W.S. Walcott Medicine Show

I was a 16 year old senior in high school when Patti Smith’s Horses came out.  I’m sure I’ve told this story 100 times already but the head of my high school religion department turned me onto the album back then.  His office was adjacent to the senior lounge and during free periods, hanging out in the lounge, I would “card” (effectively break into) his office to listen to his stereo.  It was here that I first came across this black and white album cover with this woman on the cover who was dressed like a man.  I at first glance wasn’t sure what to make of it but I placed LP on the phonograph and was immediately bludgeoned over the head with Patti’s epic opening line of “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine”.    If we had emojis back in ‘75 it would have been the one with the exploding head for sure.  Oh, did I forget to tell you that I went to an all boy’s Catholic high school and to add a cherry on top of that, the head of our religion department was a middle aged priest.  Maybe this actually deserved 2 exploding head emojis.  I became fixated by Horses, much to the chagrin of my fellow classmates who were members of the typical mid 70’s adolescent male camp of Led Zeppelin, Queen, Aerosmith and Pink Floyd.  I would listen to it every free period that I had.  I’d eventually wear out my personal copy of the LP at home.  To this day, it is one of my favorite albums of all time.  Oddly enough, it wasn’t my favorite or even my second favorite album of the incredible year of 1975.  Those two spots would belong to Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks as well as Springsteen’s Born To Run.  But I have to be honest, over the years, Horses on any given day surpasses both of those legendary LP’s.

So needless to say, Patti and her current band of longtime partner in crime, Lenny Kaye, Jay Dee Dougherty, who’s been manning the skins every since the beginning, Tony Shanahan on keys, guitar and bass, and her son Jackson on guitar doing a 50th anniversary tour of Horses falls near and dear to my heart.  Over the years, I’ve tried to never miss any kind of appearance by Patti here in New York, be it a full band performance, a solo show, one of her birthday celebrations at year’s end or a reading of poetry and/or prose.  It never fails, but Patti makes each and every one of these occasions a special event, so hearing of a Horses at 50 tour, one knew that this would be something truly special.

Artists will often admit that performing albums start to finish in a live setting isn’t always the easiest of things to pull off.  The sequencing of songs on an album doesn’t always work in a concert setting, which oftentimes dictates a different kind of ebb and flow. Horses of course (name that TV show to which that phrase comes from) poses just such an issue with the opening track, “Gloria: In Excelsis Deo”.  In an ordinary set, “Gloria” would be the show’s crescendo, but on this tour it opens the show up.  

On Friday night at the Beacon,  Patti absolutely nailed it as she and the band came out on fire with Gloria and its aforementioned opening line of “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine”.  (Did I mention that this just might be the best opening line to an album EVER?).  Patti, herself appeared to be in excellent spirits as she egged the crowd on to sing along with the G.L.O.R.I.A chorus.  What a start indeed.  From here, true to the album, next up was “Redondo Beach” with its reggae tinged rhythm which had Patti prancing and sacheting across the stage as she triumphantly sang “I went looking for you, are you gone gone?”.

Which brought us to the first deviation from the original sequencing of the album, with ”Free Money” and “Birdland” switching places in the setlist.  “Free Money” opens poignantly with Tony Shanahan’s beautifully lilting piano riff (right out of the Roy Bitten songbook) before Patti begins her tender recitation of what almost sounds like a bedtime prayer, “every night before I go to sleep”.  A song which has for most of the last 50 years been misunderstood to be a love song, is actually a paean to Patti’s mother.  Growing up in a loving, albeit financially struggling household, “Free Money” is actually a dream song where the narrator dreams of winning that lottery ticket so that their mother can finally have all of those things which she never had the chance to enjoy.  On Friday, “Free Money” started out, as expected slow and tender before Patti gets to the triumphant line where she would “buy you all the things you need, for free” and like a lightswitch being turned on in the night, all of a sudden the song transformed itself into a punk rock anthem, with Jay Dee’s syncopated drum beats pounding, Jackson and Lenny trading guitar licks, and of course Patti exclaiming triumphantly “when we dream it” over and over “free money, free money”.  “Free Money”, more than ever, was a classic tale of love, suffering and ultimately triumph and Smith absolutely crushed it.

With “Birdland”, the tempo of the evening was taken down a notch as Patti recited her poetry over the background of Shanahan’s piano and Lenny’s guitar noise.  Harkening back to her pre- Horses days where she would make a name for herself as predominantly a poet as she and Lenny would make the rounds at rooms such as Saint Marks Church, Max’s Kansas City and of course later at CBGBs with Patti reading her poetry to the backdrop of Lenny on guitar.

With Smith’s ode to her sister “Kimberly” up next, things once again picked up as Jackson’s bouncing bassline filled the theatre and his mom proudly strutted back and forth on the stage proclaiming her love and devotion to her little sister.  

Prior to “Break It Up” we would get a fantastic monologue from Patti explaining where the song actually came from.  The way Patti explained it, as is often the case in her work, she had a dream and to make a long story short, Jim Morrison exploded out of a statue of Prometheus and using a take on Morrison’s own “Break On Through”, came the resounding chorus of “break it up”.

Closing out the Horses section of the evening, we got our second sequencing change with “Elegie” being transposed with the title tune “Horses”.  This switch of tunes was a no-brainer as the slow dirgelike “Elegie” was no way a song one would want to end a set with.  Meanwhile the passion and fury of “Land: Horses” with its reprise of the opening track’s “Gloria” refrain after its mashup of early 60’s dance tunes like bony maroney, mashed potato and the alligator  was the perfect ending to an electrifying set.

Patti, who will be turning 79 in December would leave the stage at this point for a well deserved respite while the band stuck around for a tribute to legendary band and friend to all, Television.  I will admit that this 3 song interlude was the biggest disappointment to me of the evening.  But let me be clear, it was no fault of the band whatsoever.  As a matter of fact the band was spot on perfect for the trilogy of “See No Evil”, “Friction”, and what might be one of my favorite songs of all time, “Marquee Moon”.  No, my disappointment was in the rather lackluster response this section of the evening got from the audience.  Television was and always will be a New York band.  They captured the grit and dirt and energy of mid to late 70’s as well as any band on the lower east side back in the day and I expected the New York crowd at the Beacon to be especially appreciative of their music.  But the reaction was rather staid and thus totally disappointing to this fan.  Of special note was Jackson Smith’s incredible job at capturing Tom Verlaine’s guitar sound and tone on “Marquee Moon”.  Verlaine, who will forever go down in my eyes as one of the most underrated guitarists of all time, had a sound as distinct as anyone and Jackson nailed it.

Coming out of the Television section of the evening, we got Patti’s wonderful cover of They Byrds’ “So You Wanna Be a Rock and Roll Star” followed by “Dancing Barefoot” from 1979’s Wave album.  Next up we would get “Piss Factory” which Patti nonchalantly dedicated to Sydney, whose anniversary of passing was that evening. Patti would off handedly thank Sydney for bringing her into this world with no further explanation.  As it would turn out, only a year or so ago, while Smith was doing research for her recent book, Bread of Angels, she discovered that Grant Smith, the man who raised her and to whom Patti considered her father, was indeed not her biological father.  And that is where Sydney comes in.  An Ashkenazi Jew, Sydney passed away in 1965 and it wouldn’t be until the results from a research DNA test for her book came back did she discover this revelation.

Sadly, the next song came with an intro from Patti that it had been written by herself and Shanahan back in 2003 as an homage to the people of Palestine. And here we were, over 20 years later and the poignantly touching words were never truer.  Patti would dedicate “Peaceable Kingdom” to the children of Gaza.

The evening’s main set would conclude with a scorching rendition of “Because The Night”, a song which Bruce Springsteen had originally asked Smith for help writing.  After some consternation, if she was interested in such a collaboration, it came to her while waiting for  one of her evening phone calls from her husband and eternal flame, Fred “Sonic” Smith.  During that anticipatory fleeting moment, the line “have I doubt, when I’m alone, love is a ring, a telephone” and at that moment, she realized that she had come up with the hook for her friend Bruce’s unfinished tune.

For the encore, Patti and band would be joined by Jesse Paris Smith, Patti and Fred’s first born.  With Jesse on keyboards and Jay Dee coming out from behind the drums, we got a moving performance of “Ghost Dance”, a chanting tune heavily influenced by the North American Indigenous ghost dance movement of the late 19th century which exemplified both hope and survival.  And of course the evening would fittingly come to a close with Patti and Fred’s anthem of the people, “People Have The Power”.  While the song was teased earlier on in the set as part of “Peaceable KIngdome”, playing it in it’s entirety (as always) was in all

actuality the only way to end an evening with Smith.  Patti would tell us that when she and Fred were writing the song, that his hope was for them to write an anthem.  An anthem of hope and joy.  An anthem that captures life and the desire for all people to triumph over despair.  Well on Friday night at The Beacon Theatre, Patti Smith and her band accomplished Fred’s dream of creating such an anthem.  Patti was able to revel in the moment while she barely had to make any kind of effort to get the 2500 people filling the room to sing and shout the prophetic words:

The people have the power

The people have the power

The power to dream, to rule

to wrestle the world from fools

it’s decreed the people rule

it’s decreed the people rule

we have the power

People have the power

we have the power…

Sadly Fred’s words are more true today than ever before and while he could never have imagined the state of where we are in today’s society, as Patti so aptly stated from the stage on Friday night, he was looking down on everyone there that night, smiling and cheering us on to victory.

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