The band that became the Patti Smith Group was created when Ivan Kral (guitar and bass), Jay Dee Daugherty (drums) and Richard Sohl (piano) joined Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye.  The piano player’s name is fitting, since his understated work at the ivories is in many ways the soul of the Patti Smith Group.  The proto-punk band Iggy and the Stooges added Scott Thurston as a frantic pianist in 1973, but a keyboard player in a punk rock band is rare. 

Many years ago, I wrote of Patti Smith that she resembled nothing so much as the Beat poets of the 1950’s; but that really is only one side of her music persona.  She is a rocker pure and simple as well as a poet and a first-rate vocalist and one hell of a writer besides.  

Patti Smith suffered a series of losses in quick succession beginning with the death in November 1994 of her husband Fred “Sonic” Smith, followed by the unexpected death of her brother Todd Smith – her band’s keyboard player Richard Sohl and her early love Robert Mapplethorpe had died four and five years earlier.  She reemerged from that pain more visible than ever; her next album, Gone Again (1996) was perhaps her most self-assured effort and included a tribute to Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, “About a Boy”.  The final track is a heartbreaking tribute to her late husband, “Farewell Reel”. 

(February 2014)