've used just kids in my classroom to basically talk about an artist journey and discovering your path. You always do an advice uce to a young artist, what immunition would you have to help stockpile that we can continue to encourage positivity, creativity and individuality. Well, you know, the advice that I have is always very simple, that you you want to pursue life as an artist. Um. Just I could go all the way back to when
we first started talking about Robert Maplethorpe. He wanted to be an artist and he had to sacrifice a lot to make that choice. He sacrificed all his all the all his comforts, the support of his family, his scholarship. Um. He sacrificed all of that because he knew what he wanted. He had a vision, he felt he had a calling. And when you have that um and and feel it, you can't live without pursuing it. Then you have to do everything that you can um to magnify the gift
that you have, and it's going to cost you. It's you have to be willing to sacrifice. You have to be willing uh to work really hard. You have to be willing to perhaps go years or quite a long time without recognition, without acknowledgement, and you have to um in the face of all that, maintain your vision as vision,
you know, being being a real artist. And maybe in you know, some old fashioned sense, the way I look at art it is it is like it is a sacred quest and uh, it doesn't have anything to do with fame and fortune. You can achieve fame and fortune in the pursuit of it, because perhaps the stars are aligned,
but that can't be your prime directive. Your prime directive has to be to do something new, to give something new to the canon of art, to give something new to the people, and uh, to do something great, to do something enduring, something inspiring, something that will take people somewhere they've never been taken. And you have to remember, you know why you want to create. And so I just say again, simply hard work and sacrifice happily, because
if you can't sacrifice with joy, then it's meaningless. And if you sacrifice and you maintain your joy and and your enthusiasm and your curiosity and your ability to work hard, you'll achieve something. So that's what I got. We're gonna do. We're gonna do this one last one because I'm afraid you're gonna hurt yourself if I don't go right ahead, Patty, when you were starting your career, what musicians inspired you
the most? Well, first of all, I have to say again, I never embarked on a career, so you know, my road was so serendipitous that it's not really fair to call it a career. But the people that inspired me the most when I was young were um eleanor Steber, you know, uh, Maria Collis, M. Coltrane, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, of course, and Joan Baez, and and then hearing Grace Slicks sing White Rabbit. I mean, there's so many Neil Young, we have so many, there's so many people to be
inspired by. But the animals, you know, they just go on and on. But you know, if I had to distill it really down, Bob Dylan was really one of my greatest influences. I let's have a round of applause for Patty's ned. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing makes a fin w