Thurston Moore interviewing Patti Smith? What’s not to love?
We dug up this awesome interview in BOMB magazine with Thirtsy and the “Goddess of Punk” (or whatever) circa ’96. They’re hanging out, driving around, talking about music, punk, Dylan, kids, religion – all that good stuff. (Thurston also gets props for aptly noting that Patti is from – ahem – Jersey.)
Click for tickets!
Anyway, we bring this up because she’s playing her first Central California show in seven years this Tuesday, October 9th, at the newly-renovated Golden State Theater in downtown Monterey. Better yet, it’s John’s Lennon’s birthday, so she’ll be playing some of his tunes.
Again, what’s no to love?
Get your tickets here: http://www.ticketmaster.com/
Now about that interview. We’ve excerpted a money quote below – when Patti first met her hero, Robert Zimmerman – but naturally, print it out, slip into the copy room, and read the whole thing!
TM When did you first meet Bob Dylan?
PS Backstage at the Bitter End. We didn’t have a drummer yet. It was just the four of us, we hadn’t been signed yet.
TM Did you see him in the audience?
PS No. Somebody told us he was there. My heart was pounding. I got instantly rebellious. I made a couple of references, a couple of oblique things to show I knew he was there. And then he came backstage which was really quite gentlemanly of him. He came over to me and I kept moving around. We were like two pitbulls circling. I was a snotnose.
I had a very high concentration of adrenaline. He said to me, “Any poets around here?” And I said, “I don’t like poetry anymore. Poetry sucks!” I really acted like a jerk. I thought, that guy will never talk to me again. And the day after there was this picture on the cover of the Village Voice. The photographer had Dylan put his arm around me.
It was a really cool picture. It was a dream come true, but it reminded me of how I had acted like a jerk. And then a few days later I was walking down 4th Street by the Bottom Line and I saw him coming. He put his hand in his jacket—he was still wearing the same clothes he had on in the picture, which I liked—and he takes out the Village Voice picture and says, “Who are these two people? You know who these people are?” Then he smiled at me and I knew it was all right.
