Rocker Patti Smith tells sold-out crowd nourishing curiosity is what keeps her young

Few wordsmiths in the American cultural canon can bend genres like Patti Smith, the artfully rebellious rocker, poet and author who, at 79, seems destined to keep spinning gold out of her maverick life.

Smith visited Chicago on Monday to promote her latest memoir “Bread of Angels” (Random House, $30). She reminded a sold-out audience at the Art Institute of Chicago’s Rubloff Auditorium of her early roots in the city — born in a snowstorm, baptized in a Logan Square church — before spinning tales of the muses and mentors who shaped her path, from artist Robert Mapplethorpe to Bob Dylan.

In the interview seat sat Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy, who sheepishly admitted that across his own decades of musicianship, this was his first such gig. (The sold-out evening of stories and music was co-presented by WBEZ, the Chicago Poetry Foundation and the University Club of Chicago.) “Forgive me for psychoanalyzing you in any way,” Tweedy offered.

“I’ve never been psychoanalyzed,” Smith responded dryly. “As long as you don’t send me a bill.”

In the winding conversation, Tweedy and Smith found mutual appreciation for each other’s socks, their individual history of migraines and the way natural curiosity fuels songwriting.

But the conversation hit a stride once the pair started talking about work ethic. Tweedy, who released a rare triple album last year, asked Smith what compelled her prodigious output: Since returning to public life after the death of her husband in 1994, Smith has written books and poetry, toured, started a regular Substack newsletter and traveled extensively solo.

“I like to work. I like communicating with people,” Smith said. “I’ve lived alone for a long time now, so I have a lot of time on my hands. I’m compelled to write everyday. I get up and I have my coffee, and I write. I’m keeping in contact with the world and keeping in contact with like minds, or helping people who don’t have like minds look at things in a different way.”

Helping the disenfranchised find themselves in her music has been a motivator. Smith said that when she recorded the 1975 album “Horses,” her aim was to reach others who felt outside society.

“I had no aspirations to be a musician, a rock-and-roll star, to make good records,” she said. “But I got this opportunity so I thought I could do a record that would communicate with other people like myself.”

That included a 10-year-old Tweedy. The Chicago musician said that when he heard “Horses” as a child, it set “the bar you should aim for.”

“I’ve spent my whole life trying to reach that level of intensity,” he told Smith.

“I think curiosity, enthusiasm, all of these things — we age,” she responded. “I’m 79. … what makes a person more youthful is not their outward appearance … it’s nourishing that thing. That curiosity. I’ve always been curious.”

The conversation was both meandering and tender. Smith said her Chicago appearance fell on an emotional anniversary: March 9 marked the death of Mapplethorpe, the artist and photographer whose creative and romantic partnership proved formative to Smith after she arrived with a suitcase in New York. She chronicled their years together in her award-winning 2010 memoir “Just Kids.”

March 9 also marked the 50th anniversary of meeting her future husband, the musician Fred “Sonic” Smith, at a party in Detroit. Their relationship is chronicled in “Bread of Angels,” which works as both a prequel and sequel for “Just Kids.”

Smith, who dropped out of the public eye to raise two children in Michigan, said Monday that it took a “guardian angel” — R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe — to help her get back on her feet after her husband’s death. She writes of their friendship and her return to performance in “Bread of Angels.”

Today, Smith said she now finds in everything reasons for gratitude, from the soon-to-be-discarded head of her electric toothbrush to the young fans whom she’s surprised to see at her shows.

“At this point in my life, I feel very privileged and surprised that so many really young people talk to me on the street or come to my concerts,” she said. “I don’t know what they see in me, but their energy is so loving and pure.”

The interview segued into a set of music, opening with “Grateful,” written for Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia. Tweedy played guitar with multinstrumentalist Tony Shanahan and Jackson Smith, her son, on guitar.

The crowd sung along to hits “Dancing Barefoot” and “Because the Night,” the latter a ballad that Bruce Springsteen wrote and shelved; Smith told her Chicago audience about how engineer Jimmy Iovine urged her to listen to an unfinished cassette tape of the song. She finally did, wrote the lyrics that came to mind and immediately knew she had a “darn hit.”

The quartet closed the evening with “People Have the Power,” co-written with her husband in the late 1980s. The pair intended it as an anthem for Chicago Civil Rights leader Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign. Jackson, who did not secure the Democratic nomination, died Feb. 17 in Chicago and was buried last Saturday.

“We know what’s going on. We know people are suffering. It makes it very difficult sometimes,” she said. “You feel safe tonight. Some people aren’t safe tonight. Friends of mine aren’t safe tonight. But we have to keep doing our work. We have to radiate good.”