Patti Smith was there at the beginning of the punk rock movement. She was a frequent booking at the famed New York punk club CBGB, and she released high-energy albums in the same era as The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, and Iggy Pop. She share the rebellious nature of those punk bands, but her intelligent lyrics and more complex arrangements set her music apart from the frantic three-chord formula used by many of her contemporaries.
She established a reputation as a punk poet with the 1975 release of her debut album "Horses."
Fifty years later, Smith is touring to celebrate the anniversary of that landmark album. This week, the Chicago native brought the tour home with two performances at the Chicago Theatre. I caught the second night show on Wednesday.
Ms. Smith began the show by playing each track on the album in order. She prefaced each song with a brief story about its origin. She based "Break It Up" on a dream about Jim Morrison breaking free from within a statue. A conversation with Jimi Hendrix shortly before his death inspired her to write "Elegie."
At the conclusion of the album, Smith stepped off stage, allowing her band to perform a medley of songs by Tom Verlaine's Television, which they described as their "sister band."
Smith returned to the stage to sing, dance, shout, and spit for the remainder of the set, concluding with "Because the Night," her biggest commercial hit. She told the story of receiving the music from Bruce Springsteen and setting it aside until one night when she wrote the lyrics while awaiting a call from Fred "Sonic" Smith, with whom she was involved in a long-distance relationship.
Smith's band was excellent with Tony Shanahan on keyboard and bass guitar, JD Dorety on drums, Lenny Kay on guitar, and Jackson Smith on guitar and bass. Jackson is the son of Patti and Fred, and he was joined on stage by his sister, Jesse Paris Smith, who played keyboards during the encore. The encore began with "Ghost Dance," a tribute to Native Americans, followed by the anthem "People Have the Power," which inspired the crowd to sing along.
Patti Smith remained on stage long after the music stopped, taking photos, hugging her band and her children, and shaking hands with the audience. It was clear she did not want this homecoming to end.