Patti Smith is good friends with the consumer advocate Ralph Nader, and in 2015 attended the opening of Nader's American Museum of Tort Law in Winsted, Connecticut. Smith's father was a factory worker who admired Nader, and that admiration was passed down; when Nader ran for president in 2000, Smith performed at a rally to support him.
Smith had a long and intimate relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, who became a renowned photographer famous for his provocative works. The two were lovers long before either was famous; when Mapplethorpe realized he was gay, they kept their bond in a platonic fashion. When Mapplethorpe was dying of AIDS in 1989, he asked Smith to tell their story. It took her 21 years, but she did, publishing their tale in the book Just Kids, released in 2010.
Her mother was very pragmatic, while her father was always searching for the meaning of life. Both were very nurturing to Smith and gave her the confidence she needed to succeed in her profession. She said in Esquire: "I had a very down-to-earth, compassionate mother and a head-in-the-clouds, searching father. It was like being raised by the earth and the sky."
A mainstay of the New York punk scene in the '70s, Smith resisted the urge to do drugs because she saw the harmful effects it had on those around her, and she didn't want anything disrupting her mind.
She was married to MC5 guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith from 1980 until his death from a heart attack in 1994. They had two children together: a son Jackson (born 1982) and daughter Jesse (born 1987).
Her only hit was a song written by Bruce Springsteen: "
Because The Night." Smith was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007 because of her contributions to the punk rock movement and for her outsized influence on other musicians and songwriters.
She was somewhat famous in the late '70s, but decided that the notoriety "didn't contribute to any evolution." Her later projects were designed with this evolution in mind, and not for the masses.
On December 27, 2021, Mayor Bill De Blasio bestowed Smith with the key to her adopted home of New York City. "Some have called Patti Smith the godmother of punk," De Blasio said in his speech. " I think it's a fair phrase because she inspired so many people, helped shape a whole artistic movement, and in many ways a political movement as well."
Patti Smith changed her writing habits after marrying Fred "Sonic" Smith. "When I was younger, I'd sit on my bed and write all night, but when I got married to Fred and moved to Detroit, and had children, I had to find time for myself when the children were asleep or when I didn't have duties," she explained to Mojo magazine. "So, I started waking up at 5 In the morning, when everyone else was sleeping and I'd sit at the card table in the kitchen, where I'd taped a picture of Camus to the wall, and I sat there and trained myself to write early in the morning at my card table. And I wrote like that for 16 years and that's how I prefer to write."
Smith was feted on March 26, 2025 at a Carnegie Hall concert where a host of luminaries from the world of music and film performed her works. Karen O sang "
Gloria," Scarlett Johansson read some of Smith's poems, and Courtney Barnett played "
Redondo Beach." The house band was anchored by Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers, who said, "Patti is someone who chose poetry as her light. She never phones it in, she always brings the truth. Her life's mission is to get down to the core of what's happening."
While touring her debut album, Horses, along the West Coast in 1975 and 1976, Patti Smith's band was accompanied by Paul Getty (J. Paul Getty Jr.'s son) as well as French actor Maria Schneider.
Patti Smith recalled in her memoir
Bread of Angels how after she fell off a stage in January 1977, fracturing her spine and skull, the writer William Burroughs aided her convalescence by bringing her "a fish wrapped in newspaper: and cooking it for their dinner."
