Patti Smith - 18/06/13 - Shepherds Bush Empire

I’ve recently finished reading Patti’s autobiography/biography ‘Just Kids’. It’s both auto and bio because it also describes the life of Robert Mapplethorpe, who took the portrait which adorns the album ‘Horses’ as well as this shirt. Smith talks about growing up in New Jersey and failing to fit in. Eventually she takes a bus to New York City in the late 60s and begins the life of a struggling artist: living sleeping on sofas and struggling through dead-end jobs all the while trying to be an artist, who writes poems merely for her own amusement. Mapplethorpe is also an artist – painting and drawing and creating collages, with no interest in photography. Their friendship outlasts their love affair and we see them both accidentally adopt the mediums they became famous for. It’s a fabulous read, as you’d expect from a poet who’s lived the sort of life she has. It’s also a portrait of New York at its grimiest in the 70s and 80s as drugs and AIDS destroy the scene she was a part of. I’d recommend it as one of the top three music autobiographies, along with Joe Jackson’s ‘No Cure for Cancer’ and Julian Cope’s ‘Head On’. Between the three of them they give you every reason you should want to be a rock star, and every reason you should be glad you never were one!
This is the only ‘normal’ Patti Smith gig I’ve been to, having seen her do themed gigs in the past. It was a blast. The band are solid New York garage rockers and Patti was having a great time. New songs mixed with old and while the crowd was there for the classics, Smith gave them a hard time for not loving the new stuff, and answered every heckle.
The songs are lyrically dense – poetry squeezed into song with bizarre imagery and Eastern allusions crashing into everyday New York dialogue. Bodily functions form a love song (‘Pissing in a River’) then there’s the songs of rebellion – ‘People Have The Power’ and ‘Rock’n’Roll Nigger’ that turn the crowd into a roaring angry sea, and there’s ‘Land’ and ‘Gloria’ from Horses - the seminal album. If memory serves she even read a bit of the book, although I could be confused there. We got a bizarre cover of ‘Summertime Blues’ then later a set of 60s garage band classics sung by guitarist Lenny Kaye, and anther band member. It didn’t really make sense, but what do I know. My main memory of the night is Patti standing at the front of the stage, grinning and egging on the crowd, like a woman who knows exactly how she got there and how lucky she was to survive and right now couldn’t care less about anything but her art.