I’ve always revered Patti Smith but not for her music – I’m too much of an electronic-disco creature – for her word witchery. She is such a magnificent writer /thinker.
She was born with Sagittarius Rising, the Moon in Pisces and an exact Sun-Mars conjunction in Capricorn. Also in the sign of the Sea-Goat? Lilith and asteroid Ubasti/Bast.
Yes, she is and always has been an unabashedly devout Cat Lady.
And I always thought the iconic Mapplethorpe image above was just a cool pic depicting a Dark Moon, menstrual sort of a mood: “As the cat be my witness, I’m at home on a Saturday night, existentially cutting my hair.”
But no, there is a plutonic backstory.
In her memoir Just Kids, she writes about how, at the age of 20, she gave birth to what was then deemed an “illegitimate baby.” It was 1967 and she’d had Pluto squaring her natal Ascendant AND Uranus since 1965.
These are huge transits individually and to have them concurrently? Mind-blowing.*
She’s never named the baby’s father but she was working on an assembly line for a toy factory at the time, a job she delineated quite memorably in Piss Factory. The labor was not a pleasant birth experience.
“After the Easter holidays my parents came for me. My labor coincided with the full moon. They drove me to the hospital in Camden. Due to my unwed status, the nurses were very cruel and uncaring, and left me on a table for several hours before informing the doctor that I had gone into labor.
They ridiculed me for my beatnik appearance and immoral behavior, calling me “Dracula’s daughter” and threatening to cut my long black hair. When my doctor arrived, he was very angry. I could hear him yelling at the nurses that I was having a breech birth and I should not have been left alone.
Through an open window, while I lay in labor, I could hear boys singing a cappella songs through the night. Four-part harmony on the street corners of Camden, New Jersey. As the anesthesia took effect, the last thing I remember was the doctor’s concerned face and the whispers of attendants.”
Not only has Patti Smith done her own hair ever since – cut, color, everything – she effected a memorable hair-mediated speed morph in February 1970. By this time she was 23 and had encountered her Destiny Muse (it was mutual), the quadrupler Scorpio photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
Uranus – the Quickener – was on her Midheaven (public image, aspirations) and liberator Lilith conjunct her Saturn in Leo. Long story short, she goes to an Andy Warhol event and is asked if she is a folk-singer. So then…(scroll down)
Returning home in a snit, she has a Uranian lightning bolt moment regarding her hair + performance ‘look’ – can you see how it’s so apt? This is also from her memoir, which I recommend.
“I found myself in a dark humor. One of those nights when the mind starts looping bothersome things, I got to thinking about what Fred Hughes had said. Screw him, I thought, annoyed at being dismissed. I looked at myself in the mirror over the sink. I realized that I hadn’t cut my hair any different since I was a teenager. I sat on the floor and spread out the few rock magazines I had.
I usually bought them to get any new pictures of Bob Dylan, but it wasn’t Bob I was looking for. I cut out all the pictures I could find of Keith Richards. I studied them for a while and took up the scissors, macheteing my way out of the folk era. I washed my hair in the hallway bathroom and shook it dry.
It was a liberating experience. When Robert came home, he was surprised but pleased. “What possessed you?” he asked. I just shrugged. But when we went to Max’s, my haircut caused quite a stir. I couldn’t believe all the fuss over it. Though I was still the same person, my social status suddenly elevated. My Keith Richards haircut was a real discourse magnet.”
It’s such a Uranus-Midheaven trip and it flipped her image from folksy or as she called it – “sort of a hick” to “sort of awesome.” The haircut was inspired and uranian in that it was a speed morph but the impetus to never let anyone but herself touch her hair was surely forged in that earlier plutonic childbirth catharsis moment and the venomous midwives.
She’d been struggling creatively and commercially but somehow, the hair moment reverberated beyond the image shift and began to channel what she called her “mania, my telepathic energy” directly into her work. her ‘punk priestess’ persona flowed from that self-driven hair inspo.
So Mapplethorpe took the top image of Patti Smith above in 1978, as a belated homage to that moment. The cat in the picture is (I believe) Ashley, her first cat – named thus as she was rescued from an ash-filled trash can after a fire – who was also present for the original hair morph.
Finally, I love this – From a 1975 interview with Mademoiselle magazine:
“What I really want to know is, who does your hair?” She laughs. “You serious? Me. I do my hair. Yeah. I cut it, I dye it. I put henna in it, the kind for black, not red. I get it from Brooklyn, the Arab quarter. It’s this green stuff and you put it in water and you pound it in a mortar and it turns green on your hair and it’s real beautiful and then it turns blackish-purple. That’s the secret behind my hair,” she says, landing with a flourish. “
Thoughts?
*Pluto was also travelling through Smith’s 9th house at the time, en route to her Neptune-Midheaven conjunction, the signature astro-alignment of artist’s who seem to be around forever.
Pluto crossing this zenith point over 1975-1976 coincided with the release of her debut album Horses and a Saturday Night Live performance billed as “the first Punk-Rock appearance on national television.”
“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine,” were undoubtedly fresh lyrics for a woman to be relaying to the world at the time. She’d absorbed the plutonic catharsis and evolved with it.
Images: Robert Mapplethorpe – Patti Smith – 1978
Bottom Right: Norman Seeef – 1970
Iconic and rebel heart
Just Kids is such a beautiful, tender book. It’s a proper tear jerker and exactly right.
The spikiest people are sometimes the softest in the middle. She’s raw and edgy and realer than real. So original that everything said about her feels derivative, generic and pretentious. Some people have a signature so unique it seeps into anything they do. She did voice over work for Jo Nesbo’s audiobook version of the novel Blood on Snow and I can’t imagine the story without her voice narrating it. She adds so much value to anything she’s involved in because she brings her full self. This innocent straightforward plainness- directness and vulnerability. She’s massively charismatic but so pared down. I almost want to create a fragrance and a clothing line in her honour. She’s the ultimate muse without abdicating her artist throne. She’s all encompassing
THIS is why I blew the last hour on my phone. now I can get up. thank you mystic
Thank you Mystic! That is a great read! Particularly as I currently have indigo ‘developing’ in my hair. For those unfamiliar with the process or the reference to ‘black henna’ -Henna goes in one day for 4 hours and is then rinsed ( not shampooed as it continues developing). Indigo is then applied and left for a few hours. Then it is rinsed out and left to develop for a day or two and then shampooed out. Indigo needs the henna to grab onto (to cover grey hair).
It was Anita Pallenberg who elevated Keith Richard’s (and the Rolling Stones) signature style that Patti connected to that fateful evening. Patti still has great hair that defies the norms. Fab post !