The singer and writer is the guest of The great bookstore shot in midtown Manhattan.
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Broadcast on September 15 at 8:55 p.m. on France 5
She says it with a big smile to François Busnel who questions her in The great bookstore: Special New York. Published in 2010, his autobiographical book Just Kids has sold more than any of his albums. “It’s an unexpected gift”, Confides the icon of the underground counter-culture. “With my group (the Patti Smith Group – Editor’s note), I was fortunate enough to travel the world in the late 1970s. And forty later that opportunity presented itself again through writing.”
Between her first apartment ‘where she took refuge on the fire escape to write and the Wha! Café in Greenwich Village, where she met Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix or the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith offers a guided tour of “ his ”New York before landing at the legendary Electric Lady studio in the heart of Soho. It was here that she recorded her very first single (Hey Joe/Piss Factory) in three nights, that she recorded the cult “Horses” in 1975 and also boxed her very last record “Banga” in 2012.
Patti Smith also admits to taking refuge there to write. “I like to soak up the atmosphere of the place. It’s steeped in history. Apart from the sound console and speakers, nothing has changed since I first walked through the doors of the Electric Studio in 1974.”
In this show of rare quality (finally a literary journalist who does not think he is smarter than the authors he interviews), we also meet Benoît Cohen, author of the excellent Yellow Cab, Kate Reed Petty (True Story), Nicole Krauss (Be a man), William Boyle (The city of the Margins) and the crazy James McBride (Deacon Kong Kong).
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