Patti Smith: How True Crime Helped The “Godmother of Punk” Survive

The Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping, Helter Skelter, the .44 Caliber Killers, the crime and grime of 70s New York; Central Park, the Chelsea Hotel, 42nd St., rape, murder, and the influence of junkie poets, and thieving novelists, all of it compelled Patti Smith to create music “for the criminals”, and perhaps to also survive, when so many other artists did not. To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to exclusive bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠disgracelandpod.com/membership⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠GET THE NEWSLETTER⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Jake and DISGRACELAND: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠X⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (formerly Twitter) ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook Fan Group⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This is exactly right.

• 0:13Speaker 01

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• 0:43Jake Brennan?

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• 1:44Speaker 01

  Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis.

• 2:00Jake Brennan?

  The story about Patti Smith is steeped in true crime. Everything from the criminal influence of her artistic heroes, Jean Genet and William S. Burroughs, to the impression made upon her from her mother's obsession with America's first true crime of the century, the Lindbergh kidnapping, to the influence of the Manson murders and New York City's 44 caliber killings that Patti lived through in late 70s New York, to the crime and grime of Central Park, the Chelsea Hotel, and 42nd Street, rape and murder, all of it, just a shot away, as they say. But Patti Smith survived all of it to become one of the last century's great artists, a

• 2:42Jake Brennan?

  great musician, someone who made great music. Unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show, that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my Mellotron called Falling from Chelsea MK2. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to "One Bad Apple" by The Osmonds. And why would I play you that specific slice of plastic sibling cheese? Could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on February 10th, 1971, and that was the day that Patti Smith first took the stage with more than just words, with a guitarist

• 3:26Jake Brennan?

  at her side, and began building a previously unimaginable bridge between the art world and rock and roll. And she did it for the criminals. On this episode, junkies, murderers, poets, playwrights, death, destruction, the danger of pursuing one's artistic calling, and how true crime helped Patti Smith survive it all. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgrace Land.

• 4:15Jake Brennan?

  Though Patti Smith is known as the godmother of punk and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, she's much more than just an iconic rock star. She's a literary luminary, a National Book Award winner, and the recipient of the PEN Literary Service Award. She's been honored by the French Ministry of Culture and the Municipal Arts Society of New York, an organization that in 2024 awarded Patti Smith with their highest honor, the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Medal. She's met the Pope. She accepted a Nobel Prize on behalf of and at the request of none other than Bob Dylan.

• 4:59Jake Brennan?

  And her name rings true throughout the same universities and museums that teach and celebrate the authors, poets, and artists, Louisa May Alcott, Arthur Rimbaud, and Frida Kahlo, to name a few, that Patti Smith has drawn inspiration from throughout her life. To dismiss Patti Smith as merely a rock star is like calling Steve Jobs a computer salesman. She's not just a musician. She's what I refer to as the High Priestess of Art, someone who holds rare dual citizenship in the gritty origins of punk

• 5:38Jake Brennan?

  and in the highest echelons of New York and European society. Catholic priests speak of being called to the priesthood, that moment when they hear God's voice imploring them to serve Him, to dedicate their lives to Him, to sacrifice everything in His name. Many of them faced not just persecution, but even death in pursuit of their calling. Jesus' apostle, Peter, was crucified upside down. Bartholomew, another apostle, was skinned alive, tortured over days and eventually decapitated.

• 6:21Jake Brennan?

  Deacon Lawrence of Rome in the year 258 A.D. was roasted to death over an open fire. In 1792, during the French Revolution, over 200 priests were massacred by angry mobs in under 48 hours. Spanish claretian priests, Salvadoran Jesuits, Mexican seminary students, and countless others who were once called have been martyred and suffered horrific deaths for their calling. But Patti Smith, who once famously sang, "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine", was no martyr. She was and is an artist.

• 7:06Jake Brennan?

  And similar to priests, artists hear a calling. They must also navigate danger, violence, and potential death, murder even, in pursuit of their art. So, when and where was Patti Smith, the high priestess of art, called to become an artist? And what kind of danger, violence, and true crime did she have to escape to become the artist we all know her to be? As a little girl in suburban New Jersey in the 1950s, the first stories Patti Smith heard were dark. The original Brothers Grimm collection of children's fairy tales from the 1800s

• 7:50Jake Brennan?

  spoke of a stepmother in the Juniper Tree story who decapitated her stepson and cooked his flesh in a soup to serve to the boy's unsuspecting father.

• 8:02Jake Brennan?

  In the original version of Cinderella, entitled "Askenputul", one stepsister uses a knife to cut off her toes, and another hacks off the heel of her foot. Yet these stories were nothing compared to what Patty later read in the Bible, specifically in the Old Testament, where in Judges 19, one woman is severed into 12 different pieces, each given to a different tribe of Israel. Her sin? None. She was offered up to protect the crimes of a rapist. In Judges 4, Yale offers an unsuspecting enemy general hospitality. And when the general falls asleep,

• 8:45Jake Brennan?

  Yale takes a spike and hammers it through his skull. In Kings 9, Queen Jezebel's eunuchs throw her from a window, where she's then trampled to death by horses.

• 9:01Jake Brennan?

  And later on, as a teenager, rape and murder were more than just a shot away.

• 9:11Jake Brennan?

  All of these stories were right there, out in the open in Patty Smith's Bible and in her history books, and in the museums she visited as a child.

• 9:24Jake Brennan?

  If the executioner was feeling merciful, he'd build the pyre low to the ground to ensure a quick death. But this executioner was not feeling merciful. He built the pyre extra high so that Joan of Arc would be guaranteed a prolonged and painful death. And that's exactly what happened. The flames took their time. The ancient Greeks used funeral pyres to honor their departed emperors and heroes. The Romans too, not the English. When it came to Joan of Arc, they had something else in mind: revenge, public disgrace, maximum pain.

• 10:06Jake Brennan?

  In the eyes of the English-dominated ecclesiastical tribunal of 1431, 19-year-old Joan of Arc was a heretic. She claimed she'd been called by a divine voice. She cut her hair. She dressed like a boy. She made a mockery of modern authority and social norms, and the process inspired an uprising that turned the tide of the Hundreds' Years' War, driving the English out of France. And for those perceived sins, she was now roped to a stake in Market Square in the city of Rouen, high above a gridded stack of dry wood, built to burn slow and fierce, with

• 10:48Jake Brennan?

  its blue flames snapping at the skin of her feet and black smoke corroding her lungs, white-hot pain piercing every cell in her body. The blaze rose up over her legs, her midriff, and no one heard her scream, and no one saw her cry when the inferno engulfed her completely. Soon enough, Joan of Arc was gone, but embodied only. Another martyr, this one officially executed for the crimes of heresy and crossdressing, but whose life's work would inspire generations and whose name would forever ring true.

• 11:31Jake Brennan?

  In 1966, herself just 19-years-old, Patti Smith stood outside on the streets of Philadelphia, across from the Museum of Modern Art, about five miles from the more modern Market Square, and looked up at a statue of Joan of Arc. Emmanuel Framier's gilded bronze depiction of the young martyr cast a piercing impression upon young Patti. Here was this woman, her own age, who gave everything for what she believes. It was then that Patti knew she would have to do the same. It was then that Patti Smith heard her calling, in the shadows of martyrs and museums, to become an artist.

• 12:15Jake Brennan?

  The stakes of failing to fulfill her life's goal were, as they are for most teenagers, dramatic and intense. A life as anything but an artist, a life as something else in suburban New Jersey, would be its own kind of death. But art was dangerous, and not in the fairy tale, Old Testament, musty, historical kind of way, but in a real and scary kind of way. One of Patti's favorite novelists, Jean Genet, lived in squalor, forced into a life of crime and nearly imprisoned for life. One of her favorite musicians, the jazz singer Billie Holiday, died addicted to heroin.

• 13:00Jake Brennan?

  In her final living moments, she was handcuffed to her bed by federal agents and placed under arrest for narcotics possession. One of Patti's favorite painters, Jackson Pollock, was driven to alcoholism and eventually off the road in his Oldsmobile, where he flipped his car, crushed his skull, and decapitated one of his passengers. And these were just the artists that Patti knew about. Thanks to her true crime-obsessed mother, Patti Smith also knew about the dangers of the world right outside her suburban window. 1932. Patti Smith's mother was traumatized by events that were unfolding over the radio airwaves,

• 13:43Jake Brennan?

  just as the rest of the nation was. One of America's most famous sons, the aviator Charles Lindbergh, was the victim of what had quickly become America's most famous crime. Lindbergh's 20-month-old son had been kidnapped. The kidnapper used a ladder to creep into the second-story nursery of the Lindberghs' New Jersey estate. Within 24 hours of the abduction, the crime was a national sensation. By daybreak, over 100 reporters and photographers had breached the gates of the estate and contaminated the crime scene. Notorious mafioso Al Capone issued a statement from a Chicago jail cell, offering a reward for the return of the baby.

• 14:29Jake Brennan?

  Before the night of the crime had ended, news wires like the Associated Press were deluged with bulletins, transmitting over 50,000 words in just hours. Radio stations across the country took the unprecedented step of canceling all programming to issue a coordinated bulletin describing the child's appearance, in effect, creating a complete national radio blackout. And it was through the radio that Patti Smith's mother became transfixed with the early details of the crime, as well as the saga's conclusion. Ten weeks after the kidnapping, the badly decomposed body of Charles Lindbergh's baby

• 15:12Jake Brennan?

  was found by a truck driver relieving himself on the side of a New Jersey highway. The infant's corpse had been partially scavenged by animals. Just like Jezebel and the horses, and like Pollock and the crushed skull, like Yale's enemy, a hole through the head. And like Joan of Arc, the Lindbergh baby would not soon be forgotten. Young Patti Smith was transfixed by her mother's retelling of this story. She never forgot it, just like she never forgot the Brothers Grimm, or the Old Testament, or Jean, Billy, Jackson, or Joan. The lesson she took was that life was dangerous,

• 15:53Jake Brennan?

  and so too, the pursuit of art was dangerous. And in 1967, the only place to really pursue art was in America's most dangerous place: New York City.

• 16:29Speaker 04

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• 17:00Jake Brennan?

  I like a story with a twist as much as anyone, but some of the best traditions don't have one. They just started and kept going. That's something that's great about Chateau St. Michelle. They've been leading Washington wine since 1967 with wines that are balanced, expressive, and easy to enjoy. Choosing the right bottle shouldn't feel complicated. It should be something you open with confidence every time. So for once, here's a story with no twist, just a good bottle. Redefine your rituals with Chateau St. Michelle.

• 17:30Speaker 05

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• 17:50Speaker 06

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• 18:45Jake Brennan?

  The whispers Patti Smith heard at night in Central Park were the stuff of terror. The park was more than a bucolic playground for New Yorkers to laze away their afternoons. Each night, it became a den of violent criminals, thieves, rapists, and murderers, all prowling about for the ruination of souls. Central Park was also Patti Smith's sometime bedroom. It was where she'd lie down during that first summer when she arrived in the city, on those nights when she couldn't find a welcoming doorway in which to lay her head. Central Park was where she slept.

• 19:27Jake Brennan?

  And in 1967, Central Park was also the place where a 15-year-old girl was brutally raped and her friend stomped so severely that he was left in critical condition.

• 19:41Jake Brennan?

  It was, in the mid-1960s, a place where nearly 1,000 felonies were committed on average each year. In Central Park during the Summer of Love, for all the groups of young hippies strewn about on blankets with acoustic guitars and flowers in their hair, there were just as many self-described wolf packs, hordes of young neighborhood delinquents swarming the park in shifts to rob and maim not just the hippies, but the homosexuals cruising the park's so-called predatory zones.

• 20:16Jake Brennan?

  Patti Smith may have slept in Central Park, but it was in another park where she met the first great love of her life, Robert Mapplethorpe. She knew him from the bookstore where she'd taken a job. He was a customer, and she was in Tompkins Square Park on a date with an older man, a man who could afford to buy her a meal that she could not afford to buy herself. But in New York City, nothing's free. So just before the man attempted to collect his payment sexually, Patti Smith recognized the good-looking boy from the bookstore and ran to him in the park, introducing him on the spot to her predatory lunch date as her boyfriend.

• 21:01Jake Brennan?

  Robert Mapplethorpe, who was high on LSD at the time, went along with the ruse, which he no doubt thought was hilarious.

• 21:11Jake Brennan?

  Robert found Patty Lee Smith to be not only funny, but also sexy, intelligent, creative, a perfect partner in crime for his own first foray into New York City. They shared the same goal: to become artists. They weren't sure what kinds of artists they wanted to become, just that they were most certainly destined to create things that would change the world of culture and art as they knew it. In their first apartment together, the one in Brooklyn, where they had to scrub the wall of the splattered blood and psychotic scribblings from the previous tenant, they painted, created drawings and collages, and wrote.

• 21:52Jake Brennan?

  They read the great works of the great writers, those who were also criminals. Not just Jean Genet, but Paul Verlaine, O. Henry, and William S. Burroughs. Burroughs, who shot and killed his wife in a game of William Tell and got away with it. And they studied de Kooning and Rivera, Warhol and Picasso, and prayed at the altar of Coltrane, sympathized with those devils, the Rolling Stones, and filled in the oral gaps with the Shirels and Dylan, Bob, not Thomas. They had little food, even less money. They stole when they had to, but they never begged. What they did have was desire.

• 22:35Jake Brennan?

  And that desire gave way to faith, and faith to creation. And soon, the artistic callings of each would bear fruit. Robert with photography, and Patty with words. A new apartment, this one in Manhattan, signified progress. But the chalk outline of the dead body outside the front door precipitated another move, to a less dangerous neighborhood. So further uptown they went, to the Chelsea Hotel.

• 23:09Jake Brennan?

  These days, the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street, like most of Manhattan, is a glitzy, gentrified incarnation of what it once was: a dangerous rooming house for bohemian vagabonds. In 1969, the Chelsea was part artist colony and part central command for the drug-fueled late 60s counterculture, housing and hosting the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Leonard Cohen, and the Velvet Underground's Nico. Salvador Dali stayed at the Chelsea when there was no room at the St. Regis. Allen Ginsberg cruised the lobby for dates, even taking Patti to lunch one day, mistaking her, with her short-cropped Joan of Arc hair, to be a young, pretty boy.

• 23:54Jake Brennan?

  Dylan died at the Chelsea, Thomas, not Bob. Well, the poet fell into a coma in Room 205 after downing 18 straight whiskies before he was carried off to be pronounced dead at St. Vincent's. The Andy Warhol superstar, E. B. Cedric, set her room at the Chelsea on fire while high on barbiturates. She had to be rescued from Room 105, where Warhol had shot part of his acclaimed 1966 film, Chelsea Girls. A few years prior, a 20-year-old dancer named Lucille Andel found herself on the roof of the Chelsea Hotel. She walked carefully on her tiptoes, close to the edge, before giving in to the darkness

• 24:39Jake Brennan?

  that had overtaken her and plunging to her death 10 stories below. Along the way, the usually graceful Lucille struck the third-floor fire escape with a thud, partially dismembering herself before pancaking on West 23rd. But all the danger that the Chelsea Hotel represented didn't scare Patti Smith. Instead, it compelled her. Besides, Patti could navigate. She wasn't big into drugs, and she seldom drank, and, besides, she and her partner, Robert Mapplethorpe, were broke. Which other hotel would take art as collateral until they could come up with the cash to rent a room? None.

• 25:23Jake Brennan?

  And no other hotel had Burrows and the poet Jim Carroll roaming its halls. Patty befriended both of them. She also befriended Janis Joplin, who stayed in Room 411 during her run of shows at the Fillmore East. Patty listened to Janis express herself through music. Patty worked up poems with Jim Carroll. Patty met Bob Dylan's fixer and confidant, Bob Neworth. Bob Neworth encouraged Patty to work her poems into songs, to listen to Hank Williams, to listen to Blind Willie McTell, to get down to the root of what she felt and to pull it out and spill it all over open chords on an acoustic guitar.

• 26:06Jake Brennan?

  Creatively, Patty was encouraged and compelled. Robert was too, but in a darker way. It was 1969. The Rolling Stones as Brian Jones had died, and so too did the LSD dreams from the summer of love. Robert took the Stones' sympathy for the devil a little too literally. Charles Manson was all anyone at the Chelsea could talk about in 1969. Just as Patti Smith's mother had been obsessed with the Lindbergh case, Robert Mapplethorpe was obsessed with this latest crime of the century. Out in Hollywood, seven people were dead in what appeared to be a ritualistic murder

• 26:49Jake Brennan?

  spree with a decidedly rock and roll edge. The Tate La Bianca murders in August of 1969 were hard not to be affected by. And so, Robert Mapplethorpe began working a darker vision into his art. He became obsessed with the concept of evil. It was a stark counterpoint to his Catholic upbringing, a reflection of what he saw on the street up on 42nd, where he hustled sex for cash to help support himself and Patty. Patty worried about Robert. Sex work was as dangerous as it got.

• 27:29Jake Brennan?

  1969, Midtown Manhattan, 42nd Street, aka The Deuce. A neon, open-air sex market, predators and prey, pros and junkies plying their trade for pimps and pushers. Chicken hawks, older, skeevy-looking men in trench coats on the prowl for young runaways. A few dollars went a long way. A runaway can make a buck or two with one job and be able to afford a slice of pizza, a Coke, and a movie ticket into one of the theaters, The Liberty, The Empire, The Victory, and be able to pass out in relative peace and quiet, until the shakedown artist showed up looking to rob the snoozing patrons.

• 28:14Jake Brennan?

  Out on the street, Robert Mapplethorpe kept his cool. It was all about the look. The right nod from the right dude, and Robert knew it was on. But danger was everywhere. Cops posed as Johns to entrap hustlers and turn their backs when they were harassed and assaulted. Many clients refused to pay. Some insisted on rough stuff with hustlers: strangulation, knife play. Sickos were slitting the throats in the theaters, and the working boys' screams drowned out by the soundtracks blasting from the screens. Robert was a "rent boy," or so he told himself.

• 28:57Jake Brennan?

  He worked the streets to help pay his and Patty's rent at the Chelsea. It wasn't the sex so much that bothered Patty, it was the danger. Their relationship was an open one, and Robert's homosexuality by this time was no secret. It was also around this time that Patty became romantically involved with the poet Jim Carroll. Jim hustled up on 42nd Street as well. Robert asked Jim how he knew that he wasn't gay. Jim told him that he knew because he always asked for money, whereas sometimes Robert didn't. Either way, Jim hustled for heroin, and Robert hustled for rent.

• 29:41Jake Brennan?

  For Robert, there was no other way to support his pursuit of becoming an artist. And for Patty, there had to be a less dangerous way. Sam Shepard was that way.

• 29:55Jake Brennan?

  Sam was a writer, a California cowboy, a musician, an established off-Broadway playwright. And by the time he and Patti Smith began their affair at the Chelsea Hotel, already a husband and father. It didn't matter. Sam encouraged Patti to sing. He bought her her first guitar. He encouraged her artistically. Romantically, Sam was dangerous, but compared to Jim Carroll, he was safe. Sam Shepard exuded life, not junkie death. Sam didn't hustle. Well, he did, but in a different way. Sam made shit happen.

• 30:35Jake Brennan?

  And by the time he was 27, he'd won four Obie Awards for four different plays. The Obies are the highest awards given to off-Broadway artists. Sam Shepard won three in one year. Sam convinced Patti that she had something to say, as if she needed further validation. But still, hearing that her words carried weight from a sexy, award-winning playwright couldn't hurt. Sam prevailed upon Patti to collaborate with him on a new play, and they called it Cowboy Mouth. Cowboy Mouth was a semi-autobiographical account of Sam and Patti's relationship.

• 31:16Jake Brennan?

  Both acted in the two lead roles when it was staged in April of 1971, and there it was, Sam and Patti's illicit relationship brought to life for all to see. Afterward, Sam freaked out. He had a wife and a kid, and it was wrong, and he knew it. He abruptly left New York City to return to his family in Vermont. At first, Patti was devastated, but it didn't take long before she put her relationship with Sam Shepard in the proper perspective. It was brief, explosive, and overall, a positive experience. In the end, despite who got hurt and how, it was worth it, because Sam Shepard helped

• 32:00Jake Brennan?

  Patti Smith finally find her voice.

• 32:06Jake Brennan?

  Cowboy Mouth wasn't just autobiographical. It was also about a character who moves seamlessly between art and crime, specifically music, rock and roll, actually, and crime. To this point in her life, Patti Smith had spent her life moving between art and crime. Shoplifting, harrowing, hustling, Charles Lindbergh, Charles Manson, chalk outline bodies and bloodstained tenement walls, Jean Genet, William Burroughs and William Tell, Willie McTell, Bob Newworth, Robert Mapplethorpe and Jim Carroll, Sam Shepard. It was all one big art and crime collage. It was who she had become.

• 32:50Jake Brennan?

  And now it was time to give voice to all of that transgressive influence, to bridge the gap between art and artist, to be the voice of the voiceless, for those persecuted for following their calling, for their crimes. And to do it all with rock and roll.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  We'll be right back after this.

• 33:17Speaker 01

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• 33:48Jake Brennan?

  I like a story with a twist as much as anyone, but some of the best traditions don't have one. They just started and kept going. That's something that's great about Chateau St. Michelle. They've been leading Washington wine since 1967 with wines that are balanced, expressive, and easy to enjoy. Choosing the right bottle shouldn't feel complicated. It should be something you open with confidence every time. So for once, here's a story with no twist, just a good bottle. Redefine your rituals with Chateau St. Michelle.

• 34:18Speaker 05

  This is Joel Larsgaard from How To Money. As someone who travels a lot for work, I really appreciate a premium airport experience. With the Delta SkyMiles Reserve Business American Express Card, it truly feels like you can have it all. For a limited time, new Delta SkyMiles Reserve Business Card members can earn 200,000 bonus miles, the highest miles offered this year.

• 34:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, card members can also enjoy 15 visits to the Delta Sky Club each medallion year when flying Delta, and you can unlock unlimited Delta Sky Club access after spending $75,000 in purchases on your card during a calendar year. Those are benefits you can get behind. You also get four one-time guest passes each medallion year, so you can bring a friend or a colleague along. 15 Sky Club visits plus four guest passes? That's up to $950 in annual value. Value estimate based on $50 per visit rate to purchase additional visits or bring a guest to the Delta Sky Club.

• 35:14Speaker 05

  It's that kind of premium access that helps you feel right at home and at ease, no matter where you're heading. Apply today at delta.com/podcast. Offer ends November 4th. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply.

• 35:30Jake Brennan?

  On February 10th, 1971, Patti Smith stood on stage at St. Mark's Church in New York's East Village and stared out at the crowd. By her side, a lanky and musically lethal guitar-playing friend, Lenny Kay. Staring up at them from the audience, a who's who of downtown cool, Lou Reed, Todd Rundgren, Robert Mapplethorpe, Allen Ginsberg, and more. The evening was billed as a night of poetry featuring the Warhol performance artist and poet, Gerard Malanga, and Patti Smith. For whatever reason, Patti decided to include a musical element: Lenny. Lenny was already a musical encyclopedia.

• 36:14Jake Brennan?

  He wrote for jazz and pop, Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy, and at the time was busy assembling songs for what would become one of the greatest compilation albums in rock and roll history, The Nuggets Original Artifacts from the Psychedelic Era (1965-1968) set, which would become the definitive collection of American garage rock singles, and eventually, one of punk rock's guiding lights. In fact, The Nuggets liner notes feature one of the earliest uses of the term punk rock. Lenny Kay not only knew how to play guitar, Lenny Kay knew his shit.

• 36:54Jake Brennan?

  With Lenny at her side, Patti Smith stared out into the audience as the crowd settled. The two performers looked at their guests, their faces flushed with anticipation. They could all sense it, something different was about to happen. New Yorkers know this feeling, it's familiar, the promise of the new. That feeling that you're about to be let in on a secret, in on something special. It's a promise that in the 1970s, New York City seemed to constantly fulfill.

• 37:28Jake Brennan?

  The lights dimmed, guitar feedback began to creep from Lenny's amplifier, and the crowd dropped their nervous chatter. The feedback unfurled throughout the room, bending, both piercing and warm at the same time, like a blanket of nails. And Patti grabbed the microphone atop the stand with one hand, raised her other hand in the air, and abruptly brought it down to her side. Lenny muted his guitar, silence.

• 38:00Jake Brennan?

  Patti Smith leaned into the microphone and said, "This one's for the criminals." With that, Lenny Kay released the squeal and squawk from his Gibson Melody Maker, and Patti meted out the powerful words from the first lines of her poem "Oath." "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine." And suddenly, it wasn't a poem anymore, it was a song. It was Lenny, it was rock and roll. Patti Smith had answered her calling, and people loved it. The crowd that night adored her. And Patti was indeed something new, something unseen,

• 38:43Jake Brennan?

  a transgressive hybrid of poetry and music with something powerful to say.

• 38:49Jake Brennan?

  The sins of her generation were not yet answered for, and maybe they weren't even sins, who knew? That was the point, all the crime, all the transgression, the so-called sins, the cross was theirs and theirs alone to bear. Heresy. Like all great art, the action is in the risk. Patti's words were shocking. Like Joan of Arc's words, Patti's possessed unyielding conviction. And those words had the power to inspire. And inspire, they did. Patti and Lenny brought their rock and roll poetry hybrid to other stages after this.

• 39:31Jake Brennan?

  They opened for the New York Dolls at their famed Mercer Arts Center gigs. They played Le Jardin at the other end, which had been and would again be called the bitter end. Before long, in 1975, Patti found herself on the Bowery in Manhattan's Lower East Side with all its grit and grime. A motley collection of the unhoused and unwashed, derelicts and artists clinging desperately to a world trying to shake them loose, like fleas on the backside of a rabid dog. All just steps from William S. Barrows's apartment, where the iconic novelist lived in squalor and would receive Patti as a guest whenever she was in the neighborhood.

• 40:13Jake Brennan?

  It was just Patti and her fearlessness and her curiosity, and Barrows and his heroin and his shotgun. Down the street, near Bleecker, the crowd assembled outside the doors of CBGB's, a little dive no one had cared about five minutes before. But tonight, Patti and the new band she'd assembled with Lenny on guitar, Richard Soul on piano, Ivan Karl on bass, and J.D. Doherty was set to perform. The Patti Smith Group, along with one of the most inventive groups to come out of the 1970s in New York: television. Both bands were in the midst of a multi-week residency. Just like at the St. Mark's Church gig a few years prior, you could feel the anticipation

• 40:57Jake Brennan?

  in the air. Except now, there were actual stakes. Ever since that first performance at St. Mark's, Patti was heralded as a savior. This new art she was creating, this poetry-rock-and-roll hybrid, it was the natural progression of a century-long march from the romance of Arthur Rimbaud, to the squalor of Jean Genet, to the grime of Jim Carroll, to the pop of Andy Warhol, to the music of Patti Smith.

• 41:27Jake Brennan?

  And therefore, Patti's music was seen as the antidote to the poisonous drivel filling airwaves in the mid 70s, soulless, bloated, spiritually starved rock music. Patti was unofficially drafted by New York's downtown tastemakers and uptown glitterati to, as she said, "preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll." And that's exactly what the Patti Smith Group did each night at CBGB's. Patti drew strength from her mentor, William S. Burroughs, and her best friend, the first great love of her life, Robert Mapplethorpe, both of whom positioned themselves each night right up front.

• 42:10Jake Brennan?

  Robert was devoted to Patti's success as an artist in the same way he was to his own on a near spiritual level. Soon, the powerful executive Clive Davis from Arista Records would also devote himself to Patti's success, signing her to a lucrative recording contract. The Patti Smith Group's debut album, Horses, produced by the Velvet Underground's John Cale, the one with the stark and beautiful Robert Mapplethorpe portrait of Patti on the cover, did what it was supposed to do: its part, to save rock and roll. The album begins with a bang, just as Patti did at St. Mark's, with the powerful rejection

• 42:51Jake Brennan?

  of the past: "Somebody's sins, but not mine." Horses nailed the moment. Kids loved it, so did the critics. None other than America's greatest rock critic, Lester Bangs, said in his Cream Magazine review that "Patti's songs on Horses touched, quote, 'deep wellsprings of emotion that extremely few artists in rock or anywhere else are capable of reaching,' unquote.

• 43:19Jake Brennan?

  That was just it. Few artists in rock or anywhere else. I don't know if Lester Bangs intended to cast Patti's art outside the parameters of rock or not, but that's exactly where her creativity was leading her. She wasn't just a musician. She was clearly something else, something new, someone, an artist, who wasn't only revealing something about herself and her listeners, but she was revealing something that hadn't been revealed before. Here was an artist who was reclaiming rock and roll from under the safe nightlight of mainstream rock's radio play duvet and dragging it back under the grimy blanket of nails

• 44:00Jake Brennan?

  inhabited by the criminal underworld, both the perpetrators and the victims. Patti Smith was a revolution. In an iconic twist, her cause was celebrated not only downtown, but uptown as well. Soon, elite culture would take note and open its doors. Aside from the predictable grousing from conservative detractors over her line about Jesus, everyone, it seemed, loved Patti Smith's music. Except Robert Mapplethorpe. Well, not exactly. Robert was an ardent supporter of Patti's, but ever since their earliest days, when Patti would sing to them back in that Brooklyn apartment, Robert would always say to her,

• 44:45Jake Brennan?

  "Sing me a song I can dance to, Patti." The world didn't dance to the songs on horses. They studied them, like something worthy of a museum exhibit. No, the dancing would come later. With Bruce Springsteen. Perhaps you've heard of him. At the time, Bruce Springsteen had just become the definition of an overnight sensation. Upon releasing his third album, Born to Run, the previously obscure rock and roll bandleader had rocketed to stardom when he appeared on the covers of both Newsweek and Time Magazine simultaneously. Now, in July of 1976, he was filing a lawsuit against his manager, trying to extricate

• 45:27Jake Brennan?

  himself from a horrible contract, one that he believed to be criminal.

• 45:33Jake Brennan?

  Patti Smith at the time was playing shows in support of horses and preparing to record her follow-up album, Radio Ethiopia, while living with her new boyfriend, the guitarist from Blue Oyster Cult, Alan Lemire. None of them knew it yet, but all three of these artists, much like their New York City fans, were about to be gripped in fear. Young lovers like Patti and Alan, and like the couples who flocked to record stores to purchase Springsteen's records, were about to get swept up in a year of paranoia. Because the New York City night now belonged to a lunatic.

• 46:15Jake Brennan?

  July 29th, 1976, 1:10 a.m. Palombe, the Bronx. Two women, 18-year-old Donna Loria and 19-year-old Jody Valenti, sat in a nose mobile on the side of the road in the dark of night, discussing the time they just had at Peach Trees, a local discotheque. And the heavy rhythm from the tramps "That's Where the Happy People Go" supplied the adrenaline still coursing through them. The vibe was pierced by a passing car on a not-so-far-away street, blaring the haunting new hit by Blue Oyster Cult, "Don't Fear the Reaper." Suddenly, the mood turned. The street got a little darker, the inside of the car a little quieter.

• 47:00Jake Brennan?

  Donna opened the door to leave. From out of the darkness, a man with a gun. Donna startled. The man crouched under one knee, took aim at Donna with both hands and... (gunshot) Jody screamed. Donna Loria died instantly. The gunman got off another two shots, and one hit Jody in the thigh. She lived to tell the harrowing story to the New York newspapers. Three months later, the next shootings happened.

• 47:31Jake Brennan?

  Two young lovers, eighteen-year-old Rosemary Keenan and twenty-year-old Carl DeNaro, escaped the killer who fired into Carl's car in Queens. Carl took a bullet in the head, but survived, and so did Rosemary. The cops connected the forty-four caliber shell casings from the Queens shooting to the Bronx shooting, and the papers came up with a spiffy name for this lunatic terrorizing New Yorkers. The forty-four caliber killer. "Baby, don't fear the reaper." That line, from the Blue Oyster Cult single, kept asking the impossible from speakers across the city in the spring and summer of seventy-six.

• 48:13Jake Brennan?

  And later in November, another shooting. Seasons don't fear the reaper. Another couple of teenage girls, another Donna, this one Donna Damasi, sixteen, along with Joanne Lomino, eighteen, two shots. And both girls survived. But the papers, especially the New York Daily News columnists Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamel, traded ink for industry-scale paranoia. New Yorkers sweated out the winter. La, la, la, la, la. Don't fear the reaper. The new year, nineteen seventy-seven, new shootings, another couple, alone in their car.

• 48:56Jake Brennan?

  Christine Freund, twenty-six, and John Deal, thirty. Both were shot. She survived, he didn't, and the papers did their thing. And the public paranoia ratcheted even higher. Love of two is one. Here but now, they're gone. March eighth, nineteen seventy-seven, another shooting. College student Virginia Voskashin was walking back to her home in Queens in the dark after class, when the gunman appeared out of nowhere. She saw the gun, she raised her textbook in front of her face, the gunman shot, and the bullet blasted through the book and into Virginia's face. Virginia was dead.

• 49:38Jake Brennan?

  Here, but now, they're gone. A month later, a model and her boyfriend parked at about three AM on the side of the Hutchinson Parkway in the Bronx. One dead model, one dead boyfriend. Romeo and Juliet are together in eternity. Come on, baby. Don't fear the reaper.

• 50:01Jake Brennan?

  And on May 30th, 1977, when Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin was revealing to the world the psychotic ramblings of the .44 caliber killer, sent to Breslin himself by the killer, who claimed for all to be, in his words, "The Son of Sam", aka the self-proclaimed Chubby Bohemist, aka Beelzebub, aka Satan, aka Death Himself, aka The Reaper. While Breslin freaked New York City the fuck out, while cops hunted for the killer, and the killer hunted for victims, Patti Smith was planning her next album, her third, the follow-up to Radio Ethiopia.

• 50:46Jake Brennan?

  And while the NYPD hunted for the Son of Sam, Patti was still hunting for a song her friend, Robert Mapplethorpe, could dance to. By June of that year, Bruce Springsteen had finally extracted himself from his legal problems, and was beginning work on his belated follow-up to Born to Run, an album called Darkness on the Edge of Town. And there was plenty of darkness to go around, especially in New York town. Investigators were at a dead end, unable to hunt down the Son of Sam. The night no longer belonged to the city's lovers, but Springsteen didn't care. There was something there, the wisp of a song.

• 51:28Jake Brennan?

  As the sessions began with producer Jimmy Iovine, Springsteen had the chorus. It was defiant, triumphant, it reclaimed something, it went, because the night belongs to lovers. But that was it, that was all he had. The end of June came, and the Son of Sam shot another couple, Salvatore Lupo, 20, and Judy Placebo, 17, and both survived. The cops kept up their hunt for the killer, but were still coming up empty by the end of the month. July hit with the heat of a thousand suns, and that meant that it had been a full year of terror in New York City.

• 52:10Jake Brennan?

  The self-proclaimed Chubby Bohemist celebrated by shooting at a parked car, a couple kissing on their first date, Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violente, both 20, both were shot in the head. Stacy lived, Robert did not.

• 52:26Jake Brennan?

  In August, Patti Smith entered the record plant to begin work on her new album. That same week, police, acting on a tip, interviewed a chubby 20-something postal worker up in Yonkers named David Berkowitz. The following day, Berkowitz was arrested. The Son of Sam manhunt had ended. New York breathed a sigh of relief. Patti Smith kept her head down and worked, still hunting for a hit, a song Robert Mapplethorpe could dance to. On September 27th, Jimmy Iovine, who was also now producing Patti's new album, brought

• 53:09Jake Brennan?

  Springsteen's demo of "Because the Night" into the studio for Patti. Patti heard something in the song that Bruce hadn't: not just defiance, but again, reclamation. She channeled it all into verse lyrics. "Come on now, try and understand the way I feel when I'm in your hands. Take my hand, come undercover. They can't hurt you now, can't hurt you now, can't hurt you now, because the night belongs to lovers. Once more." And now, the Son of Sam was behind bars, and young couples in New York were once again freed to frolic. "Because the Night" was a massive smash.

• 53:54Jake Brennan?

  Patti Smith had her hit, and Robert Mapplethorpe had a song he could dance to.

• 54:25Jake Brennan?

  Now Patti Smith was more than just an artist. For a minute it seemed, Patti Smith was a pop star.

• 54:35Jake Brennan?

  Because the night was Patti Smith's commercial breakthrough. It was a top 40 hit, top 5 in the UK. "Easter," the album that the single supported, sold better than Patti's previous two albums combined. But pop stardom was never her goal. Being an artist was. An artist needs fuel and inspiration. And sometimes, the only source for them is love. So naturally, while at the top of her game, Patti Smith walked away from the game. She fell in love with another artist, another guitarist. This one, Fred Sonic Smith, from the proto-punk anarchists and Motor City legends, the MC5.

• 55:19Jake Brennan?

  In 1979, Patti moved to Detroit to marry Fred, and traded a quote-unquote "career" for fulfillment. The kind of fulfillment that only creating a family can bring. But soon enough, New York City would come calling again, with some very bad news.

• 55:38Jake Brennan?

  By the late 80s, Patti Smith's best friend, the first great love of her life, her creative confidant, her literal and figurative partner in crime during those formative years in New York, Robert Mapplethorpe, after having become one of the most successful photographers on the planet, was dying from AIDS-related complications. On his deathbed, Robert asked Patti a pointed question: "Did art get us?"

• 56:06Jake Brennan?

  Perhaps art took Robert, but it didn't take Fred Sonic Smith. Heart failure did. Patti's other great love, Fred Smith, died in 1994, five years after Robert Mapplethorpe. Patty did what all great artists do to process grief. She worked. She made new music, went on tour with Bob Dylan, moved back to New York City, and she wrote prodigiously, publishing books of poetry, books about her obsession with the works of Warhol, books of drawings, of photography, a collection of song lyrics, all to critical acclaim. And in 2010, she released Just Kids, a personal memoir of her early life

• 56:50Jake Brennan?

  and her time in New York City with Robert Mapplethorpe. And later that year, Just Kids won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, one of the most prestigious literary honors in the world. In 2015, Patty released a second memoir, M Train, which focused more on her present life and the unconventional ways in which she'd pursued making art and the irredeemable loss she felt after the death of her husband Fred. M Train was a national bestseller, and Patty followed it up with four more titles, including the recent Bread of Angels, another memoir. Each book was released to more critical praise and numerous awards and nominations,

• 57:34Jake Brennan?

  Grammys, a PEN Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, honorary doctorates from prestigious universities. It's now 2026, and it's clear that Patti Smith is still living a life that few artists get to live. She is, as I mentioned earlier, the high priestess of art. She has enjoyed both critical and commercial success, artistic credibility in the underground and doors that fly open for her at elite cultural institutions. Most importantly, she's survived. She's 79 years old and has lived to harvest the fruits of her artistic labor. No small feat. Most artists, of consequence,

• 58:16Jake Brennan?

  succumb to the ever-present danger that surrounds them. Jean Genet and William S. Barrows lived to be 75 and 83, respectively. But Rimbaud died at 37, Pollock at 44, Coltrane at 40, Brian Jones, 27, and too many other artists to name, all of whom died too young. And of course, there was Robert Mapplethorpe, who asked, did art get us? Dead at just 42.

• 58:49Jake Brennan?

  Perhaps the reason Patti Smith survived is something that she revealed in M Train. When you read it, you can't help but feel Patti writing at times in a sort of gumshoe detective way, channeling her inner Mickey Spillane, her inner Raymond Chandler. It's not full-on Philip Marlowe, it's subtle, but what isn't subtle is Patti's love of detective fiction, both on the page and on screen. In a word, Patti Smith is crime-obsessed. Law & Order, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Midsommer Murders, Sherlock Holmes, Luther, CSI Miami, The Killing.

• 59:31Jake Brennan?

  Patti Smith reveals in M Train that she is so obsessed with some of these crime series that she will sometimes rearrange her travel schedule in order to catch various shows when they air on TV in different countries. Her obsession with the show The Killing was so intense that she wrote to the producers when it was canceled to mourn the loss. The producers responded by giving Patti a cameo on one of the series' last episodes.

• 59:59Jake Brennan?

  But Patti Smith's obsession with TV crime shows, I don't believe that it's just folly. I believe that it comes from Patti's extensive exposure to actual crime throughout the course of her life. The Lindbergh Baby, Charles Manson, The Son of Sam. These true crime stories were formative for Patti Smith, as was the ever-present danger of New York City in the 1960s and 70s. The blood-splattered walls of her first apartment, the body outlined in chalk on the street outside Roberts, the dancer plunging to her death from the top of the Chelsea, her friend William S. Burroughs who shot and killed his wife and got away with it, Jim Carroll's deadly

• 1:00:42Jake Brennan?

  addiction to heroin, Robert Mapplethorpe's 42nd Street hustling, not to mention the addiction, violence, and deadly recklessness that accompanies most artists' lives. Patti Smith was a hair's breadth from all of it, and she learned from it all, learned from the crime, learned how not to succumb to the danger of it, but instead to use it as creative fuel. Patti Smith survived to become that rare type of artist that she became, because I believe Patti Smith knew what all crime fiction and true crime fans know, and that's how to stay safe, to be vigilant, aware, and like all great artists,

• 1:01:25Jake Brennan?

  to trust her intuition, to believe in that calling. Because the night doesn't just belong to lovers, it belongs to the criminals. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is DisgraceLand.

• 1:01:59Jake Brennan?

  All right, guys, you've now heard the Patti Smith episode of the DisgraceLand Podcast. The question I want to ask you all is, which musician's memoir or autobiography would you recommend? Get your answers in via voicemail and text to 617-906-6638, or hit me on the socials @DisgraceLandPod in the comments. Here comes some credits. DisgraceLand was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis, the Exactly Right Network, and iHeart Podcasts. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracelandpod.com. If you're listening as a DisgraceLand All-Access member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by going to disgracelandpod.com/membership.

• 1:02:44Jake Brennan?

  Members can listen to every episode of DisgraceLand ad-free. Rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook @DisgraceLandPod, and on YouTube at youtube.com-at-disgraceLandPod. Rockerola.

• 1:03:03Speaker 07

  He's a bad, bad man.

• 1:03:06Jake Brennan?

  Hey guys, time to dust off your detective skills while unwinding in the Caribbean on Virgin Voyages' second true crime voyages. Back by popular demand, this five-night, adults-only escape sets sail March 20th, 2027, to Grand Turk in the Beach Club at Bimini. The difference between this year and last will be that I will be on the cruise this year, along with Zeph, and he and I will be taping a live version of Disgrace Land, along with podcast hosts from Exactly Right's Buried Bones, Podcast of the Year Award winners, Wisecrack, and other fan favorites. Get on this cruise with us, guys, and enjoy live podcast recordings, behind-the-scenes storytelling, exclusive meet-and-greets, and immersive true crime programming throughout this one-of-a-kind voyage.

• 1:03:50Jake Brennan?

  Head over to www.virginvoyages.com/trucrime to secure your spot. I like a story with a twist as much as anyone, but some of the best traditions don't have one. They just started and kept going. That's something that's great about Chateau St. Michelle. They've been leading Washington wine since 1967 with wines that are balanced, expressive, and easy to enjoy. Choosing the right bottle shouldn't feel complicated. It should be something you open with confidence every time. So for once, here's a story with no twist, just a good bottle. Redefine your rituals with Chateau St. Michelle.