Dancing Barefoot

Revel and I practiced this a few times last night and knocked it out this morning before coffee. We're clearly a duo act. Patti Smith's Dancing Barefoot, with feeling.

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.

Radio Logorrhea

Rich Lang sobered me up yesterday just long enough to get me onto his weekly radio show Living Faith Now. The cocktail he gave me on the way over (black coffee, Methadone, and Demerol — it's an old Methodist trick) acted like a truth serum, and I babbled on the air like some sort of a snake handling Pentacostal.

There were a couple of moments of lucidity, but my preceding hell week and the insomnia that went with it turned the show into more of a monologue than a conversation, and there are times, when I listen to the recording, where I wish I'd just shut the fuck up.

I coherently discuss Real Change, and get in some great stuff about structural unemployment and homelessness, and I probably manage to piss off ninety-percent of my allies by talking about how Lora Lake is a diversion from the larger problem we have in Seattle, but I get all vague and spaced out when I try to recall why the left is pathetic on class and I ramble and repeat myself when I talk about the problem with Ten Year plans and why I hate Philip Mangano so much.

In all seriousness, it wasn't my finest hour. I wish I'd done more to prepare.

Rich, however, charitable soul that he is, seemed to think it was OK, and bills me as "one of Seattle's finest provocative minds." Well, provocative anyway.

You can stream the show from the website. Rich's line-up up of previous usual suspects also includes the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness' Bill Kirlin-Hackett, the effectively low-key Michael Ramos, the irrepressible Alice Woldt, and Cecile Andrews, who, to my great delight, seems to cross my path every twenty minutes or so these days.

By now, most Lora Lake watchers know that an injunction was issued yesterday that will probably prevent the demolition of Lora Lake until after a March hearing. This legal maneuver comes out of the little discussed King County Housing Authority eminent domain threat that was issued a few weeks ago. Sandy Brown of the Church Council is quoted in the PI saying, "When I heard, I couldn't help but jump for joy."

There's a visual. Sandy pogoing in his office like Joey Ramone in a suit.

Speaking of seventies punk icons, Carolyn and I are going to see Patti Smith at the Showbox tonight. To commemorate the occasion, I found this highly unlikely clip on YouTube: Patti Smith in 1979, on ABC's Kids are People Too, belting out Debbie Boone's You Light Up My life with Joe Brooks on Piano.

It's a little embarrassing, but she's very sweet as she answers questions from girls in the audience and talks about kids taking back Rock and Roll from the corporate exec's. This was the year that Todd Rundgren produced Wave, Patti's final album before her period of professional retirement. Wave featured the brilliant but then unnoticed Dancing Barefoot, which was described by Rolling Stone as,

her mystical ode to sexual rapture. "I think sex is one of the five highest sensations one can experience," she said in 1978. "A very high orgasm is a way of communion with our creator." She added that she masturbated to her own album cover photo, as well as to the Bible.

A Lora Lake elegy and a rock laureate

Jennifer Langston's Lora Lake elegy and awaiting the arrival of Patti. It's in the PI.

My Enduring Crush On Patti Smith

I've been using Patti Smith as my work soundtrack this week. It's just the thing to boost the dopamine in my adderall-addled brain up into the happy zone where I'm capable of pretty much anything.

Anything.

While I was looking around last night I stumbled across her MySpace page and learned that she's coming to the Showbox on August 11th with her longtime guitarist Lenny Kaye. I bought two tickets.

Smith is best known for her 1975 debut album Horses, but I'm more of a Radio Ethiopia guy. Released in 1976, this next effort was far more raw, dissonant, and experimental, and made all the more remarkable by the fact that the top Billboard release of that year was The Wings' Silly Love Songs.

Although a few of Radio Ethiopia's songs have tight pop rock structures, most are more improvisational, leading reviewers to charge that Smith lost control of her band. Lenny Kaye's guitar and Smith's ad libbed heroin inspired mutterings on the ten minute title track just kind of blow my mind every time I hear it. Critics gave the album a thorough trashing and hated this song in particular, but they're all idiots. To me, Radio Ethiopia is the 70s high water mark of rock & roll.

Born in 1946, Patti Smith blew into the seventies as the intellectual punk poet androgyn who would redefine cool for the next several generations. She was lovers with Robert Mapplethorpe (who shot the iconic photo of Smith that graces Horses), Jim Carroll, and Tom Verlaine. Smith wrote songs for Blue Oyster Cult, and in the early days earned an income as a rock journalist for Creem. She is the grande dame of punk rock and, as she's returned to the stage over the last decade, wears the role with great dignity and grace.

Maybe it's my age talking, but I swear she's sexier at 60 than she was at 29. Take a look at the clips below of her doing Free Money in 1975 and Dancing Barefoot in 2006 and tell me you don't agree.