Driven by an internal calling, she nourished herself with the adventurousness of Rimbaud, the devotion of William Blake. Where to start? At the age of 20, Smith left her family home in New Jersey for NYC, where she hustled for odd jobs and beds, using her art and poetry as currency. Photograph: Loïc Venance/AFP/Getty Images ‘I hate it when she says that … Mom, of course you are an activist!’ … Patti with Jesse Paris Smith. But here was a chick who could do it just as well, if not better. Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix … I read much and often of the cool men, men, men who roamed the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel and lived on the edge of abandon. I first discovered Smith, like many others, when I was on the cusp of adulthood and enthralled by the counterculture of 50s and 60s New York. Civil rights, human rights, women’s rights,” Smith says. “I think the climate movement is the most important thing on the planet right now. The group is campaigning for cities to switch to 100% renewable energy by 2040. Launched in the lead up to Cop21 in Paris, it brings together performers, artists and activists – including Bill McKibben, Tenzin Choegyal and the Soundwalk Collective – to encourage action to address the climate crisis. Smith will be playing at Glasgow’s Theatre Royal with Pathways to Paris, an organisation founded by her daughter Jesse Paris Smith and the musician Rebecca Foon.
An artist, almost more than anyone, has got to be free A guitar rests in the corner of the room, while her cat makes regular appearances on screen. But there she is, her thin frame draped in a green shirt, her long silver hair in plaited pigtails on each side of her angular, undone face.
We’re meeting via Zoom to discuss her headline concert at the opening of Cop26, and I’m momentarily thrown by the sight of the queen of punk waving at me from her bedroom in New York. The climate emergency is at the forefront of Smith’s mind. Not to free Tibet, but to take in hand a global concern that was going to affect us all, on a scale we haven’t seen before.”
“I thought it was so beautiful,” Smith says in her trademark East Coast drawl. M ore than two decades ago, Patti Smith and a group of other artists were sitting with the Dalai Lama when the late Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys asked the Tibetan spiritual leader a question: what’s the number-one thing that young people can do to make a better world? Without missing a beat, the Dalai Lama replied: “Look after the environment.”
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