Patti Smith, Juliette Lewis and Shingai Shoniwa on rock stardom

Patti Smith, Juliette Lewis and Shingai Shoniwa on rock stardom
(from timesonline.co.uk)

The tiny town of Lynchburg, Tennessee, where a rocking chair graces every porch and the local car dealership offers a free Bible with every automobile, is an unlikely venue for a summit meeting. But the legendary New York punk rocker Patti Smith is here today, to share a stage with the Hollywood actress turned rock star Juliette Lewis and the frontwoman of the London band the Noisettes, Shingai Shoniwa. They have come to play a birthday concert in honour of the late whiskey-maker Jack Daniel, but before going on stage they meet each other for the first time and share their experiences as three generations of women in rock.

ON WOMEN NOT PLAYING INSTRUMENTS

Sophie Heawood You three are all mainly singers, and you perform with male band members. Do you wish that more women would pick up instruments?

Shingai Shoniwa I think if women grew up seeing more women playing then there might be more sharing of the knowledge from the band to the singer. For example, Patti was saying that after about three years she found out that she had been singing songs in the wrong key for her voice because nobody told her that the key could be changed! But women do play instruments, they’re just less visible than men. There’s so many female musicians that I’ve found out about, like finding out that Ma Rainey played the sousaphone, but people weren’t shown pictures of the women playing the instruments. They wanted to see pictures of women wearing dresses.

Juliette Lewis With added sexualisation.

Patti Smith They don’t want the boobs covered with a bassoon or something!

SS It’s not that women didn’t play, but even if they played guitar on a record you would imagine it was all guys in the band. I didn’t even know that Aretha Franklin played the piano on three of her albums until I was 16 – and I’d been listening to her since I was 8. If I’d seen a picture of her playing the piano when I was 8 I’d have gone, Mum, I want piano lessons!

PS There is another aspect to this though: singers are really revered in rock’n’roll. Nat King Cole was such a great pianist and people wanted to see and hear him sing, but singing was secondary to him. Nina Simone considered herself a pianist, but people just love their singers, so some of this is really what the people want. And, compared to the Fifties and the Sixties and even the early Seventies, women can now do whatever they want. If you’re great you’re gonna get through. I never had a problem with this so-called “male-dominated” field because, in the end, show me a broad who has matched Jimi Hendrix. If a broad comes up who can match him, I’ll be at her feet. It isn’t about gender, it’s about who has the most stamina to cut through all the bull**** – and there’s a lot of that. But I think that it’s very exciting right now. It’s totally open.

ON WOMEN IN MUSIC PRESENT AND PAST

PS In the Seventies, I had one song, Because the Night, and it got to 12 or 13 in the charts [in America; it was No 5 in Britain]. Debby Boone had a song at the same time that was No 1 for like six years or something, You Light Up My Life, and I was actually told by DJs and record company people: “Oh, it’s just too bad because your song is really good, but it’s not going to go any farther because we don’t have two women in the Top Ten at the same time.”

JL I just heard there’s a radio station in LA that has a quota of how many records by women they will play! I can’t believe it.

PS Well, Debby’s was the much better song and I’d play it live and people would boo me and I’d tell them to go f*** themselves. But I still feel that you can’t hide behind that corporate stuff – you can’t just sigh and say, well, that’s the way things are. You have to keep pushing. There are struggles within the arts and within the arena of rock’n’roll, but rock’n’roll is a political experience, it’s a revolutionary experience, and we can’t all knock the doors down and get into the charts but we still do our work anyway. Because the motivation has to be to inspire each other, excite each other and to build our tribe.

SS For any kind of future emancipation you have to make personal emancipations: little ones.

PS Yes, that’s well said!

ON TOURING

PS The road lifestyle takes a lot of stamina.

SH Do you think that’s why some women have fallen by the wayside?

PS Well, it’s not as hard on me as some people because I’m a bum. I can live on a bus for long periods with no clean clothes, not combing my hair, not washing – it’s not glamorous or romantic. But the stage is not the place for everybody. Jimi Hendrix didn’t like being on stage; Marvin Gaye hated it. A lot of people have difficulty in the live context, so we should look at the whole spectrum of the ways in which people can contribute – you can still make a record or put your song on MySpace. At first I was really against MySpace but my daughter made me a page and now I have 200,000 people listening to my music, which is amazing when a record will sell 30,000 copies. And young musicians write on my page so I follow all the links to their music too. And the female voice is strong.

SS But that doesn’t mean that anyone should jump on the bandwagon just because it’s easy for women to get heard right now.

PS Well I’m not saying it’s easy.

SS It’s not easy.

ON BRITNEY SPEARS

SH Have you been following the awful scenes of Britney Spears in meltdown? Our interest in her now is all about the lifestyle. Do you blame the music industry for the mess she’s in?

PS The real situation is that the media are disgusting. I can remember a time when they had a little more dignity and a little more restraint. People always wanted to see a little bit when I was a kid; it was glamorous, it was exciting to see a picture of John Lennon in a different outfit from the one he wore on the album cover. And, ooh, is that Pattie Boyd? And it was just one little picture! But people have been groomed, they’ve been given this as a drug. The media have upped and upped the ante because it boosts ratings – it’s just like the war. They are creating an addiction. And you become desensitised. In the end it wasn’t Jim Morrison’s lifestyle that made him so interesting, it was his work. And that is what we have to build the tribe around – the work.

JL I’ve been on this big kick lately of questioning everything that I’m fed, all the signs, the consumerism, you know, is my hair full and shiny enough? I have friends reading magazines that say “find out why this celebrity is mad” and they go, ooh, why is she mad? I’m like, hello, it’s telling you to turn the page and find out why, you’ve just been duped! For someone who has been in the press for ten years, I learn to question what I’m being fed. And as for the sex, drugs and rock’n’roll lifestyle, I just think that now it’s this empty little slogan you put on T-shirts. I had my drug addiction and my own stuff when I was 21, 22, and even though they labelled me a wild child I wasn’t dancing on tables – mine was very pain-orientated! Ha ha. It was very escapist and relatively private. So my thing is, it’s good to find how to nurture yourself and understand priorities and think of consequences. When you’re younger you’re not thinking of consequences. So you have some life experience and you learn.

SS It’s sad that the media don’t seem to want artists to do the job of entertaining and emancipating people, freeing them up so they can change people’s lives in the smallest ways. The media want it to be that the more problems you have, the more records you’re going to sell. They’re mining that private vulnerability which artists are going to be thrown into because they’re out of their nest, they’re on the road and they’re lonely, in transition. But they want people to think, oh great, she’s had a drug overdose! People who read so much about other people’s addictions should question their own addictions.

JL To me, this is an exciting time because you have the fall of the major record labels and the growth of the internet, so it all comes down to your live show. The number of times I’ve been asked if I have groupies on the road . . . that’s so stupid! But yes, we did make a basketball court in the parking lot and me and the people from our show had singalongs – I don’t know how exciting that was to read, but it was fun to live it.

ON LEARNING THEIR CRAFT

PS I was a South Jersey girl, I sang like this [does horrid nasal twang], I didn’t know about keys. In the Eighties my late husband [Fred “Sonic” Smith of the MC5], who was a great musician, taught me a few things about breathing and singing. Believe me, if I could sing like Maria Callas I’d be doing it, but I can’t.

JL Being a singer is such an enigma of sorts, because the human instrument is a funny one. And the songwriter point of view, and also being a showman – show-woman – leading . . .

PS I look at the kids in the audience and I can’t give them youth, and I’m not a sex symbol or anything, but I can give them communication. And the younger the kids are, the hungrier they are to be recognised. Sometimes I’m so tired I think I’m going to die, so I want them to give me something too. Give me a transfusion and I’ll spit it right back at you.

SS I believe that women offer something different from men. We have different stories to offer. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with embracing that. We have a different kind of pain, different kind of fears. And we might not have the squeamishness that they have about some things.

ON EACH OTHER

JL I fell in love with Shingai last year when I got a CD of the Noisettes when I was looking for a support act – but you probably are too big to support us now. And Patti – the only person I’d ever want to play in a film . . . she doesn’t care for this but . . .

PS I’ve not wanted one done while I’m alive – oh, jeez, wait ’til I die! But I have to say, if I could choose anyone I would be delighted by Juliette, and I actually think it would be a good match considering what I was like.

SH What were you like?

PS Well, I mean I had a lot of bravado. I wasn’t necessarily very talented – she’s probably more talented than I was back in the Seventies – but the same bravado without being . . . but also having some moral code. She’s got an edgy . . . you know her beauty is not conventional [JL laughs]. This is the only time I’ve ever weakened. I really just adore Juliette’s work, I understand the difficulty and schism when you come out of one field and people are so suspicious of you developing another field and I think that Juliette has proved that music is not a whim with her, but I’ve also told her not to quit acting because she is such a great actress.

JL There’s no one like Patti today of such relevance, so uncompromising in their point of view. A poet, an activist – these are things that I just look up to.