Patti Smith performs in Paris, France, November 2011. Photo: David Wolfff Patrick/WireImage

The following conversation between Patti Smith and MTV Networks’ Bill Flanagan took place in front of an audience at MTV Days in Turin, Italy on June 26th, 2010. Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids –- the story of her early days in New York City with then-unknown photographer Robert Mapplethorpe — was being published in Italy. Patti told the audience, “Today is a very special day for me because my book has come out in Italian. I am very proud of that. It’s really the story of struggle, of calling, of what Robert Mapplethorpe was like as a young man, about love and friendship and remembering that what we aspire to as artists is not fame and fortune. Those things may come and they are very nice. What we aspire to is to do good work.”

Flanagan introduced Patti Smith to a great ovation. When the talk was over she left the stage and got a guitar. She returned and performed “Beneath the Southern Cross,” “My Blakean Year” and “Because the Night.”

Patti Smith:
Hello everybody. Glad to see you.

Bill Flanagan:
Patti, you are big in Italy.

Smith: The Italians are my people.

Flanagan:
I just learned that you did two big shows in 1979 that were sort of the Woodstock of Italy. Just before you retired from music you came here and said goodbye.

Smith:
Yes, it was not only the Woodstock of Italy – it was the Woodstock of myself. I never went to Woodstock but I did come to Florence and Bologna in 1979. And the people made their own festival. It was a beautiful thing.

Flanagan:
I read in the newspaper yesterday that the Library of Congress in the United States has added Horses to the register of great American recordings. That’s an honor.

Smith:
Yes, that’s a big honor. Considering all of the trouble that I’ve gotten in America for all of my political beliefs. It’s very exciting to be preserved. It shows that using your voice actually turns out to be a very American thing.

Flanagan:
You just have to stick around long enough. I have a real fan question about the imagery in “Land” on Horses. That record came out in 1975 and Equus, the Peter Shaffer play about a troubled boy who has images of horses, was a big hit in New York at the time. When your record came out I thought of Equus and Picasso’s Guernica. Were those things in your windshield at all?

Smith:
Well Guernica was very much in my windshield. I visited Guernica almost constantly whenever I had the money, at the Museum of Modern Art. It was a very important influence on me as a young aspiring artist because it showed how an artist could make an impact, politically and humanistically, through art. And I remember Equus was out but it was just a zeitgeist. It was the “Horse” zeitgeist.

Flanagan:
Well it worked. Let me hold up your book. Just Kids by Patti Smith. The portrait of the artist as a young woman. It really moved me. One of the things that struck me in the book was that sense that you knew you were an artist, but the medium was kind of liquid. You painted, you wrote poetry, you loved music but it wasn’t initially obvious that you were going to be in music. You tried acting. You wrote a play with Sam Shepard, which is pretty hip. Do you think the artistic sensibility can flow from form to form? If Picasso had not been a painter would he have been a good musician?

Smith:
Well, I don’t know about that. I think that people have a calling. I think it’s unique with certain people. William Blake moved from form to form. Obviously Leonardo, Michelangelo moved from form to form. One difficult aspect about moving from form to form is – you leave a lot of unfinished work behind because one keeps leaping like a rabbit from form to form. When I was a child I read Peter Pan and Pinocchio and Alice in Wonderland and I thought there was nothing more wonderful than the book. I wanted to be a writer. I thought of it all of the time. All I wanted to do was write.

Flanagan:
Did you have a great teacher? Was there an 8th grade English teacher or art teacher or someone who might have inspired you along the way?

Smith:
The first great teacher I had was my mother when I was maybe three. I wasn’t in kindergarten yet. My mother read all the time and I wanted to read those books. I begged her to show me how to read. My mother did ironing, she was a waitress, and she had two other children. We didn’t have much money and she didn’t have a whole lot of time. But finally because I begged her so much, she taught me how to read. That was one of the most beautiful gifts I ever have gotten – to teach me to read books. So I would say she was my first great teacher. I had a few teachers that encouraged me because I was, in the late 50s and early 60s, a little bohemian for my southern New Jersey school. I didn’t really fit in but I had a couple of teachers who did not really fit in themselves. So they understood and encouraged me, especially to write.

Flanagan:
One of the things that I have always loved in your work is this great sense of play with language. In “Redondo Beach” when you talk about making a pay phone call, “another dime mentioned.” And, “I’m no dervish but I’ll give it a whirl.”

Smith:
Oh, I have a good one. “I gave you a wristwatch; you wouldn’t even give me the time of day.”

Flanagan:
That’s like an R&B lyric. There’s just tons of them. “The Polaroid melting in my hands, I can’t get the picture.” The first time I saw you, you did a riff on radio and “the ray of God, the ray ‘Dio.’ ”Did you see words that way from the time you were little?

Smith:
I think that’s partially because I saw words visually. I loved handwriting, I liked to write, and I liked calligraphy and then started drawing with words. I would write the word “radio” and realize R-A-Y, the ray, ‘Dio’, which has to do with God. When you look at a word big or you look at a word flat on a piece of paper, you can see how it can expand. Also I come from a family who love to make jokes and puns. My father was always making plays on words. I loved Alice in Wonderland which is full of that type of wordplay.

Flanagan:
Where John Lennon got so much of his stuff.

Smith:
Yes and I love John Lennon. He was a great word player.

Flanagan:
In the book you talk about being around the Chelsea Hotel in 1969 and 1970 and getting to know Janis Joplin and Kris Kristofferson. Was there something you recognized in them? Did you feel like, ”I could be part of this,” or “I understand in some way how they do what they do”?

Smith:
I didn’t feel that except when I saw them perform. I didn’t look at rock and roll stars in a restaurant and think that I could be like them. Because I wasn’t a musician I had no aspirations to do that. I should mention that in the Chelsea Hotel in the late 60s and early 70s all of the rock and roll stars of a certain type stayed there. Robert Mapplethorpe and I lived there and so they were coming into our home. We all sort of mingled because being a rock and roll star was different then than it is now. You weren’t a big celebrity, you weren’t a multi-millionaire – you had a little more money. Me and Janis Joplin lived in the same hotel. Her room was just three times bigger. We all sort of dressed the same. Jimi Hendrix and all of these people were only a couple of years older than me. Sometimes people read the book and think, “Oh, you have dropped all of these names,” but it wasn’t like that then. The cult of celebrity had not filtered into rock and roll. Rock and roll was subversive. They didn’t want to be celebrities.