patti smith

back in y2k, i took my future ex-girlfriend to a patti smith show at the gypsy tea room. my future sweetie was there that night, too, although we didn't know each other at the time, and talked herself out of a speeding ticket later that night when she happened to have the good fortune to encounter the one fort worth patrolman who was also a patti smith fan.

while we were waiting for patti and her group to hit, the soundman played a couple of albums in their entahrty over the p.a.: first electric ladyland, then a love supreme. "at least she's got good taste," i remember thinking, before la smiff took the stage and made me eat every derisive "noo yawk art creep" comment i'd ever made about her. it's nice when art and artists surprise us, even to the point of doing a 180 on previously held ideas and beliefs.

lately, we've been listening a lot to twelve, patti's covers rekkid which i gifted my sweetie for her b-day. while one might see such a project as a sign of fatigue or at least creative stasis for a writer like patti (who 'riginally made her rep as a poet 'n' journo back in the late '60s), she's always used covers as performance vehicles (think "gloria," "so you wanna be a rock 'n' roll star," um, "because the night").

here, she reveals herself as the closet hipi brawd you always knew she was (four of the twelve toons come from the tumultuous year of 1967), renders props to cobain and coolio (!), makes me giveashit about songs i hadn't previously by tears for fears and paul simon. in the fullness of time, her serviceable poet's warble has taken on a power 'n' beauty all its own, and her son jackson (who's supposedly the spitting image of his papa fred sonic, r.i.p.) even plays some gtr. in its way, this disc is as speerchully complete as the ones by jimi 'n' trane that patti used to preface her performance back in 2000.