PATTI SMITH IN FRANCE OCT 2021
Patti Smith is in Paris for two concerts at the Grand Rex, Friday October 8 and Saturday October 9. It had been more than two years since the singer, a great Francophile, had not returned to France. A few weeks away from her 75th birthday, the rock poet keeps her energy intact in concert, and an asserted science of symbolism, as evidenced by the week she has just passed.
The life before seems to have taken back its rights, since Patti Smith is in Paris. After an essentially Franco-French musical summer, there is no shortage of opportunity to hear the most Rimbaldian of American singers in two historic monuments. Thursday, October 7, at an unusual time, that of the Sunday office, she entered the Pantheon to celebrate the 50 years of FIP radio by performing five songs in front of about fifty guests – a retransmission is scheduled on the antenna on November 26 at 8 p.m., with Sting’s concert recorded the day before. The next evening, she found herself under a luminous arch for the first of her two meetings at the Grand Rex, the splendid Art Deco room on the grand boulevards of Paris.
No album to promote since the latest one, Banga, date all the same in 2012. On the stage, Patti Smith was made less rare, since seven French dates – including two at the Olympia – had occupied her agenda in August 2019, a few months before a coronavirus appeared in China. Only the pleasure of singing and finding his audience justifies his presence in these places. At the Pantheon, she came with her family, accompanied, on the piano, by her daughter, Jesse Paris (a testament to her love for the French capital) and, on the dry guitar, by her son, Jackson. Not without having previously gone down to the crypt, where a much contested petition demands that the“Secret lover” of his youth, Arthur Rimbaud. But it will be a woman born in a land of blues, in Saint-Louis (Missouri), who will be admitted there on November 30: Joséphine Baker.
Expressive power
This voice playing alternately prayer and psalmody, anger and the call to arms naturally finds its place under the Christ of Hébert and next to the marble group. To the glory of the generals of the French Revolution. For songs of grace like Wing and Grateful, or a tribute to ” workers “ in times of pandemic, My Blakean Year. In the sweetness and intimacy.
At the Grand Rex, on the other hand, the amps and the big sound are out. The Smith children are associated with two lifelong companions, guitarist Lenny Kaye and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, plus bassist Tony Shanahan, who has been around since the end of Patti Smith’s domestic retirement in the mid-1990s. New York punk rock , which it took to the highest in the 1970s, regained all its rights from Dancing Barefoot. At 74, the pythia with gray braids and an unchanged cloakroom (black on white) has lost none of its expressive power, nor of its art of provoking climaxes through lament, scansion, shamanism.
Patti Smith by Lynn Goldsmith, Easter photo session 1978
