patti smith reviews

Patti Smith July 8th, 2000, Odeon, Cleveland Ohio
By Ray Beiersdorfer

"Baskin Robbins Sucks!" It's been over twenty years since I heard Patti Smith scream that from the stage in NYC's Central Park. I was at the Schaefer Beer or Dr. Pepper Music festival and someone had bounced a Baskin Robbins beach ball onto the stage. It startled me that someone would have a political opinion about an ice cream company but Patti sure did. I don't remember what else she said about Baskin Robbins but I sure did remember that we need to look at things more deeply. It's been twenty five years since I bought Horses. I was fortunate enough to see the Patti Smith group ten times during 1976 at various clubs and colleges around the NYC area. Four nights out of seven at The Bottom Line, including the two nights John Cale and Bruce Springsteen joined her on stage.

Once during that year my friend Freddie and I drove to Philadelphia to see Patti and the Sparks at the Tower Theater. I saw her a few more times after that but with her commercial success she seemed to play NYC less frequently and a harder ticket to get. I remember having to ask Hilly Kristal for my money back at CBGB's because it was too crowded. I was with my buddy Dave who suggested we go see this new movie, Star Wars. One of my more memorable Patti show was at the CBGB Theater on second avenue. She was joined by Bruce on stage to premier this new song Because the Night. It was awesome, almost as awesome as having the Chief of the NYC fire department walk on stage to shut the whole thing down. It seems there were twice as many people in the building as the fire code would allow. A lot of people were angry but I happily screamed out that's rock and roll. Last night was another night to happily scream out. Or to vent with ferocity and smile afterwards. I think that is the thing I love the most about Patti. She will be ranting her way through a song and after it is finished acknowledge the crowd's applause with this blushing, almost self-conscious, smile.

We walked into the smoked filled Odeon to see the stage back dropped with a large American Flag bearing only 42 stars. On either side where white sheets to serve as a screen. Projected on the stage and about five deep into the audience were musical notes from the desktop of a Macintosh computer. Susie spotted the MacHardDrive icon in the corner. Patti lead the band out onto stage and started singing "Every night before I go to sleep, buy a ticket win the lottery..." Free money. She played the next few songs without saying anything to the crowd which seemed a little odd to me. During the other times I have seen her post retirement, she was talking to the crowd from the beginning, but they where in NYC in '98 and '99 in front of her home town audience. Susie commented that she didn't look as raw as she did in NY. Her hair was freshly shampooed and she sported a new T-shirt with a drawing of Ho Chi Min and Patti Smith Gung Ho on the side (we found out later they were selling the shirts for 20 bucks). This was a big contrast to the hole-ridden, thread-bare t-shirts we saw her wear in NY. The band sounded really great. It is mostly Patti, Lenny Kaye on Guitar, Jay Dee Daugherty on drums and Tony Shanahanon Bass. Oliver Ray is on stage but you don't hear much of him in the mix.

After about three or four songs, Patti says its hard to get a gig in this town. I've been trying for 20 years. She puts on her glasses and starts reading from Allen Ginsberg's Howl which is the intro to her song Spell. Patti grabbed her clarinet and started howling herself. She wound up on her knees holding the instrument up to the microphone. Redondo Beach seemed a little faster in tempo than I remember it. It made a nice segue into Lo and Beholden which Patti said was an old testament song and then she corrected herself and said it was a new testament song. Up next was Summer Cannibals. I noticed that about half of the people near me were looking at me as I scream "eat eat" along with Patti during the chorus. There seemed to be about half of the crowd that were Patti fans and the rest didn't know her music. Beneath the Southern Cross featured Patti and Lenny on acoustic guitars. She then kept her guitar on and sat down. She talked about her day in Cleveland. She had taken a horse and buggy ride around the city which in her mind was an mixture of Philadelphia's Independence Hall, Prost and Swingos (some defunct Cleveland Store, I think). She seemed to be enjoying the banter with the crowd. Someone shouted they have loved her all their life and she replied "what a dismal life you must live." She then she said this is the story teller part of the set where I tell the story of the song, just like at the grand 'ol opry. A woman yelled "Hee Haw" and Patti replied, "that was lame even for Cleveland". She then started to tell the story of her song for Jerry Garcia (Grateful). Seems one day she had the blues and was really upset about something trivial.

That's as far as she got, she would play the opening cord of the song and then go off on tangents. She said it took her 28 minutes to tell a two and a half minute story in Detroit and did we want to beat Detroit. She then got really frustrated and said she couldn't play the song. Some one yelled something and she snarled back "you get up here and sing the fuckin song." She started to take off her guitar and then said alright, I'll play it. She played it and sounded great. She never did tell the story about how she got upset about seeing a gray hair and how a picture of Jerry Garcia's smiling face calmed her down. Strange Messengers followed with images (mostly drawings) of slavery projected on the screen. She left out the verse about smoking crack. Dancing barefoot included the mandatory, Patti takes off her shoes and socks bit, but what really made it cool was how a road brought out a chair on cue for her to sit on the remove her shoes. Gone pie was performed with out the joke being mentioned at all. You know the joke about the hipster going into a dinner and asking the waitress, "How's the pie?". The waitress replies, "The pie's gone" "Good, I'll take two slices" Because the Night and the song Patti wrote for Robert Mapplethorpe followed. Gung Ho was awesome with psychedelic images on the screen and helicopter sounds in the background. The ending of the song was incredible Patti is chanting One more revolution, One more turn of the wheel, Tony and Lenny and many in the crowd are chanting Gung Ho and before the chanting stops Jay Dee Daugherty hits the drum roll to People Have the power. I was really wiped out by the power and intensity of that segue. Wow!

Patti and the band goes off stage for several minutes and come back to play Pissing in the River and Rock-n-Roll Nigger. She starts the rant off to RnRN with "Everything is Shit." About two thirds of the way into the song Patti starts ranting about going to the warehouse district and about some girls humping on the parking meter. G-L-O-R-I-A. Then back to baby was a black sheep and the song ends with Patti chanting One more revolution, One more turn of the wheel, Gung Ho! Whew, I guess the whole show was about two hours long. They had a little souvenir booth where I bought a autographed copy of Coral Sea (Patti's book about Robert Mapplethorpe) for ten dollars and an autographed tour poster for twelve dollars.

Photo by Steven Sebring