M Train

I saw Patti Smith play live for the umpteenth time this summer. I don't think she could give a bad concert if she tried, but this was one I was a bit wary about: Like all aging rock stars, she was going to play her most popular album (Horses) live in its entirety. It's a setup that, for most artists, becomes a dull exercise in nostalgia and note-perfect reproduction. As Jim Reid of the Jesus And Mary Chain pointed out in an interview when they set out to play Psychocandy live a few years ago, their concerts back then were never faithful reproductions of the studio material, yet if they were to sound NOW like they did back then, fans who only knew the album would complain about it not being authentic.

I shouldn't have worried, though, because if there's anyone who can pull this sort of thing off, it's Patti Smith. Not only because she's kept working with (as far as life and death allows) the same musicians ever since, but also because her entire career and Horses in particular have always been about subsuming yourself in what Lethem called the ecstasy of influence. Horses was always basically a sermon using rock'n'roll and poetry as holy writ; 40 years on, she just has to acknowledge that Horses itself has become part of that gospel. The 2015 version doesn't sound dated or nostalgic, nor is it a radical rearrangement as Dylan or Reed might have done, it's just ... lived in, a bit grey and wrinkled, not as limber as it once was but still refusing to back down.

Come on, man! I am PURE! I am ready to change the fucking world! Come on, motherfuckers! Come on! Come and get me!

Which leads us to M Train, her second memoir after the brilliant Just Kids, but this time starting in the Now: Patti Smith, grey, creaky-jointed, widowed and literal Grandmother of Punk, sits in her favourite cafe in the Village, sipping coffee and reading and taking notes. Not for anything in particular, but she just woke up from a dream where she was told that "It's not so easy to write about nothing." "I could do it, if only I had nothing to say," she responds. And sets about doing that, which of course in a way means trying to say everything.

Where Just Kids had a central story set squarely in the past - her dream of becoming an Artist (irrelevant which kind), her relationship/friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, their respective rise to fame and self-awareness, with a coda set after his death - M Train is far less focused. That's not necessarily a bad thing; I'd gladly listen to Patti Smith ramble on about the phone book. Much like Dylan's Chronicles, it's not a tell-all memoir for those who want to know juicy personal details; you get to know a lot about Patti Smith, but little that concerns her actual career (the few times she even acknowledges that she's a musician can be counted on the fingers of one hand), and much more about how she sees the world and how it shapes her. She talks about books she's read and loved from Rimbaud to Murakami, people she's admired, TV shows she's following, the house she bought just a week before hurricane Sandy hit it, her various private travels all over the world (or just across the street) to visit other drifters alive and dead and collect memories with her notepad and her camera... And the still lingering grief from her husband's death 20 years earlier, that's mellowed but never goes away. She sleeps in Frieda Kahlo's bed, she visits Ozu's grave, she gets mugged, she drinks copious amounts of coffee, and she never stops thinking about it, filtering it through all that holy writ of how others have experienced the same things.

I saw a quote the other day to the effect that books are how humans update their software. M Train, using that metaphor, is one long personal debug, going over alternately hilarious and deeply moving, and sure, once or twice it goes overboard and becomes exactly as hippyish as you'd expect of an aging cat lady poet. But that's part of what Patti Smith is, and it wouldn't be her without it. At least twice, she seems to read my mind and responds (very specifically) from the written page to something I'd been thinking aboout IRL just hours earlier. In most books, I'd write that off as coincidence; but this is that rare memoir that feels not like a monologue but a dialogue, and I feel honoured to have gotten a chance to talk to her.