Musicians in Their Own Words
MUSIC
544 Pages, 6 x 9
Formats: Mobipocket, Cloth, EPUB, PDF
Cloth, $30.00 (US $30.00) (CA $40.00)
Publication Date: November 2020
ISBN 9780912777009
Rights: WOR
Chicago Review Press (Nov 2020)
eBook Editions Available
Will it work on my eReader?"Here is Patti Smith: wise-cracking and meditative; funny and profound; flippant, provocative and wise. What a treat it is to read these interviews, lovingly and expertly curated by Aidan Levy. Fans and scholars alike will drink deep from this collection, which covers every aspect of Patti Smith’s artistic life: from her days as an aspiring poet in the early 1970s to the years of alt rock stardom, and from her resurgence as a musician and author in the late 1980s and 1990s to her post-millennial incarnation as a highly respected memoirist, cultural commentator and political activist . . . More now than ever, we would do well to attend to Patti Smith, both on the page and on the record: this collection gives us the artist in full." —Philip Shaw, author of Patti Smith's Horses
“Patti Smith tore through the music world like a dervish in the ’70s, quoting Rimbaud, Jagger, and Whitman with equal verve, blowing up gender stereotypes and notions of class while making music that fused high and low culture. She was word obsessed, and Aidan Levy is up to the task of curating those words, via interviews spanning her days as a young, fierce poet, to the serene, post-punk memoirist of today.” —Susan Whitall, author of Joni on Joni and Fever: Little Willie John’s Fast Life, Mysterious Death and the Birth of Soul
“Aidan Levy has done us all a big favor by brilliantly contextualizing five decades’ worth of Patti Smith’s outrageous, hilarious, and consistently surprising interviews. Here is a Smith who practically hijacks the interview so she can turn it into a performance, a talk-poem, a shamanic possession, an improvisation as breathtaking as one of Charlie Parker’s best. Patti Smith on Patti Smith proves Smith’s tough-talking madcap shtick is as good as her Horses.” —Daniel Kane, author of Do You Have a Band? Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City
“Smith’s work is a reminder of the power of rock’n’roll and of words—both should have rhythm and the best of both, surprising rhythms that jolt the listener from the coma of everyday life.”—Shepherd Express