The first words I and probably lots of other people ever heard Patti Smith sing were: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.”
I was 17, give or take, entering the world of Horses via its first track, Gloria, and its first thrilling, transgressive lyric. It sounded iconoclastic, independent, as good a refusal of an inherited morality as you’re ever likely to hear. I was smitten.
On Wednesday I saw Patti Smith perform in a church, and not just any church: St Paul’s Cathedral. Jesus was not just in the building but perched high up above us all. He hung from his cross as he hung over Patti. The statue, like almost everything in St Paul’s Cathedral, is opulent and colourful and huge and old. How powerful the tension here, an atmosphere both hushed and overwhelming. The awe-inducing power of an institution - of an idea - to nourish people’s souls while it keeps them in their places.
Patti didn’t sing Gloria at this gig, oand therefore those astonishing words, or indeed anything off Horses. Neither did she mention Jesus. You might say she was respectful. I’d say Patti Smith saved her reverence - as she does these days in her shows and on Instagram and Substack and in the books she has continued to write since Just Kids first captured her youthful artistic and romantic flowering in New York City in the 70s - for the voices of the past she brings so vividly and thrillingly to life whenever she speaks or sings or writes. These days Patti is a curator and connector of her own pantheon, an idiosyncratic but proud tradition of poets and writers, rebels and angels, dreamers and visionaries, heretics and truth-tellers. She conjured those voices so that they too danced and sang on stage. In aggregate they pitched Patti quietly and determinedly against the setting in which she sang. They lent a gentle note of transgression which ran through everything. Of course it made the venue come even more alive.
Lights glowed like candles beneath the central dome as Patti Smith sang. First Ghost Dance, intoning “we shall live again” and encouraging the spirits to return. She talked then about the memorial to William Blake in the crypt below us (but left unmentioned Blake’s idiosyncratic take on Christian spirituality), before singing My Blakean Year. She talked about Dr Martin Luther King Jr, who stopped off in London on his way to Oslo to collect his Nobel Peace Prize and addressed a congregation from the pulpit in St Paul’s. Patti was greatly moved, she said, to sing in a place where Dr King spoke. She celebrated not the institution or the building but the great voices that had passed through it. The building couldn’t help but make its contribution anyway, helping her voice, clear and pure as water, rebound around the space. The acoustic show felt exciting and dangerous. Huge.
Patti sang Bob Dylan songs. Two, in fact, each sounding like scenes from the Bible that didn’t make it past the censors. One, The Man In The Black Coat, is a song whose protagonist may be the devil and who tempts a woman away from her partner. It is mysterious, illicit, mythical, dark. The other was A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, which is of course a kind of folk re-telling of the Revelation, part threat and part promise of an imminent apocalypse, man-made and tragic, a mirror held up to the world we’ve made for ourselves, and a long list of reasons we might want to escape it. The reportage of the “darling young one” comes in four parts - where he’s been, what he’s seen and heard, and who he has met, each a beautiful and terrible horseman all its own - with the fifth verse a kind of ‘what now’ conclusion. It is both empowering and horrifying, for what is there to do but stand against the horror.
The song circled around the dome endlessly, bewitchingly, at times maniacally. I thought of the dancers on the hillside in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.
Before she began that song Patti told us how she’d “brought the wrong glasses” to the stage and would struggle to read the piece of paper she clearly hoped to rely on. At one point during the song she missed her cue and stumbled over its strange timing, losing her place in the printed words or the music of both. After the song she told us how she practised the song over and over so she could sing it at the ceremony for Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize, only to blank on the words in the middle of that performance too, with the eyes of the world on her. It made me think of Malcolm Gladwell’s parapraxis theory of Elvis - his ‘Freudian slip’ that caused him to continually stumble over a section of Are You Lonesome Tonight? - and I wonder what unconscious forces might be crowding their way into Patti’s mind when she sings this song. “I’ll know my song well before I start singing,” it ends.
Patti dedicated a song to Sylvia Plath, and it turned out to be Pissing In The River. “Voices, voices, mesmerise”, she sang. It’s a song about abandonment, about whether to begin the fight or the journey that might secure its opposite. It’s about love, of a person I think, though it’s hard not to think of it now as a dark-night-of-the-soul, a weighing up of on the one hand devotion, and on the other, apostasy. “Oh, I give my life to you. Should I pursue a path so twisted? Should I crawl defeated and gifted? Should I go the length of a river?” Is this all just pissing in a river, she thinks. Is the wrestle with futility worth it. The song came alive, a shamanistic power ascending within Patti, I thought, perhaps because to wrestle with such futility is itself a kind of enlightenment - one which, like Plath’s poetry, can outlive death.
At the end Patti sang People Have The Power, because she still believes that they do, that we can win against the immoral might of institutions. And before that she sang Because The Night, and it was thrilling to hear its lustful yearning - “desire is a hunger, the fire I breathe” - in a place where people have had their desires suppressed and demonised for 1400 years. “Touch me now, touch me now,” she implored, as the song built to a climax. “Love is an angel disguised as lust” she sang, scrunching up and discarding centuries of doctrine like it was the lyric sheet she threw away at the end of the Dylan song. The lighting pulsed red and fast in sympathy, or in anger. The walls behind Patti Smith and around the altar lit up red too. Jesus, hanging on his cross, looked down impassively. What might he think of what was being attested to below - celebrated, even, without shame. Lust, doubt, the search for meaning - the flaws that make us human, the traits labelled sin in his name.
The red continued to flash. Jesus appeared to blush.
Thank you for sharing this incredible night with you at Patti’s concert venue. So thrilling to see your gorgeous photos!