As part of Patti Smith’s celebration of her totemic 1975 album, Horses, and the publication of her continued autobiography with Bread Of Angels: A Memoir, the author/songstress with her Band—in differing configurations—wrapped up a 50th-anniversary tour and a live celebration of Angel’s words and songs in Philadelphia.
From November 29’s full-ensemble performance of Horses and more at the Met to her quieter, nuanced musical showcase and reading in the Kimmel Center’s Marion Anderson Hall, Smith didn’t just re-prove her vitality as an artist (as if she ever needed to); she reached back to the ideas that touched her in her youth: the words, images and loves that thrillingly transformed her as a writer, as much as those same elements metamorphosed us as longtime audience members guided by the ideas that poetry could change the world. That poetry could rock—and rock ferociously.
Recalling the immediate and visceral inspirations of seeing Modigliani for the first time at the Philadelphia Museum Of Art as a child (the painter’s slender figures reminded a teenaged Patti of her own “lanky frame”), finding Rimbaud at a bookseller’s stall and gazing into his “cherubic” image (she stole that volume of poetry, a worthy crime in her estimation) or teen-dreaming about Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan, Smith reminded us how art and music transmuted her, turned her into the woman she would become. (Yes, her love of, then marriage to, MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith additionally guided everything, unapologetically, from her life to her work.)
If Saturday night’s frenetic regeneration of Horses in its entirety with guitarist Lenny Kaye and Co. was electric thunder, Monday’s Songs & Stories night with Band member Tony Shanahan and Smith’s musician children, Jesse and Jackson, was roiling, rolling thunder, both turbulent and tender.
As a whole, Horses—re-released by Sony/Legacy in October with crucial rarities such as a spine-tingling “Snowball” and a ragged alternate take of “Birdland”—has aged beautifully, with each insistent piece in its puzzle, from “Gloria” to “Elegie,” capturing the twilight’s first gleaming of Smith’s particular genius.
“The poet may stand alone, but in merging with a band, surrenders to the wonder of teamwork. Thus joined, we birthed Horses together,” writes Smith in her new Bread Of Angels.
As part of a continuing set of memoirs, Bread Of Angels goes deep, overlaps gently and treads lightly on topics she’s uncovered throughout the past with the Mapplethorpe-heavy Just Kids, the prose-filled Woolgathering and whatever M Train was in retrospect.
Most tellingly where Bread Of Angels was concerned during Monday night’s reading to a packed house were the stories of 1977’s co-write of “Because The Night” (from a tape given to her by a frustrated Bruce Springsteen and first-time producer Jimmy Iovine) along with her 1979 retirement from public life—both directed at, and motivated by, her love affair with Fred Smith. Waiting for Fred’s once-a-week phone call from Detroit (“long distance was expensive then,” she said) pushed her to crack the code in order for her to write the lyrics to “Because The Night,” with the line “Have I doubt when I’m alone/Love is a ring, the telephone” informed by the Smiths’ romance and more “relentless” and “insistent” in its display of calculated carnality and union.
Leaving the spotlight in order to join Fred as his wife in Detroit, Patti heard the cry of Beat poet Gregory Corso and heeded the words of mentor William S. Burroughs as she revealed that she must shed her skin—and possibly lose the friendship of band members—in order to fully give herself over to marriage, as if she was a priest taking holy order and ceding fidelity to one man. While the printed memoir studied the married Smiths at home along a canal, listening to Coltrane and drinking coffee and Budweiser, Patti’s live Kimmel Center reading found her focused on peeling potatoes (“the people’s vegetable,” she joked), being pregnant with Jesse and suddenly getting told by Fred to write their co-penned anthem, “People Have The Power.” The image of a forever-self-empowered Patti, pregnant and potato peeling, being prodded to write at the insistence of a man is jarring at first—Smith aficionados have long heard rumors about Fred’s domineering nature. But Patti reminded the audience that complete devotion and fidelity was hers, and hers alone to give, and give willingly.
“Our life was obscure, perhaps not so interesting to some,” Smith writes in Bread Of Angels. “But to us, it was a whole life.”
As so much of Bread Of Angels was recounted onstage with Smith’s usual sense of humor and self-deprecation as its guiding light, the music portion of the Songs & Stories event was serious, sensual, rapturous and amazing-beyond-compare.
Possessed of a gorgeous, strong, throttling low voice that grew richer, more pointed and more piercing at the end of certain stanzas—particularly, the “Peaceable Kingdom”/“People Have The Power” mash-up and the epically rebel yell of “Pissing In A River”—the quiet night’s arrangements of Shanahan plus Smith’s musician children gave the writer/vocalist’s lyrics an uncluttered poignancy, a familial passion and unfettered forcefulness reserved for an encore’s rockist heft.
From its piano-led start with “My Blakean Year” and a cover of Dylan’s “One Too Many Mornings” to its stark, holy, Marian Anderson-inspired closing “Trampin” (with funny, memoir-informed stories to “Dancing Barefoot” in-between), Patti Smith’s three-day stay in the hometown of her childhood in dedication to the 50th anniversary of Horses and the publication of Bread Of Angels was hauntingly unique and worth its weight in gold and gilded spirit.
—A.D. Amorosi; photo by Chris Sikich (taken two nights earlier at the Met in Philly)
