As Patti Smith walked back onto the stage for her encore on Saturday, Nov. 15, she smiled and waved to the cheering crowds on all four sides of the Walt Disney Concert Hall.
“I don’t usually have the experience of playing in the round,” she told them. “I know so many people are really high up there, and they’re behind us.
“But I just want you to know that half the time I’m singing with my eyes closed anyway,” Smith said, smiling as the audience laughed. “So you’re all in my consciousness, always.”
That word – consciousness – means a lot to Smith, and always has. Her eyes might be closed, but still she sees the world around her in all its passion and poetry, the beauty in all lives, the power in its people.
The current tour is a celebration of the 50th anniversary of “Horses,” Smith’s remarkable debut album, a work that some consider the first punk rock album with Smith as the genre’s godmother.
Never had a woman looked out from a record jacket with the mystery and power of Smith in the black-and-white photograph taken by her friend Robert Mapplethorpe.
Never had an album combined poetry, the raw power of the punks and outsiders, rock ‘n’ roll music, and the kind of open-hearted love that this did.
“Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine,” Smith sang on Saturday over the slow piano chords of keyboardist Tony Shanahan. It’s the iconic opening line of “Gloria,” the opening track of “Horses,” and the sold-out crowd erupted in cheers at its arrival.
The song blends a poem of Smith’s with the rock standard “Gloria,” originally sung by Van Morrison with Them, creating something entirely new. As its second half arrived with a punch, most of the crowd were on their feet singing along with Smith.
The show, which spread 17 songs across two hours, took off then, too, the eight tracks on “Horses” providing the first half of the set. “Redondo Beach,” rolled along on a light reggae rhythm, sounds like a love song, though a friend’s undoing unfolds in its lyrics.
“Free Money,” like many songs in the set, opened with a softness, just Shanahan’s keys and a bassline from Jackson Smith, Smith’s son with her late husband Fred “Sonic” Smith of the MC5. Then the chorus hit and the song exploded, with guitarist Lenny Kaye and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, both of whom played on “Horses,” adding power to the mix.
“Birdland” followed in similar fashion. Smith delivering long, spoken-word passages about a boy who believed his dead father departed on a UFO, then singing as the band kicked in for the choruses.
Smith didn’t speak much during the performance of side one of the album, but for the songs on the flip side, she offered bits and pieces of backstories for some.
“Break It Up,” which she cowrote with her friend and former boyfriend Tom Verlaine, sprang from a dream in which she was lost in a forest and stumbled upon a marble statue of Jim Morrison.
“In this clearing, this beautiful marble statue was lying, like Prometheus with longish hair and chains all edged in marble,” Smith said as the audience listened raptly. “Like from the hand of Michelangelo. I was standing there looking at it. It was so beautiful.
“And I suddenly felt this life force that seemed to be radiating or emanating from the statue,” she said. “I closed my eyes, and I did sense the screaming of the butterfly. Then I knew it was Jim Morrison. So in my dream, I was saying, “Break it up. Break it up, Jim. Break it up.
“And I kept crying, ‘Break it up,’ until it was like a great thundering crash and the marble statue split in two and Jim Morrison emerged with wings and flew away,” she said, waving her arms gently in memory of a dream.
The “Horses” set wrapped up with “Land,” an epic that ran nearly 15 minutes long, the band shifting sounds and volumes as Smith spoke and sang the story of a boy named Johnny, who roams the world, searching for rock and roll amid scenes terrible and beautiful.
In its current version, the song is updated to reflect the woes of the modern world, including environmental damage, the exploitation of children and more, until the finish brings Johnny home, Smith singing, “In the sheets, there was a man, dancing to a simple rock and roll song.”
With “Horses” finished, Smith took a short break, leaving the stage for her band to play a trio of songs by Television that included “See No Evil,” “Friction,” and “Marquee Moon.” That band, which Tom Verlaine founded, and Smith’s group played a six-week residency at the punk club CBGB around the time “Horses” was made.
“Two sets a night, four nights a week, learning how to become,” Kaye said while also noting that Jackson Smith was going to play the Television songs on one of Verlaine’s former guitars. “It was a beautiful time.”
Smith returned to deliver some of her best-loved songs outside of the “Horses” album, starting with a lovely rocking run through “Dancing Barefoot” and “Peaceable Kingdom,” a song which Smith said she and Shanahan wrote 22 years ago for the Palestinian people.
The main set ended with “Because the Night,” which she said she’d written after her band played Detroit for the first time on March 9, 1976, and she met Fred “Sonic” Smith, whom she’d soon marry. Co-written with Bruce Springsteen, it’s her highest-charting single, having reached No. 13 in 1978, and again, the crowd rose to sing and dance with Smith and the band.
The encore opened with “Ghost Dance,” which Smith and Kaye wrote for the Hopi people years ago, though the peace she’d hoped for Native Americans is yet to come.
“I believe in our country, the current administration does not show the love and respect and gratitude for our people, for our Hispanic people, our Native Americans,” she said before the song. “All the more reason we radiate love and respect and understand and help and fight if we can to keep their land.
“Right now, there’s so much so much desire from our current administration to take our lands, our public lands, the native American sacred lands and monuments and just drill the (bleep) out of it,” Smith ended. “So we have to fight if we can.”
Then, with her daughter Jessie Paris Smith and the band, the night wrapped up with “People Have the Power,” the anthem Smith wrote with her husband while pregnant with Jessie, a joyful sing-along prayer of a song that imagines a world where we the people live in peace and harmony.
“I was dreaming in my dreaming. God knows a purer view,” Smith sang. “As I lay down to my sleeping, I commit my dream to you.”
“People have the power,” she continued, her fist raised above her head, and now joined by everyone in Disney Hall. “People have the power.”