Marie Monday

So I saw Patti Smith yesterday and it was awesome.
I was surprised how good her voice was, she still sounds beautiful. Anyway her being old was not a serious obstacle; of course the concert moved at a slightly slower pace than average, with Patti sipping tea and making jokes between the songs, but that's fine as long as the performances are still vibrant. She's very lively and witty still, dances around a bit, sings passionately.

At some point someone in the audience fainted (there were many old people in the audience of course) and she was very cool and adequate about it. She took him onto the stage and proceeded to make fun of it ("Things that people do to get on the stage" and later "You might notice I have a cough. Don't worry, I'm not sick, it's not contagious, and if I feel really bad I'll get up on my own stage") There was a pretty playful vibe to the whole concert.

The setlist was surprising, lots of poems and fragments from her written work (which worked pretty well, introducing Because the Night with a fragment from her book Just Kids was a high point) and odes to William Blake and Andrei Tarkowski. She also did some covers, from Neil Young (a straightforward but beautiful cover of After the Gold Rush) to U2 (!?). She didn't play a single song from Horses, which was a pity, but I could appreciate the I'll-do-whatever-the-****-I-want attitude (audience members: *requested songs from Horses* Patti: "I'm not gonna play any of those f*cking songs"). She clearly doesn't just want to do a greatest hits routine, which is cool. Everything she did play was great, except the U2 cover, which came from one of those Songs of Innocence/Experience albums and was meh, but seeing Patti play a U2 song was pretty funny (and disorienting, because she didn't introduce it beforehand so the whole song I was wondering what the **** they were playing).

On the whole I'd say seeing her is still worth it

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