Case in point -- this extremely rare 1976 pamphlet edition of a poem by (then an item) Godmother of Punk Patti Smith and Television guitarist Tom Verlaine.
Patti was kind enough to give me an autographed copy during the course of the 1978 interview I did with her for the Magazine Formerly Known as Stereo Review. And years later -- some time in the early 90s -- a friend of mine, who was working with Verlaine's management, passed it along to Tom, who was equally kind enough to add his John Hancock along with handwritten notes as to which verses were his and which were Patti's.
What can I tell you -- it's one of my most treasured possessions, even if it IS pretentious enough to alternate pages in English and (presumably well-translated) French.
5 comments:
Did Patti really say "bleepable'?
"Basically, if there isn't somebody I want to bleep in a band, I couldn't care less. Unless it's such great abstract music it carries me away. Otherwise, if it's a rock-and-roll band, there better be somebody bleepable or forget it."
PS: "to confront Dat Old Debbil media" !!!??? Oooof.
No, she didn't say bleepable. That was my editors pretending we had a family magazine.
And the "debbil media" quote you quoted has embarrassed me for decades. Really awful.
IIRC, Smith was in the Bay Area for awhile in the early 70s. Think she worked at Rather Ripped Records in Berkeley, where she did some poetry/music shows. I think they were selling some recordings and/or similar poetry printings through their mail order catalog, which, along with a couple of reviews she had printed in CREEM, was why I, a 17-year-old resident of a small farming town in California's Central Valley, knew who the hell she was when her first album came out.
I have a copy of that book, sans autograph, but I don't remember much about it.
Must have been amazing to find that pamphlet, especially in view of her writing about that period in her memoir.
(I loved that Johnathan Richman played drums for her in SF.)
AP
Post a Comment