MFM Presents… Disgraceland

This is exactly right. When a group of women discover

“they've all dated the same prolific con artist.”

They take matters into their own hands. I vowed I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves.

We always say that trust your girlfriends.

Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the on-hot radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. [MUSIC PLAYING]

[MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] Somebody tell me that a shocking public murder. This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City, politics.

A screen good down, good down, those are shots. A tragedy that's now forgotten and a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex. Listen to Worshack, murder and city hall

on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Hander, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clarke. When like young people come off to me

and they want to be an actor, whatever.

“And my first thing is always, can you think of anything else?”

That you can do rather big. Because for today, do that. David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships, a religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight

for the guts. Dennis Leary, gate and moderato from Stranger Things. Sanam Moju, Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello. We're here to tell you, if you haven't already heard, that Jake Brennan's award-winning podcast, disgracedland, is now on the exactly right network.

disgracedland's a true crime music podcast that dives into the real stories behind the dark side of the music business. And if you're new to the show, we're here to introduce you

“by sharing one of our favorite episodes covering the legendary”

Patty Smith. If you know Patty Smith, you know that she rose to rock fame against the backdrop of 70s New York City, when crime was at an all-time high and serial killers like the son of Sam or terrorizing everyone.

So please enjoy this episode of disgracedland and once you're done, head to their feed to like and follow the show, please. And new episodes of disgracedland drop every Tuesday with bonus episodes on Thursday and rewinds on Sunday.

Listen to disgracedland on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts, and make sure to leave a rating or review. It really helps. Enjoy disgracedland.

Goodbye. Discraceland is a production of double Elvis. The story about Patty Smith is steeped in true crime. Everything from the criminal influence of her artistic heroes, Jean Jean A and William Esparos,

to the impression made upon her

from her mother's obsession with America's first true crime

of the century, the Lindberg kidnapping, to the influence of the Manson murders in New York City's 44 caliber killings that Patty lived through in late 70s New York, to the crime and crime of Central Park,

the Chelsea Hotel in 42nd Street, rape and murder, all of it, just a shot away, as they say. But Patty Smith survived all of it to become one of the last centuries great artists, a great musician, someone who made great music.

Unlike that music, I played for you at the top of the show. That wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my melodron called Falling From Chelsea MK2. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights

to one bad apple by the osmons. And why would I play you that specific slice of plastic sibling cheese, could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on February 10, 1971.

And that was the day that Patty Smith first took the stage

with more than just words with a guitarist at her side. And began building a previously unimagined bridge between the art world and rock and roll. And she did it for the criminals. On this episode, jump this murderous poets, playwrights,

death, destruction, the danger pursuing ones artistic calling and how true crime help Patty Smith survive it all. I'm Jake Brennan, this is this great slant.

Though Patty Smith is known as the godmother of punk in

“was inducted into the rock and roll Hall of Fame in 2007,”

she's much more than just an iconic rock star. She's a literary luminary, a national book award winner and the recipient of the Penn Literary Service Award. She's been honored by the French Ministry of Culture and the Municipal Arts Society of New York.

An organization that in 2024 awarded Patty Smith with their highest honor, the Jacqueline Kennedy O'Nassus Medal. She's met the pope. She accepted a Nobel Prize on behalf of and at the request of none other than Bob Dylan.

In her name rings true throughout the same universities

and museums, the teach and celebrate the authors, poets,

and artists, the reason they all caught Arthur and Bo and Frida Kahlo, to name a few,

“that Patty Smith has drawn inspiration from throughout her life.”

To dismiss Patty Smith as merely a rock star is like calling Steve Jobs a computer salesman. She's not just a musician. She's what I refer to as the high priestess of art. Someone who holds rare dual citizenship

in the gritty origins of punk and in the highest echelons of New York and European society. Catholic priests speak of being called to the priesthood. That moment when they hear God's voice imploring them to serve him,

dedicate their lives to him, to sacrifice everything in his name. Many of them face not just persecution, but even death and pursuit of their calling. Jesus' Apostle Peter was crucified upside down.

Bartholomew, another Apostle was skinned alive, tortured over days and eventually decapitated. Deacon Lawrence of Rome in the year 258AD was roasted to death over an open fire. In 1792, during the French Revolution,

over 200 priests were massacred by angry mobs in under 48 hours. Spanish Clarician priests, Salvadoran Jesuits, Mexican seminary students, and countless others who were once called have been martyred

and suffered horrific deaths for their calling. But Patty Smith, who once famously saying, Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine, was no murder. She was and is an artist.

In similar to priests, artists, here are calling. They must also navigate danger, violence, and potential death, murder even in pursuit of their art. So, when and where was Patty Smith, the high priest of Savar, called to become an artist,

and what kind of danger, violence, and true crime,

“did she have to escape to become the artist we all know her to be?”

As a little girl in suburban New Jersey in the 1950s,

the first stories Patty Smith heard were dark.

The original brothers grim collection of children's fairy tales from the 1800s, spoke of a stepmother in the Juniper tree story, who decapitated her stepson, and cooked his flesh in a soup, to serve to the boys unsuspecting father.

In the original version of Cinderella, entitled Askin Putul, one step sister uses a knife to cut off her toes, and another hacks off the heel of her foot, yet these stories were nothing compared to a Patty later read in the Bible, specifically in the Old Testament,

where in judges 19, one woman is severed into 12 different pieces, each given to a different tribe of Israel, her sin, none. She was offered up to protect the crimes of a rapist. In judges four, Yale offers an unsuspecting enemy general,

lost patality, when the general falls asleep, Yale takes a spike and hammers it through his skull. In King's Nine, Queen Jezebel's Unix throw her from a window, where she's then trampled to death by horses, horses, horses, horses, horses.

And later on, as a teenager, rape and murder

All of these stories were right there,

out in the open in Patty Smith's Bible and in her history books,

“and in the Museums she visited as a child.”

If the executioner was feeling merciful, he'd build the pire low to the ground to ensure a quick death. But this executioner was not feeling merciful. He built the pire extra high so that Joan of Arc

would be guaranteed a prolonged and painful death. And that's exactly what happened. The flames took their time. In the ancient Greeks used funeral pires to honor their departed emperors and heroes,

the Romans too, not the English.

When it came to Joan of Arc,

they had something else in mind, revenge, public disgrace, maximum pain. In the eyes of the English dominated ecclesiastical tribunal of 1431, 19-year-old Joan of Arc was a heretic.

“She claimed she'd been called by a divine voice.”

She cut her hair, she dressed like a boy. She made a mockery of modern authority in social norms and in the process inspired and uprising that turned the tide of the hundreds years war, driving the English out of France.

And for those perceived sins, she was now roped to a stake in market square in the city of Ruon, high above a graded stack of dry wood, built to burn slow and fierce. With its blue flames snapping at the skin of her feet

and black smoke corroding her lungs, white hot pain piercing every cell in her body. The blaze rose up over her legs, her midriff, and no one heard her scream, no one saw her cry. When the inferno and gulfed her completely,

soon enough, Joan of Arc was gone, but embody only another martyr.

“This one officially executed for the crimes of heresy”

in cross-dressing, but whose life's work would inspire generations and whose name would forever ring true. In 1966, herself just 19 years old, Patty Smith stood outside on the streets of Philadelphia, across from the Museum of Modern Art,

about five miles from the more modern market square, and looked up at a statue of Joan of Arc. A manual from yay's gilded bronze depiction of the young murder cast, piercing impression upon young Patty.

Here was this woman, her own age, who gave everything for what she believes. It was then that Patty knew she would have to do the same. It was then that Patty Smith heard her calling, in the shadows of martyrs and museums,

to become an artist. The stakes of failing to fulfill her life's goal were, as they are for most teenagers, dramatic and intense. A life has anything but an artist, a life as something else in suburban New Jersey,

would be its own kind of death. But art was dangerous, and not in the fairy tale, old testament, musty historical kind of way, but in a real and scary kind of way. One of Patty's favorite novelists, Jean Jean-Jane,

lived in Squalard, forced into a life of crime and nearly imprisoned for life. One of her favorite musicians, the jazz singer, Billy Holiday, died addicted to heroin. In her final living moments, she was handcuffed to her bed

by federal agents in place under arrest for narcotics possession. One of Patty's favorite painters, Jackson Pollock, was driven to alcoholism and eventually off the road in his oldsmobile where he flipped his car,

crushed his skull and decapitated one of his passengers. And these were just the artists that Patty knew about. Thanks to her true crime obsessed mother, Patty Smith also knew about the dangers of the world right outside her suburban window.

1932, Patty Smith's mother was traumatized by events that were unfolding over the radio airways, just as the rest of the nation was. One of America's most famous sons, the aviator, Charles Lindberg, was the victim of what it quickly become

America's most famous crime. Lindberg's 20-month-old son had been kidnapped.

The kidnapper used the ladder to creep into the second story

nursery of the Lindberg's New Jersey estate. Within 24 hours of the evduction, the crime was a national sensation.

had breached the gates of the estate and contaminated the crime scene.

“Natorias Mafioso al Capone issued a statement from a Chicago jail cell”

offering a reward for the return of the baby. Before the 9th of the crime had ended, newswires like the associated press were daily used with bullet hits, transmitting over 50,000 words in just hours. Radio stations across the country took the unprecedented step

of canceling all programming to issue a coordinated bulletin describing the child's appearance. In effect, creating a complete national radio blackout. And it was through the radio that Patty Smith's mother became transfixed with the early details of the crime

as well as the saga's conclusion. 10 weeks after the kidnapping, the badly decomposed body of Charles Lindberg's baby was found by a truck driver relieving himself on the side of a New Jersey highway. The infant's corpse had been partially scavenged by animals.

Just like Jezebel in the horses, like Pollock in the Crush Skull, like Yale's enemy, a hole through the head.

“And like Joan of Arc, the Lindberg baby would not”

soon be forgotten. Young Patty Smith was transfixed by her mother's retelling of this story. She never forgot it.

Just like she never forgot the brother's grim,

where the old testament was Jean Billy Jackson or John. The lesson she took was that life was dangerous and so too, the pursuit of art was dangerous. And in 1967, the only place to really pursue art was in America's most dangerous place, New York City.

A silver 40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene. From eye-hard podcasts and best case studios, this is Worshack, Murder at City Hall. Could this have happened in City Hall? Somebody tell me that!

July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.

“Both men are carrying concealed weapons.”

And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead. [MUSIC PLAYING] And have everybody in the chambers of dogs, a shocking public murder. A scream, get down, get down. Those are shots.

Those are shots, get down. A charismatic politician. You know, he just bent the rules all the time. I still have a weapon. And I could shoot you.

And an outsider with a secret. He alleged he was effective flat down. That may have been not a bit political. It may have been about six. Listen to Worshack, murder at City Hall

on the eye-hard radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you could get your podcasts. [MUSIC PLAYING] There's two golden rules that any man should live by.

Rule one, never mess with a country girl.

He plays stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anison Field. And in this new season of The Girl Friends--

Oh, my God, this is the same man. A group of women discovered they're all dated, the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me?

The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands. They said, oh hell no, I vowed. I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Listen to The Girl Friends. Trust me, babe. On the eye-hard radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hey, it's Jake Brennan. And on my podcast, Disgraceland, I tell stories from the dark side of the music business. And I'm thrilled to announce that now, Disgraceland,

and its celebrity spin-off Hollywood land, have found a new home here at the Exactly Right Network in partnership with I-Heart Podcast. You can binge over 250 episodes of Disgraceland's Back Catalog, and listen to new episodes every Tuesday.

Bonus episodes on Thursday, and rewinds on Sunday,

Listen to Disgraceland and Hollywood land on the I-Heart

“Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.”

The whispers, Patty Smith, heard at night in Central Park, were the stuff of terror. The park was more than a big collet playground for New Yorkers to lays away their afternoons. Each night, it became a den of violent criminal

thieves, rapists, and murders, all prowling about for the ruination of souls. Central Park was also Patty Smith sometime bedroom. It was where she'd lie down during that first summer when she arrived in the city.

On those nights, when she couldn't find a welcoming doorway in which to lay her head, Central Park was where she slept. And in 1967, Central Park was also the place where a 15-year-old girl was brutally raped and her friend stomped so severely

that he was left in critical condition.

It was in the mid-1960s, a place

“where nearly 1,000 felonies were committed on average each year.”

In Central Park during the summer of love, for all the groups of young hippies strewn about on blankets for the acoustic guitars and flowers in their hair, they were just as many self-described wolf packs, hordes of young neighborhood delinquents,

swarming the park and shifts to rob in Maine, not just the hippies, but the homeless sexual is cruising the park so-called predatory zones. Patty Smith may have slept in Central Park, but it was in another park where she met the first great love of her life, Robert Mabel Thorpe.

She knew him from the bookstore where she'd taken a job. He was a customer and she was in Tompkins Square Park on a date with an older man, a man who could afford to buy her a meal

that she could not afford to buy herself, but in New York City, nothing's free.

“So just before the man attempted to collect this payment,”

sexually, Patty Smith recognized the good looking boy from the bookstore and ran to him in the park, introducing him on the spot to a predatory lunch date as her boyfriend. Robert Mabel Thorpe, who was high on LSD at the time,

went along with the ruse, which he no doubt thought was hilarious. Robert found Patty Lee Smith to be not only funny, but also sexy, intelligent, creative, a perfect partner in crime

for his own first foray into New York City.

They shared the same goal to become artists. They weren't sure what kinds of artists they wanted to become, just that they were most certainly destined to create things that would change the world

of culture and art as they knew it. And their first apartment together, the one in Brooklyn, where they had to scrub the wall of the splattered blood and psychotic scribblings from the previous tenant.

They painted, created drawings and collages and wrote. They read the great works of the great writers, those who were also criminals, not just Jean-Génets, but Paul Verlaine, oh Henry in William S. Burroughs.

Burroughs who shot and killed his wife in a game of William Tell and got away with it. They studied decoony in Rivera, Warhol and Picasso, and prayed at the altar of Coltrane, sympathized with those devils, the rolling stones,

and filled in the oral gaps with the sherels and Dylan, Bob, not Thomas. They had little food, even less money.

They stole when they had to, but they'd never begged.

What they did have was desire. And that desire gave way to faith and faith, to creation, and soon the artistic columns and each would bear fruit. Grower with photography and patty with words.

A new apartment, this one, in Manhattan, signified progress. At the chalk outline of the dead body, outside the front door, precipitated another move, to a less dangerous neighborhood, so further uptown they went to the Chelsea Hotel.

These days, the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street, like most of Manhattan, is a glitzy gentrified incarnation of what it once was, a dangerous rooming house for Bohemian vagabonds. In 1969, the Chelsea was part artist colony,

and part central command for the drug fuel

and hosting the likes of Jimmy Hendrix, Leonard Cohen,

in the Villain Undergrounds, Niko. Salvador dolly stayed at the Chelsea

“when there was no room at the St. Regis.”

Alan Ginsberg, crews the lobby for dates, even taking patty the lunch one day, mistaking her with her short crop Joan of Arc hair, to be a young, pretty boy. Dylan died at the Chelsea, Thomas, not Bob.

Well, the poet fell into a coma in room 205 after downing 18 straight whiskeys, before he was carried off to be pronounced dead at St. Vincent's. The Andy Warhol superstar, Evie Sedrick,

said her room at the Chelsea on fire while high on barbituits. She had to be rescued from room 105, where Warhol has shot part of as a claim 1966 film, Chelsea girls.

In a few years prior, a 20 year old dancer named Lucille Andel found herself on the roof of the Chelsea hotel. She walked carefully on her tiptoes, close to the edge. Before giving into the darkness

that it overtaken her, plunging to her death 10 stories below. Along the way, the usually graceful Lucille

struck the third floor fire escape, the thought,

partially dismembering herself before pancakeying on West 23rd. But all the danger that the Chelsea hotel represented didn't scare Patty Smith. Instead, it compelled her.

Besides, Patty could navigate it. She wasn't big into drugs, and she seldom drank, and besides, she and her partner, Robert Mabel Thorpe, were broke. Which other hotel would take art as collateral

“until they could come up with a cash to rent a room?”

None. And no other hotel had borrows in the poet Jim Carroll roaming its halls. Patty befriended both of them. She also befriended Janice Schopplin,

who stayed in room 411 during her run a show

as of the film or east. Patty listened to Janice express herself through music. Patty worked up poems with Jim Carroll. And Patty met Bob Dylan's fixer and confident on Bob Nourth.

Bob Nourth encouraged Patty to work her poems into songs to listen to Hank Williams, to listen to Blind Willy Mabel, to get down to the root of what she felt, and to pull it out and spill it all over open cords

on an acoustic guitar. Creatively, Patty was encouraged and compelled. Robert was, too, but in a darker way. She was 1969.

“The Rolling Stones as Brian Jones had died.”

And so too, to the LSD dreams from the summer of love. Robert took the stones sympathy for the devil, a little too literally. Charles Manson was all anyone at the Chelsea could talk about in 1969.

Just as Patty Smith's mother had been obsessed with the Lindbergh case, Robert Mabel Thorpe was obsessed with this latest crime of the century. Bob and Hollywood, seven people were dead,

and were appear to be a ritualistic murder spree with a decidedly rock and roll edge. The Tate lobbyanka murders in August of 1969 were hard not to be affected by. And so, Robert Mabel Thorpe began working a darker vision

into his art. He became obsessed with the concept of the evil. It was a stark counterpoint to his Catholic upbringing, a reflection of what he saw on the street, up on 42nd, where he hustled sex for cash

to help support himself in Patty. Patty worried about Robert. Sex work was as dangerous as it got. 1969, Midtown Manhattan, 42nd Street, A.K.A. the Duce. A neon open air sex market, predators and prey.

Pros and junkies, applying their trade for pimps and pushers, chicken hocks, older, ski-be-looking men and trench coats on the prow for young runaways. A few dollars were on a long way.

A runaway can make a buck or two with one job, and be able to afford a slice of pizza, a coke, and a movie ticket into one of the theaters, the liberty, the empire, the victory. And be able to pass out and relative peace and quiet

until the shakedown artist showed up looking to rob the snoozing patrons. Out on the street, Robert may before kept his cool. It was all about the look, right nod from the right dude, and Robert knew it was on.

But danger was everywhere. Cops posed his jaws to trap hustlers

and assaulted.

Many clients refused to pay.

Some insisted on rough stuff with hustlers. Strangulation, knife play. Sickos were slitting the throats and theaters, and the working boys screams drowned out by the soundtracks blasting from the screens.

Robert was a quote unquote, "rent boy," or so he told himself. He worked the streets to help pay his and patty's rent at the Chelsea. It wasn't the sex so much to bother patty.

He was the danger. Their relationship was an open one,

“and Robert's homosexuality by this time was no secret.”

It was also around this time that patty became romantically involved with the poet Jim Carroll. Jim hustled up on 42nd Street as well. Robert asked Jim how he knew that he wasn't gay.

Jim told him that he knew because he always asked for money,

whereas sometimes Robert did either way. Jim hustled for heroin. Robert hustled for rent. For Robert, it was no other way to support his pursuit of becoming an artist.

And for patty, there had to be a less dangerous way. Sam Shepard was that way. Sam was a writer, a California cowboy, a musician, and established off Broadway playwright. And by the time he and patty Smith began their affair

at the Chelsea hotel, already a husband and father. It didn't matter. Sam encouraged patty to sing. He bought her her first guitar. He encouraged her artistically.

Romantically, Sam was dangerous,

“but compared to Jim Carroll, he was safe.”

Sam Shepard exuded life, not junky death. Sam didn't hustle him, well, he did, but in a different way, Sam made shit happen. And by the time he was 27, he'd won four obi awards for four different plays.

The obies are the highest awards given to off Broadway artists. Sam Shepard won three in one year. Sam convinced patty that she had something to say as if she needed further validation. But still, hearing that her words carried weight

from a sexy award-winning playwright couldn't hurt. Sam prevailed upon patty to collaborate with him on a new play, and they called it cowboy mouth. Cowboy mouth was a semi-autobiographical account of Sam and patty's relationship.

Both acted in the two lead roles when it was staged, in April of 1971, and there it was.

“Sam and patty's elicit relationship brought”

to life for all to see. Afterward, Sam freaked out. He had a wife and a kid that was wrong, and he knew it. He abruptly left New York City to return to his family and Vermont.

At first, patty was devastated,

but it didn't take long before she put a relationship with Sam Shepard in the proper perspective. It was brief, explosive, and overall, a positive experience. In the end, despite who got hurt and how it was worth it, because Sam Shepard helped patty Smith

finally find her voice. Cowboy mouth wasn't just autobiographical. It was also about a character who moves seamlessly between art and crime, specifically music, rock and roll, actually, and crime.

To this point in her life, patty Smith had spent her life moving between art and crime. Shoplifting, heroin, hustling, Charles Lindberg, Charles Manson, chalk outline bodies, and bloodstained, tenement walls, John Janet,

William Burrows, and William Tell, Willie McTel, Bob Newworth, Robert Mabel Thorpe, and Jim Carroll, Sam Shepard. It was all one big art and crime collage. It was who she had become, and now it was time to give voice to all of that transgressive influence,

to bridge the gap between art and artist, to be the voice of the voiceless. For those persecuted for following their calling, for their crimes, and to do it all, with rock and roll. - We'll be right back after this word, word, word.

We've got five city hall building. - A silver 40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene. - From eye-hard podcasts and best case studios. This is Worshack, murder at City Hall.

Somebody tell me that.

- July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis

“arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.”

Both men are carrying concealed weapons, and in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead. And everybody in the chambers of dogs, a shocking public murder.

- A scream, get down, get down. Those are shots, those are shots, get down. - A charismatic politician. - You know, he just bent the rules all the time. - I still have a weapon.

- And I could shoot you. - And an outsider with a secret. - He alleged he was effective flat down. - That may have been not have been political. - It may have been about six.

- Listen to Worshack, murder at City Hall on the eye-hard radio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - There's two golden rules that any man should live by.

“Rule one, never mess with a country girl.”

He placed stupid games, you get stupid prizes.

- And rule two, never mess with her friends either.

- We always say that trust your girlfriends. - I'm Anna Sinfield. And in this new season of the girlfriends. - Oh my God, this is the same man. - A group of women discover they've all dated

the same prolific con artist. - I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought how could this happen to me. - The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands.

- I said, oh hell no, I vowed. I will be his last target. - He's gonna get what he deserves. - Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe.

On the eye-hard radio app, apple podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts.

- Hey, it's Jake Brennan. - And on my podcast, disgraceland, I tell stories from the dark side of the music business. And I'm thrilled to announce that now, disgraceland, and its celebrity spin-off Hollywood land,

have found a new home here at the exactly right network and partnership with I-Heart Podcasts. You can binge over 250 episodes of disgraceland's back catalog and listen to new episodes every Tuesday, bonus episodes on Thursday and rewinds on Sunday,

now on exactly right. Listen to disgraceland and Hollywood land on the I-Heart Radio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On February 10th, 1971, Patty Smith stood on stage

at St. Mark's Church in New York's East Village and stared out at the crowd. By her side, a lanky and musically lethal guitar playing friend, Lenny Kay. Staring up at them from the audience,

a whos who of downtown cool, Lou Reed, Todd Runger, Robert Maplethor, Allen Ginsberg, and more. The evening was billed as a night of poetry featuring the War Hall performance artist and poet, Gerard Malanga, and Patty Smith.

For whatever reason, Patty decided to include a musical element, Lenny. Lenny was already a musical and psychopedia. He wrote for Jazz and Pop, Rolling Stone, Crod Daddy, and at the time was busy assembling songs

for what would become one of the greatest compilation albums in rock and roll history. The Nuggets original artifacts from the psychedelic era, 1965 to 1968 set, which would become the definitive collection of American garage rock singles.

And eventually, one of punk rock's guiding lights. In fact, the Nuggets liner notes feature one of the earliest uses of the term punk rock. Lenny Kay, not only knew how to play guitar, Lenny Kay knew his ship.

With Lenny at her side, Patty Smith stared out into the audience as the crowd settled. The two performers looked at their guests. Their faces flushed with anticipation. They could all sense it.

Something different was about to happen. New Yorkers know this feeling. It's familiar. The promise of the new.

“That feeling that you're about to be led in on the secret”

in on something special. It's a promise that in the 1970s, New York City seemed to constantly fulfill. The lights dimmed. Guitar feedback began to creep from Lenny's amplifier.

The crowd dropped their nervous chatter. The feedback on furlough throughout the room, bending. Both piercing and warm at the same time, like a blanket of nails. Patty grabbed the microphone atop the stand with one hand,

raised her other hand in the air,

Lenny muted his guitar. Silence.

“Patty Smith leaned into the microphone and said,”

"This one's for the criminals." With that, Lenny Kay released the squeal and squawk from his Gibson Melody Maker,

and Patty needed out the powerful words

from the first lines of her poem, "Oath." Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine. Suddenly, it wasn't a poem anymore. It was a song.

It was Lenny. It was rock and roll. Patty Smith had answered her calling, and people loved it. The crowd that night adored her.

Patty was indeed something new, something unseen. A transgressive hybrid of poetry and music was something powerful to say. The sins of her generation were not yet answered for. And maybe they weren't even sins.

Who knew? That was the point. All the crime, all the transgression,

“the so-called sins, the cross was theirs,”

and theirs alone to bear. Heresy. Like all gray are. The action is in the risk. Patty's words were shocking.

Like Joan of Arx words, Patty's possessed unyielding conviction. And those words had the power to inspire. And inspire, they did. Patty and Lenny brought their rock and roll poetry hybrid

to other stages after this. They opened for the New York dolls at their famed Mercer Arts Center gigs. They played Lijardin at the other end, which had been and would again be called the Bitteret.

And before long, in 1975, Patty found herself on the bowery in Manhattan's Lower East Side with all its grit and grime. A motley collection of the unhoused and unwashed,

“derelicts and artists clinging desperately”

to a world trying to shake them loose, like flees on the backside of a rabid dog, all just steps from William S. Barrow's as apartment, where the iconic novelist lived in Squallar and would receive Patty as a guest whenever she was in the neighborhood.

She was just Patty in her fearlessness and her curiosity, and Barrow's in his heroin and his shotgun. Down the street, near Bleaker, the crowd assembled outside the doors of CBGBs, a little dive, no one had cared about five minutes before.

But tonight, Patty and the new band she dissembled with Lenny on guitar, Richard Sol on piano, Ivan Karel on bass and JD Dardi was set to perform. The Patty Smith group, along with one of the most inventive groups to come out of the 1970s in New York,

television. Both bands were in the midst of a multi-week residency. Just like at the St. Mark's Church gig a few years prior, you could feel the anticipation in the air. Except now, there were actual stakes.

Ever since that first performance at St. Mark's, Patty was heralded as a savior. This new art she was creating, this poetry rock and roll hybrid, was the natural progression of a century-long march from the romance of Arthur Rimbot to the squalor of Jean Genet,

to the grime of Jim Karel to the pop of Andy Warhol, to the music of Patty Smith. And therefore, Patty's music was seen as the antidote to the poisonous drivel-filling airways in the mid-70s, soulless, bloated, spiritually starved rock music.

Patty was unofficially drafted by New York's downtown taste makers and uptown Glitterati, too, as she said,

quote, "reserve, protect, and project the revolutionary

spirit of rock and roll," unquote. And that's exactly what the Patty Smith group did each night at CBGVs. Patty drew strength from her mentor William S. Burroughs and her best friend.

The first great love of her life, Robert Maplethorn, both of whom positioned themselves each night, right up front. Robert was devoted to Patty's success as an artist in the same way he was to his own on a near-spiritual level.

Soon, the powerful executive-clive Davis from Aristotle Records would also devote himself to Patty's success, signing her to a lucrative recording contract. The Patty Smith group's debut album, Horses, produced by the Velvet Underground's John Kale,

the one with the stark and beautiful, Robert Maplethorn portrait of Patty on the cover, did what it was supposed to do. It's part to save rock and roll. The album begins with a bang,

just as Patty did at St. Marks,

with the powerful rejection of the past,

Horses nailed the moment.

Kids loved it, so did the critics.

“None other than America's greatest rock critic,”

Lester Bang, said in his cream magazine review that Patty songs on Horses touched quote, "deep well springs of emotion that extremely few artists in rock or anywhere else are capable of reaching."

That was just a few artists in rock or anywhere else. I don't know if Lester Bang's intended to cast Patty's art outside the parameters of rock or not, but that's exactly where our creativity was leading her. She wasn't just a musician.

She was clearly something else, something new, someone, an artist who wasn't only revealing something about herself and her listeners, but she was revealing something

that hadn't been revealed before.

Here was an artist who was reclaiming rock and roll from under the safe nightlight of mainstream rocks radio play duvet and dragging it back under the grimy blanket of nails inhabited by the criminal underworld,

both the perpetrators and the victims. Patty Smith was a revolution.

“In an iconic twist, her cause was celebrated”

not only downtown, but uptown as well. Soon, elite culture would take note in open its doors. Aside from the predictable browsing from conservative detractors over her line

about Jesus, everyone, it seemed loved, Patty Smith's music. Except, Robert Mabel thought, well, not exactly. Robert was an ardent supporter of Patty's, but ever since their earliest days, when Patty would sing to them back in that Brooklyn apartment,

Robert would always say to her,

sing me a song I can dance to, Patty. The world didn't dance to the songs on horses. They studied them, like something worthy of a museum exhibit. No, the dancing would come later.

With Bruce Springsteen. Perhaps you've heard of him. At the time, Bruce Springsteen had just become the definition of an overnight sensation.

“Upon releasing his third album, Born to Run,”

the previously obscure rock and roll band leader had rocketed to start him when he appeared on the covers of both News Week and Time Magazine, simultaneously. Now, in July of 1976, he was filing a lawsuit

against his manager, trying to extricate himself from a horrible contract. One, that he believed to be criminal. Patty Smith at the time was playing shows in supportive horses and preparing

to record her follow-up album, Radio Ethiopia. While living with a new boyfriend, the guitarist from Blue Oyster Colt, Allen Lanier. None of them knew it yet, but all three of these artists, much like their New York City fans,

were about to be gripped in fear. Young lovers, like Patty and Allen, and like the couples who flocked to record stores to purchase Springsteen's records, were about to get swept up in a year of paranoia,

because the New York City night now belonged to Illumatic. July 29, 1976, 110 AM. Helen Bay, The Bronx. Two women, 18-year-old Donaloria, and 19-year-old Jody Valenti,

sat in a nosemobile on the side of the road in the dark of night, discussing the time they just had at peach trees, a local disco tech. And the heavy rhythm from the trams

that's where the happy people go, supply the adrenaline still coursing through them. The vibe was pierced by a passing car on a not so far away street, blaring, haunting new hip by blue Oyster Colt,

don't fear the reaper. Suddenly, the moon turned. The street got a little darker. Inside of the car, a little quieter. Donal opened the door to leave.

From out of the darkness, a man with a gun. Donal startled. The man crouched onto one knee. Took aim at Donal with both hands and... Jody screamed.

Donaloria died instantly. The gunman got off another two shots. And one hit Jody in the thigh. She lived to tell the harrowing story to the New York newspapers.

Three months later, the next shootings happened. Two young lovers, 18-year-old Rosemary Keenan, and 20-year-old Carl Denaro, escaped the killer who fired into Carl's car in Queens. Carl took a bullet in the head, but survived.

So did Rosemary. The cops connected the 44 caliber shell caseings from the Queens shooting to the Bronx shooting, and the papers came up with a spiffy name

The 44 caliber killer.

Baby, don't fear the reaper.

“That line, from the blue oyster cult single,”

kept asking the impossible from speakers across the city in the spring in summer of '76. And later in November, another shooting. She's in stone fear of the reaper. Another couple of teenage girls, another Donna,

this one, Donna Demasi, 16, along with Joanne Lomino, 18, two shots, and both girls survived. But the papers, especially the New York Daily News call on this Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamel, traded ink for industry-scale paranoia.

New Yorkers sweat it out the winter. La-la-la-la-la, don't fear the reaper. The New Year, 1977, new shootings, another couple, alone in the car. Christine Freund, 26, and John Deal, 30,

both were shot. She survived. He didn't, the papers did their thing.

“The public paranoia ratcheted even higher.”

Love of two is one here, but now they're gone. From March 8, 1977, another shooting, college student Virginia Voskashin, was walking back to her home in Queens in the dark after class when the gunman appeared out of nowhere.

She saw the gun. She raised her textbook in front of her face, the gunman shot, and the bullet blasted through the book, and into Virginia's face. Virginia was dead.

Here, but now, they're gone. The month later, a model and her boyfriend parked it about 3am on the side of the Hutchinson Parkway in the Bronx, one dead model, one dead boyfriend. Romeo and Juliet are together in eternity.

Come on, baby. Don't fear the reaper.

“And on May 30, 1977, when Daily News call”

Ms. Jimmy Breslin was revealing to the world the psychotic ramlings of the 44 caliber killer, sent to Breslin himself by the killer, who claimed for all to be, in his words, the son of Sam, aka the self-proclaimed Chubby Bohemus,

aka Bieselbub, aka Satan, aka death himself, aka the reaper. While Breslin freaked New York City the fuck out, while cops hunted for the killer, and the killer hunted for victims, Patty Smith was planning her next album,

her third, the follow-up to Radio Ethiopia.

But while the NYPD hunted for the son of Sam, Patty was still hunting for a song, her friend Robert Maplethorpe could dance to. By June of that year, Bruce Springsteen had finally extracted himself from his legal problems.

It was beginning work on his belated follow-up to Born to Run, and album called Darkness on the Edge of Town. And there was plenty of darkness to go around, especially in New Yorktown. Investigators were out at dead end,

unable to hunt down the son of Sam. The night no longer belonged to the city's lovers, but Springsteen didn't care. There was something there, the whispers of a song. As the sessions began with producer Jimmy Ivie,

Springsteen had the chorus. It was defiant, triumphant. It reclaimed something. It went, because the night belongs to lovers, but that was it, that was all he had.

The end of June came, and the son of Sam shot another couple, Salvador Lupo, 20, and Judy Placebo, 17, both survived. The cops kept up their hunt for the killer, but were still coming up empty by the end of the month. July hit with the heat of a thousand sons,

and that meant that it had been a full year of terror in New York City. The self-proclaimed Chubby Bohem is celebrated by shooting at a park car,

a couple kissing on their first date.

Stacey Moscow, it's in Robert, Vielente, both 20. Both were shot in the head. Stacey lived, Robert did not. In August, Patty Smith entered the record plant to begin work on her new album.

That same week, police acting on a tip, interviewed a Chubby 20 something postal worker up in Yonkers named David Berkowitz. The following day, Berkowitz was arrested. The son of Sam Manhant had ended. New York breathed a sigh of relief.

Patty Smith kept her head down and worked,

A song, Robert Maplethorke could dance to. On September 27th, Jimmy Ivine,

“who was also now producing Patty's new album,”

brought springsteens demo of because the night into the studio for Patty. Patty heard something in the song that Bruce hadn't. Not just defiance, but again, reclamation. She channeled it all into verse lyrics.

Come on now, try and understand the way I feel when I'm in your hands. Take my hand, come undercover. They can't hurt you now. Can't hurt you now.

Can't hurt you now. Because the night belongs to lovers once more. And now, the son of Sam was behind bars. The young couples in New York were once again free to frolic. Because the night was a massive smash.

“Patty Smith had her hit and Robert Maplethorke had a song”

that he could dance to. Patty Smith was more than just an artist. For a minute it seemed, Patty Smith was a pop star. Because the night was Patty Smith's commercial breakthrough, it was a top 40 hit, top five in the UK.

Easter, the album that the single supported, sold better than Patty's previous two albums combined.

But pop stardom was never her goal.

Being an artist was an artist need fuel in inspiration. And sometimes the only source for them is love. So naturally, while at the top of her game, Patty Smith walked away from the game. She fell in love with another artist, another guitarist,

this one, Fred Sonic Smith, from the Protopunk anarchist and Motor City legends, the MC5.

“In 1979, Patty moved to Detroit to Mary Fred”

and traded a quote unquote career for fulfillment. The kind of fulfillment that only creating a family can bring. But soon enough, New York City would come calling again with some very bad news. By the late '80s, Patty Smith's best friend,

the first great love of her life, her creative confidant, her literal and figurative partner and crime during those formative years in New York. Robert Maplethort, after having become one of the most successful photographers on the planet,

was dying from AIDS-related complications. On his deathbed, Robert asked Patty a pointed question, did art, get us, perhaps art took Robert, but it didn't take Fred Sonic Smith, heart failure did. Patty's other great love, Fred Smith died in 1994,

five years after Robert Maplethort. And Patty did what all great artists do to process grief. She worked. She made new music, went on tour with Bob Dylan, moved back to New York City, and she wrote,

"Predigiously, publishing books of poetry, books about her obsession with the works of Warhol, books of drawings of photography,

a collection of song lyrics, all to critical acclaim.

And in 2010, she released just kids, a personal memoir of her early life in her time in New York City with Robert Maplethort. And later that year, just kids won the National Book Award for non-fiction, one of the most prestigious literary honors

in the world. In 2015, Patty released a second memoir, M.Train, which focused more on her present life and the unconventional ways in which she'd pursued making art, and the irredeamable loss she fell after the death

of her husband, Fred. M.Train was a national bestseller, and Patty followed it up with four more titles, including the recent bread of angels, another memoir.

Each book was released to more critical praise

and numerous awards and nominations, Grammys of Hanna Ward, the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, honorary doctorates from prestigious universities. It's now 2026, and it's clear the Patty Smith is still living a life that few artists get to live.

She is, as I mentioned earlier, the high priestess of art. She is enjoyed both critical and commercial success, artistic credibility in the underground,

Most importantly, she survived.

She's 79 years old, and has lived

“to harvest the fruits of her artistic labor.”

No small feet. Most artists of consequence succumb to the ever present danger that surrounds them. Jean Jean A and William S. Barrow's lived to be 75 and 83 respectively, but Rimbaud died at 37,

Pollock at 44, Coltrain at 40, Brian Jones, 27, and too many other artists to name, all of whom died too young. And of course, there was Robert Maplethorpe, who asked, "Did art get us?"

Dead at just 42. Perhaps the reason Patty Smith survived

is something that she revealed in M.Train.

When you read it, you can't help but feel Patty writing at times in a sort of gum shoe detective way, channeling her inner Mickey Splane, her inner Raymond Chandler. It's not full on Philip Marlow, it's subtle, but what isn't subtle is Patty's love of detective fiction,

both on the page and on screen. In a word, Patty Smith is crime obsessed. Law and order, the girl with the dragon tattoo, mid-summer murders, Sherlock Holmes, Luther, CSI Miami, The Killing.

Patty Smith reveals an M.Train that she is so obsessed with some of these crime series that she will sometimes rearrange her travel schedule in order to catch various shows when they air on TV in different countries.

Her obsession with the show, the Killing, was so intense that she wrote to the producers when it was canceled to mourn the loss. The producers responded by giving Patty a cameo on one of the series' last episodes.

But Patty Smith's obsession with TV crime shows. I don't believe that it's just folly.

“I believe that it comes from Patty's extensive exposure”

to actual crime throughout the course of her life. The Lindbergh baby Charles Manson, the son of Sam. These true crime stories were formative for Patty Smith. As was the ever present danger of New York City in the 1960s and '70s.

The blood splattered walls of her first apartment,

the body outlined in chalk on the street outside Roberts. The dancer plunging to her death from the top of the Chelsea. Her friend William S. Barrow's who shot and killed his wife and got away with it. Jim Carroll's deadly addiction to heroin.

Robert Maplethorpe's 40-second street hustling not to mention the addiction, violence, and deadly recklessness that accompanies Mozart's lives. Patty Smith was a hares breath from all of it. And she learned from it all.

Learn from the crime. Learn how not to succumb to the danger of it. But instead to use it as creative fuel. Patty Smith survived to become that rare type of artist that she became because I believe Patty Smith knew

what all crime fiction and true crime fans know.

“And that's how to stay safe to be vigilant, aware.”

And like all great artists to trust her intuition, to believe in that calling. Because the night doesn't just belong to lovers, if the longs to the criminals. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is disgraced land.

(upbeat music) - All right, guys, you've not heard the Patty Smith episode of the disgraced land podcast. The question I want to ask you all is, which musicians memoir or autobiography would you recommend?

Get your answers in via voicemail in text to 617-9066638, or hit me on the socials at disgraced land pod in the comments. Here comes some credits. Discraced land was created by yours truly,

and is produced in partnership with double Elvis, the exactly right network in I-Harp podcast. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes, page at disgracedlandpod.com. If you're listening as a disgraced land,

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rockerola. He's a bad, bad man!

they've all dated the same prolific con artist.

They take matters into their own hands. I vowed, I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves.

“We always say that trust your girlfriends.”

Listen to the girlfriends.

Trust me, babe. On the eye, heart rate, you app. Apple podcasts. Or whatever you get, you'll podcasts. [MUSIC PLAYING]

This is one of the most dramatic events

“that really ever happened in New York City, politics.”

[MUSIC PLAYING] A screen, good-down, good-down, those are shots. A tragedy that's now forgotten and a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.

Listen to Worshack, murder at City Hall on the eye-heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Hander, we have some fantastic guests, like Amelia Clark.

When like young people come off to me and if they want to be an actor or whatever,

“my first thing is always, can you think of anything else?”

That you can do rather big. Because for today, do that. David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships, a religion or sex or addiction, or you

just go straight for the guts. Dennis Leary, gating moderato from Stranger Things. Sanam moju, Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts.