It was a historic Election Night in New York City — and it wouldn’t be Patti Smith’s style to let the drama of the moment go unmilked. Smith appeared at Manhattan’s Town Hall on November 4 to introduce her new memoir, Bread of Angels. It was a night of songs and stories, with stripped-down acoustic performances of classics from all over her catalog. But Smith made it feel like a New York celebration, from one of the city’s great romantic bards, the Scheherazade of CBGBs — singing, reading, speaking her mind.
“I’m very happy that we’re all here together for a very auspicious day,” Smith told the crowd at the beginning. “A very special day. Out in the world, of course, it’s Election Day — but also within our little world, where we’re just sorta independent from the rest of the world, just for a little while.”
She noted that November 4 was a significant day for her, as the birthday of her longtime friend Robert Mapplethorpe, the photographer and hero of her book Just Kids. “It also marks the passing day of my beloved husband, Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith,” she said. “It’s a day of celebration and remembrance and knowing that I have the privilege of loving these two wonderful men.”
Bread of Angels looks back on her childhood, especially her tight bond with her siblings, and her early adventures running wild in NYC, as she brings her poetry and rock & roll together during the punk explosion. But she leaves rock stardom behind in 1980 to build a new life in Michigan with Smith, the MC5 guitarist — by her account, in the fourteen years after their wedding, they’re never physically apart besides the “handful of hours” she spends in the hospital giving birth to their two children.
But the heart of Bread of Angels is her grief tales, as she suffers the deaths of her husband, her parents, her brother, her friends, and many more. In one touching episode, after being widowed at 47, she receives a phone call from a total stranger — R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe — who calls to console her on her first Valentine’s Day alone, and offers to be her valentine. (As he notes, he was “somewhat intoxicated.”) Another time, Bruce Springsteen cheers up her bereaved 12-year-old son by taking him for his first motorcycle ride — a fatherly promise that Fred Smith didn’t live long enough to fulfill.
Ever the raconteur, Smith discussed writing the book, her childhood, and even her fashion. “You’re probably noticing that I took a lot of care in my attire,” she quipped early on. (To nobody’s surprise, she was dressed down in jeans and work boots.) “I’m a superstitious kind of writer,” she explained. “And I tend to wear the same thing. I wore this old Electric Lady T-shirt through writing the whole book, in many countries of the world, and these same dungarees and my old writer jacket. But I would like to say that I DID wash my hair today.”
Smith brought out her daughter Jesse to play piano while she read from the book, in a meditation on Emily Dickinson. Two of her longtime bandmates, Lenny Kaye and Tony Shanahan, joined her for an acoustic “Ghost Dance,” her 1978 lament for the Hopi tribe, and the classic “Because the Night,” recalling how she wrote her lyrics while waiting desperately for Fred Smith to call. Her producer Jimmy Iovine slipped her a tape of the Springsteen song while she was making her Easter album, resistant to the idea of doing any outside material — until she heard “Because the Night.” As she said, “I wanted to write my own songs and I had this fucking hit staring me in the face!”
But the night’s highlight came when she cast a spell with a hushed performance of “Dancing Barefoot,” her greatest song, the sex-and-death incantation from her 1979 album Wave. She read about getting inspired to write it by Delacroix’s painting of Mary Magdalene gazing up at the crucified Christ. She kept the postcard in her guitar case for inspiration, until she and Ivan Kral wrote the tune together. “This song has many levels, but essentially it was a love song to Fred,” she said. “I was imagining Fred and I in another realm, he the hero and me the heroine.” But the record company tried to get her to change the word “heroine,” thinking it was a drug reference. “Just a little window of how tough it was to be a girl in the Seventies,” she said with a laugh. “I won the argument but lost the radio play.”
She discussed her upcoming live shows to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of her classic 1975 debut Horses. “I can still access the part of me who wrote those things,” she said. “I can’t say that I want to stay there — because I’ve evolved — but I still can comprehend the energy.” She recalled the album’s climactic fantasy “Land,” calling it “a semi-apocalyptic journey of the hero Johnny. But in fifty years, so many things have changed. The things that Johnny saw and was concerned about fifty years ago—they seem like baby sauce compared to what Johnny is going through now. The world is complete fodder for the dark adventures of Johnny.”
She read a poignant section from Bread of Angels where she contemplates the writer Yukio Mishima and “the lust for ascension,” as expressed in his poem Icarus. “At times I mourn the worlds I knew,” Smith mourned. “The hopes of my generation, flowers in hair, dancing to the Dead, seeking a universal music, ‘the language of peace,’ as Jimi Hendrix would say.”
For the end of the night, she had the crowd sing “Happy Birthday” to Robert Mapplethorpe, then led a festive romp through “People Have the Power.” She’d already done the song earlier, as part of a medley with “Peaceable Kingdom” — but she wasn’t letting the crowd go home without a full-on sing-along version, not on a night when the city was possessed by Zohran fever. She turned “People Have The Power” into an Election Night sing-along, which turned out to be prophetic a few hours later when the city got a new mayor whose knockout victory speech quoted Eugene Debs in the first line. It was one of those nights when Patti Smith and New York City seemed to be vibrating on the exact same wavelength.
Set List:
“Ghost Dance”
“Dancing Barefoot”
“Because the Night”
“Peaceable Kingdom”/“People Have the Power”
“Happy Birthday”
“People Have The Power”
