Patti Smith @ The Great Hall at Cooper Union, New York, NY 3/5/25
Bill: Patti Smith
Venue: The Great Hall at Cooper Union, New York, NY
Date: 3/5/25
Door: Free with Eventbrite "First Come First Serve" Advance Ticket
7pm Patti Smith
Active: 1967 (New York, NY via Deptford Township, NJ)
Latest Release: Banga (Columbia, 2012), (with Soundwalk Collective) Khandroma (Khu, 2024)
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This free show was more a Q&A with Kit Nicholls. There was an acoustic guitar ominously set up on stage next to a a couple comfy looking chairs. The event had advance "first come first serve" tickets, which of course meant a line in the pouring and ever intensifying rain before Cooper Union security started letting people in. Carefully, oh so carefully. You wouldn't want to make people miss out on as much rain as possible while people were getting situated unassigned. About 1/3 of the seats were reserved with white paper and with the concrete pillars of the Great Hall the sight lines were not so great for where the comfy chairs and guitar were. This meant normally great looking seats were obliterated by pillar, which meant people would take a seat in the rapidly filling room only to get up in a panic and realize they had better find something else. Fortuately, I was there early enough to also make this mistake, get stuck behind someone else aimlessly standing in the stairway and into my clean view seat. The pillar obliterated the podium, but that had nothing to do with Patti, just the introductory lecturer who came on after the introductory corporate-college video extoling the history and past appearances of The Great Hall had technical difficulties.
For a Q&A the host was average and broke a cardinal rule of injecting too much of himself on the interview for a showcase for the general public. Fortunately, we found out she is fine after collapsing on stage from migraine related dizziness in Brazil last January. She still gets a few headaches but in her estimation, she is ok. So after some other chit chat he whipped out a cute fox mask made by one of his studios. "You're a bit of a nut!" Patti proclaimed. I don't know if Patti knew Kit before the interview, but it seemed like he was solely there as head representative of Cooper Union’s writing department. She did bring a tambourine gifted to her by Robert Maplethorpe in 1967 that has survived all these years. That is what you see in the photos.
With an hour booked, there were only a couple songs tagged on at the end. With no band and no Lenny Kaye, Patti strummed out a track from 2004's Trampin', "My Blakean Year." Then she did her big hit acapella "Because The Night." I always thought it was written by Bruce Springsteen, but she says she wrote the lyrics about her deceased husband Fred "Sonic" Smith when they were courting. I don't know if he did some lyrics or did the melody and music to her lyrics but there you have it. The crowd then dispersed into the lover's night.
FOR FURTHER REVIEW:
Various Artists-No Alternative (1993)
Blue Oyster Cult-Agents of Fortune (1976)
Bob Dylan-Highway 61 Revisited (1965)
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