Concert review
Patti Smith infuses concert with poetry, dance, charisma
By Elizabeth Kieszkowski
Advertiser Staff Writer
In concert, Patti Smith channels the spirits of long-dead poets and high priests, along with the oddest of rock 'n' roll idols, including Buddy Holly, Van Morrison, Lou Reed and Bob Dylan.
At the World Cafe last night, she was as odd and irreplaceable as any of these heroes, putting on a strange and wonderful show for an admiring audience of about 500.
Patti Smith gave an energetic performance last night at World Cafe.
Like Dylan, she's a forceful, stubborn troubadour, mixing it up musically and spinning elaborate webs of words.
Like Reed, she can be dark and jagged.
Like Van Morrison, she uses her charisma to get audiences on her side.
And like Buddy Holly, she uses repetition and a playful sense to make the music fun.
Last night, she read poetry that had something to do, I think, with Bob Dylan and a snake; blew a few bars of free jazz on an alto sax and turned Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away" into an avant-garde musical collage.
At one point during the above-mentioned song, having used a sort of free-form chanting and some barely contained, semi-chaotic, distortion-rimmed music to excite the audience into a transcendent state, she forcefully strode to the stage rim and in a low, bold voice sang: "I'm going to tell you how it's going to be. You're going to give your love to me."
And she pretty much had that right.
Thin and a little more fragile than she was during her first reign in the music world during the '70s and early '80s, she was nevertheless a powerful performer, making frequent eye contact with audience members, stalking the stage and sometimes clasping her chest or raising fluttering hands toward the crowd.
With a body of work that goes back more than 25 years, and a style of performing that draws from rock at the roots, jazz and psychedelia, there was plenty to pay attention to.
Smith is a slight person, but seems tall on stage. Her eyes are piercing, her nose beaky and her face masculine, making her interesting to watch and a favorite subject of well-known photographers, including the late Robert Mapplethorpe, who was her New York City roommate in the '70s, and Richard Avedon.
With a four-piece band backing her up, she presented a cross-section of her work, from her 1976 album "Horses" to songs written over the last few years. She started out wearing a loose blazer, jeans, boots and a tie-dyed Jerry Garcia T-shirt — and even played a countryfied tribute to Jerry because, she said, it was his birthday. She ended up barefoot, throwing off her boots and dancing briefly on a chair during "Dancing Barefoot," a song she wrote about her feelings for the man she would marry, Fred "Sonic" Smith.
Her treatment of the Buddy Holly song summed up her approach — mixed up, forceful, wordcentric and by turns, rocking and blissed out. It was great stuff. She played for more than two hours.
I had to leave to write this review, but my source at the concert tells me Smith took the stage for an encore, a blowout version of "Gloria" at least 15 minutes long, during which she wore a blindfold for a good piece of the time, played an acoustic guitar and finished up by tearing out the guitar's strings. Like the rest of the concert, that's how Patti Smith presents her poetic and profound takeoff on confusion, glory, lust, love, adrenaline and soul.
