In January 1977, Smith tumbled off a Florida stage while doing her dervish whirl to "Ain't It Strange": "Don't get dizzy do not fall now," go the lyrics. She broke two vertebrae in her neck and wound up convalescing for several months, during which she wrote a book of poetry, "Babel," and prepared her third album, "Easter." Released in 1978, "Easter" moved Smith even further toward mainstream rock, though without pandering. The arena anthems "Till Victory" and "Because the Night" (co-written with Bruce Springsteen) sonically skirt Jefferson Starship territory, and she was rewarded with her highest-charting record yet.

Having infiltrated the ears of mainstream America, Smith pried them open with the hypnotic faux-Plains Indian chant "Ghost Dance," and "Babelogue," a duet for swaggering poet and audience that begins at a boastful pitch with "I don't fuck much with the past, but I fuck plenty with the future," and crescendoes through glorious nonsense to the finish line: "I have not sold myself to God." In the searing "Rock 'n' Roll Nigger" and in interviews, she mounted a misguided campaign to reclaim the word "nigger" for all people "outside of society," starting with herself; there were few takers. Politics was never her strong suit.

Much of the material on "Easter" had been in Smith's repertoire for years, and the songs that were new seemed more specifically about love and God, as if she were narrowing the parameters of a personal quest. Around 1978, she found what she was looking for in the person of Fred "Sonic" Smith, former guitarist for the MC5. Though she'd had relationships with other intense artists -- among them Mapplethorpe, Sam Shepard, Tom Verlaine and Allen Lanier of Blue Oyster Cult, with whom she'd lived for years -- she now recognized her future, and it was to raise a family with Fred, not expend her energy on the road and in the studio. The 1979 album "Wave" was a weak wave goodbye, though with plenty of good moments. "Dancing Barefoot" may be her best song, and in the stomping "Revenge," she tosses off a couplet that would have done Muddy Waters proud: "I gave you a wristwatch, baby/You wouldn't even give me the time of day."

And that was it. She married Fred Smith, moved to the suburbs of Detroit and had two kids. In 1988, she and Fred released "Dream of Life," which disappointed fans and was ignored by everybody else, in spite of a great single, "People Have the Power." Nestled in an over-lush production, the rest of the songs seemed complacent rather than ecstatic; domestic tranquility resulted in ho-hum music. She didn't tour, and within a few months it was as if the album had never happened.

Death brought Patti Smith back. Robert Mapplethorpe died in 1989, pianist Richard Sohl in 1990. In 1994 came the suicide of Kurt Cobain, one of many younger rockers to cite Smith as an influence, whose writhings on the hook of fame she had watched sympathetically. And near the end of that year, the hearts of Fred "Sonic" Smith and her brother, Todd, gave out within two months of each other. Strafed by grief, Smith plunged back into music. She had given a small handful of mostly non-singing performances in the '90s, but in 1995 she assembled a band again, including old stalwarts Lenny Kaye and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, and featuring a young guitarist named Oliver Ray.

"Gone Again," the terrific album she released in 1996, finds her fully in the fray again, grappling with mysteries. "About a Boy," her elegy for Cobain, is the kind of electric-guitar freakout she hadn't sponsored since "Radio Ethiopia," but much of the album is folksier, in a Carter Family rather than a Joan Baez way: A slightly sinister fervor mingles with Smith's determination to survive. In "Beneath the Southern Cross," though, she allows naked optimism to radiate through sorrow, and the result is the album's masterpiece and her most affecting song ever.

A year later, in 1997, she released "Peace and Noise," informed by the deaths of two more friends and mentors, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. It's a dense record, devoid of glee, tough to listen to all the way through, but every time I do it draws me further in. Smith's voice keeps getting darker and fuller, and she sounds like a stern angel of judgment on droning, baleful, minor-key songs with titles like "Death Singing," "Dead City" and "Last Call" (about the Heaven's Gate suicides). "1959" reflects her long-standing support for Tibetan Buddhists, and the CD booklet pictures her and the band in the company of the Dalai Lama. By and large, "Peace and Noise" sounds more like Christian-period Dylan than like "Horses," which is to Smith's credit -- she's still capable of changing tack and getting somewhere new that's worth the trip, which is more than can be said for most rock performers over 50.

And she's all over the place now. "Patti Smith Complete," a gorgeous coffee-table book of lyrics, notes and photos, just came out in paperback. A clumsy, salacious biography by Victor Bockris and Roberta Bayley was published in September. A new album is due in early 2000. Patti Smith may have a hard time singing, "I'm so goddamn young" with a straight face anymore, but she can probably still do a more persuasive "My Generation" than Roger Daltrey's been able to for the last 20 years. In 1988, she told an interviewer, "The greatest thing about having done ["Dream of Life"], besides having had the opportunity to work with Fred, is having created something that can be inspiring or useful to people in some way. Even if it just helps them have good dreams." She's accomplished this goal in spades throughout her career, and before she burns out, sucks up or runs down, she'll do it again.

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