January 3, 2004

Enjoying the Moment, Patti Smith Celebrates Time's Passage

atti Smith probably wasn't the only performer in New York who welcomed 2004 by saying, "We salute the departed year, we salute our departed friends." But on New Year's Eve at the Bowery Ballroom she also found time for more unusual wishes and pleas and dreams.

About halfway through her set she said, "Happy New Year to John Walker Lindh, who is hopefully doing great studies and great meditations in government prison." Coming from another performer this message might have sounded tendentious or even self-serving, but Ms. Smith made it seem nothing more or less than an act of extraordinary kindness.

All night long the coming of the new year served as both a running joke ("So, uh, gee, I forgot all about our mission tonight," she said, with 10 minutes left in 2003) and as cause for something both wilder and heavier than hope. Ms. Smith turned 57 the day before, and although she didn't mention her birthday, she found appropriately complicated ways to commemorate both occasions. This was a party to celebrate the passing of time.

The concert began with one of Ms. Smith's most ecstatic songs, "25th Floor." Loud, sturdy chords kept pace while she intoned her shivery verses:

Desire to dance

Too startled to try

Wrap my legs round you

Starting to fly.

And early on, she brought out Steve Earle, who sang a loose, exuberant version of his "Transcendental Blues."

Ms. Smith released her first album, "Horses," in 1975, and part of the thrill of seeing her now is the thrill of seeing someone who has learned to enjoy her own performances fully.

Onstage she seems to do only and exactly what she wants to do. Whether reciting favorite lines by Rimbaud or leading the crowd in a protest song, she found joy in every moment, inevitably dissolving into a huge grin when another dense, tangled song was finished.

Her next album is due in March, and some of the new songs she played were unabashedly allusive: there was a serpentine ode to Blake and an oddly straightforward tribute to Gandhi. But the best moments were often the cagiest. For "Beneath the Southern Cross," from her 1996 album, "Gone Again," she picked up an acoustic guitar to strum a pair of chords, over and over, while she sang a vivid, splintered poem:

Oh to cry

Not any cry

So mournful that

The dove

Just laughs

And the steadfast

Gasps.

When 2004 finally came, Ms. Smith revived the ecstatic spirit she had conjured up at the beginning of the concert. She announced that "2004 is the year of ecstatic strife," and soon the countdown began. She brought her son, Jackson, onstage. (His garage band, Back in Spades, was the opening act.) And while she clutched a lyric sheet, they sang the Rolling Stones' "Salt of the Earth."

The rest of the concert was a typically engrossing, uncompromising mishmash of greatest hits, political protest and disarming generosity. She dedicated Bob Dylan's "I am a Lonesome Hobo" to the crew, and she urged audience members to fight to change the world. But she also offered more immediate advice for everyone celebrating the new year: "Drink plenty of water."