Exclusive Q&A: The Final Word From Patti Smith on CBGB

DF: Are there other early songs, like "Birdland," that were born and shaped as you played at CBGB?

PS: Pretty much all of Horses. Lenny, Richard [Sohl, pianist] and I started some of these songs at the little jobs we had in bookstores and art galleries. But at CBGB, we had so much time and space to develop. The line "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine" is from a poem. I used to read this poem, but I wanted to go from it into something simplistic. I loved three-chord songs, and "Gloria" [by Them] is the quintessential three-chord song. So "Land" [which features "Land of a Thousand Dances"] and "Gloria" were there, initially, to help me keep improvising.

We used to call it "fieldwork" -- Lenny and Richard would give me three-chord fields. Even though I wrote the poem at the beginning of "Gloria" in 1970, it took all those years to evolve, to merge into "Gloria." And that was pretty much done at CBGB. We recorded Horses in 1975, and did all the groundwork at CBGB.

DF: The economic changes in New York City, particularly on the Bowery in the last few years, have been a factor in the club's closing. Did you notice those changes when you moved back to New York, from Detroit, in 1996?

PS: I felt heartbroken. I came to New York [from southern New Jersey] in 1967. The city was down and out, and so were we. We have a song called "Citizenship." It goes, "'68, it broke the Yardbirds/We were broke as well." And we were. But New York was an artist- and poet-friendly city. You could find a place for sixty-five dollars a month, find a crappy practice place and do your work. We all had jobs. I always worked in a bookstore. Lenny worked at a record shop, Village Oldies. I think Jay [Dee Daugherty, drummer] worked at Crazy Eddie's or Radio Shack. We could get by.

I used to love walking to CBGB. When you came up the Bowery, back then, it was all winos. In the winter, they would have oil cans, set them on fire and warm themselves. You could see their bottles lined up, and they'd have old overcoats on. Sometimes you couldn't distinguish us from the winos. These guys looked at us like we were the weirdos.

DF: Did you feel threatened?

PS: I never felt threatened. I feel more threatened now. I feel confined by the intense commercialism. The stores, the shopping, these people all night long in their limos, acting like they own our little streets. New York to me was the worker city, the artist city. It was a place to get your shit together. Now it's a place people come to with their shit together. They have a lot of money, and they want condos. They want high life. They come to film here and have fashion shows. You try to walk on your street, and they act like they own it.

Cities should be edgy. They are edgy parts of America. They are not suburbia. They are supposed to be a melting pot of struggles, a collective force of ideas and energy. I watched horrified recently -- NYU students coming in with truckloads of fancy stuff. Magic Chef stoves and boxes with new computers. I mean, these are not struggling college kids. Get a hot plate. Drink some Nescafé.

DF: You played one new song during the show, "Without Chains," about a young Muslim man held without charge for four years at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay. It was as if you wanted the crowd to know that, for all of the nostalgia in the room that night, there was still serious business going on outside.

PS: We had emotional duties, and I respected that. But I also thought it was important to do a song like that. Even the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" -- I was thinking about the words to that: "War, children, it's just a shot away." To me, a song like that is more meaningful than ever.

DF: You also put your own spin on it in the show. You sang "Love, peace, forgiveness, it's just a breath away."

PS: Well, I always have to add a word or two. I have to put my two cents in.

We are still who we are. I did my duty to the club. But my band -- we still have our own identity. And that's what we do. We were doing the same thing in 1974. Our message then was, rock & roll was losing its power. We have to take it over again. But it was not a message for myself. It was a message for new generations, the people after us. I considered us a bridge. You could walk over us and get to the other side.

I guess it's just the kind of person I am and how I see my duty. I still feel the same way. I'm going to be sixty this year. I've seen a lot of stuff, gone through a lot of things. But I'm still here. I've got new ideas, and I have some things to impart.

One thing I feel about our present condition is, I'm the same age as George Bush. So I'm not looking at my generation to save the world. The hope is in the future. I can't speak with intense pride about how my generation is conducting itself in this world. I have to look to the new generations to do better than we did.

DF: You ended the night by reading a list of departed souls -- such as Johnny, Joey and Dee Dee Ramone and your pianist Richard Sohl -- as you sang "Elegie" from Horses. What inspired that?

PS: I was thinking of this movie The Mission. The last line is from the cardinal, writing to the pope, about this mission that has been completely destroyed. And the line he writes is, "The dead live on in the memory of the living." As I was reading that little list, those people seemed in that moment -- because of the intense emotional energy in that room -- to be alive. Everyone in the room knew or heard of or loved one of those people. That collective love and sorrow and recognition made those people seem as alive as any of us.