Patti Smith and her band give an age-defying performance
At a time when we endlessly debate the proper age of our leaders, rock's reigning poet laureate makes 77 feel like just another number
On Friday afternoon, Patti Smith stood on stage at the Englert Theatre and shuffled through papers and books like an absent-minded creative writing teacher in a lecture hall, looking for the right poem to read as she took her glasses off and put them back on, apologizing for being a bit disorganized. She was an endearing presence, like a favorite aunt who always manages to bring the right gift even if it is wrapped haphazardly in yesterday's comics section.
On Saturday night, Smith was a commanding stage presence — fierce in one moment, disarmingly charming the next — as she led her powerful band through a career's worth of musical highlights.
Smith embodies both of these personas effortlessly, the self-effacing poet and the forceful rock singer, and it is this blend that has made her such a dynamic cultural presence for five decades.
During Smith's stay in Iowa City this weekend as part of Hancher's Infinite Dream festival, she participated in a handful of events, including a free public reading and a ticketed concert. I was startled I arrived at the Friday reading 15 minutes before it started and was urged to go to the balcony in pursuit of one of the few remaining good seats. I had assumed there would be a more modest crowd. This was billed as a poetry reading, right? But I foolishly underestimated Smith's appeal (and/or the appeal of poetry in Iowa City). She drew more than 600 people on a busy Friday afternoon, and the crowd was treated to a delightful hybrid reading and acoustic concert.
Smith was joined onstage by longtime band members Tony Shanahan and Lenny Kaye. Each sat to one side with an acoustic guitar in his lap while Smith read a couple of poems. She had a set list, but as she introduced one song while Shanahan and Kaye were prepared to play another, she grew sheepishly apologetic. She needn't have worried; this crowd was hers and its members were willing to forgive any slips from their 77-year-old hero.
In addition to the poems, she offered a poignant mix of readings from Just Kids, the award-winning memoir of her time in New York in the early 1970s with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, interspersing these among acoustic versions of a handful of songs that ranged from "Ghost Dance" from 1978's Easter, to "My Blakean Year" from 2004's Trampin'.
Smith sat down halfway through the hour-long set, telling the crowd she had stomach cramps. Seeming to sense the worry creeping in, she offered immediate assurance that she was all right, and that the next night's show would be fine.
"That’s not why we screwed up before," she said of the earlier setlist confusion. "That’s just normal stuff."
The funniest moment was her reading of a poem called "Dog Dream." She told of a time when she and then-boyfriend Sam Shepherd ("I had good boyfriends," she said, after earlier talking about a time when her boyfriend was guitarist Tom Verlaine.) each woke from a dream involving Bob Dylan. She captured her dream in this poem.
have you seen
dylan's dog
it got wings
it can fly
if you speak
of it to him
its the only
time dylan
can't look you in the eye
She told of a time she read it when Dylan, unbeknownst to her, was in the audience. Her brief story of the interaction that followed, complete with her Dylan impression, brought the laughs.
The trio was then joined by band drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, who played guitar as Shanahan shifted to keyboard for Smith's anthem, "People Have the Power," as the audience stood and sang along.
The next night an even bigger crowd assembled for her festival-closing full band performance at Hancher. The discombobulated presence from the previous afternoon was gone, replaced by an artist who was dialed in. The only other time I saw Smith perform was in 2000 at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas1. It was a large outdoor show, and while I don't remember particulars of the set, I do recall being captivated by this older artist (at 53, she would have been a year younger than I am now) who had complete control of the crowd. This show 24 years later wasn't much different. The moves might be a bit more mannered, but her voice and the roar of the band was intact.
The band on Saturday — the aforementioned trio of long-time mates augmented here by Smith's son, Jackson Smith, on guitar — opened with "Dancing Barefoot," one of a handful of Smith's best-known songs. She connected immediately with the audience, coming to the lip of the stage to wave to adoring fans, seeming decades younger as she alternated between sliding sylphlike around the stage and bouncing in unison with the excited audience members in the front row.
The opening section of the show leaned heavily on older material, from "Redondo Beach" and "Free Money" from Horses to another run through "Ghost Dance" from Easter.
As the set progressed, she drew from albums later in her catalog, again offering "My Blakean Year" followed by "Nine" from 2012's Banga.
The first half of the show peaked with the band's version of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." I will admit that when Smith released the song as part of her 2007 covers album, Twelve, I was skeptical. I remained so after hearing what seemed like a fairly plodding take that didn't harness the power of the original. I was wrong, or at least I was wrong when that skepticism seeped in Saturday night. As I watched teenagers who weren't born when Nirvana was a going concern — maybe not even when Smith's cover was released 17 years ago — and felt the power of her band driving it forward, I realized this was something new, something different. Smith had claimed the song as her own while leaving the original intact.
Smith left the stage for a break while her band played a couple of Velvet Underground covers. They were fine if unremarkable runs through "Sweet Jane" and "Rock and Roll." It was testament to Smith's power as a frontwoman that what felt like an incredibly accomplished bar band one moment was transformed into a mighty powerhouse when she stepped back on stage.
Everything was a highpoint from here on out. Smith offered a powerful indictment of global warmongering without uttering a word that wasn't sung. First was a searing run through Bob Dylan's "Masters of War," then "Peaceable Kingdom," Smith's tribute to activist Rachel Corrie, who was killed in 2003 when attempting to protect Palestinian property from destruction.
"Pissing in a River" from 1976's Radio Ethiopia was a chance to catch a breath before the closing trio of songs that wrung every bit of the energy from the room. "I'm just a human battery," Smith said with a smile in response to enthusiastic calls from the crowd, and then proved it as Shanahan played the familiar opening notes to Smith's best-known song, "Because the Night."
It would have been a fitting set closer, but instead Smith returned to the microphone and sang one of the most famous opening lines in rock, "Jesus died, for somebody's sins, but not mine," and led the band through a searing version of "Gloria" that slowly built from simmer to full boil as the years seemed to slip away. At least three of the five people on stage are in their seventies, yet none seemed to show it beyond gray hair and a slowed step. In fact, at one point, someone shouted, "Run for president!" Smith laughed and said, "Yeah, I'll run. The other way."
The band exited for a brief moment after "Gloria," but returned for the obligatory-in-any-year-but-particularly-this-year anthem, "People Have the Power." Divorced of its music, you could be forgiven for thinking the lyric a little corny, a little trite:
The people have the power
To redeem the work of fools
Upon the meek the graces shower
It's decreed, the people rule
It's a simple song — anyone with a couple of months of guitar under their belt could play these five chords well enough for a campfire sing along — but in Smith's hands it is a call to action, and admonition to use your voice. Watching these five people on this big stage — no light show, no projections, no stage set beyond the tastefully stacked road cases that would soon hold these instruments on route to the next stop — it was a visceral rush to see an audience connect with words and music. You could imagine everyone there heading out into the night to look for ways to make the world a better place. And even if that feeling might not last beyond the next morning, it's the rare artist who can conjure it at all.
I was sent to Austin by the Gazette to cover the SXSW appearance by Kelly Pardekooper and his band, back when newspapers had money. Could you imagine the Gazette flying someone to Texas for four days to write about an unsigned rock band today? My write up about the conference does offer an interesting look back at that time, before the Internet killed newspapers and record labels.
“For struggling up and comers, however, company after company claims to have the tools needed to get music to listeners,” I wrote. “Some, like the Orchard (www.theorchard.com) will promote and distribute artists work, while others, like Napster (www.napster.com), live365.com and www.com allow computer users to sample a band's songs in various forms over the World Wide Web.”
Ignoring that we had to refer to it as “the World Wide Web,” it is interesting to note that all of those sites but one, however improbably, still exist.