Patti Smith: A Biography [Paperback]

Nick Johnstone (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 7, 1997

This biography traces the career of Patti Smith from home town poems to street performances in Paris, the highlife in New York, and life with her husband in Detroit. It covers the release of her debut album in 1975 and collaborations with people such as Bruce Springsteen.

Product Details

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: Omnibus Press (November 7, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 071196193X
• ISBN-13: 978-0711961937
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,314,651 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A satisfactory overview, until something better comes along., November 11, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Patti Smith: A Biography (Paperback)

As with many unauthorized biographies, Nick Johnstone's study of Patti Smith suffers from his lack of access to many of the key figures in her career. Instead, Johnstone attempts to make-do with a host of admiring, but often unconnnected, individuals who offer little beyond their worship and negligible opinions.

That said, Johnstone's book does concentrate information from a variety of largely available sources into a single volume and serves as a passable reference with regard to many key events in Smith's maturation and career. His interpretations of the meaning of lyrics, the choices for cover art, and other "insights", however, are often painful to wade through. Typos, misspellings (Jimmy "Lovine"), and factual errors (who brought "Because the Night" to whom?) are often a distraction and cause one to question the veracity of other "facts" presented. These errors are now more obvious when this work is compared to Patti's own Complete. Nonetheless, Complete does not attempt to approach the detail of this volume, so Johnstone's work will stand until an autobiography or authorized biography comes along.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Patti Smith Incomplete, May 28, 2010

By 

Josephine Segarra "JoJoSeahorse" (Brooklyn NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Patti Smith: A Biography (Paperback)

I mostly enjoyed this book; it is obvious that Mr Johnstone did not personally interview Patti or anyone close to her, either personally or professionally - he acknowledges as much, and that may have hampered him in obtaining crucial facts, but he has evidentally spent considerable time reading other material, so the book is pretty well researched and does include info I had never read before. I am still a little taken aback by some factual errors; as someone has already pointed out, the repeated misspelling of Jimmy Iovine's name (I fail to see how someone who works as a music writer would not know the name of such a well-known producer), also he gets Patti's son Jackson's birth year wrong! As for the attempted interpretations of Patti's writing; didn't Mr Johnstone have access to a lyric sheet for "Easter"? He thinks the title track is about "Frederick and Little Lee" and assumes the latter is a nickname Fred gave Patti because her middle name is Lee? The actual names referenced are "Frederic and Vitalie" the siblings of Arthur Rimbaud, and the song is about their First Communion - this is explained in the liner notes! His dissection of the poems "Judith" and "Judith Revisited" are equally ridiculous; he speculates as to whether they refer to a lesbian crush or a male lusting after a female friend, even as he acknowledges the "red herrings" that one apparently has the name "Patti" and "homosexual love" is mentioned! Patti wrote those poems about her own unrequited crush on her friend Judy Linn, the photographer - she discussed it extensively in a 1972 interview with Victor Bockris! I can't believe Mr Johnstone missed these facts, since he does seem to have read up on a lot of research material.

Anyway, overall it did make for an interesting read, minus the "interpretations". I was a little disappointed at the photos; a lot of them are not even of Patti, and the ones that are do not include any accompanying info about when and where they were taken. However, the cover photo more than makes up for it - it is gorgeous! Such a pale-skinned beauty; the stuff that dreams are made of,for this girl at least :)