Changing Of The Guards (2007)

Another Dylan cover:

Madonna's Woes and Tramping Abroad

Madonna got into a bit of trouble overseas in France. link  I'm mostly bored with the details and won't go into them. The crowd's reaction reminded me of a Patti Smith concert I saw in Florence, Italy, back in 1979.  Smith really riled the crowd and retired from performing afterwards.

My mother salvaged an old diary I kept on that trip and returned it to me last month. Here's what I said about that concert then.

Martedì 10 settembre [1979]
Rome, Villa Borghese 

Wow what a night last night. I went to the Patti Smith concert at the stadium in Florence. The stadium looked like a huge bathtub. I couldn't believe it when I arrived. It was as if Led Zeppelin were playing. There were people all over 5 hours before the concert began. We waited away from the noisy mob collecting near the gates. I caught some sleep. Then there was a shout--the gates were opening. We made for the nearest gate.
After waiting in the hot noisy crowd (like so many grains of sand all trying to get through the neck of an hourglass) we broke through to the inside and picked ourselves some good seats.
Below it was like pigs to a feeding trough, pushing shoving, shouting, etc. I remember laughing as we watched people scaling the fence around the field track. At the top there was 3 wires of barbwire and some people would get their shirts or pants caught.
Well after some length of time the music began. First it was tapes. Lynyrd Skynyrd "Street Survivors" and then Dire Straits--"Down By The Waterfront."
When the equipment was tested, I thought at first it was just the roadies tuning up stuff, but then they played songs, rock like "You Really Got Me" and then quit--the tapes continued. But when the real band began I realized it was the same musicians.
Patti Smith had a hard time with the audience. First of all she barely knew a word of Italian, only "ti capisc" which she pronounced like "ti capeach."  Secondly the audience couldn't understand a word of English.
She had a problem with people climbing up on the stage--the crowd was absolutely unruly.
"Hey man, you wanna climb the stage, get your own stage, man."
The last song they played was "My Generation."  Before this though the guitarist played the first few notes of the Star Spangled Banner (like Hendrix at Woodstock) and a big American flag came up behind them. Then all the Italians gave it the finger. Then the Who song--then a finale and then chaos; people surged up onto the stage like the pressure of being pushed forward reached a breaking point.
Then "Hey man, get the fuck off the stage" but there was nothing that could be done.
Patti tried to talk with them. "Hey you know" she said to one, "you light up my life." She tried to get him to sit down at the piano "fucking sit down, asshole....how do you say sit down in Italian" she said through 80,000 pairs of ears--but to no avail.
The chaos ended when the road crew swept the undesirables off the stage and then, like a giant bathtub, the moment came when the plug was pulled and it started to drain, not without leaving a residue of paper, cans, and bottles though. So went the concert in Italy.

My own recollection of the same concert, written a year and a half ago from memory is here.
It's interesting for me to compare the two accounts--one fresh and the other filtered by 30 years of  experience and memory.

Frederick (1979)

Everybody Wants To Rue The World

Patti Smith is a long time favorite recording artist--warts and all. She's a much better role model than say, Madonna and that ilk. I like her cover of the Tears For Fears song better than the original version--though I do like their video.

I read once that she heard it in coffee shop or a mall somewhere in suburban Detroit and that it helped to inspire her to restart her career. Here's hoping.

Return to Florence

My Patti Smith Group concert ticket from their last performance in 1979

My best musical memory of 1979 was seeing the original Patti Smith Group play what turned out to be their last concert ever. Of course nobody knew that at the time. I didn't know for years after that it was their last concert. But after that show Smith went into semi-retirement, married Fred Smith and moved to Detroit to raise a family. And I was fortunately there that night.

The concert was in Florence and was just part of a glorious 1979 trip to Italy that summer. I could and should blog that whole summer experience because it was so defining and yet eye-opening for me. So much discovery. I came back and felt a little like il Marco Pollo, telling my Midwestern friends and family about good Italian coffee (which you could only get in fine restaurants in Madison then) and the food--OMG the food!  I even learned to love black olives.

The concert was, as the Italians might say, un disastro. The band's actual play list is recorded here and sounds vaguely familiar. There's a cache of photos here. Of course I look for myself in them. From my vantage point, a bit off to the right (stage left) and elevated in the stands just a bit, things look just as I remember them except that they're colored by my memories.

It's the chaos that happened at the end that I remember best. The crowd had been allowed right up to the stage's edge, which apparently was a mistake. But her real "mistake" was to raise an American flag during a penultimate song. The crowd went pazzo and took the stage. Patti Smith corroborates here. Unruly men surrounded her and cut her off from the other band members. Frightened and fearless, Smith improvised. She tried to humor them, playing them a piano rendition of You Light Up My Life. It became a real stand off and fortunately no real violence ensued. I felt helpless--as both a fan and as an American. She was surrounded by ostensibly adoring fans and yet she looked and acted like a hostage. That little concert stage scene foreshadowed the world stage because two months later Iranian students stormed our embassy in Tehran. It's all a bit surreal in retrospect.

I'll add another piece of material to the mix besides my concert ticket stub (above): a photo of a concert poster before the show:

Had people known what they had seen then they would have been tearing those posters off the walls after the show as souvenirs. I used to have a poster from the event--not the flimsy plaster-posters like in that photo but a gorgeous lithographed one, done on nice card stock with blue ink. A shopkeeper gave it to me before the show that day and I carried it to the show. When I search the photos from that historic concert, I'm always looking for my 19-year old self carrying that rolled-up poster. Sadly, I lost that poster somewhere along the long, long pathway from there to here but at least I still have the memories and thank God for that.

[Added: I augmented my memories with what I actually wrote at the time here]