CONCERT MEMORIES:
*Note: if you were there
and would like to share your memories, pictures or tape please send it info@rirocks.net
Patti Smith’s New Year’s Eve vow: “We
must not behave!”
January 1, 2017 by Howard
Mandel (https://www.artsjournal.com)
Ushering in 2017 with Patti Smith and band at Chicago’s Park West New
Year’s Eve was inspiriting for us of a certain age and artsy disposition.
Grey-haired but loose and limber — funny, fierce,
profane and poetically incantatory — Smith celebrated her 70th birthday in the
city of her origin as if for all boomers and our progeny. At the Riviera Theatre
on Dec. 30 she performed the whole of Horses, her
winning 1975 debut album; on the 31st, backed by her four-man Nuggets, she
offered a mixed bag including Debbie Reynold’s plaintive “Tammy,” the Doobie
Brothers’ “Jesus Is Just Alright,” a Prince cover, vague comments that become
stories that turned images into phrases conjuring her anthems “Gloria,” “Because
the Night” and “People Have the Power,” and for a finale the Who’s “My
Generation” — as a call to arms in the form of active humanitarianism united
in cultural bohemianism, a commitment to folk-rock-soul-art-literary-punk fun.
“2017 is the 50th anniversary of the Summer of
Love!” Smith exhorted the full house of hipsters — perhaps a third the 900
standing for three hours in a mosh pit, though most looked as well-aged as Smith
and her longtime guitarman, Lenny Kaye. “Our generation had ideals! We were
going to change the world with music, love, sex, drugs, understanding! This was
our weapon — ” she hoisted a Fender — “and now we’ve got to be strong! We’ve got
a voice! We’ve got to teach the young, they’re the future!” She waved at her
daughter playing keyboards, and hugged a Japanese guitarist who’d come from
Tokyo to sit in. “We must not
behave!"
Photo by Lauren Deutsch
Extraordinarily for a New Year’s Eve party, in
the middle of a show which had the immediacy of something thrown together with
and for friends, Smith broke into talking about people less fortunate that those
of us who’d gathered at some cost just for a good time. It was as if she made it
easier to enjoy by acknowledged how fucked up things are, on so many levels. She
complained of not understanding why people who need blankets can’t be given
them, people who need food or water aren’t provided for of
course, and segued into her sympathies for Syrian refugees and others
displaced by war.
Photo by Lauren Deutsch
This came off not as a self-righteous didactic
political statement but straightforward personal expression and the crowd
responded with a long moment of quiet solemnity. Which Smith broke by mentioning
he and the band were supposed to be revving up to a climactic midnight, so the
drummer resumed rocking, guitars chimed in, she sang with a throb and a catch in
her voice, bass lines led in a bumptious way to spinning, glinting, swirling
disco-ball lights and a cascade from the ceiling of colored balloons — “Happy
New Year! Stay strong!”
