Patti Smith performed Friday night at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which might be a strange venue for a rock show, but it wasn’t really a rock show, so I suppose it doesn’t matter.
The performance was billed as a night of remembrance in honor of All Saints Day. She brought a ragoût of spoken word, poetry performance, and music, assisted by Phillip Glass (on a Burroughs tribute), among others. Patti’s mother, Beverly, died just over a month ago, and her memory permeated the performance. I almost wrote that it hung heavily, but that’s not the case at all. Her mother seems to have had a very irreverent and light-hearted personality and that was the spirit that Patti herself had when talking about her.
Much of the show was Patti Smith, onstage alone, at a microphone, reading poetry, telling stories about her friends and family, and joking with the audience. She seemed both at-ease and nervous, at the same time. Her hair, once black, is now silver-gray, and she wears it long and straight. Her love of androgyny remains: she wore a black suit, a loosened thin black tie, and a white shirt, open at the collar. Although she’s certainly not conventionally pretty, I believe that Patti Smith remains, at 56, one of the sexiest women I’ve seen.
I can never quite describe what Smith’s music means to me and even when I play it for people, they often don’t get it. When I do try to explain it, I sound like I’m speaking cliches: she “understands” me, her music “resonates,” whatever. All I know is that I feel a deep, intimate interlocking with her music. Something about her music and my spirit just snap together. To hear her voice in person was profoundly moving for me.
Smith spoke about her friends, her mentors, her heroes: William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ezra Pound, Alan Ginsberg, Georgia O’Keefe. She read poems by or about those people. She spoke of her family–her parents’ separation during WWII, her mother’s work to provide joy to her children when no one knew how they’d afford another day’s meals. She sang Sonny Boy in honor of her brother, and When My Ship Comes In to memorialize her parents.
She spoke with disarming candor about her feelings and inspirations. She spoke to us as if we were each her friends. A woman of modesty and wisdom, she was surprisingly sentimental and even goofy at times. That appeals to me, for anyone who knows me well understands that I too can be sentimental and goofy. For an evening, I was in the largest living room in Manhattan, listening to one of my heroes discussing her heroes as if we were talking over coffee.
She performed only one song, to my knowledge, that she’s recorded before–Dancing Barefoot–during a two-song encore that began with a charming performance of the Beatles song Blackbird, during which she flubbed the lyrics and then giggled.
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