Patti Smith’s ‘Horses’ Turns 50

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Speaker 2 This is Fresh Air. I'm David Biancoole.
Patty Smith is now considered one of the wise women of Rock and Roll, an eloquent chronicler of her life in music and in a series of acclaimed memoirs.

Speaker 2 But 50 years ago, she was a scrounging poet who wanted to be a rock star on her own very literary terms, and her debut album, Horses, announced a unique artist.

Speaker 2 Today, we're going to listen back to portions of two of Terry's interviews with Patty Smith about her early days as a poet and performer.

Speaker 2 But first, rock critic Ken Tucker takes a look back and tells us about the new anniversary edition of Horses, which is supplemented with previously unreleased music

Speaker 3 jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine

Speaker 4 Pat thieves

Speaker 4 wild cord of my sleeve

Speaker 5 50 years on, Patty Smith's horses still sounds like nothing else before or since its arrival in 1975.

Speaker 5 At the time, Smith had one foot in poetry, the other in rock and roll. Her spirit animals were the French surrealist Arthur Rambeau and the Doors demigod Jim Morrison.

Speaker 5 Both bad boys who died young, they inspired Patty as self-mythologizing, rebellious innovators.

Speaker 5 But they also served as warning lessons in the self-control and discipline necessary to be a long-lasting, prolific artist, which the 78-year-old Smith has indeed become.

Speaker 5 Consider, however, what it was like to see for the first time the 28-year-old Smith as she struck an androgynous pose in a white shirt and black tie cover photo by pal Robert Mapplethorpe.

Speaker 5 And consider what it must have been like to first hear her tremulous croon on a song like Free Money.

Speaker 4 Every night before I

Speaker 4 could sleep,

Speaker 4 find a ticket,

Speaker 4 win a lottery,

Speaker 4 scrub the pearls up from the sea.

Speaker 4 Cash them in and buy you all the things

Speaker 4 you need

Speaker 4 every night before I

Speaker 4 rest my head.

Speaker 4 See those dollar bills

Speaker 4 swirling at my bed.

Speaker 4 I know they're stolen, but I don't be bad.

Speaker 4 I dig that money, buy you

Speaker 4 things you never had.

Speaker 4 Oh, baby,

Speaker 4 it would mean

Speaker 4 so much to me.

Speaker 5 Music critics write about 1970s downtown Manhattan Patty Smith performing at CBGB's and Max's Kansas City, but they ignore or aren't aware of the true crucible of her talent, St.

Speaker 5 Mark's in the Bowery, the Lower East Side Church, and ground zero for the New York School of Poetry.

Speaker 5 This was the site of open readings, where Patty could rub shoulders with key influences like Alan Ginsburg, John Giorno, and Ann Waldman.

Speaker 5 Patty's print poetry was flatly derivative, but Smith's creative breakthrough came in collaboration with guitarist Lenny Kaye.

Speaker 5 Together, they set her poems to music, with Lenny plugging in to accompany her words at readings.

Speaker 5 Very quickly, they were welding electric guitar to epic creations, as in this nine-minutes-plus opus combining one of her poems with a cover of Chris Kenner's Land of a Thousand Dances.

Speaker 5 It's the song that gave the album its name.

Speaker 4 Another boy was sliding up the hallway. His gold nerves merged perfectly with the hallway.
He merged perfectly

Speaker 4 with the hallway.

Speaker 4 He merged perfectly

Speaker 4 in the hallway. The boy looked at Johnny.
Johnny wanted to run, but the movie kept moving as planned.

Speaker 4 The boy took Johnny,

Speaker 4 he pressed him against a locker.

Speaker 4 He drove it in, he drove it home, he drove it deep. Then Johnny, the boy disappeared.

Speaker 4 Johnny fell on his knees. Started crashing his head against a locker.

Speaker 4 Started crashing his head against a locker. Started laughing disturbedly.

Speaker 4 When

Speaker 4 suddenly

Speaker 4 Johnny

Speaker 4 gets a feeling he's been surrounded by

Speaker 4 persons, purses, purses, purses. Coming in in all directions, white, shining, silver, studies with their nose in flames.

Speaker 4 He saw horses, pusses, horses, horses, horses, pusses, pusses, pusses, so you know how to tell names.

Speaker 5 Patty quickly went full-on rock star, getting signed to Clive Davis's then-new Aristor Records alongside unlikely label mates such as Barry Manilow and Lou Rawls.

Speaker 5 At once a punk and an artiste, Smith had to grapple with the question of what it meant to be avant-garde when you also love the Marvelettes.

Speaker 5 Certain things rearrange,

Speaker 4 and this old world seems like

Speaker 4 a new place.

Speaker 5 Oh, yes, they go. That's The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game, a 60s hit for Motown's Marvelettes, written by Smokey Robinson and adored by Smith, who has always had juicy taste in oldies.

Speaker 5 The new 50th anniversary edition of Horses includes some alternate takes of songs from this album and others that would appear on subsequent releases.

Speaker 5 The one previously unreleased song is called Snowball.

Speaker 4 Oh, don't look behind me now, I know what's coming.

Speaker 4 Big white hairy bald light,

Speaker 4 looking like

Speaker 4 a snowball.

Speaker 4 When it hits me, I'm so amazed.

Speaker 4 When it hits me, I'm feeling crazed.

Speaker 4 When it hits me, I start to recall. Memories

Speaker 4 flooding like a snowball, rolling down the hill. Snowball, giving me a chill.
Your face that I used to see. Faces that we used to be.
They stopped.

Speaker 5 It's pretty easy to hear why Snowball didn't make the horses cut. It's a more conventional pop song, one that doesn't possess the grand delirium Smith was going for.

Speaker 5 Right from the start, she knew how she wanted to sound and reportedly fought with her producer, the Velvet Underground's John Kale, to achieve the sounds she heard in her head.

Speaker 4 Car

Speaker 4 stopped in a clearing.

Speaker 4 Revenge of life, it was nearing.

Speaker 4 I saw the boy break out of his skin.

Speaker 4 My heart turned over, and I cried. He cried, Break it up.

Speaker 5 These days, Patty Smith is still touring. She has a sub-stack newsletter to chronicle her dreamiest thoughts and has a new memoir called Bread of Angels.

Speaker 5 The reissue of Horses fits right into her current context, sounding as urgent and immediate as it did a half century ago.

Speaker 2 Ken Tucker reviewed the new 50th anniversary edition of Horses. It was released last month by Legacy Recordings.
After a break, we'll listen to a portion of Terry's 1996 interview with Patty Smith.

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Speaker 2 November 10th marks 50 years since Patty Smith released her debut album Horses. One of the biggest influences on Smith was her friendship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe.

Speaker 2 They both were 20-year-old aspiring artists when they met in 1967 in New York City. They soon moved in together and helped nurture each other's artistic development.

Speaker 2 Mapplethorpe became one of the most controversial artists of his time.

Speaker 2 His photographs of nudes, often in erotic and sadomasochistic poses, put him at the center of a battle over censorship and federal funding of the arts.

Speaker 2 Maplethorpe died of AIDS in 1989 at the age of 42.

Speaker 2 Terry first spoke with Patty Smith in 1996 when Smith had published a book of short prose poems dedicated to and inspired by Mapplethorpe. The book was called The Coral Sea.

Speaker 2 Terry asked Smith about a famous photograph he had taken of her.

Speaker 4 He took the photograph,

Speaker 4 perhaps the most famous photograph of you that was on

Speaker 4 the cover of your album Horses, I think in 1975, in which you were wearing wearing a kind of oversized white shirt and an undone tie with

Speaker 4 like a suit jacket slung over your shoulder. Tell us how that photograph came about.

Speaker 7 Well, we wanted to take the cover and Robert knew where he wanted to take it. It was up in Sam Wagstaff's apartment

Speaker 7 in New York City, which was very white, a very white room. And there was a triangle of light that used to come through a window, and he was was extremely interested in photographing that triangle.
And

Speaker 7 we went up there, and I remember the light started changing, and he wanted us to hurry up, and we had to run.

Speaker 7 We couldn't get a cabin. We had to run as fast as we could, because he could really feel the light changing.
And in terms of my clothing, It was just my usual clothes.

Speaker 7 I used to like,

Speaker 7 I really wanted to have a a Botolarian type of look. I wanted a black and white sort of a mixture of

Speaker 7 just how I was and little 19th century feel in it. But in the end,

Speaker 7 the final photograph, which some people have made quite a bit of, the particular pose or stance in the photograph, was really a tribute to Frank Sinatra.

Speaker 7 Well, no, actually,

Speaker 7 he did a movie, I think it was called,

Speaker 7 oh man.

Speaker 7 I don't think it was Pal Joey. It was the Joey Lewis story.
And Joey Lewis was a singer that got in trouble with the mob and got his throat cut and he wound up a comedian.

Speaker 7 I don't know if you remember that.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's the movie that All the Way comes from.

Speaker 7 Yeah, that's right. The last scene of it, Frank Sinatra's walking alone down a dark street with a lantern.

Speaker 7 There's a lantern-lit street, and he sort of philosophically talking to himself in a pane of glass, and he slings his coat over his shoulder and

Speaker 7 philosophically walks into the city sunset. But

Speaker 7 I always thought it was cool the way he slung his coat over his shoulder. So

Speaker 7 that was the only,

Speaker 7 there was only a couple of photographs in that particular shooting like that, but that was the one Robert picked, the Frank Sinatra shot.

Speaker 4 The Joker is Wild, I think it's a little bit more.

Speaker 7 Yeah, that's it. Yeah,

Speaker 7 that's it. The Joker is Wild.
Appropriate title.

Speaker 4 You met Robert Maplethorpe in 1967 when you were 20. Do I have that right? Yes.
How did you meet?

Speaker 7 Well,

Speaker 7 we met in Brooklyn.

Speaker 7 I was around

Speaker 7 Pratt Institute of Art where he went to school.

Speaker 7 I had a friend there and my friend had moved and I was looking for my friend and I knocked on the door where he used to be and someone said, well, I don't know where your friend is, but you can ask the guy in there.

Speaker 7 And I went in another room and saw this kid sleeping on this cot. And I just stood there and was watching him sleep and

Speaker 7 he

Speaker 7 opened his eyes and smiled at me. and that's how we met.

Speaker 4 Now, was he already taking photographs when you met?

Speaker 7 No, he didn't start taking photographs till late 69

Speaker 7 when we were at the Chelsea Hotel. He really only started taking photographs.
He was doing drawings, paintings, and collages and some constructions. And then later he did installations.

Speaker 7 But in his huge montages and collages, he

Speaker 7 used a lot of magazine pictures, holy cards, existing pictures,

Speaker 7 reproductions of Michelangelo, who he greatly admired, reproductions of statues and sculpture. But he was never satisfied, and he really started taking photographs

Speaker 7 to insert within his other work. He didn't set out to become a photographer.
He really just wanted to create his own information for his drawings and montages.

Speaker 4 Did you help each other with your work?

Speaker 7 Always.

Speaker 4 What ways were you able to help him and how did he help you?

Speaker 7 Well, we helped each other in any way we could,

Speaker 7 whether it be

Speaker 7 financially or an encouraging word or constructive criticism

Speaker 7 and just

Speaker 7 mutual belief in each other's work. When you

Speaker 7 that's something really that

Speaker 7 no one

Speaker 7 can duplicate nor take away from you is when you have another human being that completely believes in your work.

Speaker 4 Was he the first person who completely believed in your work?

Speaker 7 I'd say so, yes.

Speaker 4 You said that Mabel Thorpe helped you make the transition from psychotic to serious art student. What did you mean by that?

Speaker 7 Well, I'm never quite sure of what I meant.

Speaker 7 You know, when people asked me to explain what I said 20 years ago or something, it's,

Speaker 7 I don't, I couldn't exactly say what I meant, but I

Speaker 7 probably,

Speaker 7 when I met him, I felt like my work was really an extension of my neuroses

Speaker 7 instead of an extension of intelligence. And

Speaker 7 he

Speaker 7 by helping me believe in myself as a person and gaining respect for my own intelligence shifted

Speaker 7 the emphasis where the work came from.

Speaker 7 I really did start writing and drawing when I was younger to relieve myself from certain emotional tensions.

Speaker 7 Like what?

Speaker 7 Well, I mean whatever tensions people have when

Speaker 7 they're growing up, whether it be

Speaker 7 fear or

Speaker 7 sexual tensions or parental tension, youthful paranoia, I don't know.

Speaker 7 Name it.

Speaker 4 Now, I think he gave you

Speaker 4 the money to record your first record, the 45 that had Hey Joe on one side and Piss Factory on the other.

Speaker 4 Tell me the story of that.

Speaker 7 Well, it's really simply, Robert,

Speaker 7 you know, for a long time I had helped him financially, and Robert's situation got more solid. He had a really benevolent and wonderful patron, Sam Wagstaff.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 through Sam Wagstaff, Robert was able to finance our first independent, well, our only independent single. And

Speaker 7 that's all the story was. I wanted to do a single and didn't have the money, and he gave it to me.
So

Speaker 7 we went into Electric Ladyland one night and

Speaker 7 did it in one night.

Speaker 7 They left and they expect me to think, but I will never faint. I refuse to lose, I refuse to fall down.

Speaker 7 Because you see, it's the monotony that's got to me. Every afternoon, like the last one,

Speaker 7 every afternoon, like a rerun. Next to God hooked, and yeah, we look the same.
Both pumping steel, both sweating. But you know, she got nothing to hide.
And I got something to hide here called desire.

Speaker 7 I got something to hide here called desire. And I will get out of here.

Speaker 7 You know, the fear potion is just about to come. In my nose, it's the taste of sugar.
And I've got nothing to hide here save desire.

Speaker 7 And I'm gonna go, I'm gonna get out of here.

Speaker 7 I'm gonna get out of here. I'm gonna get on that train.

Speaker 7 And I'm gonna go out on that train. Go to New York City.
And I'm gonna be somebody.

Speaker 7 I'm getting gonna get out of here. Robert always, when we were younger, he

Speaker 7 thought that I should sing, although it was never really an ambition of mine. And he was really happy when I wanted to do the single, and he was really pleased to be a part of it.

Speaker 4 Had he heard you sing? I mean, would you sing?

Speaker 4 Were you singing in the house before you were singing in performance?

Speaker 7 Yeah, you know, I'd, you know, be making spaghetti or washing clothes and sing. I don't

Speaker 7 used to sing little songs, and

Speaker 7 for some reason he liked my singing. He used to think I used to sing little blues songs and things and

Speaker 7 he used to think I

Speaker 7 well, he always thought I should sing.

Speaker 4 You think you would have done it if he didn't nudge you in that direction?

Speaker 7 Well, he did push me towards that, but

Speaker 7 it was a series of people actually.

Speaker 7 You know, um Sam Shepherd was really instrumental in getting me to sing in public. Um

Speaker 7 I had a few different friends that

Speaker 7 seemed to think that I had a

Speaker 7 bend toward that. And I really do believe if it wasn't for those friends,

Speaker 7 Lenny Kaye and a few others, no, I don't believe that I would be singing.

Speaker 7 At least not recording. I mean, I might still be singing around the house making spaghetti, but

Speaker 7 I can't say that I would have been recording.

Speaker 2 Patty Smith, speaking to Terry Gross in 1996. After a break, we'll listen to portions of another of their conversations, this one from 2010.

Speaker 2 Also, we'll hear from actress Laura Dern in a 2023 interview discussing her mother, Diane Ladd, who died this week at age 89.

Speaker 2 And I'll review Pluribus, the new series from breaking bad creator Vince Gilligan. I'm David Biancoole, and this is Fresh Air.

Speaker 4 Late afternoon,

Speaker 4 dreaming of tal.

Speaker 4 You just had to quarrel,

Speaker 4 sent you away.

Speaker 4 I was looking for you.

Speaker 4 How you gotta gun

Speaker 4 Thought you wonderful.

Speaker 2 We're commemorating the 50th anniversary of Patty Smith's debut album Horses. She's considered the godmother of punk.

Speaker 2 With her first album, she created a hybrid of poetry and rock and established a high-energy performance style that was sometimes aggressive and sometimes ecstatic.

Speaker 2 When Terry spoke with Patty Smith in 2010, Smith had written the memoir Just Kids about growing up in New Jersey, moving to New York in 1967, evolving into a poet, songwriter, and performer, and beginning a relationship with artist Robert Mabelthorpe.

Speaker 4 You say that until a friend suggested that you be in a rock and roll band, it had never occurred to you. It was just like not part of your own world.
Why would it?

Speaker 3 You know, I'm not a musician. You know, I don't play any instrument.
I didn't play any instrument.

Speaker 3 I didn't have any specific talents. I mean, I came from the South Jersey, Philadelphia area, and in the early 60s, everybody sang.
They sang on street corners, three-part harmonies, a cappella.

Speaker 3 I knew most of my friends were better singers than me.

Speaker 3 There was nothing in what I did that would give a sense that I should be in a rock and roll band. Also, girls weren't in rock and roll bands.
I mean, they sang, but,

Speaker 3 you know, the closest thing to a rock singer, a real rock singer that we had was Gray Slick. And I certainly didn't have Gray Slick's voice.

Speaker 4 So you found the guitarist Lenny Kay. You read an article by him about a cappella groups, and you really liked it.
And

Speaker 4 you found him. You sought him out.
He was working at a bookstore in the village. If you had not found Bunny Kaye, do you think you wouldn't have been in a rock and roll band?

Speaker 4 Because he has been your guitarist kind of forever.

Speaker 3 Well, I can't say what would happen. It was really Sam Shepard who suggested...
You know, I said to Sam

Speaker 3 when Robert helped me through Gerard Malanga to get my first reading, I said, I got to do something special because if I don't do something special, Gregory's going to, you know, throw tomatoes at me or something.

Speaker 3 Gregory Corso,

Speaker 3 who was

Speaker 3 mentoring me not to be a boring poet.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 3 I said, I want to do something special. And Sam said, well, you have these.
And I said, well, I could sing a cappella songs. And he said, well, do you know anybody that plays guitar?

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I said, well, this fellow, Lenny Kaye, mentioned he played a little guitar.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I don't know how I would have evolved because the thing about Lenny that made him different from everyone else is Lenny was there to magnify

Speaker 3 my ideas.

Speaker 3 He really,

Speaker 3 I'm not saying he was totally selfless. He had a sense of himself, but he was completely there for me.
Aaron Trevor Brandon.

Speaker 4 You were saying that you didn't have, you know, you didn't think of yourself as a singer per se, that your friends had better voices than you did.

Speaker 4 But you created this new style, really, that was a combination of poetry and music. It wasn't about having like a perfect singer's voice.

Speaker 4 It was the style that you performed and the personality that you put into it,

Speaker 4 the kind of defiance that you had in some songs, the energy. Would you talk about what you felt you were doing early on that was different from what you'd seen other people do?

Speaker 3 I think my perception of myself was really as a performer and a communicator. My first album, Horses,

Speaker 3 my mission and the collective band mission was really

Speaker 3 on one level to merge poetry and rock and roll, but more humanistically to reach out to other disenfranchised people.

Speaker 3 In 1975,

Speaker 3 the

Speaker 3 young homosexual kids were being

Speaker 3 disowned by their their families.

Speaker 3 You know, kids like me who were a little weird or a little different were often persecuted in their small towns. And it wasn't just

Speaker 3 because of sexual persuasion. It was for any reason, for being an artist, for being different, for having political views, for just wanting to be free.

Speaker 3 And I really recorded the record to connect with these people

Speaker 3 and also

Speaker 3 in terms of our place in rock and roll, just to create some bridge between our great artists that we had just lost, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, among them, and to create space for what I felt would be the new guard, which I didn't really include myself.

Speaker 3 I was really anticipating people

Speaker 3 or bands like The Clash and the Ramones. I was anticipating in my mind that a new breed would come, television, a new breed would come and they would be less materialistic,

Speaker 3 more

Speaker 3 bonded with the people, and not so glamorous.

Speaker 3 That's I didn't I wasn't thinking so much of music, I wasn't thinking so much of perfection or stardom or

Speaker 3 I I had this mission and I thought I would do this record and then go back to my writing and my drawing and and you know, return to my

Speaker 3 my

Speaker 3 somewhat abnormal, normal life.

Speaker 3 But horses took me on a whole different path.

Speaker 4 Is there a track from Horses that particularly

Speaker 4 illustrates what you were describing as what your mission was?

Speaker 3 Birdland. Okay.

Speaker 3 I think Birdland because for various reasons, Birdland was

Speaker 3 an improvisation, build on an improvisation.

Speaker 3 It very it so much exemplifies the communication of my band, especially between Richard Lenny and I.

Speaker 3 And it speaks of this new breed, you know, the

Speaker 3 new generations who'll be dreaming in animation, you know, the new generations that will

Speaker 3 race across

Speaker 3 the fields no longer presidents but prophets.

Speaker 3 That was my

Speaker 3 it was like my telegram to the new breed.

Speaker 4 Oh, let's hear it. This is Birdland from Patty Smith's first album, Horses.

Speaker 4 won't let up. And I see them coming in.
Oh, I couldn't hear them before, but I hear now.

Speaker 4 It's a

Speaker 4 made oscillator, and all sorts of platinum lights moving in like black ships. They were moving in streams of them.
And he put up his hands and he said, It's me, it's me. I'll give you my eyes.

Speaker 4 Take me up. Oh, Lou, please take me up.

Speaker 4 Robert Maplethorpe did the very iconic photograph for the cover of Horses. What impact do you think that photo had on how people perceived you?

Speaker 4 Well,

Speaker 3 I, you know,

Speaker 3 I don't know.

Speaker 3 I know people really liked it. I know the record company didn't.

Speaker 4 They didn't? It's such a great photo. Why didn't the record company like it?

Speaker 3 Because my hair was messy, because,

Speaker 3 you know, it just, it was a little incomprehensible to

Speaker 3 them at the time. But I fought for it, and they did try to airbrush my hair, but I made sure that was

Speaker 3 fixed. People were very upset constantly about my appearance when I was young.
I don't know what it was. You know, they just,

Speaker 3 it was very hard for them to factor. But I've always had that problem, even as a child.

Speaker 3 You know, I used to go to the beach when I was a little kid and just want to wear my dungarees and my flannel shirt. And the whole time people would be, why are you wearing that?

Speaker 3 Why don't you get a bathing suit?

Speaker 3 It's like, leave me alone. It's just like, I'm not bothering you.
Why are you worried about what I look like?

Speaker 3 It's just, I'm not trying to bother anybody.

Speaker 3 But people love the photograph. The people on the streets love the photograph.
And it gave Robert

Speaker 3 some instant attention. I think it was his,

Speaker 3 you know,

Speaker 3 where he, it really helped, you know, launch his work into the public consciousness. And

Speaker 3 so we were both very happy about that. And the funniest thing, and sort of the sweetest thing, was

Speaker 3 when I started performing after the record came out, I would go to clubs anywhere. It could be Denmark, could be in Youngstown, Ohio.

Speaker 3 And I would come on stage and at least half of the kids had white shirts and black ties on.

Speaker 3 It was kind of cool.

Speaker 3 We all had suddenly turned Catholic.

Speaker 2 Patty Smith, speaking with Terry Gross in 2010. There's a new 50th anniversary edition of her debut album, Horses, now out on legacy recordings.
She also has a new memoir titled Bread of Angels.

Speaker 2 Coming up, we remember actress Diane Ladd, who died Monday at the age of 89. This is Fresh Air.

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Speaker 2 Actress Diane Ladd died Monday at the age of 89. Her most famous film roles include Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, in which she played the foul-mouthed southern waitress Flo.

Speaker 2 Here she is telling customers to leave the other waitress alone.

Speaker 4 Everybody can see she's got big on her.

Speaker 8 But hands off. Let the girl do her work.
If there's going to be any grab assing around here, grab mine, Steve.

Speaker 7 You look, but don't you touch.

Speaker 2 And David Lynch's Wild at Heart, in which she played a former beauty queen who hires a hitman to kill her daughter's boyfriend. The boyfriend is played by Nicholas Cage.

Speaker 2 Here he is, calling the house to talk to her daughter. Can I

Speaker 5 talk to Lula?

Speaker 9 There's no way in hell that you're going to talk to her.

Speaker 6 If you even think about seeing Lula, you're dead. What?

Speaker 3 You heard me. And don't you ever call here again.

Speaker 2 Ladd's real-life daughter, Laura Dern, played her daughter in the film. They worked together again in mother-daughter roles in the film Rambling Rose, and both were nominated for Academy Awards.

Speaker 2 They continued in that pairing in the HBO series Enlightened. In 2023, Terry Gross spoke with Laura Dern.
The actress had just written a book about conversations with her mother.

Speaker 2 It grew out of her mother's diagnosis of lung disease when the doctor had given her six months to live.

Speaker 2 He suggested that walks might help increase her lung capacity, so Dern began taking her mother on 15-minute walks every day.

Speaker 4 What is something that you asked her on these walks that you don't think you otherwise might have asked her? That was important for you to hear about.

Speaker 10 Well, my mom says, we both thought I was dying, so we spilled the beans.

Speaker 10 And most of us, within our own family, particularly, don't spill the beans, or we wait till it's too late and say, Oh, I wish I'd asked them this or that.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 10 what shocked me

Speaker 10 as I would start to

Speaker 10 engage her in topics is how little I had asked this only child, single mother who raised me an only child, and yet

Speaker 10 I hadn't asked her

Speaker 10 why did you from this tiny town in Mississippi think

Speaker 10 I'm going to be an actor, that's what I want to do.

Speaker 10 What was the first movie that inspired you? Who were the actors you fell in love with?

Speaker 10 Given that I became an actor as well, and we worked together, as you mentioned a number of times, wouldn't that be a natural conversation? It never came up.

Speaker 10 Things as seemingly mundane as favorite foods, favorite colors, favorite flowers that were just to pass the time.

Speaker 10 It moved me so much how little the people in our most intimate relationships, how little we ask.

Speaker 10 And I know her emotionally.

Speaker 10 But I never asked where those feelings stemmed from.

Speaker 4 I want to play a scene you did with your mother in the H. Bro series Enlightened.
I'm not going to set up the whole story. I will just say that

Speaker 4 you had basically

Speaker 4 a ragey, nervous breakdown at work. And you go off to rehab in Hawaii where you learn to meditate.
And you return home

Speaker 4 changed by it.

Speaker 4 You've learned to meditate to calm the rage and anger and to center yourself and focus.

Speaker 4 And you come home with an exercise that you're supposed to write a letter to somebody who you have difficulty communicating with.

Speaker 4 So you come home, and your mother, who's played by your mother, Diane Ladd, is there. And here's the scene where you start reading her the letter that you were told to write in rehab.

Speaker 4 Mother.

Speaker 10 They've asked me to write a letter to the person I have the most difficulty communicating with. It was not hard for me to decide who that person is.

Speaker 4 How long is this gonna take?

Speaker 10 You have somewhere to be?

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 4 I just wanted to know how long this is gonna take.

Speaker 4 Uh, not long.

Speaker 10 I've just gotta read you what's on these papers.

Speaker 4 Well, I can read, honey.

Speaker 10 But I'm supposed to read it to you, Mom.

Speaker 4 That's the point.

Speaker 4 Okay, Amy.

Speaker 10 You and I have been through a lot. Dad's death, all of Bethany's issues, issues, my divorce, money problems.

Speaker 4 You name it, we have dealt with it.

Speaker 10 I know I have disappointed you in many ways. And yes, there have been times that you've disappointed me.

Speaker 10 But I want to change that.

Speaker 10 And I truly believe that we can change.

Speaker 10 And if we can change,

Speaker 10 anything is possible. If we can change, the whole world can change for the better.

Speaker 4 I don't know what that means, honey. Mom, can you just let me finish and we'll talk after.
Is this what they asked you to do up there? One of the things, yeah. And what medications did they give you?

Speaker 4 Mom, nothing. I'm off my medications.
Well, wow, nurse.

Speaker 10 Mom, I don't want to talk about my medications. I'm here reading you.

Speaker 10 I just want to be sure that you are okay.

Speaker 4 Okay. I just.

Speaker 4 Look, don't get irritated with me because I just, I just want what's best for you. That is all I have ever wanted.

Speaker 4 Such a beautiful scene about miscommunication and not understanding each other and having like a different approach to expressing things.

Speaker 4 When you work with your mother, as you've done several times, does it make you self-conscious? Because you know each other so well.

Speaker 4 It's not like a professional relationship because you have, you know, the deepest personal relationship anybody has.

Speaker 10 Well, first of all, thank you for playing that scene. I'm just smiling and cracking up over here as I'm listening to it because it is the extraordinary writing of Mike White, who

Speaker 4 navigates

Speaker 10 the complexity of that dynamic, as you mentioned. And

Speaker 10 in the book, in our conversations, my mom talked about the joy she had remembering the first time we worked together on Wild at Heart, the first film we did together, and we had to do this very emotional scene.

Speaker 10 And she remembered me preparing for the scene at one end of the set and her at the other, both doing our work, both having trained separately as professionals, you know, not engaged in that together.

Speaker 10 And then coming together to do this very emotional scene. And the camera rolls and David Lynch called action and it's very emotional and I'm crying in her arms and

Speaker 10 he said, cut. And mom describes us pulling away and her looking in my eyes and realizing that she knew exactly what had brought up the emotion in me.

Speaker 10 And I looked at her and felt I knew the emotion and the pain she was expressing in the scene. Both very personal, both never discussed, but we just know each other so well.

Speaker 10 And so at that moment, we started laughing hysterically right after this big crying scene. And mom describes the whole crew looking at us as if we were nuts.

Speaker 10 But it was such a personal, intimate, beautiful thing to share, the kind of knowing and bringing it into this professional space, but also the boundaries of that professional space that it's sort of this unspoken language.

Speaker 4 So you wouldn't ask your mother, what were you thinking of when you made that scene?

Speaker 10 Exactly. And yet we knew.

Speaker 10 And yet we knew and never discussed it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Laura Dern, speaking with Terry Gross in 2023. Her mother, Diane Ladd, died Monday at the age of 89.

Speaker 2 Coming up, I review Pluribus, the new Apple TV Plus series from Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad. This is Fresh Air.

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Speaker 2 Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad and co-creator of Better Call Sol, has a new series called Pluribus.

Speaker 2 It stars Ray Sehorn from Better Call Sol, and the first two of its nine episodes premiere tonight on Apple TV Plus. Seven of the nine were made available for preview, and I've seen them all.

Speaker 2 But I want you to have as much fun watching Pluribus as I did, so I'm going to say as little as possible about what happens in them.

Speaker 2 Apple TV Plus already has renewed Pluribus for a season two, and it's a smart move. Vince Gilligan, once again, has come up with a boldly brilliant TV series.

Speaker 2 The best way to describe Pluribus without revealing anything is to think of it as an episode of the Twilight Zone spun off into its own series.

Speaker 2 It begins with scientists monitoring a radio telescope and discovering something new and exciting.

Speaker 5 It's got to be something bouncing off the.

Speaker 4 off the moon. It's not bouncing off the moon, Dave.

Speaker 2 Maybe it's those chatty Kathys at the Forest Service.

Speaker 5 I hate those guys, always on their radios talking about trees.

Speaker 2 Dave, it's not Smokey Bear we're picking up. Look at that signal.

Speaker 6 It's drifting.

Speaker 4 What is it then?

Speaker 11 Looks like simple pulse with modulation. Old school like Morse code.

Speaker 5 Maybe somehow it's the time signal out of Fort Collins.

Speaker 5 They use pulse-width modulation.

Speaker 11 It's not the atomic clock. The atomic clock changes every minute because it's a clock.
This is the same exact data repeated every 78 seconds.

Speaker 4 Plus,

Speaker 5 this is coming from 600 light years away.

Speaker 2 That's similar to the way another fantasy drama series, Three Body Problem, began recently. But this new series has other plots and plot twists on its mind.

Speaker 2 Before too long, we meet the protagonist of Pluribus. She's Carol Sterka, best-selling author of sexy, sappy sci-fi fantasy novels.

Speaker 2 And she's played by Ray Sehorn, who was so unforgettably real and relatable as as Kim Wexler in Better Call Saw.

Speaker 2 We meet Carol at a Barnes ⁇ Noble in Dallas, reading from her book to her adoring fans, then signing copies and interacting with them before retreating with her agent and best friend Helen to a local bar.

Speaker 2 At the bar, Helen, played by Miriam Shore, offers a toast to the new booktour. A toast Carol rejects.

Speaker 11 Best Book Tour. What is that? Is that like best stomach cancer? You endure it.
You do not toast it. Oh, how I hate all those paying customers showering me with love and respect.

Speaker 11 Why do I have to make so much money?

Speaker 2 Carol has fame and money and a beautiful house back home in Albuquerque. Yes, once again, Gilligan and company have returned there to film parts of this new series.

Speaker 2 But all that doesn't seem to make her happy. And when people around her suddenly start acting very strangely, she feels even more isolated.

Speaker 2 Apple TV Plus, in its own press materials, describes the premise of Pluribus this way. The most miserable person on Earth, it says, must save the world from happiness.

Speaker 2 And even if I wanted to elaborate, the streaming service's press restrictions on spoilers make it next to impossible. I've never seen such a long, detailed list of plot points not to reveal.

Speaker 2 But I don't mind. If you stick with the Twilight Zone analogy, you'll notice echoes in Pluribus from various classic zone episodes.

Speaker 2 A woman all alone in her home fighting against a mysterious enemy surrounding her. A woman fighting against a society that wants her to conform and act just like them.

Speaker 2 A man all alone with buildings and streets deserted trying to survive. And so on.

Speaker 2 Vince Gilligan was a writer and producer on the X-Files, and his love of the genre comes through loud and clear here, like a radio signal from across the universe.

Speaker 2 And what he's doing in Pluribus, while having fun with themes from the Twilight Zone and classic sci-fi films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, somehow is paradoxically bordering on unique.

Speaker 2 Yes, he and his creative team of writers and directors dip into Gilligan's familiar bag of tricks.

Speaker 2 Beautiful photography, long extended set pieces and montages, intense and lengthy conversations among characters.

Speaker 2 But the way those characters are introduced and dealt with here, here, and the way the plot widens and deepens to say so much about so many big idea topics, it's as singularly and hypnotically odd in its way as Twin Peaks was.

Speaker 2 It's disturbing, unpredictable, and alternately funny and creepy.

Speaker 2 And while Ray Sehorn doesn't carry all of the weight of Pleuribus, Other co-stars, including Carolina Wydra and Carlos Manuel Vesca, are wonderful too.

Speaker 2 Her Carol is a character you'll relate to, laugh at, and buy into completely. The opening episode, written and directed by Gilligan, takes her on a wild and crazy ride, and we go right along with her.

Speaker 2 And Gilligan and Pluribus ask a larger question as well.

Speaker 2 Fighting for life and liberty, that's a given. But what if the pursuit of happiness is vastly overrated? Maybe even dangerous?

Speaker 2 On Monday's show, Academy Award winner Tim Robbins talks about Topsy-Turvy, the new play he wrote in response to pandemic isolation.

Speaker 2 From the Shawshank Redemption to founding the Actors Gang, Robbins discusses how his commitment to creating politically relevant art has shaped his four-decade career. I hope you can join us.

Speaker 2 To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air.

Speaker 2 Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Sam Brigger is our managing producer.

Speaker 4 Our senior producer today is Roberta Sharock.

Speaker 2 Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld, and Deanna Martinez.

Speaker 2 Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Challener, Susan Yacundi, and Anna Bauman.

Speaker 2 Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy Nesper.

Speaker 2 Hope Wilson is our consulting visual producer. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Biancoule.

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