Patti Smith She is primarily known for her role as a singer and composer, but those who know her work know that she is as passionate about music as she is about poetry. And also that one of her great references in this field is Federico Garcia Lorca. With the city of this, Grenadewill be back this Saturday 21st to give a show in the Generalife gardens, as part of the series of concerts called 1001 Músicas Festival.
Reunion is an appropriate word because this is not the first time that the 77-year-old artist has visited Granada. In 1998, he inaugurated a series of shows to commemorate the centenary of Lorca’s birth and ten years later he returned to offer an acoustic and intimate concert with the San Vicente Gardenone of the houses where the poet lived. He visited her and, without an audience, played his piano. Later, she said she felt “connected to the artistic legacy” of the Granada writer.
The format with which he returns to Granada does not suggest, in principle, a night loaded with decibels, although as he is a hurricane on stage, you never know. He performs in front of the Patti Smith Quartet, completed by his son Jackie Smith on the guitar, Seb Rochford on drums and Tony Shanahan he does a bit of everything, because he plays several instruments.
Born in Chicago In December 1946, at the age of 21, he moved to new York to try to make it as a writer. His adventures during those years when he shared a house with the photographer Robert Mappelthorpeare collected in her autobiographical book, “We Were Children,” and explain how difficult it was to make a living in the Big Apple.
Pioneer of punk
But in the 70s there was a musical revolution that changed everything: it was punk that lit the fuse in New York, although it became more popular later when it crossed the Atlantic and settled in London, loaded with safety pins. Patti Smith was one of the regulars at the legendary CBGB club, where they started Blondie, Ramones, Talking Heads or Televisionand in 1975 he joined this select club when he released his first album, “Horses”.
Then came ‘Radio Ethiopia’, ‘Easter’ and ‘Wave’ to complete a first poker which, without reaching the top places, earned him a good handful of followers. They liked his committed and sometimes, at least for the time, provocative lyrics. He got into trouble for reading during a concert: “Jesus died for the sins of others, not for mine” just before singing “Gloria”, a gem he borrowed from Van Morrison.
Collaboration with another consecrated person called Bruce Springsteen – well, at that time, in 1978, it was not yet the case – earned him the song “Because the night” and probably the biggest hit of his career, a thirteenth place in the North American charts. Of which he never again approached the first positions.
He didn’t care either, he always went his own way. It was enough for him that people sang anthems like “People Have the Power,” which she wrote with her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith -who was the guitarist of the seminal MC5-to lock himself in a studio from time to time to record new songs and to go on tours during which it is rare that he does not walk the living animal that he has always been.
