walking upstream…
Patti Smith
photo: ratatosk · cc by-sa 3.0 ↗Patti Smith
sourcesWikipedia — Patti Smith · Oceanstar archive — Mademoiselle, September 1975 interview ('part Bob Dylan, part Keith Richards') · Boston.com — Patti Smith on writing, Bob Dylan, 'Horses,' turtles, and gratitude for a rich inner life (bio quotes, 1975 Bitter End encounter) · Far Out Magazine — the alternative band Patti Smith compared to the Rolling Stones (Nirvana/Stones quote, told to Rolling Stone) · Far Out Magazine — 'Boundless energy'
Patti Smith grew up in New Jersey in the 1950s, discovering rock and roll on the radio and poetry on library shelves, and never fully separated the two educations again. As a teenager she and a college friend stood in line for hours at a Philadelphia record shop to buy Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, then combed the city for a scarf like the one on its cover. "My role models were Bob Dylan, Rimbaud, and Picasso," she has said. By 1975, backed by guitarist Lenny Kaye, she turned that curriculum into Horses, setting her own incantatory verse over garage-band rock and effectively inventing punk's literary wing. She later stepped back from performing to write full-time — "writing, words, are what I fell in love with at 3 years old" — but the fusion she pioneered on Horses remade what a rock song could carry.
the sound in question
1978
Because the NightPatti Smith
walk the tributaries ↓
Bob Dylan1960s · Folk / Folk rock / Rock
Dylan was, by Smith's own account, the artist she measured herself against before she ever picked up a guitar. "I related completely to him," she said, "his arrogance, his humour, his mergence of poetry and performance." When "Like a Rolling Stone" hit the radio in 1965, she was a college freshman: "It was so overwhelming that nobody went to class." A decade later, sizing up her own stage persona, she called herself "part Bob Dylan, part Keith Richards" — proof of how directly his template became her own.
listen: upstream & heresource: Irish Times — Patti Smith ↗
1965
Like a Rolling StoneBob Dylan
1975
GloriaPatti Smith
listen forCue Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" before Smith's "Gloria" and listen for the shared move: neither song simply sings its opening line, it recites it, syllables landing ahead of the beat like spoken accusation before the band catches up. Dylan sneers a put-down into verse; Smith declares "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine" flatly, almost talking, before Lenny Kaye's guitar even arrives. Both treat the voice as an instrument for talking first and singing second — the trick Smith took most directly from him.
The Rolling Stones1960s-70s · Rock / Blues rock / Hard rock
Smith's sexual and artistic awakening arrived by television. Watching the Stones perform "Time Is on My Side" on The Ed Sullivan Show, she recalled: "my brain froze... I got shook. Light broke," while her father sat "frothing like a dog... shouting, Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ!" — losing him only sharpened the thrill, she said: "that band was as relentless as murder." Decades later, measuring her own devotion against a new generation's, she put it plainly: "I'd had The Rolling Stones. I was happy for the kids to have Nirvana."
listen: upstream & heresource: Cheatsheet — Patti Smith's 'brain froze' hearing the Rolling Stones' 'Time Is on My Side' (Stones sexual awakening) ↗
1969
Gimme ShelterThe Rolling Stones
2007
Gimme ShelterPatti Smith
listen forSmith made the connection literal in 2007, cutting her own version of the Stones' "Gimme Shelter" for the covers album Twelve. Where Jagger's original rides Merry Clayton's shrieking backing vocal and a storm-warning guitar into pure dread, Smith drops the gospel wail and half-speaks the verses in her flat, urgent talk-singing, turning the song's apocalyptic warning into something closer to a spoken prophecy — the same instinct for turning menace into declaration.
Little Richard1950s · Rock and roll / Rhythm and blues / Gospel
Long before Dylan or the Stones, there was Little Richard on the radio. "I was a little girl when Little Richard hit the scene," Smith has said, dating her first real musical memory to hearing him sing "Tutti Frutti" at five or six years old: "The energy of it just, like, got me," she told Interview magazine, "the energy in it was akin to a child's boundless energy." It's the earliest layer under everything she built afterward — proof rock and roll could feel like a physical event before she understood it as an art form.
listen: upstream & heresource: Hi Barr Substack — 1996 Patti Smith interview ('Like a Rolling Stone' overwhelm; Little Richard first encounter) ↗
1955
Tutti FruttiLittle Richard
1975
LandPatti Smith
listen forPlay "Tutti Frutti" before the extended "Land" suite that closes side one of Horses and listen for the same all-out vocal abandon: Little Richard's whoops give way to Smith's own unhinged crescendo, her voice cracking into a wordless chant of "horses, horses, horses, horses" as the band pushes past any verse-chorus shape into pure noise. Neither singer is performing restraint — both are chasing the same ecstatic edge, two decades apart.