Author: Urban Bolta
Photos: Urban Bolta
Location: Diga Nazario Sauro / Grado / Italy
Concert date: 02.08.2010
Attendance: 500
Ticket price: €35
Just a stone’s throw from the Slovenian border, across the Gulf of Trieste, Patti Smith headlined the final night of the 2010 Grado festival. She’s one of the godmothers of punk, though at heart she’s a sworn child of the flower generation, from the turn of the sixties into the seventies, when the hippies ruled the world. These days Patti is roaming up and down the Italian peninsula, and the Grado show was the easternmost stop on her mini Italian tour. The venue sat right on the shore in the middle of town. The seaside setting shamelessly flirted with the one at Simonov zaliv in Izola, while the black sky and menacing lightning all around added an extra charge to the atmosphere. I couldn’t help remembering the Jethro Tull gig in Udine last July, when the weather also kept brewing trouble all night, but the sky only broke once the show was over. This time we got away more or less dry too, thanks to “brother thunder” and “sister nature”, as Patti called them, who hit with full force right at the moment we were climbing, happy and full of concert impressions, into our trusty steel steed. But let’s take it from the top!
Before the American singer took the stage, a singer-songwriter of local roots got his turn, though sadly I don’t know his name. Armed with an acoustic guitar, he ran through original material of quality pedigree and spiced up the set with a take on Springsteen’s The Ghost Of Tom Joad. His one-dimensional rock marches and the performance as a whole are easiest to compare to the aforementioned Boss. The only thing separating the energy and charisma of his songs from a perfect match with Springsteen’s view of music was a strong folk component, courtesy of the accompanying harmonica. Despite a satisfying performance, it felt like this melancholic, emotional musician’s set, with everyone waiting for the main attraction of the night, drifted past Italian ears and out toward the open sea.
After a short break it was already time for Patti Smith! The members of the backing band took their places on stage first and kicked things off, and only the first verses spat their boss out onto the stage, charisma and all. A laid-back, mellow start that practically begged for sleepy lazing somewhere on the Adriatic coast was only shaken awake by the first big hit, Free Money, played third. Patti had the support of two acoustic guitars, while the keyboards, occasionally swapped for a synthesizer, took care of the organic sound. There was no room for the sound of electric guitars this time, and it worked damn well, because an exclusively acoustic set took Patti’s songs to a new level, amplified their message and ultimately colored the whole show with the authenticity of the seventies, the era that Patti Smith and her work come from.
Understandably, a big chunk of the program was made up of material every fan of her music can relate to. Gloria, Redondo Beach, Birdland and Beacuase The Night, which she wrote together with Bruce Springsteen way back in 1977, were all there. Worth mentioning are the covers People Who Died (Jim Caroll) and Play With Fire (The Rolling Stones), which proved that Patti is an extremely open-minded artist. She can identify with angrier punk rock elements as well as with the far more subtle legacy of blues-rock legends, while packaging those covers in her own recognizable style and still keeping them attractive.
Patti Smtih is extremely convincing on stage. She’s a charismatic yet utterly simple figure. The show is a jigsaw of mellower and more energetic rhythms that weave together and slide into one another like sand in an hourglass, and Patti ties them together skillfully with simple speeches in which she often mentions freedom, nature, following your heart and similar phrases from the time she was growing up, when flowers bloomed everywhere and young people were bursting with love. A smiling Patti laid those simple words straight into the audience’s hearts, and the peak of the message came with the closing song People Have The Power, which fit perfectly with an almost unbelievable moment from the middle of the show. Despite security stepping in at first, two “flower girls” managed to get the whole multi-headed crowd on their feet and right up to the stage from the seated area laid out like a theater. That finally broke through the invisible wall that had been holding back the flow of energy between the band and the audience during the first part of the show. It was instantly clear that this event, which happens very rarely at concerts of this kind, gave the already high-spirited band a fresh boost, so every following moment was pure pleasure. It seemed like a revived Patti Smith was playing her farewell show! A few times she also slung a guitar over her shoulders, and the lovely interplay of three acoustic guitars was just one more piece of the puzzle that made the night, which, hand on heart, I didn’t expect much from, truly unforgettable.
Photos: Urban Bolta
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