MFM Presents… Disgraceland

and grime of Central Park, the Chelsea Hotel in forty second Street, rape and murder, all of it just to shot away, as they say. But Patti Smith survived all of it to become one of the last centuries great artists, a great musician, someone who made great music. Unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show. That wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my melotron called Falling from Chelsea MK. Two. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to

one Bad Apple by the Osmonds. And why would I play you that specific slice of plastic sibling cheese? Could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on February tenth, nineteen seventy one, And that was the day that Patti Smith first took the stage with more than just words, with a guitarist at her side, and began building a previously unimagined bridge between the art world and rock and roll. And she did it for the criminals.

their highest honor, the Jacqueline Kennedy on Nassis Medal. She's met the Pope She accepted a Nobel Prize on behalf of and at the request of, none other than Bob Dylan, and her name rings true throughout the same universities and museums that teach and celebrate the author's poets and artists Louisa may Alcott, Arthur Rimbau, and Fried de Callo, to name a few that Patti Smith has drawn inspiration from

throughout her life. To dismiss Patty Smith as merely a rock star is like calling Steve Jobs a computer salesman. She is not just a musician. She's what I refer to as the high priestess of art, someone who holds rare dual citizenship in the gritty origins of punk and in the highest echelons of New York and European society.

Catholic priests speak of being called to the priesthood that moment when to hear God's voice imploring them to serve Him, to dedicate their lives to him, to sacrifice everything in his name. Many of them faced not just persecution, but even death in pursuit of their calling. Jesus' apostle Peter was crucified upside down. Bartholomew, another apostle was skinned alive, tortured over days, and eventually decapitated. Deacon Lawrence of Rome in the year two fifty eight, a d was roasted

to death over an open fire. In seventeen ninety two, during the French Revolution, over two hundred priests were massacred by angry mobs in under forty eight hours. Spanish Clarician priests, Salvadoran Jesuits, Mexican seminary students, and countless others who were once called have been martyred and suffered horrific deaths for they're calling. But Patti Smith, who once famously saying Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine, was no murdyr.

She was and is an artist, and similar to priests, artists here recalling they must also navigate danger, violence, and potential death murder, even in pursuit of their art. So when and where was Patti Smith, the high Priestess of art called to become an artist? And what kind of danger, violence, and true crime did she have to escape to become the artist we all know her to be. As a little girl in suburban New Jersey in the nineteen fifties,

the first stories Patti Smith heard were dark. The original Brother's Grim collection of children's fairy tales from the eighteen hundreds spoke of a stepmother in the Juniper Tree story who decapitated her step son and cooked his flesh in a soup to serve to the boy's unsuspecting father. In the original version of Cinderella entitled Askinputul, one stepsister uses a knife to cut off her toes, and another hacks

off the heel of her foot. Yet these stories were nothing compared to what Patty later read in the Bible, specifically in the Old Testament, where in Judges nineteen, one woman is severed into twelve different pieces, each given to a different tribe of Israel. Her sin none. She was offered up to protect the crimes of a rapist. In Judges four, Yale offers an unsuspecting enemy general hospitality, but when the general falls asleep, Yale takes a spike and

hammers it through his skull. In King's n Eyes, Queen Jezebel's eunuchs throw her from a window, where she's then trampled to death by horses, horses, horses and horse, and later on as a teenager, rape and murder were more than just shot away. All of these stories were right there, out in the open, in Patti Smith's Bible, and in her history books, and in the museums she visited as a child. If the executioner was feeling merciful, he'd build the pire low to the ground to ensure a quick death.

But this executioner was not feeling merciful. He built the pire extra high so that Joan of Arc would be guaranteed a prolonged and painful death. And that's exactly what happened. The flames took their time, and the ancient Greeks used funeral pyre to honor their departed emperors and heroes. The Romans too, not the English. When it came to Joan of Arc. They had something else in mind, revenge, public disgrace,

maximum pain. In the eyes of the English dominated Ecclesiastical Tribunal of fourteen thirty one, nineteen year old Joan of Arc was a heretic. She claimed she'd been called by a divine voice. She cut her hair, she dressed like

a boy. She made a mockery of modern authority in social norms, and in the process inspired and uprising that turned the tide of the hundreds years War, driving the English out of France, and for those perceived sins, she was now roped to a stake in Market Square in the city of Ruan high above a gritted stack of dry wood built to burn slow and fierce, with its blue flames snapping at the ski of her feet, and black smoke corroding her lungs, white hot pain piercing every

cell in her body. The blaze rose up over her legs, her midriff, and no one heard her scream and no one saw her cry when the inferno engulfed her completely. Soon enough, Joan of Arc was gone, but embodied only another martyr, this one officially executed for the crimes of heresy and cross dressing, but whose life's work would inspire

generations and whose name would forever ring true. In nineteen sixty six, herself just nineteen years old, Patti Smith stood outside on the streets of Philadelphia, across from the Museum of Modern Art, about five miles from the more modern Market Square, and looked up at a statue of Joan of Arc, Emmanuel Fremier's gilded bronze depiction of the young martyr cast a piercing impression upon young Patty. Here was this woman her own age, who gave everything for what

she believes. It was then that Patty knew she would have to do the same. It was then that Patty Smith heard her calling in the shadows of martyrs and museums, to become an artist. The stakes of failing to fulfill her life's goal were, as they are for most teenagers, dramatic and intense. A life as anything but an artist, a life as something else in suburban New Jersey, would

be its own kind of death. But art was dangerous, and not in the fairy tale Old Testament, musty historical kind of way, but in a real and scary kind of way. One of Patty's favorite novelists, Jean Jeannet, lived in squalor, forced into a life of crime, nearly imprisoned for life. One of her favorite musicians, the jazz singer Billie Holiday, died addicted to heroin. In her final living moments, she was handcuffed to her bed by federal agents and

placed under arrest for narcotics possession. One of Patty's favorite painters, Jackson Pollock, was driven to alcoholism and eventually off the road. In his oldsmobile where he flipped his car, crushed his skull, and decapitated one of his passengers. And these were just the artists that Patty knew about. Thanks to her true crime obsessed mother, Patty Smith also knew about the dangers

of the world right outside her suburban window. Nineteen thirty two, Patti Smith's mother was traumatized by events that were unfolding over the radio airwaves, just as the rest of the nation was One of America's most famous sons, the Aviator Charles Lindberg, was the victim of what had quickly become America's most famous crime. Lindberg's twenty month old son had been kidnapped. The kidnapper used the latter to creep into the second story nursery of the Limburg's New Jersey estate.

Within twenty four hours of the abduction, the crime was a national sensation. By daybreak, over one hundred reporters and photographers had breached the gates of the estate and contaminated the crime scene. Notorious mafioso Al Capone issued a statement from a Chicago jail cell offering a reward for the return of the baby, and before the night of the crime had ended, newswires like the Associated Press were deluged with bulletins, transmitting over fifty thousand words in just hours.

Radio stations across the country took the unprecedented step of canceling all programming to issue a coordinated bulletin describing the child's appearance, in creating a complete national radio blackout. And it was through the radio that Patty Smith's mother became transfixed with the early details of the crime, as well as the saga's conclusion. Ten weeks after the kidnapping, the badly decomposed body of Charles Lindbergh's baby was found by a truck driver relieving himself on the side of a

New Jersey highway. The infant's corpse had been partially scavenged by animals. Just like Jezebel and the horses, and like Pollock and the crushed skull, like Yale's enemy a hole through the head, and like Joan of Arc, the Lindbergh Baby would not soon be forgotten. Young Patty Smith was

transfixed by her mother's retelling of this story. She never forgot it, just like she never forgot the Brother's Grim or the Old Testament, where Jean, Billy Jackson or Joan, and she took was that life was dangerous, and so too the pursuit of art was dangerous, and in nineteen sixty seven, the only place to really pursue art was in America's most dangerous place, New York City. The whispers Patty Smith heard at night in Central Park where the stuff of terror. The park was more than a bucolic

playground for New Yorkers to laze away their afternoons. Each night it became a den of violent criminals, thieves, rapists, and murderers, all prowling about for the ruination of souls. Central Park was also Patti Smith's sometime bedroom. It was where she'd lie down during that first summer when she arrived in the city. On those nights when she couldn't find a welcoming doorway in which to lay her head,

Central Park was where she slept. And in nineteen sixty seven, Central Park was also the place where a fifteen year old girl was brutally raped and her friend stomped so severely that he was left in critical condition. It was, in the mid nineteen sixties a place where nearly one thousand felonies were committed on average each year in Central

Park during the Summer of Love. For all the groups of young hippies strewn about on blankets with acoustic guitars and flowers in their hair, there were just as many any self described wolf packs, hordes of young neighborhood delinquents swarming the park in shifts to rob in main not just the hippies, but the homosexuals cruising the park so called predatory zones. Patti Smith may have slept in Central Park, but it was in another park where she met the

first great love of her life, Robert Maplethorpe. She knew him from the bookstore where she'd taken a job. He was a customer, and she was in Tompkins Square Park on a date with an older man, a man who could afford to buy her a meal that she could

not afford to buy herself. But in New York City, nothing's free, So just before the man attempted to collect his payment sexually, Patti Smith recognized the good looking boy from the bookstore and ran to him in the park, introducing him on the spot to a predatory lunch date as her boyfriend. Robert Maplethorpe, who was high on LSD at the time, went along with the ruse, which he

no doubt thought was hilarious. Robert found Patty Lee Smith to be not only funny, but also sexy, intelligent, creative, a perfect partner in crime for his own first foray into New York City. They shared the same goal to become artists. They weren't sure what kinds of artists they wanted to become, just that they were most certainly destined to create things that would change the world of culture

and art as they knew it. In their first apartment together, the one in Brooklyn where they had to scrub the wall of the splattered blood and psychotic scribblings from the previous tenant, they painted, created drawings and collages, and wrote. They read the great works of the great writers, those who were also criminals, not just Jean Jeanne, but oh Henry and William S Burrows, Burrows who shot and killed his wife in a game of William Tell and got

away with it. And they studied to Cooney and Rivera, Warhol and Picasso, and prayed at the altar of Coltrane, sympathized with those devils the rolling Stones, and filled in the ooral gaps with the Cherells and Dylan, Bob not Thomas. They had little food, even less money, and they stole when they had to, but they never begged. What they did have was desire, and that desire gave way to faith, and faith to creation, and soon the artistic callings of

each would bear fruit. Robert with photography and Patty with words. A new apartment, this one in Manhattan, signified progress, with the chalk outline of the dead body outside the front door precipitated another move to a less dangerous neighborhood, so further uptown they went to the Chelsea Hotel. These days, the Chelsea Hotel on West twenty third Street, like most of Manhattan, is a glitzy, gentrified incarnation of what it

once was, a dangerous rooming house for bohemian vagabonds. In nineteen sixty nine, the Chelsea was part artist colony, in part central command for the drug fueled late sixties counterculture, housing and hosting the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Leonard Cohen

in the Velvet undergrounds. Nico Salvador Dali stayed at the Chelsea when there was no room at the Saint Regis Alan Ginsburg cruised the lobby for dates, even taking Patty to lunch one day, mistaking her with her short crop Joan of arc Hare to be a young pretty boy. Dylan died at the Chelsea Thomas not Bob, while the poet fell into a comb in Room two five after downing eighteen straight whiskies before he was carried off to

be pronounced dead at Saint Vincent's. The Andy Warhol superstar Evie Cedric set her room at the Chelsea on fire while high on barbituates. She had to be rescued from room one oh five, where Warhol had shot part of his acclaimed nineteen sixty six film Chelsea Girls. In a few years prior, a twenty year old dancer named Lucille Andell found herself on the roof of the Chelsea Hotel.

She walked carefully on her tiptoes close to the edge before giving into the darkness that had overtaken her, plunging to her death ten stories below. Along the way, the usually graceful Lucille struck the third floor fire escape with a thud, partially dismembering herself before pancaking on West twenty third, but all the danger that the Chelsea Hotel repres Sena didn't scare Patty Smith. Instead, it compelled her. Besides, Patty could navigate it. She wasn't big into drugs and she

seldom drank. And besides, she and her partner, Robert Maplethorpe were broke. Which other hotel would take art as collateral until they could come up with the cash to rent a room. None and no other hotel had Burrows and the poet Jim Carroll roaming its halls. Patty befriended both of them. She also befriended Janis Choplin, who stayed in Room four or eleven during her run of shows at the Fillmore East. Patty listened to Janis express herself through music.

Patty worked up poems with Jim Carroll, and Patty met Bob Dylan's fixer and confident, Bob Newarth. Bob Newarth encouraged Patty to work her poems into songs, to listen to Hank Williams, to listen to Blind Willie mctel, to get down to the root of what she felt, and to pull it out and spill it all over open chords on an acoustic guitar. Creatively Patty was encouraged and compelled.

Robert was too, but in a darker way. It was nineteen sixty nine The Rolling Stones, as Brian Jones had died, and so too did the lsd Dreams from the Summer of Love. Robert took the Stone's sympathy for the devil a little too literally. Charles Manson was all anyone at the Chelsea could talk about in nineteen sixty nine. Just as Patty Smith's mother had been obsessed with the Lindberg case, Robert Maplethorpe was obsessed with this latest crime of the century.

Out in Hollywood. Seven people were dead in what appeared to be a ritualistic murder spree with a decidedly rock and roll edge. The Tate LaBianca murders in August of nineteen sixty nine were hard not to be affected by, and so Robert Maplethorpe began working a darker vision into his art. He became obsessed with the concept of evil. It was a stark counterpoint to his Catholic upbringing, a reflection of what he saw on the street up on forty Second, where he hustled sex for cash to help

support himself and Patty. Patty worried about Robert. Sex work was as dangerous as a gun. Nineteen sixty nine, Midtown Manhattan, forty second Street aka the Deuce, a neon open air sex market, predators and prey pros and junkies applying their trade for pimps and pushers, chickenhawks, older skeevy looking men in trench coats on the prow for young runaways. A

few dollars went a long way. A runaway could make a buck or two with one job and be able to afford a slice of pizza, a coke, and a movie ticket into one of the theaters, the Liberty, the Empire, the Victory, and be able to pass out in relative peace and quiet until the shakedown artist showed up looking to rob this using patrons out on the street. Robert Maplethorpe kept his cool. It was all about the look, the right nod from the right dude, and Robert knew

it was on. But danger was everywhere. Cops posed as John's to entrap hustlers and turn their backs when they were harassed and assaulted. Many clients refused to pay. Some insisted on rough stuff with hustlers. Strangulation, knife play. Sickos were slitting the throats and the theaters, and the working boy's screams drowned out by the soundtracks blasting from the screens. Robert was a quote unquote rent boy, or so he told himself. He worked the streets to help pay his

and Patty's rent Chelsea. It wasn't the sex so much that bothered Patty, it was the danger. Their relationship was an open one, and Robert's homosexuality by this time was no secret. It was also around this time that Patty became romantically involved with the poet Jim Carroll. Jim hustled up on forty second Street as well. Robert asked Jim how he knew that he wasn't gay. Jim told him that he knew because he always asked for money, whereas

sometimes Robert didn't. Either way, Jim hustled for heroin, Robert hustled for rent. For Robert there was no other way to support his pursuit of becoming an artist, and for Patty there had to be a less dangerous way. Sam Shepherd was that way. Sam was a writer, a California cowboy, a musician, an established off Broadway playwright, and by the time he and Patti Smith began their affair at the Chelsea Hotel, already a husband and father. It didn't matter.

Sam encouraged Patty to sing, He bought her her first guitar. He encouraged her artistically, romantically. Sam was dangerous, but compared to Jim Carroll.

sexy award winning playwright couldn't hurt. Sam prevailed upon Patty to collaborate with him on a new play, and they called it Cowboy Mouth. Cowboy Mouth was a semi autobiographical account of Sam and Patty's relationship. Both acted in the two lead roles. When it was staged in April of nineteen seventy one, and there it was Sam and Patty's illicit relationship brought to life for all to see. Afterward, Sam freaked out, he had a wife and a kid,

that it was wrong and he knew it. He abruptly left New York City to return to his family in Vermont. At first, Patty was devastated, but it didn't take long before she put a relationship with Sam Shepard in the proper perspective. It was brief, explosive, and overall a positive experience in the end, despite who got hurt and how it was worth it because Sam I'm Shephard helped Patty Smith finally find her voice. Cowboy Mouth wasn't just autobiographical.

It was also about a character who moves seamlessly between art and crime, specifically music, rock and roll, actually and crime. To this point in her life, Patti Smith had spent her life moving between art and crime, shoplifting, harrowing, hustling, Charles Lindbergh, Charles Manson, chalk outlined bodies and bloodstained tenement walls, Jean Janet, William Burrows and William Tell, Willie Micktel, Bob Newarth, Robert Maplethorpe, and Jim Carroll, Sam Shepherd. It was all

one big art and crime collage. It was who she had become, and now it was time to give voice to all of that transgressive influence, to bridge the gap between art and artist, to be the voice of the voiceless, for those persecuted for following their calling, for their crimes, and to do it all with rock and roll. We'll be right back after this. We're We're, We're On February tenth, nineteen seventy one, Patti Smith stood on stage at Saint Mark's Church in New York's East Village and stared out

at the crowd. By her side, a lanky and musically lethal guitar playing friend, Lenny Kay, staring up at them from the audience, a who's who of downtown cool, Lou Reed, Todd Rudgren, Robert Maplethorpe, Alan Ginsburg, and Moore. The evening was billed as a night of poetry featuring the Warhol, performance artist and poet Gerard Malanga and Patti Smith. For whatever reason, Patty decided to include a musical element. Lenny

Lenny was already a musical encyclopedia. He wrote for jazz and pop rolling Stone Crawdaddy, and at the time was busy assembling songs for what would become one of the greatest compilation albums in rock and roll history, the Nuggets Original Artifacts from the Psychedelic Era nineteen sixty five to nineteen sixty eight set, which would become the definitive collection of American garage rock singles and eventually one of punk

rock's guiding lights. In fact, the Nuggets' liner notes feature one of the earliest uses of the term punk rock. Lenny Kay not only knew how to play guitar, Lenny Kay knew his ship. With Lenny at her side, Patty Smith stared out into the audience. As the crowd settled, the two performers looked at their guests, their faces flushed with anticipation. They could all sense it something different was

about to happen. New Yorkers know this feeling. It's familiar, the promise of the new that feeling that you're about to be let in on the secret, in on something special. It's a promise that in the nineteen seventies, New York City seemed to constantly fulfill. The lights dimmed, guitar feedback began to creep from Lenny's amplifier, and the crowd dropped

the nervous chatter. The feedback unfurled throughout the room, bending both piercing and warm at the same time, like a blanket of nails, and Patty grabbed the microphone atop the stand with one hand, raised her other hand in the air, and abruptly brought it down to her side. Lenny muted his guitar silence. Patti Smith leaned into the microphone and said,

this one's for the criminals. With that, Lenny k least the squeal and squawk from his Gibson melody maker, and Patty meted out the powerful words from the first lines of her poem Oath, Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine. And suddenly it wasn't a poem anymore. It was a song, and with Lenny it was rock and roll. Patty Smith had answered her calling and people loved it.

The crowd that night adored her, and Patty was indeed something new, something unseen, A transgressive hybrid of poetry and music, was something powerful to say. The sins of her generation were not yet answered for, and maybe they weren't even sins. Who knew that was the point, all the crime, all the transgression, the so called sins. The cross was theirs and theirs alone to bear heresy. Like all great art, the action is in the risk. Patty's words were shocking,

like Joan of ARC's words. Patty's possessed unyielding conviction, and those words had the power to inspire. And inspire they did. Patty and Lenny brought their rock and roll poetry hybrid to other stages. After this, they opened for the New York Dolls that their famed Mercer Art Center gigs. They played Le Jardin at the Other End, which had been

and would again be called the Bitter End. Before long, in nineteen seventy five, Patty found herself on the Bowery in Manhattan's Lower East Side, with all its grit and grime, a motley collection of the unhoused and unwashed, derelx and artists clinging desperately to a world trying to shake them loose like fleas on the backside of a rabid dog, all just steps from William S. Burrows's apartment, where the iconic novelists lived in squalor and would receive Patty as

a guest. Whenever she was in the neighborhood. It was just Patty in her fearlessness and her curiosity, and Borrows and his heroin and his shotgun. Down the street near Bleaker, the crowd assembled outside the doors of cebe GEB's A

Little Die. No one had cared about five minutes before, But tonight, Patty, in the new band she'd assembled with Lenny on guitar, Richard Sole on piano, Ivan Carl on bass, and j. D. Darty was set to perform the Patti Smith Group, along with one of the most inventive groups to come out of the nineteen seventies in New York television. Both bands were in the midst of a multi week residency. Just like at the Saint Mark's Church gig a few years prior, you could feel the anticipation in the air,

except now there were actual stakes. Ever since that first performance at Saint Mark's, Patty was heralded as a savior. This new art was creating, this poetry rock and roll hybrid. It was the natural progression of a century long march from the romance of Arthur Rimbau to the squalor of Jean Jeannet, to the grime of Jim Carroll, to the pop of the Andy Warhol, to the music of Patti Smith.

And therefore, Patty's music was seen as the antidote to the poisonous drivel filling airwaves in the mid seventies, soulless, bloated, spiritually starved rock music. Patty was unofficially drafted by New York's downtown tastemakers and uptown glitterati too. As she said, quote, preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll unquote, And that's exactly what the Patti Smith Group did each

night at CBGB's. Patty drew strength from her mentor, William S. Burrows and her best friend, the first great love of her life, Robert Maplethorpe, both of whom positioned themselves each night right up front. Robert was devoted to Patty's success as an artist in the same way he was to his own, on a near spiritual level. Soon, the powerful executive Clive Davis from Arista Records would also devote himself to Patty's success, signing her to a lucrative recording contract.

The Patti Smith Group's debut album, Horses produced by the Velvet Undergrounds John Cale, the one with the stark and beautiful Robert Maplethorpe portrait of Patty on the cover, did what it was supposed to do, its part to save rock and roll. The album begins with a bang, just as Patty did at Saint Mark's, with a powerful rejection of the past. Somebody sins but not mine. Horses nailed

the moment. Kids loved it, so did the critics. None other than America's greatest rock critic, Lester Bangs said in his Cream magazine review that Patty's songs on Horses to quote, deep wellsprings of emotion that extremely few artists in rock or anywhere else are capable of reaching. Unquote, that was just it, few artists in rock or anywhere else. I don't know if Lester Bangs intended to cast Patty's are outside the parameters of rock or not, but that's exactly

where her creativity was leading her. She wasn't just a musician. She was clearly something else, something new, someone an artist who wasn't only revealing something about herself and her listeners,

she was revealing something that hadn't been revealed before. Here was an artist who was reclaiming rock and roll from under the safe nightlight of mainstream rocks radio play duvet and dragging it back under the grimy blanket of nails inhabited by the criminal underworld, both the perpetrators and the victims. Patty Smith was a revolution in an iconic twist. Her cause was celebrated not only downtown but uptown as well. Soon elite culture would take note and open its doors.

Aside from the predictable growsing from conservative detractors over her line about Jesus, everyone it seemed, loved Patty Smith's music except Robert Maplethorpe. Well, not exactly. Robert was an ardent supporter of Patty's, but ever since their earliest days, when Patty would sing to them back in that Brooklyn apartment, Robert would always say to her, sing me a song I can dance to, Patty. The world didn't dance to the songs on horses. They studied them like something worthy

of a museum exhibit. No, the dancing would come later with Bruce Springsteen. Perhaps you've heard of him. At the time, Bruce Springsteen had just become the definition of an overnight sensation upon relief his third album, Born to Run. The previously obscure rock and roll band leader had rocketed to stardom when he appeared on the covers of both Newsweek

and Time magazine simultaneously. Now in July of nineteen seventy six, he was filing a lawsuit against his manager, trying to extricate himself from a horrible contract, one that he believed to be criminal. Patti Smith, at the time, was playing shows in support of horses and preparing to record her follow up album, Radio Ethiopia, while living with her new boyfriend,

the guitarist from Blue Oyster Cult, Alan Lanier. None of them knew it yet, but all three of these artists, much like their New York City fans, were about to

be gripped in fear. Young lovers like Patty and Allen, and like the couples who flocked to record stores to purchase Springsteen's records, were about to get swept up in a year of paranoia, because, as the New York City night now belonged to a lunatic July twenty ninth, nineteen seventy six, one ten Am Pellam Bay the Bronx, two women, eighteen year old Donna Lauria and nineteen year old Jody Valenti sat in a nosemobile on the side of the road in the dark of night, discussing the time they

just had at Peach Trees, a local discotheque, and the heavy rhythm from the tramps that's where the happy people go supplied the adrenaline still coursing through them. The vibe was pierced by a passing car on a not so far away street blaring the haunting new hit by Blue Oyster Cult, Don't Fear the Reaper. Suddenly the mood turned, the street got a little darker, the inside of the car a little quieter. Donna opened the door to leave. From out of the darkness a man with a gun.

Donna startled. The man crouched onto one knee, took aim at Donna with both hands, and Jody screamed. Donna Lauria died instantly. The gunman got off another two shots, and one hit Jody in the thigh. She lived to tell

the harrowing story to the New York newspapers. Three months later, the next shootings happened two young lovers, eighteen year old Rosemary Keenan and twenty year old Carl Denaro escaped the killer who fired into Carl's car and Queen's Carl took a bullet in the head but survived and sewed, did Rosemary. The cops connected the forty four caliber shellcasings from the Queen shooting to the Bronx shooting, and the papers came up with a spiffy name for this lunatic terrorizing New Yorkers,

the forty four caliber killer. Baby. Don't Fear the Reaper. That line from the Blue Oyster cult single kept asking the impossible from speakers across the city in the spring. In summer of seventy six and later in November, another shooting, Seasons, Don't Fear the Reaper. Another couple of teenage girls, another Donna, this one Donna Demassi sixteen, along with joe Anne Lomino eighteen.

Two shots and both girls survived, but the papers, especially the New York Daily News columns Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill, traded inc for industry scale paranoia. New Yorkers sweated out the winter La.

gunman appeared out of nowhere. She saw the gun, she raised her textbook in front of her face. The gunman shot, and the bullet blasted through the book and into Virginia's face. Virginia was dead here, but now they're gone. A month later, a model and her boyfriend parked at about three am on the side of the Hutchinson Parkway in the Bronx. One dead model, one dead boyfriend. Romeo and Juliet are together in eternity. Come on, baby, don't fear the reaper.

And on May thirtieth, nineteen seventy seven, when Daily News calmed, Miss Jimmy Breslin was revealing to the world the psychotic rambling of the forty four caliber killer sent to Breslin himself by the Killer, who claimed for all to be, in his words, the son of Sam aka the self proclaimed Chubby Bohemoth aka Beezobub aka Satan aka Death himself

aka the Reaper. While Breslin freaked New York City the fuck out, while cops hunted for the killer and the killer hunted for victims, Patty Smith was planning her next album, her third, the follow up to Radio Ethiopia. And while the NYPD hunted for the Son of Sam, Patty was still hunting for a song her friend Robert Maplethorpe could dance to. By June of that year, Bruce Springsteen had

finally extracted himself from his legal problems. It was beginning work on his belated follow up to Born to Run, an album called Darkness on the Edge of Town, and there was plenty of darkness to go around, especially in New Yorktown. Investigators were at a dead end, unable to hunt down the Sun of Sam. The Knight no longer belonged to the city's lovers, but Springsteen didn't care. There

was something there, the wisp of a song. As the sessions began with producer Jimmy Iavin, Springsteen had the chorus. It was defiant, triumphant. It reclaimed something. It went because the knight belongs to lovers. But that was it. That was all he had. The end of June came and the Son of Sam shot another couple, Salvatore Lupo twenty and Judy Placbo seventeen, and both survived. The Cobs kept up their hunt for the killer, but were still coming

up empty by the end of the month. July hit with the heat of a thousand suns, and that meant that it had been a full year of terror in New York City. The self proclaimed chubby bohem Is celebrated by shooting at a parked car a couple kissing on their first date. Stacey Moskowitz and Robert Violente, both twenty, both were shot in the head. Stacy lived, Robert did not. In August, Patty Smith entered the Record Plant to begin

work on her new album. That same week, police acting on a tip interviewed a chubby twenty something postal worker up in Yonkers named David Berkowitz. The following day, Berkowitz was arrested. The Son of Sam manhunt had ended. New York breathed a sigh of relief. Patti Smith kept her head down and worked, still hunting for a hit, a

song Robert Maplethorpe could dance to. On September twenty seventh, Jimmy Iavin, who was also now producing Patty's new album, Springsteen's demo of Because the Night, into the studio for Patty. Patty heard something in the song that Bruce hadn't not just defiance, but again reclamation. She channeled it all into verse lyrics, Come on now, try and understand the way I feel when I'm in your hands, take my hand,

come undercover. They can't hurt you now, can't hurt you now, can't hurt you now, because the Knight belongs to lovers once more, and now the son of Sam was behind bars, and young couples in New York were once again free to frolic. Because The Night was a massive smash. Patti Smith had her hit, and Robert Maplethorpe had a song you could dance to. Now Patty Smith was more than just an artist. For a minute, it seemed Patty Smith was a pop star. Because The Night was Patty Smith's

commercial breakthrough. It was a top forty hit, top five in the UK Easter. The album that the single supported sold better than Patty's previous two albums combined. But pop stardom was never her goal being an artist was. An artist need fuel in inspiration, and sometimes the only source for them is love. So naturally, while at the top of her game, Patty Smith walked away from the game.

She fell in love with another artist, another guitarist, this one Fred Sonic Smith from the proto punk anarchists and Motor City Legends the MC five. In nineteen seventy nine, Patty moved to Detroit to marry Fred and traded a quote unquote career for fulfillment, the kind of fulfillment that only creating a family can bring. But soon enough, New York City would come calling again with some very bad news.

By the late eighties, Patti Smith's best friend, the first great love of her life, her creative confidant, her literal and figurative partner in crime. During those formative years in New York, Robert Maplethorpe, after having become one of the most successful photographers on the planet, was dying from AIDS related complications. On his deathbed, Robert asked Patty appointed question,

did art get us? Perhaps Art took Robert, but it didn't take fred sonicsmith heart failure did Patty's other great love. Fred Smith died in nineteen ninety four, five years after Robert Maplethorpe, and Patty did what all great artists do

to process grief. She worked, She made new music, went on tour with Bob Dylan, moved back to New York City, and she wrote prodigiously, publishing books of poetry, books about her obsession with the works of Warhol, books of drawings, of photography, a collection of song lyrics, all to critical acclaim, and in twenty ten she released Just Kids, a personal memoir of her early life in her time in New York City with Robert Maplethorpe, and later that year, Just

Kids won the National Book Award for non Fiction, one of the most prestigious literary honors in the world. In twenty fifteen, Patty released a second memoir, M Train, which focused more on her present life and the unconventional ways in which she'd pursued making art and the irredeemable loss she felt after the death of her husband Fred. M Train was a national bestseller, and Patty followed it up with four more titles, including the recent Bread of Angels

another memoir. Each book was released to more critical praise and numerous awards and nominations Grammys, a Pen Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, honorary doctorates from prestigious universities. It's now twenty twenty six, and it's clear that Patti Smith is still living a life that few artists get to live. She is, as I mentioned earlier, the high priestess of art. She has enjoyed both critical and commercial success, artistic credibility in the underground, and doors that fly open for her

at elite cultural institutions. Most importantly, she survived. She's seventy nine years old and has lived to harvest the fruits of her artistic labor, no small feat. Most artists of consequence succumbed to the ever present danger that surrounds them. Jean Janay and William S. Burrows lived to be seventy five and eighty three, respectively, but Rimbaud died at thirty seven, Pollock at forty four, Coltrane at forty, Brian Jones twenty seven, and too many other artists to name, all of whom

died too young. And of course there was Robert Maplethorpe, who asked, did Art get us dead at just forty two? Perhaps the reason Patty Smith survived is something that she revealed in Mtrain. When you read it, you can't help but feel Patty writing at times in a sort of gumshoe detective way, channeling her inner Mickey Spellane, her inner Raymond Chandler. It's not full on Philip Marlowe. It's subtle. But what isn't subtle is Patty's love of detective fiction,

both on the page and on screen. In a word, Patty Smith is crime obsessed. Law and Order, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Midsummer Murders, Sherlock Holmes, Luther, CSI, Miami, The Killing. Patti Smith reveals an m Train that she is so obsessed with some of these crime series that she will sometimes rearrange her travel schedule in order to catch various shows when they air on TV in different countries.

Her obsession with the show The Killing was so intense that she wrote to the producers when it was canceled to mourn the loss. The producers responded by giving Patty a cameo on one of the series' last episodes, but Patti Smith's obsession with TV crime shows. I don't believe that it's just folly. I believe that it comes from Patty's extensive expos to actual crime throughout the course of her life. The Lindbergh Baby, Charles Manson, The Son of Sam.

These true crime stories were formative for Patty Smith, as was the ever present danger of New York City in the nineteen sixties and seventies. The blood splattered walls of her first apartment, the body outlined in chalk on the street outside Roberts, the dancer plunging to her death from the top of the Chelsea, her friend William S Burrows, who shot and killed his wife and got away with it. Jim Carroll's deadly addiction to heroin, Robert Maplethorpe's forty Second

Street Hustling. Not to mention the addiction, violence, and deadly recklessness that accompanies most artists lives. Patty Smith was a hair's breath from all of it, and she learned from it all, learned from the crime, learned how not to succumb to the danger of it, but instead to use

it as creative fuel. Patty Smith survived to become that rare type of artists that she became because I believe Patti Smith knew what all crime fiction and true crime fans know, and that's how to stay safe, to be vigilant aware, and like all great artists, to trust her intuition, to believe in that calling, because the knight doesn't just belong to lovers, it belongs to the criminals. I'm Jake

Brennan in this is Disgraceland. All right, guys, you've not heard the Patti Smith episode of the disgrace Slam podcast. The question I want to ask you all is which musician's memoir or autobiography would you recommend? Get your answers in via voicemail and text to six one seven nine oh six six six three eight, or hit me on the socials at disgracelampod in the comments. Here comes some credits.

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