Patti Smith.

`To me, rock 'n' roll is a totally people-oriented. grassroots music. But it's not ours anymore.'

Almost thirty years have passed since Patti Smith burst out of South Jersey, with a poem--"Piss Factory"--that declared, "I'm going to be somebody, I'm going to go on that train and go to New York City, I'm going to be so bad, I'm going to be so big, I'm going to be a big star, and I will never return."

Smith did become a star. She published critically acclaimed books of poetry. She traveled in the circles of Warhol and Mapplethorpe. And she did what no woman had done before.

Relying on male icons--the teenaged French poet Arthur Rimbaud, American Beats Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, rock stars Keith Richards, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Bob Dylan--she fashioned a rock-star persona that made the Patti Smith Group an icon for a whole generation of young rockers.

Smith defined the punk aesthetic, wrote a hit single ("Because the Night") with Bruce Springsteen, released four stunning albums, and performed before crowds that numbered in the tens of thousands. Then, in 1979, she "retired" to raise a family in Detroit with legendary MC5 guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith. Over the next fifteen years, she brought up a daughter. Jesse, and a son, Jackson. Though she continued to write poetry and songs, she published only sporadically and released just one album.

In 1994, as she and her husband were preparing to record new music, a wave of tragedy hit. Fred died of a heart attack, as did Smith's brother, Todd. In the wake of those deaths, Smith has forged a comeback. Haunted and fragile on last year's album, Gone Again, she emerged this fall with Peace and Noise, which Billboard magazine declared to be "as potent an artistic statement as Smith has ever crafted."

Peace and Noise is Smith's most politically charged album, with songs that address Tibet, the Heaven's Gate suicides, AIDS, memories of Vietnam, and anger at the lingering hangover of the Reagan era.

For all of its politics, however, Peace and Noise retains the reverence for poetry and the faith in rock 'n' roll that has always underpinned Smith's work.

On the eve of a series of concerts in New York, where she now lives, Smith met me at a cafe in Soho. We ate French toast and watched Jesse draw pictures of clouds. Then we wandered over to Patti's house--a venerable 150-year-old structure on land once owned by Aaron Burr. On a wooden table in the kitchen sat a copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

Q: As an artist, did you feel you had to pick up a guitar and form a band to get your message across in an age where there are so many voices competing for attention?

Patti Smith: I've always loved the format of rock 'n' roll. I remember, as a child, watching rock n roll develop. I grew up with it. I was certainly comforted by it, inspired by it, excited by it.

Then in the early 1970s, when I really felt that rock `n' roll was losing some of its strength--when it just seemed like a format people were visiting for some kind of glamorous lifestyle, or to take a lot of drugs, twist people's minds, make a lot of money, and then exit--I reacted. Maybe I overreacted. But I really felt that rock 'n' roll was going into a bad place. I actually worried that it would just disintegrate.

I had never had any aspirations toward being a musician. I m not a musician. I m not really much of a singer. I wasn't brought up in a time where females even thought of things like that. In terms of female performers, we had memories of Edith Piaf, Billie Holiday, jazz singers, then you had Janis Joplin coming up, and Tina Turner. But in terms of a singer-songwriter leading a rock band, there really wasn't anyone I could think of. So I just didn't think about it.

It wasn't my intention to be involved in all this. I really wanted to be a painter, but I just didn't quite have the stuff to be a painter. Parallel to that, I always wanted to write.

But I seemed to have some kind of a natural calling to be a performer, to speak. I always felt comfortable and I had a desire to speak. When I was younger, I thought I'd be a missionary, or a preacher or a teacher. I went to teacher's college. I always liked the idea of talking to people about things, whether it was Moby Dick or the environment or making them laugh. And it turned out that rock 'n' roll was the place for me to do it.

Q: You've been at it for a quite a while. Is the soul still there in rock 'n' roll?

Smith: I don't worry about that so much anymore. I think the soul is there, if you look for it. Luckily, a lot of young bands and new performers have gone the independent route. They exchange ideas through vehicles that I m not even really schooled in--through computers and the Internet. There's a huge independent-music scene in recording, in performing.

But the music industry is worse than ever. It seems to me a lot like it was in the 1950s. I look at it now and the doors need to be kicked through because it's just as bad as any other time I can remember. Radio is more formatted than ever. Music TV is really a disappointment. They never took advantage of the potential that was there. They took advantage of how powerful they could get, and how much money they could make, but what I thought might be the prime directive--communicating in a serious way--they sort of forgot about that. Now they're just a big business.

All the communication that comes out in formatted radio and music television is token. It's really a shame. And I think that people are going to have to fight. We have to demand something more, something better.

I'll do what I can, say what I can. But it's got to be new people, new guard, who are going to have to fight and say they're not going to stand for this I'm not just talking about musicians and artists. It's got to be people working at radio stations people at the college level. It's got to be people across the board. People have to decide that they want to take over again.

I remember that the Beside of our first single, "Gloria," is "My Generation," recorded live in Cleveland. We said on there, "We created it. Let's take it over." To me, rock 'n' roll is a totally people-oriented, grassroots music. It came up from the people, from the blues. The roots are deep. It came from the earth. It's our thing. Rock 'n' roll is great because it's the people's art. It's not an intellectual art. It's totally accessible. The chords are totally accessible. The format is totally accessible. But it's not ours anymore. Right now, rock 'n' roll belongs to business. We don't even own it.

The people have got to wake up and reclaim what belongs to them. The music business should be working for us; artists should not be working for the music business.

It's the same with America. The country belongs to us. The government works for us. But we don t think of it that way. We've gotten all twisted around to a point where we think that we work for the government.

Q: You set out to address this a decade ago, with the song, "People Have the Power," which touched a lot of activists. How did you come to write it?

Smith: "People Have the Power" was Fred's phrase. I was sitting in the kitchen, literally peeling potatoes, and Fred came into the kitchen and said, "Tricia, people have the power--write it." And I said, "All right."

I had been reading the Bible, as I often do, and I had just reread the section about how the meek shall inherit the Earth. I was thinking a lot about all this and he and I spent several days talking about what we were going to try to communicate through this song--we often did that, he'd have an idea and a philosophy but he'd ask me to write the lyrics.

"People Have the Power" was the perfect song for the two of us to write. He had protested the Vietnam War he had supported the civil-rights movement. His band, the MC5, was a very political band. I also had addressed these things I did it in my way, which was more biblical. He was more politically articulate. So we just merged all of our ideas.

A lot of different things were on my mind. The first verse abstractly addressed the state of the environment. The second verse was actually about Afghanistan--Russia had invaded Afghanistan--and I was imagining these Afghani shepherds and the Russian soldiers just lying together on a hill at night and looking at the stars and talking about things, instead of fighting. It was a vision.

That song came out in an election year, in 1988, and I saw Jesse Jackson delivering speeches and I felt like, if I knew his phone number, I'd call him and say, "I have a song for you." His speeches, the concepts he was addressing, were very similar to the lyrics in the song.

We still perform that song. I think it's a very important song.

Q: Almost twenty years ago, you wrote a song called "Citizenship." But it seems to me your ideas have evolved. Can you describe your sense of the role of the artist as citizen?

Smith: My feelings about that are mixed. When I was younger, the last thing I wanted to be was a citizen. I wanted to be an artist and a bum--what Genet would call one of "the sacred bums of art." That's pretty much all I wanted to be. I was concerned about certain things--about censorship, about nuclear power, about the Tibetan situation, and the famine in Ethiopia. I did have concerns, but still, as an artist and a human being and an American, I was basically self-centered. I didn't really have an understanding of what it was like to be a citizen.

In 1979, when I moved to detroit to live with Fred, my life changed drastically. I came to understand George Washington's quote after he left the Presidency, when he said, "I have resumed my life as a citizen." I took comfort from that, because I actually became "as a citizen."

We had children. We had house. We faced financial struggles. We lived very simply. We did everything ourselves, whether it was clearing out little piece of land or--because we lived on a canal that often flooded--sandbagging in the middle of the night. I had to wash diapers and clean toilet bowls and nurse sick children and find time to do art.

I had to get up at five in the morning and write before the baby woke up. My art didn't suffer. My work actually flourished in that period because I learned new disciplines. I had to become much more focused in those time periods when I could work.

I gained a lot of respect for people. It's not my bent. I'm just not a middle-class person. I don't have middle-class sensibilities, desires. But I would never again be so snooty about the middle class and middle-class struggles.

Q: Has that changed your sense of art? Do you feel different responsibilities?

Smith: I think the artist's first responsibility is to his work, to the quality of his work. An artist must concern himself with what's motivating him, whether it's a spiritual motivation, or a vision thing, an abstract principle, or something totally intellectual.

An artist must concern himself with the quality of his work. What it does out in the world is not always of the artist's choosing. I don't think it's the artist's duty to be political. It's the artist's duty to do good work. If that work inspires people--if he's a politically articulate artist--that's great. But the main thing to inspire people or to comfort them or to touch them in some way, which may or may not be political.

Some artists become political just because what they're doing is revolutionary. Picasso was revolutionary because of the way he looked at the world. Jackson Pollack was not a political revolutionary; he was very meditative man, but he seemed revolutionary because of the nature of his work.

An artist's role in society is often decided by the people. The people decide how they want to use the work of a certain artist, or how the work of that artist affects them or their ideas.

Q: That said, Peace and Noise contains a great many statements of a political nature. And those statements are, in many ways, refinements of messages you have delivered throughout your career.

Smith: I intentionally do that. I'm not a pure artist. I would like to be, and I would like to think that occasionally I write a pure poem or a pure prose piece. But, in terms, of rock 'n' roll, I never set out to be a purist. Again, I'm not a real singer. I'm not a true musician. I had things to say, and I felt that it was my right to say those things in the format of rock 'n' roll. It took it as my right. I've always seen rock 'n' roll as a vehicle to share ideas or to incite people. I've really never considered--especially when I was younger--that my work itself was that important. What I thought was important was that I had certain amount of energy, and I seemed to affect people in a certain way, and so I wanted to use that power to get people who were more articulate than me, more motivated, to take the next step and do things.

I've always wanted to make people think. We've got plenty of entertainment happening in America. There's plenty of people writing the kind of songs or singing the kind of songs or developing the sort of image that will entertain America. That's not my real interest.

I like people to have a good time when I'm performing. I like to see people laugh. I love to make people laugh. But I'm not there to entertain people.

Q: Perhaps the most powerful song on Peace and Noise is "1959." It's about Tibet, which is a trendy cause now, but for you this is an expression of a very old concern, isn't it?

Smith: I got involved in the Tibetan situation as a young girl. In the late fifties, when I was a schoolgirl, we all had to pick a country to do a year report on. We had to take things out of the newspapers. I picked Tibet, which I had learned about in the library. I was vary taken with the Dalai Lama and his philosophies. My teacher said to me, "Patti Lee, this country you've taken is so obscure. You'll never be able to fill a scrapbook with newspaper articles about this country. No one's ever heard about it." And I said, "No." I insisted on keeping Tibet. And much to my shock, in March of 1959, the Chinese invaded and all of a sudden this country that I adored and was so obscure was suddenly all over the newspapers. It was heartbreaking. The Dalai Lama, they thought, was dead, and they didn't know what had happened to his family.

I was devastated by this. My father has fought in World War II. I was pretty much raised with the idea that the great wars were settled and the world was free. I just couldn't understand how this could happen in Tibet. And what I really couldn't understand was how no one seemed to mind. I've been baffled by the Tibet situation since 1959. I've thought about it a lot. I've written little pieces. But this was the first time I really addressed it in a song.

Q: There is anger in "1959," and in a number of the other tracks on the new album.

Smith: Certainly. There's a lot to be angry about. When you look around, when you open your eyes, you see things that make you angry. It's like when I lived in Detroit and I would drive through Detroit on this road called Jefferson. You drive through downtown Detroit, a once-proud city that's trying to build up, and then you drive through deeper downtown--which is pretty much boarded up. Then, a block away, there is one of the richest communities in America, Grosse Point. It's flabbergasting.

We have had so many great opportunities in America to make things right, and we still have them, but we just let the opportunities go by. It's almost like everything has just become a CNN soap opera. We look at children and put on whatever sitcom we want to see.

What ended the Vietnam War, as much as anything, was a handful of photographs looking at the atrocities in Vietnam. A handful of photographs just incensed the people so much that we just couldn't take it. We couldn't take the guilt. And now people seem like they just can take anything. I just think, right now, we're preoccupied. We're too busy. Our heads have been turned. We're getting, unfortunately, on a real materialistic ride right now. And I hope it's a phase.

Q: You recently visited the grave of Walt Whitman for the first time. What drew you there?

Smith: When I was a teenager growing up in South Jersey, I was allowed to take the bus to Camden, and when I got off the bus there was the Walt Whitman Hotel. I was very taken with Walt Whitman. I felt proud that I was living in a state where they had things honoring Walt Whitman. But I don t think I realized that he was buried there, or I would have gone sooner.

I have always admired Walt Whitman. And the people I have admired have admired Walt Whitman. Allen Ginsberg's Howl is extremely Whitmanesque.

When Allen was dying, I went to his loft, and I spent time with him. One of the most memorable things was that there was a very peaceful portrait of Walt Whitman by his bed. That picture of Allen sleeping and quietly dying beneath Walt Whitman's portrait rekindled my thoughts about Whitman. Simultaneously, I got a letter from the Walt Whitman Cultural Center in Camden, asking if we might consider helping them. Camden is a struggling city, and they had seen me open up for Bob Dylan in Philadelphia and send a salute to Camden, New Jersey, and they thought I might be open to this. So I felt I had to go. I went to the Walt Whitman Cultural Center and did a benefit for them. We toured his home and his grave site, and it was all very moving. His grave is just beautiful; he designed it himself and it s very simple--slightly overgrown, very peaceful, right across from an old abandoned factory.

Q: Whitman is such a dramatic figure, yet he is so often taught in our schools today as a stodgy remnant of the nineteenth century. In truth, there's nothing stodgy about him. He really was, and is, a very radical figure.

Smith: He was the first true modern American poet. Certainly, he was the inspiration for the Beat movement. The Beats were also informed by his openness concerning his sexual persuasion, which was a radical thought in Ginsberg's time, let alone Whitman's. And Whitman's descriptions of the Civil War--which come from having been there, having nursed soldiers--are some of the most informative and beautifully written pieces I have ever read.

He had a strong sense of himself. He had a benevolent ego--he had a huge ego, but he loved mankind, and he loved people of all walks of life. Whitman intentionally communicates with us in our time. He says in his poetry that he is speaking to you--to you personally: To the poet who is reading this. 100 years from now, 200 years from now, I am thinking of you. I am telling you that I did all these things, suffered all these humiliations, went through these particular joys and illuminations, just as you are, and I am with you.

That is such a great thing--to speak across time. Right now, however, we're in a very quick-gratification time. We re not looking for the messages that poets have left for us. People want things quick, and their attention span is short. They want answers, and by the time they get those answers they want something new. This is because we have a myriad of ways to be entertained in these times. We're not really being spoken to, or informed, or drawn together.

Basically, right now, we're all being distracted. And what are we being distracted from? Unification. We're being distracted from finding some kind of common ground, from mobilizing, and getting things done. We're being distracted from what we need to be doing: deemphasizing material acquisition and finding some common beliefs on which we can rebuild our country.

Q: You've been very engaged with people like Ginsberg, who have tried to make America live up to its promise--in a variety of different ways.

Smith: Allen, really, was filled with a lot of joyful, conspiratorial energy. He really had that sixties thing right to his death. It's really a shame to lose him because I can't think of anyone else who brought so many people together, which was completely obvious at his deathbed. In his loft, through his dying process. coming to visit him or going in and out were all of these different types of people: young poets that none of us knew but that he had encouraged, the Buddhist community and his Buddhist teacher and the monks chanting, and all of his Jewish relatives who were flabbergasted at this whole monk scene, librarians from New Jersey. Allen's death was a lot like Allen's life--it was filled with people from various camps and he found a way to get along with all of them, and to try and pull everyone together.

Q: That's what you're talking about in a sense, isn't it? To get America and Americans more connected?

Smith: That's right--the sense that this country can be about something more than just the gratification of the individual. That s the thing I really didn't like about the whole Republican era in the eighties. Being a good American isn't being a flag-waver or having idealistic parades and all of that. The real American thing, to me, is first of all charity. This country should be built on charity. And it should be built on the idea that, while all of us should find our individual strengths, we should also promote a certain sense of equality. One can't say we are all equal in every way, I know that. We are different as people. We have different callings. We are not going to have equal lives. We are not going to have equal joys. But there are ways where we are equal. We are equal because we are all human. We are equal because we all have breath. And we're all going to die. We all enter life, and we all are going to have a story. And I think it's our duty to find a way for each of us to have the best story possible.

How do we do that? We do that by living as decent human beings. By thinking of others. By going through life and doing what we need to do and what we want to do, but also do enough that reverberates some good around us.

All of that reverberation is connective tissue. That's how we pull together a world that is good, that seeks to achieve good. It's not our inalienable right to have a car, or a nice house. Those things are great. But those are not our inalienable rights. Our inalienable rights are much purer, much more important than that.

What got instilled in the American population in the eighties was this sense that it s not only our right but our duty to better ourselves materially; in the way that we dress, in the way that our house looks in the quality of our furniture, in the quality of our Wranglers--now you have to have this type of dungaree that costs four times as much and if you don't have it you're jive or something. There's so much attention not only on material things but on image and on the way that people look.

Q: It's hard to break through the apathy that seems to go hand-in-hand with the entertainment culture, isn't it?

Smith: Very hard. People hear a lot of warnings. We're constantly being warned about things--about the environment, about health issues about these new viruses. We're constantly being warned that we re taking chances with the planet that are dangerous or that are too extreme.

To respond to those warnings requires us to cut back on things that make life easier. There's a lot of resistance to that. But it's not impossible. For instance, we know that if everybody would just stop buying Pampers and just wash diapers it would make a big difference for the environment. Well, I'm a mother. I had small children. I washed a lot of diapers, and, yes that's a drag. It's not the end of the world, though. If we all did it, there would be tons and tons and tons less of that kind of pollution.

There are so many things we could do that wouldn't hurt us at all and that would make a huge difference in all of our lives There are all these things that we could do that could "nd out a reverberation, make things better--not just for ourselves but for everyone.

Q: Is creating that spark, causing that reverberation, what motivates you as an artist?

Smith: I would hope so. I do work hoping only for that. I don't have the vocabulary, nor the energies nor the organization skills to do the things that have to be done. I can do benefits and speak for things and be of some help. I just try as an artist to do the best that I can. And I try as a person to do the best that I can, to be maybe some kind of example. Because the example of somebody living their life in a certain way can cause a reverberation. And so I try to pass it on.

John Nichols, an editorial writer for the Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin, writes regularly for The Progressive.