Review: Patti Smith at the Minetta Lane

Patti Smith at the Minetta Lane by Patti Smith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I got this one through Audible, but didn’t consider it a “book” until I saw the New York times had reviewed it. If it’s good enough for them, then I suppose it’s good enough for me.

I love Patti Smith at what I think of her as her best, as a kind of punk poet. I admit I get tired of her work (though not her, never her) when she lapses into the heavy recitation rhythm stuff, when she reads a poem mid-concert and seems to ask, implicitly, if we wouldn’t rather be sitting by ourselves and reading. No, no we wouldn’t – not even those of us who do happen to read our share of poetry in other circumstances.

But, on balance, I like Patti Smith very much, and I certainly enjoyed her Just Kids. It’s justifiably celebrated as one of the great rock memoirs.

This, it turns out, is a kind of greatest hits live. It’s her reading excerpts of her two memoirs and then punctuating them with live music. The memoirs are very good – I enjoy those prose breaks more than I do the poetry interruptions – but I’ve read them. And the music is generally great, but it doesn’t really rock here. For the most part, these are late-middle-aged reworkings of the classics, songs that – beyond their excellence – are supposed to matter here because of the context of her memoirs and because of what we bring to them from our past as well. They tend to linger, to move more slowly than the album versions or, presumably, the classic concert arrangements.

This is, in effect, Smith’s answer to Springsteen on Broadway. She isn’t selling out at a major theater, but she is reuniting with her fans. She’s talking through the music, not feeling that rock spirit but capably performing a script.

I doubt I’ll ever find Smith truly boring – and this is certainly not – but I did get the sense I’d heard it all before. She’s one of the rock queens, someone I’m glad to see basking in her well-deserved renown. I’d be interested in a full concert, one where we get to see her rethinking the music as music, slowing it down and drawing new nuances from it.

Framing the music in her strong memoirs makes it something that, live, must still pack a punch. Recorded – as something that we’re supposed to acknowledge as a book – it leaves me hungry for something purer: another memoir or another concert.


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