-What does freedom mean to you? -Freedom is inside of me, it means that I am not hung up with like anybody’s idea of how I should be, you know. I’m outside of society, I’m an artist, rock n’roll is my art, […], and I am free because I can leap up and scream, I can put my fist up in the air, I don’t give a shit, you know. I am not afraid of death, you know, it’s like you know I’m… I’m not afraid of uuh… anything except for uh… fear itself. I mean that to me is the greatest thing to fear, it’s fear itself, collapse of the imagination. Otherwise… I feel pretty good! My father was sort of a beatnik, and he believed in, the one thing my father believed more than anything else, was the development of the country of the mind. He believed that the mind was a country, and you had to develop it. You have you had to build and build and build and build the mind. That was his… his whole philosophy is the development of the mind. My mother believed in the development of the heart. And I believed in the development of the hands. So we… between the three of us, hand, heart and he..head, hand, head.. they’re all Hs! H,H,H. HHH, that’s good, hand heart and head. Hi Ivan -Hi Patti -Radio Ethiopia. -What does that mean? -Radio Ethiopia is the name of our new record, and it represents to us a naked field, wherein, anyone can express themselves, it’s a free radio, you know. We’re the DJs, the people are the DJs, when we perform Radio Ethiopia, I play guitar, I don’t know how to play guitar but I just get in a perfect rhythm and I play I don’t care, and the people are allowed to do as they wish, if it’s a really good show there’s like a thousand, ten thousand, fifty thousand people, fifty thousand minds, fifty thousand subconsciousnesses that I can dip into, I mean the more people submit, and the more I submit, the greater show it’s gonna be, the greater we’re gonna be, I mean I don’t like audiences that sit there and act cool like this ‘pff’ because nothings gonna happen!    -I think about liberation and stuff, liberation of yourself, there’s uh, there’s like a huge liberation game, a lot of people are walking around saying how free they are, you know, saying all these dangerous sex words to demonstrate… -Yeah but I feel if you talk about anything too much, you know if you spend too much time defining what you do or telling people that you’re free or, or being defensive about your freedom obviously you’re not free -right -you know it’s like anytime you have to push things down people’s throat… I mean I don’t, I don’t have to, I don’t try to seduce, I do what I do. Ten people come, ten million come, great. What I do I believe in, you know, it’s like… liberation and all, there’s a lot of movements whether it was like beatniks, hippies, women’s lib, they’re all just new political structures they’re all new dogma they’re just… to me as soon as… we wanna initiate change but as soon as you get it you structure your change as soon as you start writing patter as soon as you write uh some political order you write dogma you’re right there with catholicism. You’re right there with communism. Anything, anytime you start stating, this this and this, rules and regulations, you’re no longer liberated. You’re just like a new, a new political game, wether it’s religious… you know, spiritual, whatever, social… - it’s all like uh… the Doors song, break on through to the other side -yeah and then after you have to break on through to the other side then you break on through to the other side, and the other side and the other side and our point is that you can, you spend your whole life keep breaking on through. You can’t just break on through once and think well I’ve made it I broke through, there’s a million membranes to break through. There’s a million places to go you know. You move to another direction another dimension, big deal. We went to the moon, big deal! We went to Mars, big deal, we keep moving and moving and moving you know. Muhammad went through seven heavens, big deal! I want to see the eighth heaven, tenth heaven, thousandth heaven, you know it’s like, break on through the other side it’s just like going through one door. One door isn’t enough. A million doors aren’t enough. You have to go beyond, beyond one reflection, beyond the mirror, beyond beyond. - Patti Smith - Interview, Stockholm October 1976