On the afternoon of the evening I went to see Patti Smith last week, I sat at my kitchen table and made a bunch of friendship bracelets, similar to the ones Taylor Swift fans make to trade at their stadium extravaganzas, using elastic thread and alphabet beads to spell out favorite song titles or lyrics.
(Friendship bracelets.)
If I’d had more beads – and maybe a bigger wrist - - I would have made ones that said, “Johnny started to run” and “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine” and maybe even “Oh watch me now,” the last line of “Piss Factory,” which is one of my favorite poems by her. But I was a little constrained by a sad lack of vowel-beads, so I could only make four and they said, “Gloria,” Easter,” “Horses,” and “People Have the Power,” only I had to fake some of the O’s.
Swifties trade such bracelets with fellow fans at the Eras concerts, but there was no one to trade mine with at the Patti Smith show I attended at the Golden State Theater in Monterey last friday night. However, I am sure there would have been if anyone else had thought of it, since the level of fandom at a Patti Smith show is just as intense as it is at Eras. That set of fans is 70,00 strong per evening; and each of them has paid a bunch to sit in the presence of their idol, but although there are fewer of us, and we are older and maybe poorer, I am pretty sure that Patti Smith holds the same place in the hearts of my friends as Taylor does to millions upon millions of others.
Is there an overlap? I don’t think so. The love may be the same in a general sense, but there is a difference, because surely those who love Taylor Swift are looking for something in her music that is utterly unlike what those who love Patti Smith are going after. According to what one reads, Swifties have a parasocial relationship with Taylor and that is the exact opposite to my feelings about Patti Smith. I don’t want to be her, be like her, or even hang out with her, because I do not feel like I am her equal. And Christ, who would even want to be? What a burden.
Also, she is very singular, and I come from an era, unlike now, when singularity was a paramount virtue. Patti is utterly unlike anyone else, and nothing evinces this more than her evasion of gender and age constraints. She is genderless in both her presentation and in the content of her work, and additionally, she is ageless.
And yet, she also seems quite mortal, which is something that Taylor Swift does not seem to be: when I saw the latter a few weeks ago, she looked like a hologram come to life, perfectly toned and smoothed all over, an avatar in human form. By contrast, Patti is the grey-haired crone of a sinister fairy story, dropping in to tell us some home truths about life here on earth.
(Patti Smith Trio, August 11, 2023)
One thing about Taylor Swift and many of her popular peers is that, because they started their careers so young, nothing has ever happened to them. Given their life history, most of what they sing about must be more or less theoretical. But a lot of things happened to Patti Smith before she came famous. For example, she worked in a factory and a bookstore. She had a gay boyfriend. She gave birth to a kid and gave it up for adoption. She lived in a squat in the Lower East Side. She went to Paris with her sister and busked in the streets there.
In short, she participated fully in the 20th century. Those experiences don’t often appear in her poetry or her music except obliquely; much of what she writes now is more impressionistic and solemn, even hymnal if you will. But I am sure that her experiences are what gives her songs, and her singing, so much depth.
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For me, going to see her perform at the Golden State Theater in Monterey was a spur of the moment impulse, a lagniappe of sorts. All of a sudden I found out she was doing a few gigs in Central California, and I just made some bracelets and went. In Monterey, she was performing in a trio backed by Tony Shanahan and her son Jackson before hitting S.F. for a bigger-profile gig at Stern Grove on the weekend. In S.F. I heard, she backed by a full band, including a drummer. On Friday night in Monterey, that was not the case, and it occurred to me that the lack of percussion was appropriate, because Patti Smith doesn’t just march to a different drummer, she marches to NO drum. She is drummerless, both literally and figuratively. At times, that must be terrifying. But she is obviously nothing if not courageous.
In Monterey, her set that consisted largely of covers, including Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” and “One Too Many Mornings” Television’s song “Guiding Light” and, in tribute to Robbie Robertson, “It Makes No Difference,’ sung by Shanahan while she left the stage and pulled herself together. She also dedicated a song (“Peaceable Kingdom”) to Sinead, and although this reminded me of what a very mortal week it had been for rock stars, Addie later pointed out that Patti’s whole deal is mortality: from her book about Mapplethorpe to her passion for Baudelaire, keeping the dead close is very much what she was put here on earth for. No one can take a secular crowd to church as fast as Patti Smith, and for some of us, that experience is as close to a religious outing as we ever plan on getting.
(Detail from the Golden State Theater, Monterey California.)