NEW YORK (AP) -- Seventies proto-grunge rocker Patti Smith was a major fan of '90s grunge icon Kurt Cobain. She just can't feel his pain.
The lead singer of Nirvana's suicide left her more infuriated than sad.
Watching a friend, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, die of AIDS put Cobain's death in perspective.
"When you watch someone you care for fight so hard to hold onto their life, then see another person just throw their life away, I guess I had less patience for that," Smith says in the July 11 issue of Rolling Stone.
"You want to take a person by the scruff of the neck and say, `OK. You're suffering? THIS is suffering. Check it out.'"
Smith just released her first album in eight years, "Gone Again." She spends most of her time raising her two sons, but looks back on her days as a full-time performer fondly.
"I'm proud that I can actually say, 'Yes, for a brief period of my life, I was a rock 'n' roll star,'" she says. "I cherish that."