Musical legend Patti Smith entered the sunlit Second Presbyterian Church, its white walls reflecting the blue light of the stained glass window, to boisterous applause on Monday evening. And the living were not the only ones rising for her.
“I got quite a welcome as I was walking in,” said Smith, who gave a surprise pop-up poetry reading and performance the day before her June 4 scheduled Spoleto Festival USA concert. “This headstone on the right side says Patricia Smith. And on the left side is Edward Lee, and my middle name is Lee. So I feel fully represented.”
Spoleto teased the event on social media just three days earlier, with a black-and-white photo of a collared shirt and “Words & Music: A special evening with ….” By the time Smith’s special show was announced on June 1, tickets were already gone.
The pop-up show, which included seven songs, marks the first collaboration between Spoleto Festival USA and the Charleston Literary Festival.
For Sarah Moriarty, the literary festival’s executive director, having Smith mediate between words and music was evidence of her gifts as a writer as well as a songwriter.
“She’s a rock’n’ roll music icon, but she’s also a literary figure,” said Moriarty, who is married to Spoleto Festival USA General Director Mena Mark Hanna.
The living dead
Two-thirds of Smith’s touring band – Tony Shanahan and her son, Jackson Smith – accompanied her on the songs. But she was also supported by Sam Shepard, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Mapplethorpe, Fred Smith and Jerry Garcia, even in death.
In addition to her own poems, she also read “A Supermarket in California,” Ginsberg’s 1956 tribute to Walt Whitman, one day before Ginsberg’s birthday and two days after Whitman’s.
“I always like to remember Allen on his birthday,” the 78-year-old Smith said. “As Bob Dylan says, ‘Salute him when his birthday comes.’”
An even bigger portion of the event was dedicated to Robert Mapplethorpe, Smith’s friend, lover and collaborator of almost 20 years. Among her readings were two moving excerpts from her book Just Kids — a story about a snowy day in New York City and a letter sent to Mapplethorpe before his death in 1989.
Her cover of Tim Buckley’s “Phantasmagoria in Two,” a song that she and Mapplethorpe loved throughout their relationship, brought some audience members to tears, despite her fear of butchering it at Second Presbyterian.
“This song made us happy and romantic, but it also made us cry,” said Smith, who introduced her rendition as being the first time she had ever sung it in public. “I always wanted to do it, but it’s really not in my range.”
Smith then read her poem “Wilderness,” written after the death of her husband, the MC5 guitarist Fred Smith. This heartfelt poem about grief required no lengthy introduction — only a few words.
“I lost my beautiful husband, the love of my life, at the end of 1994, and this poem is written for him,” she said.
Before closing the gate of her heaven, Smith honored Grateful Dead lead guitarist Jerry Garcia, who died in 1995. While earlier readings and songs in the event had carried sadness and nostalgia, her tribute through the song “Grateful” was filled with hope and laughter.
“Maybe in this setting, it’ll make perfect sense,” Smith said, “but I had a vision of Jerry Garcia’s head floating and Jerry smiling. And it wasn’t like seeing Jesus in a potato chip. It was like he was right here.”
Finding holiness
The irony of dropping an F-bomb in a church was not lost on the crowd. As Smith stopped herself with the profanity at the beginning of “Beneath the Southern Cross,” laughter rang through the space. Yet the profanity did not take away from the reverence of the evening.
Smith seemed well aware of the significance of the venue. Before performing “Phantasmagoria in Two,” she told the crowd, “This seemed like the perfect place to fail. A beautiful, forgiving place.”
From where Smith stood, a stained glass mosaic depicting Jesus on the Cross stared down at the artist and her band. Sometimes, with her eyes closed and arms out, Smith almost mirrored Christ behind her.
Standing up for her beliefs
To close the evening, Smith leaned into her political side, performing “Peaceable Kingdom.” Before beginning the song, Smith addressed her concerns with the state of the world, dedicating the song to children killed in war. “It’s an illusion that people win wars,” Smith said. “Because if one child is lost to the war, the war is already lost.”
“Peaceable Kingdom” questions the lack of empathy that war breeds, with Smith hoping that the world will push back against it. At the end, she added on the first verse and pre-chorus of her protest anthem “People Have the Power,” inspiring an audience member in the front pew to stand and applaud.
Smith’s performance served as a reminder that pockets of joy can exist even in bleak times. And when hope feels lost, the punk rocker provides words to live by: “The people have the power / To redeem the work of fools / Upon the meek the graces shower / It’s decreed: The people rule.”
Ally Watkinson and Mathilde Refloch are graduate students in the Goldring Arts Journalism and Communications program at Syracuse University.
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