There isn’t anyone really quite like Patti Smith out there. As a musician, she’s almost without peer: by the sheer power of her ambition and ability, she was one of the few women to rise out of New York’s punk scene and remains relevant decades later. And aside from her music, she’s also a great writer.
Published as a poet before she released Horses, Smith’s been writing professionally for decades. In the early 70s, she freelanced for the seminal music magazine Creem and her 2010 memoir Just Kids was an instant classic, a look at her early days in New York and ending with her marriage to Fred Sonic Smith and retreat from performance. Her new memoir, M Train isn’t exactly a sequel, but for Smith fans, it’s essential.
In M Train, Smith takes readers a loose, non-linear look back at the past three decades. She ruminates on cafes, travels with her husband and searches for the perfect cup of coffee. At times she writes about the mundane – feeding the cats, watching a crime drama, going for a walk – and at others, takes readers into a meeting of a quasi-historical society, through remote South American towns and into a futuristic Japanese hotel. Throughout, she’s engaging and interesting.
At the same time, this is not a typical musician memoir. She doesn’t get into the details of her music, how she writes songs or what it was like to record and tour with The Patti Smith Band. There aren’t any gossipy stories of the road or profiles of fellow musicians. In fact, I think Lenny Kaye is the only other musician who makes more than a slight cameo in her book. But then again, neither was Just Kids.
In it’s own way, Smith’s book is darker and sadder than Just Kids. There isn’t the same sense of discovery and joy, although some of the same emotions about her and Robert in that book are present here, too. What’s here instead is the ghosts of a lifetime, people Smith sometimes struggles to remember, but are always with her: fellow writers like Paul Bowles or William Burroughs, her brother Todd and her husband Fred Sonic Smith. She looks back at the good times and the bad, the memories and how to move on in life.
Here, she also writes a lot about coffee, her drink of choice. In a sense, the book is a requiem for a local and now-defunct café where she spent her mornings. Caffeine is present almost always throughout the book, a cup of coffee following her as she travels the worlds. But it’s also functions for her as madeleines worked for Proust; a way for her to remember afternoons with Fred or trips around the world, cups of coffee in Detroit bars or with a Central American bean roaster. To wit:
“I sat at one of the small round tables and lifted two fingers. I wasn’t sure what this meant, but all the men did this with happy results. I wrote incessantly in my notebook. No one seemed to mind. The next slow-moving hours could only be described as sublime. I noticed a calendar tacked over a sack of overflowing beans marked Chiapas. It was February 14 and I was about to give my heart to a perfect cup of coffee…” (pg 113-14)
It helps if you have a good idea who Smith is going into this book; her fans know her just as much for her poetry and writing as they do her music. And they know how she’s drawn on a wide range of influences, too. So it makes sense how Smith casually namedrops authors and poets she likes throughout.
However, I can see it getting tiresome for people who’ve aren’t interested in her reading lists and are instead looking for an introduction to Smith. If you’ve never heard much of her music or read her before, I’d recommend starting at the beginning for both, pairing Horses (or the greatest hits collection Outside Society) with Just Kids instead of jumping in here.
Still, for people who already like her music or writing and want more, you can’t go wrong here. Even when she’s writing about nothing, as she puts it in the first pages of her book, Smith’s writing is enchanting; I found myself reading it slow, taking my time and not wanting it to end.
