Patti Smith

You were saying that you didn't have – you didn't think of yourself as a singer per se, that your friends had better voices than you did.

But you created this new style, really, that was a combination of poetry and music.

It wasn't about having a perfect singer's voice.

It was the style that you performed and the personality that you put into it, the kind of defiance that you had in some songs, the energy.

Would you talk about what you felt you were doing early on that was different from what you'd seen other people do?

I think my perception of myself was really as a performer and a communicator.

My first album, Horses, my mission and the collective band mission was really on one level to merge poetry and rock and roll, but more humanistically to reach out to other disenfranchised people.

You know, we, in 1975...

The young homosexual kids were being disowned by their families.

Kids like me who were a little weird or a little different were often persecuted in their small towns.

And it wasn't just because of sexual persuasion.

It was for any reason, for being an artist, for being different, for having political views, for just wanting to be free.

And I really recorded the record to connect with these people.

And also in terms of our place in rock and roll, just to create some bridge between our great artists that we had just lost, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison among them,

and to create space for what I felt would be the new guard, which I didn't really include myself.

I was really anticipating people or bands like The Clash and The Ramones.

I was anticipating in my mind that a new breed would come, television.

A new breed would come, and they would be less materialistic, more bonded with the people, and not so glamorous.

I wasn't thinking so much of music.

I wasn't thinking so much of perfection or stardom.