Patti Smith writes tribute to her “buddy” Sam Shepard

Patti Smith has written a moving recollection of her friendship with Sam Shepard, the brilliant playwright and actor, who recently passed away

Article by The Skinny | 02 Aug 2017

Rock icon Patti Smith has written a loving tribute to American playwright, actor and director Sam Shepard, who died last week. Writing in The New Yorker, she recalls the phone calls they used to share, where they’d put the world to rights on a variety of subjects, especially literature.

“He would call me late in the night from somewhere on the road…” she writes. “I’d happily awake, stir up some Nescafé and we’d talk about anything. About the emeralds of Cortez, or the white crosses in Flanders Fields, about our kids, or the history of the Kentucky Derby. But mostly we talked about writers and their books. Latin writers. Rudy Wurlitzer. Nabokov. Bruno Schulz.”

The pair became pals in the early 70s. In her 2010 memoir, Just Kids, Smith explains how she met Shepard when he was drumming with folk group the Holy Modal Rounders, although she had no idea he was an acclaimed playwright. They later co-wrote a play (Cowboy Mouth) together, in which they both performed.

In her New Yorker piece, Smith reveals that Shepard enjoyed a life on the open road. “Sam liked being on the move,” she writes. “He’d throw a fishing rod or an old acoustic guitar in the back seat of his truck, maybe take a dog, but for sure a notebook, and a pen, and a pile of books. He liked packing up and leaving just like that, going west.”

This peripatetic lifestyle gave Shepard inspiration for his writing, she writes. “He liked getting a role that would take him somewhere he really didn’t want to be, but where he would wind up taking in its strangeness; lonely fodder for future work.”

In a moving passage, Smith says that “Sam promised me that one day he’d show me the landscape of the Southwest, for though well-travelled, I’d not seen much of our own country.” Unfortunately, ALS, the illness from which Shepard would eventually pass away, aged 73, put paid to his travelling. “Sam was dealt a whole other hand, stricken with a debilitating affliction,” writes Smith. “He eventually stopped picking up and leaving.”

Read Smith’s full, beautiful tribute to Shepard over at The New Yorker.

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