Even from the back, Patti Smith was unmistakably Patti Smith. Standing on a downtown-Manhattan sidewalk on a late-summer afternoon, she wore loose jeans rolled at the cuff, white high-tops, a black blazer, and—on a cool day for August, but still an August day—a wool cap over her long gray hair. We had arranged to meet at a gallery owned by friends of hers and, for the time being, we were locked out. A life-size horse statue was the only thing visible through the glass windows, like one of Smith’s lyrics come to life. Someone came a few minutes later to open the door, and we stepped into the cool interior to discuss Smith’s new memoir, Bread of Angels.

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Smith, who turns 79 in December, was preparing for a busy fall ahead: the release of her memoir, an international concert tour to mark the 50th anniversary of her seminal album, Horses. In addition to reading the book, I’d spent the preceding weeks listening to her songs on repeat, and one lyric in particular seemed like it might be a kind of key to her career, which over the course of six decades has comprised poetry and performance, memoir and drawing, photography and painting, an induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and a National Book Award. “People say, ‘Beware,’ but I don’t care,” she sings defiantly in the first track on Horses. “The words are just rules and regulations to me.” After a pause she repeats the last word, elongating the vowel for emphasis: “Meeeeee.”

I already knew that she started chafing early on against authorities and edicts. Smith writes in the memoir about a question that came to her as she sat in Bible study in South Jersey at the dawn of the 1960s: What will happen to art? Her father, Grant—the man who taught her to question everything—had recently taken their family of six to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He was a fan of Dalí; Patti, 12, was captivated by Picasso and cubism. Now, listening to a Jehovah’s Witness elder describe the coming apocalypse, she couldn’t shake the image of museums in flames: “sculpture, great architecture, to say nothing of Picasso’s paintings.” Who would rescue the art?

Her mother, Beverly, had joined the Witnesses after her own father’s sudden death, drawn to the promise of a reunion in the New World. Smith was attracted to the Witnesses’ status as outsiders; on Saturdays, she forswore cartoons to go door-to-door and preach the good news, relishing the hostile reception the proselytizers often got.