'Rock 'n' roll was my salvation': Patti Smith looks back before Camden, Red Bank concerts

Patti Smith is coming home.

Smith, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer singer/songwriter who spent much of her youth in South Jersey, returns to the state this month for a weekend of gigs. She and her band play Camden's Freedom Mortgage Pavilion on Friday, Sept. 16, as part of the XPoNential Music Festival, then they make their debut at the Count Basie Center for the Arts' Hackensack Meridian Health Theatre on Saturday, Sept. 17.

“I’m so happy to have the opportunity, just even to drive from one place to the other," said Smith. "I love New Jersey, and I’ve never played at the Count Basie theater and it’s so beautiful, it’s so well-known and its provenance is so wonderful. But we’re all excited because most of us are Jersey people.”

Lenny Kaye of North Brunswick has been Smith’s stalwart guitarist since the beginning, and her band also includes Milltown native Tony Shanahan on bass.

The Chicago-born Smith, now 75, lived in Philadelphia before calling Deptford and Pitman in Gloucester County home for her youth and young adulthood, so the XPoNential Festival bow will be a return to her childhood stomping grounds.

“I feel very attached to Camden," Smith said. "And of course when we play there I’ll get to visit Walt Whitman’s grave, and then we’ll all pile up in a car and come to the Count Basie, so I’m really happy about all of that.”

Patti Smith left New Jersey for New York City in 1967 at the age of 20. She became an integral part of the city's cultural landscape, crossing paths with the likes of Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg, as she detailed in her 2010 memoir "Just Kids" and as was glimpsed in Martin Scorsese's 2019 Netflix documentary "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese,” the 2019 Netflix epic.

More than half a century, 11 studio LPs and a slew of books later, Smith has earned plenty of laurels as a four-time Grammy nominee, 2007 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, 2010 National Book Award winner and New Jersey Hall of Fame class of 2021 member. This year she received an honorary doctorate from Columbia University and was awarded France’s Légion d’Honneur.

But through all of the history and accolades, the worldview Smith gained growing up in South Jersey remains intact.

“I lived in Philly until I was around 8 years old, so I knew about big cities," she said. "And then we came to a very rural area and I had to get used to it, but I fell in love with it because I got attached to the land. Back then there wasn’t a lot of cultural offerings but there was learning about the land – you could dig and find this red clay that generations before people had made pottery with. I found arrowheads. I got to know the little farms that sold foxes. Really, I became a little tracker."

Growing up, Smith recalled, the most important thing to her family was music.

“There weren’t any galleries or museums or cafes or anything, so we really came to culture through music – through of course R&B and dancing and then, really importantly, (John) Coltrane and Nina Simone and Joan Baez. So for me, I think of Jersey as a time where I grew and I learned to love the land, but also where I learned to dance. I grew up at the same time, almost simultaneously, with rock 'n' roll and the development of our cultural voice."

The cultural importance of the radio and records can be heard loud and clear in Smith's own work. Since "Hey Joe," her debut single in 1974 that was a radical recontextualization of a song popularized by Jimi Hendrix less than a decade prior, Smith consistently has found ways of boldly reinterpreting the hits of others. Her first LP, 1975's "Horses," saw Smith take possession of Them's "Gloria" and Wilson Pickett's "Land of a Thousand Dances." The theme continued all the way to her most recent album, 2012's "Banga," closing with a tender rendition of Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush."

“I genuinely, so deeply, appreciate the work of others because especially in rock 'n' roll when I was young I was so awkward. I was such a skinny kid and I didn’t really fit in," Smith said. "Really, rock 'n' roll was my salvation. And evolving with it, going from R&B all the way through to Bob Dylan, it was a comfort, an inspiration, and a way to express myself through other people. So I’m still grateful for that, and really just love to sing other people’s songs.”

Since "Banga," Smith has stayed plenty active as a writer. Her latest book, 2019's "Year of the Monkey," is an intimate and inventive work that combines memoir and Haruki Murakami-style magical realism. From 2019 to 2020, she collaborated with Soundwalk Collective on a triptych of experimental albums.

Looking ahead, Smith said she's written handfuls of tunes she describes as "old porch songs." She hopes to work on a new LP next year.

"I really count on my musicians or friends to perhaps inspire me to write something," she said. "But we have been working on some things, I have some ideas. I just have been focusing, really, on writing my books. And now I’m going to be 76 so I really am anticipating (asking), ‘How long do I have as a performer, where I can really deliver, where my voice is strong?’ So I really am focusing on making statements whatever I want to make live.

“I want to do one more record, but I don’t want to just do a record," she continued. "I just want to do a great record that’s unique and really a contribution. Because I’ve done my 12 records or 13 records. I don’t feel the need to just put out a record. There’s plenty of people doing great music that are more in touch with our culture at this point. So if I do a record, I want to do something that is really going to be, as I said, a contribution.”

Go: XPoNential Music Festival, featuring Patti Smith and her band, Friday, Sept. 16, through Sunday, Sept. 18, Wiggins Park and Freedom Mortgage Pavilion at the Camden waterfront. Other acts include Lucinda Williams, War on Drugs, Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, Taj Mahal, Lo Moon and many more. For tickets, a full festival schedule and more information, visit xpnfest.org.

Go: Patti Smith and her band, 8 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 17, Hackensack Meridian Health Theatre at the Count Basie Center for the Arts, 99 Monmouth St., Red Bank, $35 to $99; thebasie.org/events/patti-smith-and-her-band.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Patti Smith talks NJ roots before Camden, Basie concerts