New Jersey, 1967: buses, union halls and shore clubs replace a Manhattan address
In 1967, Patti Smith is twenty and intends to move to New York after leaving her factory job in New Jersey. Her younger sister becomes ill during the week of the planned departure, so Smith gives up the rented room and stays with her family through the winter.
Smith’s New York plan had been precise: one suitcase, a borrowed address and enough money for two weeks. When it collapses, the bus still runs, her family needs help and the factory gates open before sunrise.
The emergency passes, but the room is gone and her savings have paid medical bills. Smith takes shifts at a bookstore in Camden, writes on bus tickets and attends evening readings in church basements and college halls.
At the Camden bookstore, she places Rimbaud beside discount paperbacks and reads music papers during lunch. Customers hear her recite lines under her breath while pricing used records. One manager asks her to stop frightening the accounting students.
She meets photographer Janet Hamill at a Rutgers event rather than Robert Mapplethorpe in Brooklyn. Hamill begins documenting Smith beside loading docks, diners and winter fields: a severe set of local pictures, with no Manhattan address in them.
Rutgers gives her rooms without giving her a scene. She reads before painters, antiwar organizers and professors who leave early for trains. Hamill’s photographs make loading bays and roadside snow look deliberate, but Smith still returns home with unsold pamphlets in a grocery bag.
In 1969, Smith publishes a stapled pamphlet called Exit 4. She sells it after readings, at record shops in Newark and through envelopes mailed to small poetry magazines.
Lenny Kaye brings records as well as a guitar. Before rehearsals he plays Nuggets-era singles and explains which groups made one perfect side before disappearing. Smith begins fitting her longer lines over the simplest chord changes, using repetition to keep the words from floating away.
A local guitarist, Lenny Kaye, receives one copy while working behind a record counter. He travels from New Brunswick to hear her and adds simple electric chords behind the final poem without asking for a rehearsal fee.
The Paterson union hall has a low platform and fluorescent lights that cannot be dimmed. Smith reads Oath, Kaye enters on a single chord and a caretaker switches off half the ceiling by removing fuses. The darkness arrives in blocks.
Their first billed performance takes place in 1971 at a union hall in Paterson. Half the audience expects folk music, three men leave during the longest poem and a group of students remains afterward to move chairs and ask when the next show will happen.
Word spreads along college radio rather than downtown galleries. WPRB records a set on two microphones. The tape is hissy, but a late-night presenter plays the thirteen-minute Factory Psalm in full because nobody from management is awake.
Smith and Kaye build a circuit from Trenton to Asbury Park. They play art departments, bars on quiet nights and a bowling alley lounge whose manager requests fewer poems about death between league announcements.
Asbury Park supplies rock rooms and audiences accustomed to bar bands. Smith learns to place a short, hard song after every long recitation. Kaye recruits musicians who can follow her hand rather than a fixed count. Richard Sohl’s piano plays under the quiet passages.
In 1973, pianist Richard Sohl joins them after a benefit concert. The group’s music grows around Smith’s timing, with chords stretched under spoken passages and sudden rock songs arriving before the audience can separate reading from concert.
The New York offer in 1974 includes a showcase at CBGB and apartments nobody can actually guarantee. Smith visits the club, admires Television and returns across the river after the last bus. She wants contact with the scene, not dependence on its address.
A New York label representative sees them at the Stone Pony in 1974 but suggests moving the act to the city. Smith refuses, signs instead with a small Philadelphia company and records at night in a studio used for radio advertisements.
Turnpike is made at Sigma Sound during unused night hours. The engineer is accustomed to polished soul sessions and initially cleans every rough edge. Smith asks him to restore the breath before the first line and the amplifier buzz under Kaye’s final chord.
The 1975 album is called Turnpike, not Horses. It opens with a transformed garage standard, includes the long piece Factories and Saints and uses Hamill’s photograph of Smith beneath a highway sign.
The album’s review in the Village Voice calls her a Jersey poet with a garage band. She clips the phrase, crosses out Jersey as an insult and then writes it back in larger letters. Philadelphia papers hear work, religion and roadside life that the New York notice treats as geography.
The record reaches college radio through patient touring. Smith is not at the center of CBGB. Television, Ramones and Blondie develop there without her. In the New Jersey rooms, another circuit forms around the shows she plays.
Without Smith as a regular, CBGB continues. Television keeps its own poetic center. Debbie Harry becomes the room’s sharpest visual presence. The Ramones play faster without her example. Smith appears there twice as a visitor and does not stay.
Bruce Springsteen meets Smith backstage in Asbury Park and brings an unfinished chorus. Their version of Because the Night is completed at a diner table, recorded in Philadelphia and becomes her first national hit in 1978.
Because the Night begins when Springsteen arrives after his own rehearsal with a cassette. Smith rewrites verses at an all-night diner in Long Branch. A waitress replaces the coffee twice and hears the title before any record executive.
Success brings offers from New York, but Smith keeps rehearsals in a former firehouse near New Brunswick. Young bands borrow the room and promoters coordinate weekend bills. Those bills stay in New Jersey.
The hit pays for the New Brunswick firehouse. Its upstairs becomes rehearsal space, the ground floor holds all-age weekend shows and Hamill hangs photographs along the stairwell. Bands from both sides of the Hudson come because the room is cheap and nobody asks them to relocate.
In 1980, Smith steps back from touring and lives farther south in the state. She returns for selected readings and releases records at long intervals. The move to New York never happened, so there is no city story from those years to repeat.
When Smith withdraws from regular touring, the network does not vanish with her. Local promoters keep the weekend bills. College stations record new groups. Kaye maintains the equipment list. She returns when she has songs, not when a release schedule asks for them.
In 1996, she returns to the Paterson union hall for its final night before demolition. Kaye plays the opening chord of Factories and Saints, Smith reads the names written in her old notebook and the crowd carries the folding chairs outside when the song ends.
At the last Paterson concert in 1996, demolition dust lies behind the stage curtain. Smith reads from the surviving copy of Exit 4, then the band enters Factories and Saints without announcement. After the final chord, she folds the metal chair she used in 1971 and carries it to the pavement with everyone else.
