Location: Grado / Diga Nazario Sauro / Italy
Date: Monday, August 2, 2010
Just a stone’s throw from the Slovenian border, on the other side of the Gulf of Trieste, Patti Smith played as the guest on the final night of the 2010 Grado festival. She’s one of the godmothers of the punk movement, though at heart she’s a sworn member of the flower-power generation from the turn of the sixties into the seventies, when the hippies ruled the world. These days Patti Smith is roaming the Italian peninsula, and the Grado show was the easternmost point of her mini Italian tour. The venue sat right on the shore in the very center of town. The seaside setting shamelessly flirted with the one at Simon’s Bay in Izola, while the black sky and menacing flashes of lightning all around added an extra charge to the atmosphere. Without meaning to, I found myself remembering the Jethro Tull concert I went to last July in Udine, when the weather also brewed trouble the whole time, but the sky only broke open once the show was over. This time we got away reasonably dry too, thanks to “brother thunder” and “sister nature,” as Patti called them, who struck with full force at exactly the moment we were climbing, happy and full of concert impressions, into our trusty steel steed. But let’s start at the beginning!
Before the American musician took the stage, a local singer-songwriter got his turn, but unfortunately I don’t know his name. Armed with an acoustic guitar, he walked through a set of original material with a quality pedigree, and spiced it up with a rendition of Springsteen’s The Ghost Of Tom Joad. His one-dimensional rock anthems and his whole performance are easiest to compare to the Boss himself. What kept the energy and charisma of his songs from matching Springsteen’s vision of music perfectly was only a strong folk streak, courtesy of the accompanying harmonica. Despite a decent performance, it seemed that this melancholic, emotional musician’s set, played while everyone waited for the main attraction of the night, drifted past the Italian ears and out toward the open sea.
After a short break, it was time for Patti Smith! The members of the backing band took their places on stage first and kicked things off, and only with the opening verses did their boss get spat out onto the stage, charisma and all. A laid-back, mellow start that practically begged for a sleepy lazy afternoon 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 electric guitars this time, and it came off damn well, since a purely 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’s persona and work come from.
Understandably, a big chunk of the program was made up of songs any devoted fan can identify with. Gloria, Redondo Beach, Birdland and Beacuase The Night, which she wrote together with Bruce Springsteen way back in 1977, were all there. Worth a mention are the covers of People Who Died (Jim Caroll) and Play With Fire (The Rolling Stones), with which Patti proved she’s an incredibly open-minded artist, able to connect with angrier punk rock elements as well as the far subtler legacy of blues-rock legends, while wrapping those covers in her own recognizable style and keeping them captivating.
Patti Smith comes across as incredibly convincing on stage. She’s a charismatic yet utterly simple figure. The show is a patchwork of mellower and more energetic rhythms that weave together and trickle into one another like 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 grew up in, when flowers bloomed everywhere and young people were bursting with love. A smiling Patti planted those simple words straight into the audience’s hearts, and the message peaked 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 many-headed crowd up on their feet and right up to the stage, out of the theater-style seating area dotted with chairs. That was the final breakthrough of the invisible wall that had been holding back the flow of energy between the band and the audience in the first part of the show. It was instantly clear that this moment, which happens very rarely at concerts of this caliber, gave fresh strength to an already well-disposed band, so every moment after that was pure pleasure. It felt like a Patti Smith come fully alive was playing her farewell show! A few times she even slung a guitar over her shoulders, and the beautiful interplay of three acoustic guitars was just one more piece of the puzzle that made this evening, which, hand on heart, I hadn’t expected all that much from, truly unforgettable.
author: Urban Bolta
photos: Urban Bolta
