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Photos: The Young Adults at the Met

Live Reviews

From Bono to Blake

BACK THEN: Patti Smith in '75

At 60, Patti Smith remains something of an elder punk stateswoman. But she’s always had more than a little of the hippie beat poet in her too. She drew on both a week ago Wednesday at the ICA, during a program titled “On Words.” She’d booked a gig with band that week in Providence, but this was no rock show. Instead, she spoke extemporaneously, answered questions, read poems, and, yes, she sang songs as well.

Gray-haired and lithe as ever, she began the night by answering questions about rock celebs like Bono. She soon picked up an acoustic guitar to play “Beneath the Southern Cross” and Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” Both were gorgeous, plaintive. She strummed her way through a bridge in the latter, noting, “This is the part where a really good guitar player would do the solo.” She recited “Bird of Iraq,” a poem she’d written while suffering a migraine as the US bombing of Baghdad began. She’d wondered whether the birds sang; she found out later from an embedded journalist/friend that, no, right before the bombs fell the numerous little rooks went silent. Deadly serious at times, spinning lines like “gyrations on the edge of indifference,” Smith was not unfunny. She admitted that, yes, she’d considered Rimbaud her boyfriend when she was a lonely teen. And why not? It made as much sense as having unrequited love for someone her own age. She said she spent “a lot of time with” Rimbaud and joked that what they did together was her “business.”

The intent was to play it loose, have fun, and pack a few relevant punches. She talked of contemplating a Picasso who would never die just before he actually did. She told of hooking up again with her old friend playwright/musician Sam Shepard to record a bluegrass interpretation of a Nirvana song for an album of covers she has in the works. Perhaps the highlight was a new version of “My Blakean Year.” It began with allusions to Britney Spears (“I wish that I might have shaved my head/Then I might be on the cover of newspapers”), mutated into a condemnation of all the current president’s men, and ended on an upbeat note with the line “Joy will conquer all despair in my Blakean year.”