Save for the 15 years she retreated from the spotlight to raise a family with her late husband Fred “Sonic” Smith (of the MC5), Patti has remained active to the present, including recording and touring with her band, still featuring Kaye and Daugherty alongside bassist/keyboardist Tony Shanahan and son Jackson Smith on guitar. Her imprimatur and blessings anointed punk scenes the world over, including a June 1978 evening at Raul’s at which she joined the Skunks onstage in an improvisation, centered around the instant refrain, “Tell God the Skunks are here/Have no fear now, now, now….” Earlier that day, her brother Todd bought her the antique dress she wore on the cover of her 1979 LP, Easter. She straddled the sanctified and the secular, bridged Sixties counterculture with Seventies rebellion, and served as punk’s original poet laureate. While Smith and her musical cohorts – guitarist Lenny Kaye (also a pioneering rock journalist who defined the garage aesthetic with his seminal Nuggets compilation in 1972), drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, Sohl, and guitarist/bassist Ivan Kral – hardly invented punk rock, they lent the form beauty and poetry. It was the world’s first notice that a musical/cultural revolution was brewing in a long, narrow room on NYC’s Bowery called CBGB. In 24 seconds’ time, Chicago-born, New Jersey-raised Patricia Lee Smith, then 29-years-old, blew apart several social and musical taboos, in the first eight words of her sacreligious remake of Van Morrison’s garage rock standard “Gloria.” She also blew every set of ears which had not heard those words on the Patti Smith Group’s landmark debut LP Horses, released the previous November 10th. The first words out of her mouth, before jutting her jaw in determination? “ Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.” Maybe 40 minutes into the broadcast, Nessen stares into the cameras at 30 Rockefeller Center and intones, “A special, uh, treat for me tonight – and I think for you, too – is the Patti Smith Group….”Īfter the camera focuses on pianist Richard DNV Sohl’s hands hammering out a trio of chords, it dissolves to Patti Smith in close-up, her profile emerging from inky black.
This evening, President Gerald Ford’s press secretary Ron Nessen was the guest host – hilariously subversive, for such a revolutionary program, born of the counterculture. April 17, 1976: Saturday Night Live, NBC’s controversial new late night sketch comedy show which premiered six months earlier, was beaming into America’s living rooms and bedrooms, including those of a few children whose parents might have been upset at what was being exposed to tender minds.