← DISGRACELAND
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Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis. 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 Patty 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 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 melotron 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 10, 1971. And that was the day that Patti Smith first took the stage with more than just words, with a guitarist at her side, and began building a previously unimagined bridge between the art world and rock and roll. And she did it for the criminal on this 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. 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 Penn 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. 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 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. 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 Claritian 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. 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 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. In the original version of Cinderella entitled Askinputl, one stepsister used 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 protect the crimes of a rapist. In Judges four, Yale offers an unsuspecting enemy general hospitality. When the general falls asleep, 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. Horses. And later on, as a teenager, rape and murder were more than just a shot away. All of these stories were right there, out in the open, in Patti Smith's bible and in her history books and in the museums she visited as a child. 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 revenge. Public disgrace, Maximum pain. 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 in 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 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 in body only. Another murder. This one officially executed for the crimes of heresy and cross dressing. But whose life's work would inspire generations and whose name would forever ring True. 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 Fremier's gilded bronze depiction of the young martyr cast a piercing impression upon young Patty. 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. 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 Patty'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. In her final living moments, she was handcuffed to her bed by federal agents and placed under arrest for narcotics possession. One of Patty'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. 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 time. Lindbergh's 20 month old son had been kidnapped. The kidnapper used a ladder to creep into the second story nursery of the Lindbergh's 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. Before the night of the crime had ended, newswires 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 was found by a truck driver reported 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. 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.
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Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. 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. 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. 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. 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 dude boy from the bookstore and ran to him in the park, introducing him on the spot to her predatory lunch date. As her boyfriend Robert Mapplethorpe, who was high on LSD at the time, went along with the ruse, which he no doubt thought was hilarious. Robert found Patti 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 tenet, they painted, created drawings and collages and wrote. 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 Shirelles 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. 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. With the chalk outline of the dead body outside the front door precipitated another move to Olestion. Dangerous neighborhood. So further uptown they went to the Chelsea Hotel. 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 Niko 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. Dylan died at the Chelsea. Thomas, not Bob, well, the poet, fell into a coma in room 205 after downing 18 straight whiskeys before he was carried off to be pronounced dead at St. Vincent's the Andy Warhol superstar Evie Sedgwick set her room at the Chelsea on fire while high on barbiturates. She had to be rescued from Room 105, where Warhol has shot part of his acclaimed 1966 film Chelsea Girls. A few years prior, a 20 year old dancer named Lucille Andell 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 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 it. 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. 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. Patti listened to Janice express herself through music. Patti worked up poems with Jim Carroll. Patty met Bob Dylan's fixer and confidant, Bob Neuwirth. Bob Neuwirth encouraged Patty to work her poems into songs. To listen to Hank Williams, to listen to Blind Willie Mattel, 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. Creatively, Patti 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 Stone's 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 spree with a decidedly rock and roll edge. The Tate LaBianca 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 40 seconds, where he hustled sex for cash to help support himself and Patty. Patty worried about Robert. Sex work was as dangerous as it got. 1969, Midtown Manhattan. 42nd street, aka the Deuce. A neon open air sex market. Predators and prey, pros and junk Yankees 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 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 turned 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 quote unquote, rent boy, or so he told himself. 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. 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. 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. And by the time he was 27, he'd won four Obie awards for four different plays. The object movies are the highest awards given to off Broadway artists. Sam Shepard won three in one year. Sam convinced Patty 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 Patty to collaborate with him on a new play. And they called it Cowboy Mouth. Cowboy Mouth was a semi autobiographical account of Sam and Patty's relationship. Both acted in the two lead roles when it was staged in April of 1971. And there it was, Sam and Patty's illicit relationship brought to life for all to see. Afterward, Sam freaked out. He had a wife and a kid. That it was wrong and he knew it. He abruptly left New York City to return to his family in Vermont. At first Patty was devastated. But it didn't take long before she put a 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 worse worth it. Because Sam Shepard helped Patti Smith finally find her voice. 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, heroin, hustling, Charles Lindbergh, Charles Manson, chalk outline bodies and blood stained tenement walls. Jean Genet, William Burroughs and William Tell, Willie Mictel, Bob Neuworth, Robert Mapplethorpe and Jim Carroll. Sam Shepard, it was all one big art and crime collage. It was who she had become. And now it was time to get 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. We'll be right back after this. On February 10, 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 K. 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 Lenny. Lenny was already a musical encyclopedia. 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 note notes feature one of the earliest uses of the term punk rock. Lenny Kaye not only knew how to play guitar, Lenny Kay knew his shit. 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 the secret, in on something special. It's a promise that in the 1970s, New York City seemed to constantly fulfill. The lights dimmed. Guitar feedback began to creep from Lenny's amplifier. 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. Patty 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. 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 Patty meted out the powerful words from the first lines of her poem. Oath. Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine. Suddenly it wasn't a poem anymore. It was a song. And with Lenny, it was rock and roll. Patti Smith had answered her calling and people loved it. The crowd that night adored her. Patti was indeed something new, something unseen, a transgressive hybrid of poetry and music with something powerful to say. 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, Patty's possessed unyielding conviction. And those words had the power to inspire. And inspire they did. Patty And Lenny brought their rock and roll poetry hybrid to other stages. After this, 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. Before long, in 1975, Patty 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. Burroughs apartment where the iconic novelist lived in squalor and and would receive Patty as a guest whenever she was in the neighborhood. It was just Patty in her fearlessness and her curiosity and burrows in his heroin and his shotgun. Down the street near Bleecker, the crowd assembled outside the doors of CBGBs, a little dive no one had cared about five minutes before. But tonight, Patty and the new band she'd assembled with Lenny on guitar, Richard Soule on piano, Ivan Carl on Bass and J.D. daugherty, 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 in the air. Except now the 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. 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. Patty was unofficially drafted by New York's downtown tastemakers and uptown glitterati to, as she said, quote, preserve, protect and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. 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. 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 Patty on the COVID did what it was supposed to do its part to save rock and roll. The album begins with a bang, just as Patty did at St. Mark's, with a powerful rejection 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 Bang said in his Cream magazine review that Patty's songs on Horses touched, quote, deep wellsprings of emotion that extremely few artists in RO or anywhere else are capable of reaching. That was just it. Few artists in rock or anywhere else. I don't know if Lester Bangs intended to cast Patty'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 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, sing me a song I can dance to Patty. 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 1970, he was filing a lawsuit against his manager, trying to extricate himself from a horrible contract, one that he believed to be criminal. 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 Lanier. 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 Patty and Allen, 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. July 29, 1976, 1:10am Pelham Bay, the Bronx. Two women, 18 year old Donna Lauria and 19 year old Jody Valenti, sat in an Oldsmobile 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. Supply 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. Donna opened the door to leave from out of the darkness a man with a gun. Donna startled. The man crouched onto one knee, took aim at Donna with both hands and Jody screamed. Donna Lauria 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. Two young lovers, 18 year old Rosemary Keenan and 20 year old Carl Daro, 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.44 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.44 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 76. And later in November, another shooting seasons. Don't Fear the Reaper. Another couple of teenage girls, another Donna, this one Donna Damasi, 16, along with Joanne Lomino, 18. Two shots. Both girls survived but the papers, especially the New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill traded ink for industry scale paranoia. New Yorkers sweat it out. The winter. La la la la la. Don't Fear the Reaper the new year 1977. New shootings. Another couple alone in the car. Christine Freund, 26, and John Deal, 30. Both were shot. She survived, he didn't. The papers did their thing. The public paranoia ratcheted even higher. Love of two is one here, but now they're gone. March 8, 1977. Another shooting. College student Virginia Voskoshine 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 here. But now. Now they're gone. A month later, a model and her boyfriend parked at about 3am on the side of the Hutchinson Parkway in the Bronx. One dead model, one dead boyfriend. Romeo and Juliet are together an eternity. Come on, baby, don't fear the reaper. And on May 30, 1977, when Daily Night 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 behemoth, 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. And while the NYPD hunted for the Son of Sam, Patty 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 to the city's lovers. But Springsteen didn't care. There was something there. The wisp of a song. 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, 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, the self proclaimed chubby bohemias 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. 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 20something 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 27, Jimmy Iovine, who was also now producing Patti's new album, brought Springsteen's demo of because the Night into the studio for Patty. 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 free to frolic because the night was a massive smash. Patti Smith had her hit and Robert Mapplethorpe had a song he could dance to. Now Patti Smith was more than just an artist. For a minute it seemed Patti Smith was a pop star because the night was Patti Smith's commercial breakthrough. It was a top 40 hit, top five in the UK. Easter, the album that the single supported, sold better than Patty's previous two albums combined. But pop stardom was never her goal. Being an artist was. And artists need 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 movies, Motor city legends, the MC5. In 1979, Hattie 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. 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? Perhaps art took Robert, but it didn't take Fred. Sonic Smith. Heart failure did. Patty's other great love, Fred smith, died in 1994, five years after Robert Mapplethorpe. Patti 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 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. 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 succumb to the ever present danger that surrounds them. Jean Genet and William S. Burroughs 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? Perhaps the reason Patti Smith survived is something that she revealed in M Train. When you read it, you can't help but feel Patty 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 Patty's love of detective fiction both on the page and on screen. In a word, Patti Smith is crime obsessed. Law and Order the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Midsummer Murders Sherlock Holmes Luther CSI Miami the Killing 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 cancelled to mourn the loss. The producers responded by giving Patty a cameo on one of the series last episodes. But Patti Smith's obsession, obsession with TV crime shows, I don't believe that it's just folly. I believe that it comes from Patty'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 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 did know. And that's how to stay safe. To be vigilant, aware and like all great artists, 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 Disgrace. All right guys, you 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 in iHeart podcasts. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page@gracelandpod.com if you're listening as a Disgraceland Altogether 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. 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