Patti Smith

Over the years I've happened to see Patti Smith live more than once, even catching one of her many tours around Europe, and finding her extraordinary every single time: for the beauty of the songs, for the charisma, for a unique voice that time simply doesn't erode, for the credibility of her words and of those eye-level, person-to-person gazes that seem to want to reach every single person in the room.
I hadn't missed the Bergamo stop of the celebratory tour for “Horses“, either, with Lenny Kaye in the band, the sing-a-long charge of “Gloria”, the improvisations on “Redondo Beach” and the tribute to Television. And that same New York was also the guiding imagery of the Milan set on July 29th, a New York suspended between the beat generation and punk, one that only Patti is left to represent now that Tom Verlaine and Lou Reed are gone: not the big apple itself, but its visionary, under-the-skin worm, fed on decadent European humus and the iron stench of the subway.
There was no time for the cover of “Walk On The Wild Side”, but it hardly mattered. The freedom and expressive urgency are still those of the loosened tie under Mapplethorpe's still-smitten eye on the cover of “Horses”. A framework of meaning that undoubtedly makes the figure, the musician and the human being that is Patti Smith one of the most significant examples of civic commitment in the history of rock — and in this show it emerged with a particularly sharp outline.

More than a concert, then, a moment of pure empathy. Whether because of the context — the celebration of Radio Popolare's 50th anniversary, with an audience in total harmony, tied both to the tradition of Milan's left and to a whole progressive youth underground, whose presence, helped along by the 15-euro ticket, was one of the evening's added values; or because it was the closing date of a European tour full of satisfactions, extending the long wave of celebrations for another fifty-year-old with its whole life still ahead of it, the aforementioned “Horses”; or because Patti had both of her children with Fred “Sonic” Smith by her side: Jackson, moved but flawless on guitar, and Jesse Paris, singer-songwriter and environmental activist, as well as a fierce opponent of Trump, who backed up trusty Tony Shanahan on keyboards, while he was mostly busy in his usual role as bassist. And the widely applauded set by one of the finest and most accomplished Italian singer-songwriters of the newest generation, Marta del Grandi, played no small part in the evening's success.

Over everything, finally, hung the fresh and unexpected news of the passing of Glen Hansard. An emotional telegram that left us dismayed by our attachment to music and to life itself, as always happens after the death of someone dear, when every instant becomes a last one and the presence of the other suddenly stops being something to take for granted.
This dense emotional undercurrent wrapped the concert in an hour and a half of embrace. The artist, us in the audience, and a world outside: to be looked at with the hope, irrational, unfounded, but no less true for that, of one day being able to welcome it in — and that it won't be the one to do away with us instead, along with our illusions, too unwieldy to fit inside a reel. 

The songs are correlated to this same breath. “Dancing Barefoot” sounds like an ancestral call at the start of a rite. “Ghost Dance” returns to the original spirit and intent it had when Patti turned a dance of vengeance and ghosts into a song of forgiveness and hope, as 1979 — then still a year of childhood — drew near. ⟦Q1⟧, we sing along with the officiant, projecting that “we” into a dimension with no time and no expectations. Sooner or later someone will watch the burden of individualism and hatred that poisons these years sink beneath the waves, and it will be for him that we will have sung. For him too. Seen in this light, even the poetics of resentment in “Revenge” — a masterpiece from the sometimes underrated “Wave” — seems to transfigure into a reflection on human nature, and the wristwatch in the lyrics seems to mark the passing of a collective time.
Then comes the sequence dedicated to Jim Morrison. We change city but not country. The Lizard King arrives in a dream: “I was wandering through a forest when I came upon a marble statue, a marble so white it was dazzling. The statue depicted Prometheus in chains, but inside it was Jim Morrison, and he was screaming ‘break it up! break it! break it up!’, until the marble shattered and Jim came out of it, taking flight and beating his great white wings”. The version of “The Crystal Ship”, a gem from the first album by The Doors, becomes in this context a metaphor for the fragility of humanity's delirious dream of omnipotence, from which he frees himself by shattering the titanic remains in which this world of capital and clicks keeps him imprisoned. So the dream, so “Break It Up!”, which follows the Doors cover in a kind of thematic interlude.

“Nine”, the most site-specific of Patti Smith's songs, originally written for one of Johnny Depp's birthdays, and an intense cover of “Falling Slowly”, sung by Tony Shanahan, are the tribute to Glen Hansard. What follows is a moved embrace between Tony and Patti, and the words she speaks almost in a whisper: “There was an old captain, who wandered through Ireland searching for his ship, even though it had been a long time since he had lost it. One day, though, he spotted it in the distance on the Irish Sea. It was golden, covered entirely in green shamrocks. It wasn't his eyes that saw it, but his heart. And he went to breathe his last breath on that wonderful ship, sailing not the sea, but the clouds drifting through the sky, all the way to the Milky Way, from one galaxy to another. He saw magnificent places, but what he wanted was to see his island shining emerald green once more. Once again: Ireland and his mother's face, she who had given him life”. Chills.

“Fireflies”, “Summer Cannibals” and “Beneath The Southern Cross” were also born out of a process of grieving, all three coming from “Gone Again”, the album released after Fred's death, among the last songs written together with her husband. And Patti's emotion in playing them on stage together with her children is tangible for us too, in front of an audience that feels more like a kind of chosen family, witnessed by the full moon that the “priestess” invokes several times during the show, inviting us as well to a toast shared with her in some ancestral way once we're back home.
When “Peaceable Kingdom” starts, dedicated to Palestinian children, the “family” waves flags from all corners, and the purity of the outrage becomes one single breath. Patti introduces “Because The Night” as the song dedicated “to the love of her life”, Fred.
The other is people. “People Have The Power” arrives right on cue to remind us who we are. And that staying human is not just rhetoric.

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