This is Patti Smith
Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso
Higher Ground
4.8 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 18 January 2026
⏱️ 83 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Patti Smith has been hailed as the Godmother of Punk, the people’s poet, a defining voice of her generation. She’s been inducted into the Rock & Roll of Fame. She won a National Book Award for her memoir, Just Kids. Last fall, she published her most intimate book yet: Bread of Angels.
Act I: In Sickness and In Health
We discuss Patti’s early creative awakenings in South Jersey (7:50), discovering Bob Dylan at sixteen (18:00), and the summer job that inspired her infamous poem, Piss Factory (21:20).
Act II: Coming to New York
Then, we walk through her nomadic years with Robert Mapplethorpe in-and-out-of the Chelsea Hotel (32:30), her run-in with the Rolling Thunder Revue (39:58), the whirlwind of making her debut album Horses (45:28), and why she left it all behind (50:24).
Act III: Curtain Call
To close, she talks about giving voice to those whose time was cut short (53:00), her tireless desire and commitment to evolve as an artist (59:23), and the protests and politics that have shaped some of her best and most urgent work to date (1:01:37).
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Transcript
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| 1:41.0 | Today, Patty Smith. |
| 1:43.9 | Smith has been hailed as the godmother of punk, the people's poet, a defining |
| 1:48.5 | voice of her generation. She's been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She's won a |
| 1:53.7 | national book award for her memoir, just kids. She's even been asked by Bob Dylan back in 2016 |
| 1:59.2 | to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature on his behalf, |
| 2:02.8 | which she did. There are so many more titles and disciplines I could list here, but all of that |
| 2:08.5 | stuff, she told me, is just semantics. Quote, I am ultimately a worker. And the work, well, it speaks for |
| 2:17.0 | itself. When I sat with Patty, |
| 2:19.1 | she was in between completing one tour and beginning another. Last year, she traveled |
| 2:23.5 | the globe around the 50th anniversary of her seminal debut album, Horses, which Rolling Stone recently |
... |
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