Watch: Patti Smith performs ‘My Blakean Year’ at Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota
“I didn’t come out of the womb as a punk rocker.”
Acclaimed musician, writer and multidisciplinary artist Patti Smith got a laugh Tuesday evening in response to that statement from a crowd of about 500 people at Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota. Smith was talking about her love of botanical gardens and flowers – and of the late Robert Mapplethorpe, whose photos, hand-in-hand with Smith’s work as a writer and musician, are the muse of Selby Gardens’ exhibition “Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith: Flowers, Poetry and Light.”
During An Evening With Patti Smith, an event celebrating the exhibit’s opening, Smith spoke of her time the marshes of rural Deptford Township, New Jersey, in her adolescence before moving to New York and meeting Mapplethorpe, who would become her lover, but more importantly and enduringly, her friend. In a conversation with Selby Curator-at-Large Carol Ockman, Smith discussed her ties to the natural world, Mapplethorpe and his artwork, as well as her book about their friendship, “Just Kids.”
That Smith tell their story was one of Mapplethorpe’s last requests before his death from complications of AIDS in 1989. He was 42.
The book, she noted, has become her most successful work to date – and her success, she said, was always Mapplethorpe’s dream more than her own. After speaking with Ockman, Smith and her bandmate Tony Shanahan performed a five-song set, interspersed with readings from “Just Kids” and anecdotes about Mapplethorpe.
Smith opened with “Wing,” from her 1994 album “Gone Again,” then performed “My Blakean Year,” from 2004’s “Trampin’,” which she prefaced by saying that she thought of Blake often toward the end of Mapplethorpe’s life, because of how dedicated he remained to his work as his health was failing.
She followed that with “Blame it on the Sun,” a Stevie Wonder tune she said she chose because Mapplethorpe had a great love of Stevie Wonder and Motown was his favorite musical style. When she was younger, she said, her vocal range was unsuited for the song, but “I think Robert would have liked to have heard that.”
Smith and Shanahan then played “Wild Leaves,” which she wrote for Mapplethorpe’s 40th birthday, and closed the set with her breakout hit “Because the Night,” from 1978’s “Easter.”
This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Watch: Patti Smith performs ‘My Blakean Year’ at Selby Gardens
