Great Moments In Ukulele HIstory

Another blow-off post from the man who can't keep up. One of my peak concert experiences ever was Patti Smith doing Smells Like Teen Spirit last summer at the Showbox. This, had I seen it, may have rated a close second. The anthem of Generation X, played by the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. Part of the charm here is that the audience can't quite believe what they're seeing. For comparison purposes, I've included Nirvana's brilliant original, which unexpectedly became the most popular MTV video of all time.

Below are college orchestra and piano versions of the same song. I usually don't go for videos with a still image, but the piano arrangement is so beautiful I'm making an exception.

Patti Smith and Duende

The poet Lorca has spoken of duende, a word sometimes translated as "primal earth magic" that has only recently begun it's migration northward to enter our language. I've always understood it to mean the experience one has of a performer who seems somehow rooted in the earth itself, who seems to channel the power and groundedness of the universal through themselves so as to somehow have it resemble a fucking freight train as it hits you between the eyes and sends chills up the back of your spine.

Patti Smith, last night at the Showbox, had duende to spare. The first few songs were knocked out nicely. I thought, based on her Redondo Beach warm up, that this might just be a night of familiar tunes delivered with professionalism and polish. I'd have been OK with that. I mean, anyone born in 1946 who can still hop up on stage and be a credibly sexy rock & roller deserves respect. Looking around the crowd last night, at 46 I may easily have represented the statistical mean.

But Patti Smith is nobody's fucking nostalgia act.

The moment of lift-off arrived three songs into the set, when she picked up a soprano clarinet and started honking waves of gorgeous dissonance into the microphone as the band launched into Hendrix's Are You Experienced. From there, the show never came back down, and I don't recall the last time I saw a crowd so completely slain by anyone. She was transcendent.

For a moment, as hundreds of forty and fifty somethings stomped their way with Patti through Gloria, I thought the floor was going to give way and that's how I was going to die. It would have been a stupid but happy ending to a short, charmed life.

Other highlights for me included an absolutely gorgeous version of We Three, and her scorching close with Rock & Roll Nigger, the outsider rock anthem of all time.

The sweetest moment came with the Nirvana cover, off her new album Twelve, which was simply beautiful and, again, delivered with great duende. The video from a show last April gives a sense — especially in its last few minutes — of last night, but you also have to imagine a more rocked up band, joined by REM's Peter Buck, and the crowd screaming back "hello, hello, hello, hello" loud enough to match.

Smith, whose remarkable life includes a relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe that extended through his tragic death from AIDS, was a great admirer of Kurt Cobain and was angered by his suicide. She told a reporter from Rolling Stone, "When you watch someone you care for fight so hard to hold onto their life, then see another person just throw their life away, I guess I had less patience for that."

Below is a clip from the 70s that I love, wherein Patti pogoes. Ask the Angels.

On the Other Hand ...

If there's anywhere that one can access the Dionysiac it's at a good rock show.

The past few weeks I've been obsessed with Nirvana's In Utero album. I was alone this morning and cranked the stereo as far as the speakers would take it and listened to Milk It about six times straight. The pain of the lyrics and the rawness of Kurt's voice on this song goes straight to that fucked up space in my soul that I'd rather not talk about. There's this place where he does something between a sob and a chuckle that just slays me every time.

I got to thinking that there had to be something out there that captures a bit of what Nirvana must have been like live, and found this, from a show on February 6, 1994, in Cascais, Portugal. Two months later was the tragic suicide. It's funny how something like that can brand an inconsequential detail into your brain.

My wife and I had just moved to Seattle three weeks prior, on March 14th, and landed in a little student apartment near University Village. We went shopping at the QFC, where I got all nostalgic for my youth and bought one of those Chun King chow mein things, with the juice and vegetables in separate cans. On the way out of the store I saw the headline.

We went home and made the chow mein. It sucked.

As a newcomer to Seattle and not a huge grunge fan, I was unprepared for the city-wide paroxysm of mourning that followed. It wasn't until later that I grew to appreciate what Nirvana meant.

While the sound quality of this clip leaves a little to be desired, you really get a taste of the experience. On the first note of Heart Shaped Box there's a roar, and the crowd starts singing and clapping along, and then on the chorus, they come in full force. There's way more than just the music going on here.