Smith Perfected Spitting To Silence Hecklers

Punk poet Patti Smith became so disgruntled with sexist hecklers mocking her carefully crafted verses during performances, she began spitting on the stage to silence them. The EASTER rocker was a regular at defunct New York City club CBGB in the 1970s, but many male audience members believed a woman's place was still in the home. So Smith decided to use her saliva skills to prove she was not a woman to be messed with. She tells PageSix.com, "When I started in the mid-1970s trying to read my poems like P**S FACTORY, I'd get hecklers. "Drunks yelled, 'Go back to the kitchen, bitch.' So I'd just spit on the stage. I was a good spitter. That stopped them. I was nicknamed 'the keeper of the phlegm'."