Patti Smith Sings “You Light Up My Life” with Composer Joe Brooks on 1979 Show Kids Are People Too

Maybe the Yo Gab­ba Gab­ba of its day, the Sun­day morn­ing kids’ show Kids are Peo­ple Too ran from 1978 to 1982, dur­ing which time it attract­ed such guests as Cheap Trick and KISS to its stu­dio. KISS was vir­tu­al­ly a car­toon already, and Cheap Trick def­i­nite­ly had its kid-friend­ly ele­ments, but one of the show’s musi­cal guests prob­a­bly did­n’t reach into a lot kids’ bed­rooms with her blas­phe­mous take on Van Morrison’s “Glo­ria,” her “Hey Joe / Piss Fac­to­ry,” or her spo­ken word open let­ter to Pat­ty Hearst. But the lengthy Q&A with Pat­ti Smith before she sings, with host Michael Young prompt­ing ques­tions from excit­ed audi­ence mem­bers, leaves me with the impres­sion that she was more pop­u­lar with Amer­i­ca’s youth than I thought.

Maybe it was her 1978 hit “Because the Night,” writ­ten by Bruce Spring­steen, that tempt­ed Kids are Peo­ple Too’s pro­duc­ers to invite Smith on the show to sing anoth­er cov­er, “You Light Up My Life,” with com­pos­er Joe Brooks. It’s a pret­ty weird moment in pop cul­ture his­to­ry, espe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing the strange turns both musi­cians’ lives took. Smith went on to win a Nation­al Book Award and remains vital and cre­ative. Brooks went on to a very sor­did, igno­min­ious end. But here, they cross paths after Brooks won an Oscar for his song and Smith had recov­ered from a dis­as­trous fall from the stage and reboot­ed her career in a more pop direc­tion. Despite her greater mass appeal, Young still assumes that Pat­ti Smith means one thing. He even asks the kids in the stu­dio audi­ence, “didn’t you say Pat­ti Smith, punk rock, right?” The kids all yell back, “Yeah!” Hip kids or very effec­tive teleprompter? You be the judge.

*Note, an ear­li­er ver­sion of this post iden­ti­fied the host as Bob McAl­lis­ter and stat­ed that “Hearst went on to win a Nation­al Book Award.” As some read­ers have point­ed out, the host was Michael Young, and it was Smith, of course, not Pat­ty Hearst, who won the Nation­al Book Award in 2010.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See Pat­ti Smith Give Two Dra­mat­ic Read­ings of Allen Ginsberg’s “Foot­note to Howl”

Watch Pat­ti Smith Read from Vir­ginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Sur­viv­ing Record­ing of Woolf’s Voice

Pat­ti Smith Shares William S. Bur­roughs’ Advice for Writ­ers and Artists

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness