2025 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Patti Smith’s debut album Horses, with Robert Mapplethorpe’s black and white cover portrait of the artist posed with her jacket slung over her shoulder, Frank Sinatra-style – ‘the most electrifying image I had ever seen of a woman of my generation’, exclaimed Camille Paglia, who reckoned it one of the most powerful portraits since the French Revolution. The record inside the cover sleeve hasn’t wilted either, retaining its classic status as a declaration of desperado intent, from the boppy ‘Redondo Beach’ to the trippy ‘Birdland’ to the unfolding vistas of ‘Gloria’ and ‘Land (of a Thousand Dances)’, where Patti could truly stretch out her skinny arms and fan out her fingers to spread the word. (As the choreographer Paul Taylor once quipped, that’s the definition of lyricism: long arms.) To celebrate the album’s fiftieth, Patti and her band have been touring triumphal live concert versions of Horses across the US and Europe, the rapturous reception at the London Palladium somewhat mottled when Patti brought out Johnny Depp for the encore anthem ‘People Have the Power’, Depp draped and layered in hipster duds in his continuing role as America’s premier hobosexual. Irate fans and commentators on both sides of the Atlantic squawked betrayal, trying to reconcile the populist idealism of Patti’s music and persona with jamming on stage with an alleged spouse abuser and celebrity prima donna who owns a private island in the Exumas.

Whatever one thinks of Depp as an actor, individual, and fashion disaster, he still carries an aura of legend scarfed around his neck and Patti has always been drawn to legend, to a scruffy, buffeted, nicotine-stained charisma that supersedes career dips, scandalabras, and similar secular concerns. Rimbaud, Keith Richards, Bob Dylan, William Burroughs (who fatally shot his wife playing William Tell), Pier Paolo Pasolini, these are among the pantheon figures and expanding cast members in her cosmology, the Pattiverse. The title of her latest memoir and emanation, Bread of Angels, sounds almost Swedenborgian, its text baubled with auguries, portents, celestial blessings, desert howlings, hallowed namedroppings, and mystic synchronicities. Take a hit on the hookah pipe and ponder this: ‘The Revelator held the apocalyptic key just as Rimbaud held the keys to the savage circus. What if those same keys mystically found their way into Bob Dylan’s holy trousers, and after a time, one slipped from his pocket. Might I find it in the dust, trampled by a thousand hooves, the new silver penny.’ Dimes are silver, pennies copper, but let’s not be pedantic and trim Patti’s Pegasus wings, for: ‘Everything is within us: moccasins disintegrating in my hand, the prayer wheel, shaman bells, reliquaries, goddesses with a thousand arms, the blood that flows through my brother’s granddaughter, and the blood of the mind forming these words at this moment.’

It isn’t all stardust and arm-flapping incantations in these pages, praise Allah. In reverent and evocative detail, Patti recounts a baby boomer’s childhood, a lost time of bicycles, endless summers, playing outdoors and pretending to be a coonskin-capped Davy Crockett or Buster Crabbe’s Captain Gallant with no helicopter parents hovering or digital tethers:

There was an outhouse by the road that I sometimes used, as our small bathroom was often occupied. I didn’t mind it, nor the ants crawling across my shoes. It was all captivating, sleeping in the grass, pissing in a hole, a peanut butter sandwich wrapped in a bandana, lunch in the woods.

The family was poor, moving around a lot and having to make do, beset by the sorts of setbacks that a more settled suburban middle-class family might shrug off. Patti honours this hard-knocks upbringing without brandishing her bruises, going mawkish, or turning class traitor. One of her most enduring admirable qualities is that after achieving fame, critical respect, and a modicum of affluence, she hasn’t pulled a post-Hillbilly Elegy JD Vance heel turn and treated the plight of the less fortunate as their own damned fault. She isn’t accursed with that skunk stripe of American exceptionalism, the school of ‘I’ve got mine’, though she has been accused of being a monumental pain with wait staff. (See restaurateur Keith McNally’s memoir I Regret Almost Everything.)

After Just Kids, her 2010 bestselling dual portrait of herself and Mapplethorpe clinging to each other and their aspirations in the floating crash pad of boho Manhattan, the reminiscences here about Mapplethorpe, holing up at the Chelsea Hotel, and forging a rock career in the lower intestine of the punk club CBGB’s have a low hum of autopilot to them and more than a touch of romantic retouching. A referee’s whistle needs to be blown when Patti writes, ‘When I first headed to New York I sought to be an artist, but destiny led me to the precipice of public life.’ Destiny had little to do with it. From the moment Patti slid her dance slippers into the downtown poetry scene, a shark fin of ambition seemed to trail behind, slicing through the fug. It was part of her chalky charisma, a hard focus that owed something to Bob Dylan circa 1965, when his hair went nuclear. Hers wasn’t the bolted-down, battle-mapped ambition of Madonna, but it had its own formidability, lightened and brightened by a goofball side alien to Madonna’s control panel. In the early days at CBGB’s Patti would play with her zipper, scratch her breast, spit, crack jokes about the New York Mets, pay homage to Johnny Carson (the master of segues), and pick loose change and bills off the tiny stage floor flung by fans after the band performed ‘Free Money’. That Patti receded from view as she has tended to solemnize her rocker journey, to time-capsule it:

It was the bicentennial year, 1976, the celebration of the Revolution. We were touring Horses riding straight into the future. It was a freewheeling time, hanging out with William Burroughs at his bunker on the Bowery, watching Television at CBGB, plotting a chaotic future with my brother Todd, and crossing America with a rock and roll band. Our country had its great failings, the shame of Vietnam, racial injustice, and sexual discrimination. But we reveled in America’s cultural contributions…

It sounds more like liner notes than personal testimony, and a more electric account can be found flipping through Claude Gassian’s photo journal Patti Smith: Horses, Paris 1976 (2025), its grainy punch preserving the glamorous immediacy of her emergence. Given that Bread of Angels is Patti’s fourth memoir (Just Kids was followed by M Train and Year of the Monkey), she might be forgiven for desultorily mucking out the same stalls.

The less-trod terrain explored in Bread of Angels covers Patti’s midcareer retreat to Michigan in 1979 and her marriage a year later to Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, the former guitarist for the proto-punk MC5. She was still repairing and finding her bearings after a 14-foot fall she took while performing in Tampa, Florida in 1977, landing on a concrete floor and breaking several neck vertebrae. The photograph of Fred in Bread of Angels reveals a handsome young man with method actor cheekbones, his resemblance to previous beaux Sam Shepard and Television’s Tom Verlaine unmistakable. She definitely had a type. The Smith-Smith courtship and marriage unfolds as a ramshackle idyll in a rust-belt arcadia removed from the strain and exposure of the urban rock grind. They buy a boat that, in need of repair, languishes in the yard, ‘reverberating with the sounds of baseball and Beethoven, never to touch the sea’. They have two children, a son Jackson and a daughter, Jesse Paris, ‘born in the same hospital as Jackson, greeted by a double rainbow’. Patti and Fred collaborate on the 1988 comeback album Dream of Life and co-write the fist-pumping ‘People Have the Power’. If Fred emerges from these pages less as a real person and more of a holographic archetype, well, archetyping is what Patti does, how she arranges her Zodiac.

Twin tragedies hit in 1994. Fred dies of heart failure in his mid-forties, joining the roll call of those taken too soon, which includes Mapplethorpe, bandmate Richard Sohl, and Patti’s brother Todd, who dies only a month after Fred, from a massive stroke while wrapping Christmas presents, one of God’s crueller gestures. The one-two blow brings to mind the double loss of husband and daughter in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, but Didion’s grief memoir for better or worse was written in one register while Bread of Angels veers from bereavement to notational observation to rhapsodic reverie, a mixtape bequeathed to posterity. Part of the mixtape features Patti taking up the clarinet. ‘I played in my own way, which resonated an Arabian night more than the mathematics of music. I had played clarinet for William Burroughs till three in the morning at the American Hotel in Amsterdam.’ Sounds torturous, practically elder abuse.

The double tragedies of Fred and Todd in Bread of Angels are succeeded by a double discovery. Patti reunites with the long-lost daughter that she gave up for adoption when she was 20. Together, through DNA testing, they learn that the man who raised Patti, Grant Smith, was not her biological father, and her sister Linda is actually her half-sister. Her actual begetter was an Ashkenazi Jew named Sidney, ‘a handsome Jewish pilot’ with dark wavy Hollywood hair. It’s startling proof that the assumptions and narratives we’ve taken for granted all our sleepy lives can be upended by a saliva sample or two. ‘We are on this chessboard Earth, we attempt our moves, but at times it seems as if the great hand of a disinterested giant haphazardly sends us on a trajectory of stumbling.’ The memoir tails off with a meandering travelogue-pilgrimage in which Patti pays homage to culture heroes: ‘I board a train to Bologna with its majestic yet crumbling towers and think of Gregory Corso’, ‘I will finish what I started in Nice, in the Hotel Suisse, where James Joyce first envisioned Finnegans Wake’, etc. It’s almost poignant how after all of her years and achievements, her secure place in the pop firmament, Patti still feels compelled to impress upon us her connection to the filaments of creation. No one would begrudge her taking a breather from all this devout humble-bragging. She’s earned a peaceful rest, as have we. 

Read on: Richard Merton, ‘Comment on Beckett’s “Stones”’, NLR I/47.