Posts Tagged ‘Patti Smith’

It all started when Jac Holzman, who signed The Doors to Elektra Records way back in 1966, started to think about how to turn the legendary LA band’s boxed set into a digital wonderland. The result is a brand new $4.99 digital App from Warner Music Group’s Rhino Entertainment.

In the official announcement, Holzman has a cool description for The Doors App. He suggests that it’s like a “1500-piece jigsaw puzzle in three dimensions, which arrives on your iPad, elegantly pre-assembled.”

If you click “The Story” button, there is a treasure trove of photos, videos and interviews to light your nostalgic fire. As well as essays by everyone from the late Hunter S. Thompson to Patti Smith.

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Rock star, punk poet and bestselling author Patti Smith played a private show Wednesday night as part of KCRW’s Berkeley Street Sessions, and FishbowlLA was lucky enough to score an invite. We rocked out with a crowd of approximately 175 public radio supporters including Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson, Ellen Page, Tim Robbins, Amy Madigan and Jason Bentley‘s mom. We sat next to Bookworm‘s Michael Silverblatt, who was getting his groove on, and watched Ed Harris bark like a dog during Smith’s performance of “Banga.” Magical.

Halfway through the show the music stopped and Smith was joined onstage by KCRW DJ Anne Litt for an interview that touched on a number of topics, including music, motherhood and Smith’s award-winning book, Just Kids. When Litt mentioned how much she’d been enjoying the audiobook version, narrated by Smith, the author revealed that publishers had so disliked her South Jersey accent that they told her to re-record parts of the book speaking “normally.” Thankfully, Smith declined, and her drawl remains on the audio version.

The event was recorded for Morning Becomes Eclectic and will air on November 14. The full recording of the event will become available in the station’s archives that same day.

Photo by Larry Hirshowitz

Last night in Manhattan, legendary rock star Patti Smith received the nonfiction prize at the National Book Awards ceremony for her memoir “Just Kids.” The book recounts Smith’s coming of age as an artist in New York in the 60s and 70s with her dear friend and lover Robert Mapplethorpe. The memoir serves a counter-culture history lesson, a tender love story, and an evocative meditation on art, and any bump in sales it receives as a result of winning the award is well deserved.

Smith became emotional while accepting her prize. She recalled her days as a clerk at Scribner’s Bookstore, where she shelved the National Book Award winners and dreamed of one day writing a story of her own. And she made a case for analog literature:

Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.

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