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Interview, June, 1996 by Ingrid Sischy

This kind of consensus speaks to the enormous belief that people have in Smith's integrity and in her ability to create something that matters. That kind of response doesn't happen here just because someone who is an icon has a project. Usually, the editorial response is, "Let's wait and see," not, "Let's run and get it." But Smith is not a woman who puts out product for the sake of it. This is an artist who, in 1979, sang, "Bye-bye, hey hey / Maybe I will come back someday," and who then basically chose to live and work in private for the next fifteen years. During that period, she did peripatetic appearances, recordings, and projects, as well as some published writing. All of these things were in keeping with her concerns and interests, but there was nothing big, nothing that grabbed the spotlight - nothing that was meant to.

During the '80s, I used to hear little tidbits about Smith from our mutual friend, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. In fact, the one time I'd seen her was in 1989, when she spoke at his memorial service in New York. I remember being struck not only by what she said, but by how she said it. Things had already begun to heat up regarding the enormous amount of ignorance, confusion, and bigotry surrounding Mapplethorpe's work, his sexuality, and his death from AIDS. This ignorance eventually led to censorship and all sorts of other backward responses. The reactionary reactions hadn't yet happened at the time of Mapplethorpe's memorial, but they were in the air. And it was as though Smith knew what was coming. Up there on the podium, somehow she created a private space that seemed to be about her communicating with him as well as with us, the people sitting and listening to her. Her words were about courage, truth, and freedom, and they were visceral because she let herself get lost in sorrow. At times she didn't "hold it together." She showed the pain, the anguish, the loss that death is.

In talking to her for the interview that we publish here, Smith calls that period "the youth of [her] grief." Since then, she has grieved a lot for many others, including her brother and her husband. But the reason that Smith is on our cover is not because she is a tragic figure any more than because she is some important mythic figure from the past. Rather, it is just the opposite. Patti Smith is a figure for now. Like many, many people, she has experienced the loss that seems to be defining our society. And she is cause for hope, for inspiration, for action. She is all about connection, because she gives us something that music and words are supposed to but, in fact, rarely deliver - the power to transport ourselves.

This is what happened when I went to hear her new album, Gone Again. I walked from my place to the loft of her longtime collaborator, Lenny Kaye, who co-produced the new album. I felt a little tentative as I strolled through the Village, almost not wanting to get there just in case the music didn't live up to the anticipation I'd been feeling from my colleagues and that I felt myself. When I got there, Kaye pulled up a canvas chair and put a piece of fake fur on it, so I could settle in comfortably. He turned the tape on, and went back to his desk to finish filling out his income-tax form. As soon as the music started, I forgot that I was in somebody else's house. It grabbed my heart, my stomach, and my ears. I wasn't the only one. Kaye's dog, Quillie, jumped on my lap and stayed there, enraptured, for the next fifty-six minutes.

Listening to Gone Again was a journey I'll never forget. By the time it was over, I had experienced so many emotions that I have felt over the course of my life - only they were sharpened. I am sure this will be true for everyone who gets to hear the album. Although it's a personal record, it's a collective work, too. There's rock 'n' roll at its hard core. There's being in love, being hurt, being moved, being left. There's country, there's folk; there's this country and there's us folk. There's darkness and light - lots of it. And humor and knowing. And, my God, so much beauty. Beauty that defies any categorization. When the record ended, I just cried. I think it was, in part, because of all the things and people that Smith made me remember. But I'm sure it was also because of how inspiring this new work is. Who would have thought that much beauty was possible? I left in a hurry to choose an image of Smith for the cover of Interview, certain that in 1996 she will be someone who has something to give all of us.