PATTI SMITH AND HER BAND/TELEVISION • BRIXTON ACADEMY, LONDON • JULY 3, 2004

Television opened the festival of CBGB icons, and for most bands they would have been a tough act to follow. Tom Verlaine and corps have lost nothing to the years. They're, technically, one of the most impressive bands that I've seen in a long while, repeatedly flashing flourishes of musical empathy, if not downright clairvoyance, that isn't the sort of thing you typically associate with bands brought up on the bar circuit. They were a lot of fun and very well received, despite their almost devout lack of charisma-which probably explains why they've been one of the most underrated bands in the world for nearly three decades.

Patti Smith is, of course, charisma incarnate. She doesn't even have to say or do anything, she is an artist of the magnitude that her ongoing presence speaks for itself and, unlike most of her contemporaries, the message has never been either garbled or self-contradictory. It doesn't hurt that her appearance seems to have shrugged off more tragedy than anyone deserves-her smile has never generated more kilowatts, and at 57 she has become that rare individual who has only grown more physically attractive over the years.

She opened with “Trampin',” from the new CD of the same name. It's a rare cover, half gospel and half nursery rhyme (“I'm trampin', trampin'/tryin' to make Heaven my home”), the sort of gentle reverie that lesser artists would only use to close a show, and certainly not play so early for fear of putting out any fires in the audience. Lenny Kaye burst straight through the reverie, rather than shattering it, with the opening power chords of “Stride of the Mind,” and we were off!

The most commonly used term to describe Patti, in the media, has for years been “the high priestess of punk.” There's some truth to the phrase (like most stuff in the media), but Patti's vision has always gone well beyond any panorama envisaged by Johnny Rotten, Joey Ramone, or even Greil Marcus. Patti's world has been one without apparent limitation, but with points of reference shared by Baudelaire, the Dylans, Mondrian and Jim Morrison.

Morrison is, as almost everyone agrees, dead, as is Patti's husband Fred “Sonic” Smith of the revolutionary garage rockers MC5, and now Marlon Brando. Each was given heartfelt and extended tribute on the protean and somewhat vertiginous screen behind the band. With Patti onstage the screen struck me as almost too much, I just don't have enough senses for what would have been sensory overload even without it. That being said, the screen did serve as a kind of psychic lightning rod for the audience, and allowed Patti to develop themes including peace and the environment without getting overtly preachy.

Patti's band, and Lenny Kaye in particular, have always been hideously unappreciated, cast into the shadow of the prodigious talent on centre stage before them. Patti's poetry and persona deserve at least as much acclaim as they've received, but it's too easy to become lost in them at the expense of understanding that the boys in the band can alternately rock their balls off, and then settle into tastefully texturing and colouring around the peripheries of Patti's many moods.

The performance was absolutely glorious. Whenever I go through the short litany of the few very greatest of the thousands of concerts that I've seen, this one will always have a place.

Patti's hold on the crowd was mesmerizing, there's no point in trying to explain what happened without resorting to religious metaphor, Freud's concept of the totem, Wilhelm Reich's ideas about orgone energy, the science of astral physics, and the soulful eyes of dogs. Actually, there's not much point trying to explain any of it anyway, you can pick up some of it through the symbols and associations of words, but for psychic revelation you had to be there.

Trampin' was played nearly in its entirety. That Patti could generate and maintain such incredible energy, excitement, enthusiasm and pandemonium while building a show upon a foundation of her newest work says a couple things: (1) she's great, (2) the album's great, and (3) her contemporaries should be ashamed of themselves. Patti's rock is not a nostalgia trip, but a living, breathing challenge to idiocy and hypocrisy in their many forms, a spiritual and aesthetic awakening, and a damn good opportunity to revel in the dionysian turbulence and currents of the art form that has always been on the most intimate terms with the most important aspects of performance.

“Peaceable Kingdom” was a beautiful, and telling, yearning for the reemergence of something that has already been, if only in embryonic form: typically, Patti's one moment of sentimentality already projects, and demands, everything good about it for the road ahead of us. “Gandhi” gave Patti a focal point for that very road, and the band an opportunity to explore its impressive improvisational sensibilities. “My Blakean Year” was offered in the form of a meditation on the inadequacy of even situational ethics, an unapologetic apologia for textures, and for the trials and tribulations of taking the roads that look like the most fun.

There were old songs, to be sure, thrown and slammed through the audience more than played for them. The selections were tasteful, rather than predictable. The song Patti calls her “only hit” (“Because the Night”) never showed up, though several cuts from the album Easter did. “25th Floor” found Kaye wallowing shamelessly in metal guitar hero land, crashing chords with a passionate abandon to inspire teenagers in garages everywhere, and “Space Monkey” was timed perfectly within the set, setting Patti off on tangents that seemed at once raunchy, playful, and visionary in some pop psychology/sci-fi/ saturated student way.

“Free Money” and “Break It Up” reminded everyone, as if anyone there needed reminding, why Horses is universally considered one of the great rock statements. “Gone Again” was positively consumptive. By the time that Patti swung the band into the screaming, chanting, fist-waving frenzy of “People Have the Power” the concert had long more resembled some tantric variation of psycho-spiritual-political orgasm more than any popular conception of what a musical performance is supposed to be like.

It wasn't a short set, and she had to be exhausted. We were, but we weren't about to let the tantric totem go. The demand for an encore was absolutely thunderous, measure of decibels and seismic activity could never have told half the story.

They emerged for a sonic rendering of “Pissing in a River,” which is my favourite song whenever I hear it. The performance was flawless, the peak power immeasurable. I don't believe that any words that Patti has written offer as much insight into the author as do “should I pursue a path so twisted/should I crawl/defeated and gifted/should I go the length of the river.” She offered, and sings, the words not at all as a question-they are instead an unequivocal affirmation of whatever it is in herself that makes compromise unthinkable.

Against any pre-existing strategies of how to run a concert, from there they went into the lengthy, experimental, and musically impressionistic “Radio Baghdad.” It proved the perfect move, with Kaye going sonic, highlighting riffs in places that you'd never heard them, Patti offering an irrefutable indictment of the western invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the night ending on a note stressing the necessity of contemporary engagement.

But wait! The crowd still won't let her go! Thumping and thundering, hoarse voices calling to the wind in attractively flawed echoes of the perfection they once knew!

She's back. One more. “Gloria.” Nothing in Patti's long and controversial career has been nearly so provocative as “Gloria.” Nearly everyone has found something to complain about at some point. “Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine...” Conservative Christians couldn't have been more alienated right off the bat, and Patti didn't hesitate to offend the agnostic wing of her own faithful by singing the song in any manner reflecting her own personal path, including “Jesus died for my sins” in the late 1990s.

There is less difference between what appear to be polar positions than the uninitiated might assume, Patti having consistently asserted the existence and power of the spirit of Jesus, but undergoing an evolution with regard to questions of whether she was interested in giving her sins away, and perhaps other dogmatic matters including the essence of sin, what part the death penalty played in the universality of the availability of redemption, whether Jesus proposed a process or a path, the coercive methodology of organized religion, and the other questions that inevitably plague and spice the lives those who insist on a participatory role in the acquisition of spiritual knowledge.

“Jesus died for somebody's sins....” backed by thundering power chords and the explosive celebration of life that is “Gloria.” Patti went into meditative states, offering up her gratitude and concerns to the cosmos in the posture of a loving but questioning saint of the street, her band throbbing all around her in the sea of physical chaos that was her crowd. The moment was declarative but ambiguous, fraught with passion and possibility and paradox, anything but misanthropic or willfully sacrilegious, questioning but ultimately seeking-through thought, through prayer, through passion and through performance-peace.

Seeking peace in the most unorthodox and chaotic way possible, that's our Patti.

This review originally appeared in FM Sound.

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