Swagger of Jersey is heard through Patti Smith

Patti Smith wasn’t born in New Jersey. She didn’t launch her career here. And at 69, she hasn’t lived in the state for nearly 50 years.

Smith had to leave to make her art — 11 albums that more than justify her inclusion in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, plus more than a dozen books of poetry, prose, drawings and photography, to say nothing of cameos in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Film Socialisme” and “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.”

But the decade she spent in South Jersey, from ages 9 to 20, made her who she is.

She and her longtime guitarist Lenny Kaye were both transplants to New Jersey. Smith was born in Chicago and moved to Philadelphia’s Germantown section when she was 5 before her parents settled in Deptford’s Woodbury Gardens development four years later. Kaye, who is three days older than Smith, grew up in Brooklyn until his family came to New Brunswick when he was 13.

“It was a good environment to grow up in because it was neither totally urban nor totally rural,” Kaye says on the phone from his home on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware Water Gap.

Perhaps that sense of dislocation in their formative years branded them as “outside of society,” as Smith boasted in a song with an unprintable title, and eventually bonded them with bandmates who were similarly out of step with the mainstream: bassist-guitarist Ivan Kral, a Czech refugee; pianist Richard Sohl, a gay man who’d rebelled against his religious upbringing; and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, a Southern California native who moved to New York in his early 20s.

MORE: Rock stars give Jersey a good name 

1974’s “Piss Factory,” the B-side of Smith’s first single, exults in escaping. Backed by Sohl, Smith details the monotony of the plant where she labored, her co-workers’ lack of ambition and her desire to rise above her circumstances.But for all Smith’s affection for South Jersey, she had to leave to find her way.

“I’m gonna be somebody, I’m gonna get on that train, go to New York City,” she vows. “I’m gonna be so bad, I’m gonna be a big star and I will never return, never return, no, never return to burn out in this piss factory.”

And she was right.

Smith quit the factory, dropped out of Glassboro State Teachers College, left her apartment in Pitman and her family at their new home in Mantua — father Grant, a Honeywell machinist; mom Beverly, a drugstore-counter waitress; and younger siblings Linda, Kimberly and Todd — and moved to New York City in 1967.

She never did move back to the Gloucester County of her youth. But the time she spent here is evident in her songs.

Meanwhile, Kaye had learned his craft as a young fan watching bands like the Driftwoods at the Linwood Ballroom in Edison and as a Rutgers student, playing the regional fraternity circuit with his band the Zoo.

Once he moved back to New York after graduation, he and Smith bonded over the music of their youth, making their own dance party for two at Village Oldies, the record shop where Kaye worked, with tunes that would have been familiar to any teenager who’d grown up in range of Philly or New York radio in the 1950s and early ’60s.

“I would put on the Dovells’ ‘Bristol Stomp’ or ‘My Hero’ by the Blue Notes or ‘Today’s the Day’ by Maureen Gray,” he recalls. “Just these records that we shared in common, and the music and the spirit behind them, and we’d dance around.”

You can hear the region’s rhythms in “Piss Factory,” which name-checks Philly R&B DJ Georgie Woods, “the guy with the goods,” and in the eight songs that comprise Smith’s 1975 debut album “Horses,” which fused the elements of rock, reggae, jazz, pop, doo-wop, poetry and opera that she and her bandmates grew up on — and, in the process, damn near invented punk rock.

You can recognize the South Jersey accent on songs like “25th Floor,” “Wave” and “People Have the Power,” an anthem on 1988’s “Dream of Life” that might have an extra resonance to people who grew up on either side of the Delaware River when Smith declares, “Like cream, the waters rise” with her telltale pronunciation of “wooders.”

And you can practically taste Jersey in the sweat of “Because the Night,” an unfinished Bruce Springsteen tune that the Patti Smith Group turned into its biggest hit in 1978.

That’s how Amy Longsdorf, then a teenage Springsteen fan, discovered Smith. Listening to “Because the Night” and “Easter,” the album it appeared on, were a revelation.

“It was the album I’d been waiting my whole life to hear,” she says.

The music gave her strength, while Smith’s name-dropping prompted Longsdorf to check out the artists and writers who’d inspired her idol. And the do-it-yourself spirit of the times put her on a new career path.

“I was in high school and punk rock was just coming into its own,” recalls Longsdorf, 55. “And the big message that was coming from artists like Patti and The Clash, who revered her, was D.I.Y.

“At the record store near my house, there were lots of fanzines for sale but none about Patti. So I decided to write one.”

With a little help from her parents, Longsdorf published five issues of “Another Dimension,” which included reviews of bootlegs and articles about Smith’s work with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and playwright Sam Shepard.

The young fanzine publisher also received assistance from Smith’s inner circle: Kaye answered questions about Smith’s lyrics as Longsdorf charted the evolution of their songs, while Beverly Smith — who maintained a post office box in Mantua until her death in 2002 to communicate with her daughter’s fans — sent encouragement in the form of handwritten letters.

“I didn’t really think about becoming a journalist until I started putting ‘Another Dimension’ together,” says Longsdorf, a freelance writer who, among other things, writes about movies and movie stars for the Courier-Post. “It made me realize how much I loved writing about music and movies and books.”

You can feel Jersey’s seedy/sensual/spooky side in “Ain’t It Strange,” a mystical song from 1976’s “Radio Ethiopia” — and one of two early Smith lyrics that include the phrase “another dimension.” It drops in on a place “down in Vineland” where some unholy mixture of sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll and spiritual transcendence is on offer to anyone who can find it.

You can see the Jersey swagger in Mapplethorpe’s iconic portrait of Smith on the cover of “Horses,” in which she borrows from Frank Sinatra — a man’s man from Hoboken — to strike a tough, vulnerable, sexy androgynous pose.

Mapplethorpe’s images are what first drew Marissa Paternoster, the virtuosic guitarist and iron-lunged singer in New Brunswick’s Screaming Females.

“I initially found out about Patti Smith through Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography,” she says. “My mom taught photography, so we had one of his coffee table books lying around and there were some photos of Patti Smith in it.”

Before Smith started making her own music — in the period detailed in her 2010 memoir “Just Kids,” after she moved to New York and developed a deep friendship with Mapplethorpe that would last until his 1989 death — she dabbled in music criticism and theater.

In “Cowboy Mouth,” the 1971 play she co-wrote with Shepard, Smith’s character, Cavale — described as “a chick who looks like a crow, dressed in raggedy black” — kidnaps Shepard’s Slim in an attempt to transform him into a new kind of hero, “a rock ’n’ roll Jesus with a cowboy mouth.”

Smith was still figuring out her own rock-star ambitions at the time but could have easily been talking about Paternoster — except that she wouldn’t be born for another 15 years.

Listening to Paternoster’s one-of-a-kind vocalizing on originals like “Crow’s Nest,” watching her hands wring unearthly sounds out of her guitar on “Criminal Image” — or, for that matter, hearing her shred on “Because the Night,” which Screaming Females and Garbage teamed up to cover in 2013 — it’s tempting to see Paternoster as the answer to Cavale’s prayers.

Smith’s music clicked for Paternoster, now 29, when she finally started listening to “Horses” in college, but while the decades-old songs remain vital, even incendiary, the appeal goes deeper than that, deeper than the grooves worn in a well-loved LP.

Smith’s dedication to making art in all its forms is also an inspiration for Paternoster, who is also a prolific writer and visual artist, as is simply living life on her terms.

“When she tells stories, I can't help but visualize them through rose-tinted glasses — hanging out with Television in Max's Kansas City, sharing an apartment with Jim Carroll, those scenarios are unimaginable to me, like the sort of stuff that only happens in movies,” Paternoster says.

Kaye gets it.

“It’s very much present tense,” he says of the music he made with Smith before her retirement in 1979 and since she returned to the stage for good — literally and figuratively — in 1995.

“You can feel the emotional commitment in a song,” he adds. “And especially with Patti, who represents so many different things, even extra-musically, in terms of her vision and her sense of all-inclusive art and her positive energy and spirit. All of these things make her relevant whenever you come into the universe of her music.”

Relevance turned to reverence at Philadelphia’s World Café Live in December, when a number of the city’s musicians gathered to perform “Horses” in its entirety to mark the 40th anniversary of its release.

A couple months after the show, Cynthia G. Mason, who sang “Elegie” — the album’s haunting final track — shared how her admiration and respect for Smith had deepened over time.

Mason recalls her giddy introduction to the music when, as a teenager, her older friend Gloria helped her sneak into a bar in Philly. “Horses” happened to come on the jukebox, sparking an impromptu sing-along to “Gloria,” the rollicking opening song.

“We were all belting out ‘G-L-O-R-I-A,’ serenading her,” Mason remembers. “I felt like such a grown-up, hanging out and drinking pitchers in that bar, joking around.”

In the following years, the young singer-songwriter gleaned more inspiration from Smith’s music, as well as her keynote speech at the Philadelphia Music Conference in 1997.

But life has also given her perspective on the rock icon’s career choices.

Smith left the spotlight for most of the 1980s and half of the ’90s to raise a family near Detroit —making one album with husband Fred “Sonic” Smith — and then returned to New York as a widow with two children.

Mason, 41, also stepped away from music while starting a family. And like Smith, Mason has felt pulled back to it.

“When she re-emerged in the ’90s after her husband and brother passed away, I couldn’t imagine how someone would be able to leave a music career like that in the first place,” Mason says. “I also couldn’t imagine how she could return. I couldn’t relate to it on any level.

“It was long before I was married and had a child of my own, long before I also decided to leave music completely and return to it. Now I appreciate what she was able to do in a whole other way. It’s an emotional and physical process, to be able to write and perform after not doing it for so long.”

When Smith was in her self-imposed exile, Kaye continued working in the music business. It was then that Kral, Kaye’s comrade in the Patti Smith Group, introduced him to Tony Shanahan.

“Tony was hosting a weekly residency at a club called the Melody Bar on French Street in New Brunswick. It was kind of an open jam session,” Kaye recalls.

“I remember going from CBGB one night, where I’d gone to see a band just trying so hard to get signed or find the hit single, and going to this small bar in my old town, my hometown, and seeing people just have fun with the music.”

Back in New Jersey, miles and worlds away from the high-stakes music industry, Kaye was reminded of his roots.

“They’d be picking each other up, getting drunk, paying attention to the bands sometimes — or not — actually, it reminded me of playing the fraternity parties at Rutgers, getting up there, doing a bunch of classic songs, and it reminded me of why I started playing music in the first place,” he said.

When Smith decided to get the band back together in 1995 — after the deaths of her husband, her brother, Mapplethorpe and Sohl — Kral was out and Shanahan was in.

They recorded 1996’s “Gone Again” at Electric Lady, the New York studio where they made “Horses,” but for 1997’s “Peace and Noise,” they holed up at IIWII, the studio John Hanti and Roy Cicala opened in Weehawken after the demise of New York’s beloved Record Plant.

“It was great to record there because sometimes getting out of New York allows you a sense of perspective on who you are,” Kaye says. “And even though we were literally just across the river, that sense of looking out over the city instead of being within it allowed us to look at the music we were making with a kind of subjective distance.”

Since then, they’ve made four records, all in New York, and have only grown in stature and influence. But next time they need to be outside of society, they know the way. Jersey’s not just a destination — it’s a state of mind.

M.J. Fine: mjfine@gannettnj.com

Patti Smith timeline

1946: Patricia Lee Smith is born — Grant and Beverly Smith welcome their first child on Dec. 30, in Chicago.

1971: Patti Smith begin collaborating with Lenny Kaye and Sam Shepard — On Feb. 10, Patti Smith reads her poetry at St. Mark’s Church in New York with guitar accompaniment by fellow Jersey expatriate and rock critic Lenny Kaye.

1975: Patti Smith releases first album — “Horses,” Smith’s debut studio album, is released on Dec. 13, produced by Velvet Underground co-founder John Cale, with an iconic cover photograph of Smith by her best friend Robert Mapplethorpe. The album includes a complete reworking of Them’s 1965 tune “Gloria,” memorably prefaced by the line “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.”

1978: Patti Smith’s biggest single charts — While making her third album, “Easter,” producer Jimmy Iovine — who is simultaneously working on Bruce Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town” — shares a tape of Springsteen’s unfinished song “Because the Night.” Smith rewrites it and includes it on “Easter,” and it hits No. 13 in the Billboard Hot 100 on July 1.

1988: Patti Smith briefly resurfaces — Nine years after retiring to raise a family, Smith releases her fifth album, “Dream of Life,” in June. It is co-produced by Iovine and Smith’s husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith. “People Have the Power” peaks at 19 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Tracks chart.

2007: Patti Smith joins Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — Eleven years after reuniting with Kaye and Daugherty and bringing bassist/keyboardist Tony Shanahan into the fold for five albums, Smith is inducted the Rock Hall on March 12, alongside R.E.M., whose members have cited Smith as a major influence and have collaborated with her on a number of occasions.

2012: Patti Smith releases “Banga” — Smith’s most recent studio album is her 11th overall, released on June 1. It includes an elegy for jazz and soul singer Amy Winehouse (“This Is the Girl”) and an epic meditation on St. Francis (“Constantine’s Dream”).