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Complete: Lyrics, Reflections and Notes for the Future
Light wear to the covers. Orders received by 3pm Sent from the UK that weekday.
Paperback
First published October 20, 1998
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About the author
Patti Smith
150 books13.2k followersPATTI SMITH is a writer, performer, and visual artist. She gained recognition in the 1970s for her revolutionary merging of poetry and rock. She has released twelve albums, including Horses, which has been hailed as one of the top one hundred albums of all time by Rolling Stone.
Smith had her first exhibit of drawings at the Gotham Book Mart in 1973 and has been represented by the Robert Miller Gallery since 1978. Her books include Just Kids, winner of the National Book Award in 2010, Wītt, Babel, Woolgathering, The Coral Sea, and Auguries of Innocence.
In 2005, the French Ministry of Culture awarded Smith the title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, the highest honor given to an artist by the French Republic. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007.
Smith married the musician Fred Sonic Smith in Detroit in 1980. They had a son, Jackson, and a daughter, Jesse. Smith resides in New York City.
Smith had her first exhibit of drawings at the Gotham Book Mart in 1973 and has been represented by the Robert Miller Gallery since 1978. Her books include Just Kids, winner of the National Book Award in 2010, Wītt, Babel, Woolgathering, The Coral Sea, and Auguries of Innocence.
In 2005, the French Ministry of Culture awarded Smith the title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, the highest honor given to an artist by the French Republic. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007.
Smith married the musician Fred Sonic Smith in Detroit in 1980. They had a son, Jackson, and a daughter, Jesse. Smith resides in New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
March 9, 2009
Really interesting read. There are a few notes that refer to milestone events. Patti Smith is from another world. Very ethereal. She must have experienced such grief over her lost and departed loves, but her poems and notes are philosophical and beautiful. I was lucky enough to see Patti Smith up close twice during the recent Melbourne Festival. The first time was a surprise visitation at a screening of the documentary about her life. She honoured us with a song. The second was at a recording of the ABC Arts show at the Speigel Tent (it's free and a great way to see a selection of the Melbourne Festival - but get there early). She is unique. My only qualification is that finding out who is who in the photos is a bit of a labyrinthian task. The publishers have chosen to list the photos under the name of each photographer so finding tiny page numbers under those references is quite painstaking. This is just a petty gripe. The book's fantastic and a must for any fan.
May 14, 2020
“I am the innovator! I am the originator! I am the emancipator! I am the architect! I’m rock & roll!” -Little Richard
It was the morning of 9 May 2020. I had just woken up and, before getting out of bed, checked the news to see the latest reporting about the pandemic. For the first time in about two months the leading news story that greeted me was not about COVID-19, but the death of rock n’ roll pioneer Little Richard. I had some cereal with the wife and kids and listened to what is widely considered the greatest Little Richard anthology, The Georgia Peach, some “Tutti Frutti” and “Jenny, Jenny” over a bowl of corn flakes. Then I went to my room and picked up a new book, some lighter reading in between Federico García Lorca in Spanish, with English translation, and Albert Camus in French. I read Spanish and French well enough to get by in most cases, but still sift through the works slowly as there are many new words and phrases I need to look up. A chapter of Camus or a couple poems by García Lorca require a bit of time and patience. I looked on my bookshelf for something to fill in the time between these other two works. Blake’s work on Milton? That seemed too dense. The Leopard, Crime and Punishment, Love in the Time of Cholera, Uncle Tom’s Cabin? I read the first pages of these books; then Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell, a handful of autobiographies, Song of Roland and some works of poetry and prose by Leonard Cohen. Nothing felt just right. Then I picked up this book by Patti Smith, Patti Smith Complete 1975-2006: Lyrics, Reflections Notes for the Future and read a few lines — it contains song lyrics, other poetry, and insights on her life and music. It seemed the perfect fit.
So I read a chapter of Camus and then turned my attention to Patti. I’ve long been a fan of her music since I first heard the album Horses, followed by Easter and Radio Ethiopia. I still remember buying Radio Ethiopia. I got it at a record store called Wax Trax! in Denver, Colorado. And the guy behind the counter was thrilled to see me buying this album, praising it for its achievements, feeling it was treated harshly by critics and was actually a greater musical achievement than Horses. Later, while still living in Denver, I would read Patti Smith’s Just Kids, which sucked me in, tore me apart and reassembled me anew. Then I read M Train some years later in Los Angeles. Around the same time that I read M Train I had also read Clinton Heylin’s brilliant history of early American punk From the Velvets to the Voidoids, which mesmerized me and introduced me to many artists to whom I was previously uninitiated, many of whom played CBGB in its early years, along with the talented young woman who would later earn the nickname “The Godmother of Punk,” Patti Smith.
When I got tickets to see Patti in concert on 6 March 2020 I was disappointed to be seeing her play for the first time at Disney Concert Hall in LA. I had planned to drive to San Francisco to see her on stage at the Fillmore, that was more suitable to Patti Smith, but the Fillmore tickets soon sold out and people started reselling them online for four times face value. So Disney Concert Hall it was, where Patti joked that playing that stage she felt like she should be dating a cellist. Patti still sounds amazing live and seeing her perform with her adult kids and the incredible Lenny Kaye was a real treat, hilarious and deeply moving. I was drawn to tears listening to her cover of Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush.” But it was the final moment that sealed it for me. Everyone in the audience stood and raised their hands in the air and Patti, now poet priestess, spoke inspirational words about anxieties people were having (this was the early days of COVID, long before 300,000 deaths, when - even then - few people were riding the subway car with me and a quarter of those who did ride it were already wearing masks and gloves to protect against that virus which we knew so little about, giving me the feeling that I was in a post-apocalyptic movie). Patti knew people were stressed and she offered something like a communal prayer; it wasn’t religious in a dogmatic sense, but it had a spiritual element. And I left the concert feeling as though a weight I didn’t know I had been carrying had been lifted from my shoulders. It was a baptism after having been reborn. I had expected to enjoy the concert, but never anticipated the communion I would feel with artist and fellow members of the audience. Picking up this book by Patti as we had been through lockdown and are now just cautiously starting to loosen some restrictions (experts argue prematurely) , I felt like I was picking up the work of a dear and trusted friend, a wise and beautiful confidante whose words hold special significance for me. We had all stood together not knowing then how the pandemic might play out, but never expecting the quarantine that we bore witness to. She was a friend and acquaintance of many of my musical and literary heroes and we both share an appreciation for the works of Whitman, Blake, Rimbaud. I never met Patti, but in a small way I feel that I get her (at least artistically) and that she gets me, the things I value in a political and aesthetic realm. In short, I felt that her book would be not fluff reading, but easier than reading Spanish and French, and also that I would encounter in these pages a friend of sorts.
Not more than a couple of pages in I read the following lines:
[T]he song that made the deepest impression, that produced my first visceral reaction, was sung by Little Richard. . . .
I didn't know what I was hearing or why I reacted so strongly. It wasn't 'Shrimp Boats' or 'Day-O.' It was something new and though I didn't comprehend what drew me, drawn I was. Drawn into a child's excited dance. That was 'Tutti Frutti,' so alien, so familiar. That was Little Richard. That was for me the birth of rock and roll.
Something about it clicked. Something made sense, but at the same time nothing did. Did I find this book or did the book, as Breton suggests, find me? Less than 50 pages in I also found the names of others whose books I had considered reading just a short while earlier — Blake, Rimbaud, Burroughs — and the names of so many artists whose works filled my album crates and bookshelves. But it was Little Richard that really hit me like a thunderbolt, Little Richard who had died after a battle with cancer during the pandemic that was just starting to work its way through the world with a vengeance when I saw Patti Smith on stage for the first time.
Little Richard hit a chord. The politics in the book struck a chord, as many of us feel led astray now (perhaps more than ever) by our world leaders. But also, perhaps more than anything, it was the pandemic. I had seen Patti on March 6. On March 8 and 9 she was playing the Fillmore. On March 12 my work closed its doors and I started working from home. It all happened so quickly. And though this book was published in 2006, the weight of the pandemic haunted me in its pages, with lyrics to songs like "Death Singing":
Have you seen death singing
Have you seen death singing
Have you seen death singing
In the straw-colored light . . . .
In these viral times
Then there were photos of graves, Mother Teresa praying, and the image that struck me dumb, a photo of a painting of St. Sebastian who turned his head and let the arrows fly. I wasn't sure why it hit me like it did, but I couldn't turn the page, cast under the spell of the saint and martyr who protects against plague. So many bizarre coincidences, and these are just the beginning.
It was the stories and insights that I enjoyed most in this book, but so too the pictures. As for the lyrics, I was already familiar with many, others not so much. It was nice seeing them all on a page. But really the thing I cherished most about this read was its overall relevance in my life at this time. Never had a book felt so right at a moment in my life since I read an introduction to a book on plays by Strindberg, which tied in everything I had read and watched in recent months and dove into my own autobiography as well.
And like rock n' roll music itself (many would argue), it all started with Little Richard. Little Richard may have left the building, but his presence is heard and felt in Patti Smith, in the Beatles, the Stones, James Brown and everyone they influenced. Little Richard acknowledged this as much as if not more than anyone else. He also once said, "I call my music the healing music … It makes the blind feel that they can see, the lame feel that they can walk, the deaf and dumb that they can hear and talk." To many, Little Richard was and is the very embodiment of rock n' roll and rock n' roll had the power to save lives in a way, as the Velvets famously proclaim in their song "Rock and Roll." Music and art are a tonic in these times and sometimes we read ourselves in the lyrics, we learn more about ourselves in the pages of a book, or in a single image than we might in hours of introspection. We feel something in "Tutti Frutti," we recognize something of ourselves in a line in a book by Patti Smith, in a painting by Michelangelo, in a photo in Life magazine, and we say, as though a mirror was being held up to our nose, "That's me, that's me."
It was the morning of 9 May 2020. I had just woken up and, before getting out of bed, checked the news to see the latest reporting about the pandemic. For the first time in about two months the leading news story that greeted me was not about COVID-19, but the death of rock n’ roll pioneer Little Richard. I had some cereal with the wife and kids and listened to what is widely considered the greatest Little Richard anthology, The Georgia Peach, some “Tutti Frutti” and “Jenny, Jenny” over a bowl of corn flakes. Then I went to my room and picked up a new book, some lighter reading in between Federico García Lorca in Spanish, with English translation, and Albert Camus in French. I read Spanish and French well enough to get by in most cases, but still sift through the works slowly as there are many new words and phrases I need to look up. A chapter of Camus or a couple poems by García Lorca require a bit of time and patience. I looked on my bookshelf for something to fill in the time between these other two works. Blake’s work on Milton? That seemed too dense. The Leopard, Crime and Punishment, Love in the Time of Cholera, Uncle Tom’s Cabin? I read the first pages of these books; then Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell, a handful of autobiographies, Song of Roland and some works of poetry and prose by Leonard Cohen. Nothing felt just right. Then I picked up this book by Patti Smith, Patti Smith Complete 1975-2006: Lyrics, Reflections Notes for the Future and read a few lines — it contains song lyrics, other poetry, and insights on her life and music. It seemed the perfect fit.
So I read a chapter of Camus and then turned my attention to Patti. I’ve long been a fan of her music since I first heard the album Horses, followed by Easter and Radio Ethiopia. I still remember buying Radio Ethiopia. I got it at a record store called Wax Trax! in Denver, Colorado. And the guy behind the counter was thrilled to see me buying this album, praising it for its achievements, feeling it was treated harshly by critics and was actually a greater musical achievement than Horses. Later, while still living in Denver, I would read Patti Smith’s Just Kids, which sucked me in, tore me apart and reassembled me anew. Then I read M Train some years later in Los Angeles. Around the same time that I read M Train I had also read Clinton Heylin’s brilliant history of early American punk From the Velvets to the Voidoids, which mesmerized me and introduced me to many artists to whom I was previously uninitiated, many of whom played CBGB in its early years, along with the talented young woman who would later earn the nickname “The Godmother of Punk,” Patti Smith.
When I got tickets to see Patti in concert on 6 March 2020 I was disappointed to be seeing her play for the first time at Disney Concert Hall in LA. I had planned to drive to San Francisco to see her on stage at the Fillmore, that was more suitable to Patti Smith, but the Fillmore tickets soon sold out and people started reselling them online for four times face value. So Disney Concert Hall it was, where Patti joked that playing that stage she felt like she should be dating a cellist. Patti still sounds amazing live and seeing her perform with her adult kids and the incredible Lenny Kaye was a real treat, hilarious and deeply moving. I was drawn to tears listening to her cover of Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush.” But it was the final moment that sealed it for me. Everyone in the audience stood and raised their hands in the air and Patti, now poet priestess, spoke inspirational words about anxieties people were having (this was the early days of COVID, long before 300,000 deaths, when - even then - few people were riding the subway car with me and a quarter of those who did ride it were already wearing masks and gloves to protect against that virus which we knew so little about, giving me the feeling that I was in a post-apocalyptic movie). Patti knew people were stressed and she offered something like a communal prayer; it wasn’t religious in a dogmatic sense, but it had a spiritual element. And I left the concert feeling as though a weight I didn’t know I had been carrying had been lifted from my shoulders. It was a baptism after having been reborn. I had expected to enjoy the concert, but never anticipated the communion I would feel with artist and fellow members of the audience. Picking up this book by Patti as we had been through lockdown and are now just cautiously starting to loosen some restrictions (experts argue prematurely) , I felt like I was picking up the work of a dear and trusted friend, a wise and beautiful confidante whose words hold special significance for me. We had all stood together not knowing then how the pandemic might play out, but never expecting the quarantine that we bore witness to. She was a friend and acquaintance of many of my musical and literary heroes and we both share an appreciation for the works of Whitman, Blake, Rimbaud. I never met Patti, but in a small way I feel that I get her (at least artistically) and that she gets me, the things I value in a political and aesthetic realm. In short, I felt that her book would be not fluff reading, but easier than reading Spanish and French, and also that I would encounter in these pages a friend of sorts.
Not more than a couple of pages in I read the following lines:
[T]he song that made the deepest impression, that produced my first visceral reaction, was sung by Little Richard. . . .
I didn't know what I was hearing or why I reacted so strongly. It wasn't 'Shrimp Boats' or 'Day-O.' It was something new and though I didn't comprehend what drew me, drawn I was. Drawn into a child's excited dance. That was 'Tutti Frutti,' so alien, so familiar. That was Little Richard. That was for me the birth of rock and roll.
Something about it clicked. Something made sense, but at the same time nothing did. Did I find this book or did the book, as Breton suggests, find me? Less than 50 pages in I also found the names of others whose books I had considered reading just a short while earlier — Blake, Rimbaud, Burroughs — and the names of so many artists whose works filled my album crates and bookshelves. But it was Little Richard that really hit me like a thunderbolt, Little Richard who had died after a battle with cancer during the pandemic that was just starting to work its way through the world with a vengeance when I saw Patti Smith on stage for the first time.
Little Richard hit a chord. The politics in the book struck a chord, as many of us feel led astray now (perhaps more than ever) by our world leaders. But also, perhaps more than anything, it was the pandemic. I had seen Patti on March 6. On March 8 and 9 she was playing the Fillmore. On March 12 my work closed its doors and I started working from home. It all happened so quickly. And though this book was published in 2006, the weight of the pandemic haunted me in its pages, with lyrics to songs like "Death Singing":
Have you seen death singing
Have you seen death singing
Have you seen death singing
In the straw-colored light . . . .
In these viral times
Then there were photos of graves, Mother Teresa praying, and the image that struck me dumb, a photo of a painting of St. Sebastian who turned his head and let the arrows fly. I wasn't sure why it hit me like it did, but I couldn't turn the page, cast under the spell of the saint and martyr who protects against plague. So many bizarre coincidences, and these are just the beginning.
It was the stories and insights that I enjoyed most in this book, but so too the pictures. As for the lyrics, I was already familiar with many, others not so much. It was nice seeing them all on a page. But really the thing I cherished most about this read was its overall relevance in my life at this time. Never had a book felt so right at a moment in my life since I read an introduction to a book on plays by Strindberg, which tied in everything I had read and watched in recent months and dove into my own autobiography as well.
And like rock n' roll music itself (many would argue), it all started with Little Richard. Little Richard may have left the building, but his presence is heard and felt in Patti Smith, in the Beatles, the Stones, James Brown and everyone they influenced. Little Richard acknowledged this as much as if not more than anyone else. He also once said, "I call my music the healing music … It makes the blind feel that they can see, the lame feel that they can walk, the deaf and dumb that they can hear and talk." To many, Little Richard was and is the very embodiment of rock n' roll and rock n' roll had the power to save lives in a way, as the Velvets famously proclaim in their song "Rock and Roll." Music and art are a tonic in these times and sometimes we read ourselves in the lyrics, we learn more about ourselves in the pages of a book, or in a single image than we might in hours of introspection. We feel something in "Tutti Frutti," we recognize something of ourselves in a line in a book by Patti Smith, in a painting by Michelangelo, in a photo in Life magazine, and we say, as though a mirror was being held up to our nose, "That's me, that's me."
November 19, 2013
An older book - 1998 - but I really liked this. The lyrics are great, obviously, but I liked it mostly for the photos and in particular the contextual notes around the songs and diary entries/poems.
December 10, 2008
I have a signed copy that my father got for me! He told that I adored her like he had loved the Beatles and it made her happy...Thanks Dad!
September 15, 2016
I was tempted when I decided to read this, rather than just referring to when I wanted to follow the words to a particular song, to just sit down and listen to the albums as I went, but found myself distracted by the music and less able to concentrate on the lyrics. So I stopped that and it became a better reading experience. Patti Smith is a brilliant lyricist and poet, and reading the words and occasional explanatory notes was almost like reading a book of her poetry. Some of it is quite forceful, some quite gentle, often spiritual, but always filled with emotion. Reading lyrics by someone who does not usually take the ordinary as a theme makes you realise the true power of music, and how much more it can and should be. I still have time for silly love songs though.
November 8, 2017
This is a beautiful and moving work containing 30+ years of Patti Smith's songwriting career. Not only does it contain her lyrics, but also bits of memoir describing her lyrical inspirations, much of which is pain and loss. While none of Patti's photographs are included, there are many images of her taken by others including Robert Mapplethorpe and Annie Leibowitz. Highly recommended.
November 16, 2007
patti smith is like a god to me...
April 24, 2009
loved this.... she is an amazing writer
January 10, 2013
A TREASURE CHEST FROM A BRILLIANT ARTIST
December 9, 2013
I remember seeing "Clapton is God" sprayed on building walls. They got it wrong, Patti Smith is GOD, Clapton is merely good.
January 27, 2015
I don't do well with reading lyrics or poetry and I much prefer Ms. Smith's transition narratives. The book design and presentation are terrific and the photos just rock. Ms. Smith and I were in NYC, Manhattan, at the same time back in our day and I probably saw her not knowing her traveling the streets of the East Village. I lived on 6th St.(?) between B and C and I ate at Leshko's and I walked back and forth to and from NYU and then I lived on 6th St.(?) just near the Filmore East and the Factory. Later in time I used to walk by CBGB's from time to time, probably on my way to the Amatto Opera Company, I was afraid of CB's cause I could see from outside it was a wild scene and I'm sure I'd've been freaked out if I'd really known Ms. Smith we'd've been so completely different. Yeh I can feel the passion the power the energy to just do it and the images are like that. They're terrific.
July 19, 2007
"Take me now, baby here as I am"! What rocker doesn't know Patti's famous hit "Because the night"?!(If you don't, you should...even my Mother loves it)I love to read lyrics and Patti's songs really can read like poetry. Favorites are Because the night, Pissing in a river and dancing barefoot. She really knows how to belt it, wheather shes in-love or crying.
May 5, 2007
The lyrics of her songs, arranged chronologically by album, with photos by Robert Mapplethorpe, Annie Liebovitz, etc. Also includes some notes from over the years, and more recent commentary. It is a roadmap of Patti Smith's creative career, inspirations, and transformations.
November 3, 2007
What I really enjoyed was her photographs and art work, also her straight ahead writing ( the lyrics read well, but in the end they are just lyrics). When I want Patti Smith the Poet, I pull out one have her many excellent poetry books. Patti isn't afraid to stir it up, I like that.
January 8, 2015
It always feels like I'm plunging, feet first, ramrod straight, into Smith's writing. Once I'm in I'm sinking, and there's nothing that could be more pleasant in those moments. Back to reality, and I can say that this book has some great photographs that I'd never come across before now.
January 18, 2016
A mentor, rock star, lyricist, poetess, goddess. Love her and this volume of monumental work.
August 11, 2015
I am enamored of Patti for a long time, so I am biased, but this could've been great with more poems and less song lyrics.
March 6, 2016
My favourites were:
-the Jackson Song
- Memorial Song
- Mother Rose
- Peaceable Kingdom
- Cartwheels
- Strange Messengers
-the Jackson Song
- Memorial Song
- Mother Rose
- Peaceable Kingdom
- Cartwheels
- Strange Messengers
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews