{"id":29503,"date":"2025-11-05T13:57:05","date_gmt":"2025-11-05T13:57:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/29503\/"},"modified":"2025-11-05T13:57:05","modified_gmt":"2025-11-05T13:57:05","slug":"patti-smith-in-new-york-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/29503\/","title":{"rendered":"Patti Smith in New York City"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIt was a historic Election Night in New York City \u2014 and it wouldn\u2019t be Patti Smith<\/a>\u2019s style to let the drama of the moment go unmilked. Smith appeared at Manhattan\u2019s 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\u2019s great romantic bards, the Scheherazade of CBGBs \u2014 singing, reading, speaking her mind.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019m very happy that we\u2019re all here together for a very auspicious day,\u201d Smith told the crowd at the beginning. \u201cA very special day. Out in the world, of course, it\u2019s Election Day \u2014 but also within our little world, where we\u2019re just sorta independent from the rest of the world, just for a little while.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShe 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. \u201cIt also marks the passing day of my beloved husband, Fred \u2018Sonic\u2019 Smith,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s a day of celebration and remembrance and knowing that I have the privilege of loving these two wonderful men.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBread 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 \u2014 by her account, in the fourteen years after their wedding, they\u2019re never physically apart besides the \u201chandful of hours\u201d she spends in the hospital giving birth to their two children.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut 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 \u2014 R.E.M.\u2019s Michael Stipe<\/a> \u2014 who calls to console her on her first Valentine\u2019s Day alone, and offers to be her valentine. (As he notes, he was \u201csomewhat intoxicated.\u201d) Another time, Bruce Springsteen<\/a> cheers up her bereaved 12-year-old son by taking him for his first motorcycle ride \u2014 a fatherly promise that Fred Smith didn\u2019t live long enough to fulfill.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tEver the raconteur, Smith discussed writing the book, her childhood, and even her fashion. \u201cYou\u2019re probably noticing that I took a lot of care in my attire,\u201d she quipped early on. (To nobody\u2019s surprise, she was dressed down in jeans and work boots.) \u201cI\u2019m a superstitious kind of writer,\u201d she explained. \u201cAnd 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSmith 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 \u201cGhost Dance,\u201d her 1978 lament for the Hopi tribe, and the classic \u201cBecause the Night,\u201d 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 \u2014 until she heard \u201cBecause the Night.\u201d As she said, \u201cI wanted to write my own songs and I had this fucking hit staring me in the face!\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut the night\u2019s highlight came when she cast a spell with a hushed performance of \u201cDancing Barefoot,\u201d her greatest song, the sex-and-death incantation from her 1979 album Wave. She read about getting inspired to write it by Delacroix\u2019s 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. \u201cThis song has many levels, but essentially it was a love song to Fred,\u201d she said. \u201cI was imagining Fred and I in another realm, he the hero and me the heroine.\u201d But the record company tried to get her to change the word \u201cheroine,\u201d thinking it was a drug reference. \u201cJust a little window of how tough it was to be a girl in the Seventies,\u201d she said with a laugh. \u201cI won the argument but lost the radio play.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tShe discussed her upcoming live shows to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of her classic 1975 debut Horses. \u201cI can still access the part of me who wrote those things,\u201d she said. \u201cI can\u2019t say that I want to stay there \u2014 because I\u2019ve evolved \u2014 but I still can comprehend the energy.\u201d She recalled the album\u2019s climactic fantasy \u201cLand,\u201d calling it \u201ca 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\u2014they seem like baby sauce compared to what Johnny is going through now. The world is complete fodder for the dark adventures of Johnny.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShe read a poignant section from Bread of Angels where she contemplates the writer Yukio Mishima and \u201cthe lust for ascension,\u201d as expressed in his poem Icarus. \u201cAt times I mourn the worlds I knew,\u201d Smith mourned. \u201cThe hopes of my generation, flowers in hair, dancing to the Dead, seeking a universal music, \u2018the language of peace,\u2019 as Jimi Hendrix would say.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tFor the end of the night, she had the crowd sing \u201cHappy Birthday\u201d to Robert Mapplethorpe, then led a festive romp through \u201cPeople Have the Power.\u201d She\u2019d already done the song earlier, as part of a medley with \u201cPeaceable Kingdom\u201d \u2014 but she wasn\u2019t 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 \u201cPeople Have The Power\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tSet List:\u00a0
\u201cGhost Dance\u201d
\u201cDancing Barefoot\u201d
\u201cBecause the Night\u201d
\u201cPeaceable Kingdom\u201d\/\u201cPeople Have the Power\u201d
\u201cHappy Birthday\u201d
\u201cPeople Have The Power\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was a historic Election Night in New York City \u2014 and it wouldn\u2019t be Patti Smith\u2019s style…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":29504,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[11955,18252,9,11,10,18253],"class_list":{"0":"post-29503","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-bruce-springsteen","9":"tag-michael-stipe","10":"tag-new-york","11":"tag-new-york-headlines","12":"tag-new-york-news","13":"tag-patti-smith"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29503\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}