Line-up

Headliner
Patti Smith Last time in Baltimore: 13 years ago

Venue

801 Chase Street, 21401, Annapolis, MD, US

Patti Smith biography

Patricia Lee Smith, aka ‘Patti’ Smith (born 30th December, 1946) is a multi-talented performer who is a seasoned poet, visual artist, and singer-songwriter. She was a leading figure of the punk rock movement in New York City in 1975 with her debut album, Horses.

Patti Smith was coined the ‘Godmother of Punk’, a hugely prestigious title, due to her original and unique fusion of genres, combining rock and poetry to create her music. As well as an incredibly fruitful solo career, Smith’s collaboration with Bruce Springsteen on her most widely praised song Because The Night, and gave her huge amounts of exposure and following.

Additionally, Smith has several awards under her belt, as well as being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, and winning the National Book Award in 2010 for her memoir Just Kids. Smith has also been nominated for Grammy Awards throughout her career. Influential for her musical style and poetic abilities, Smith’s lyrics and performances explore controversial topics from AIDS to Green Party ideologies, which has given her much attention. Patti’s band currently consists of Lenny Kaye on guitar, Jay Dee Daugherty playing Drums, and Tony Shanahan on bass and keys, adding great depth to her performances.

With 11 studio albums recorded by Smith over the years, her debut record, Horses, remains the most popular over the years, although Smith is still creating critically acclaimed music today. Several huge artists today such as Courtney Love and Candy Slice claim that their creative inspirations are due to Smith’s musical creations.

Live reviews

What else is there that’s left to say about Patti Smith? There’s no question that she’s a bona fide punk icon, having been one of the towering creative forces of the New York movement of the seventies. She’s been inducted - quite rightly - into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, won the National Book Award for her gorgeously poignant memoir Just Kids, and has influenced everybody from Morrissey and Jonny Marr to Courtney Love, and Michael Stipe to Madonna. It probably says a lot about the society that we live in that you never seem to hear the term ‘renaissance woman’ thrown around, but I can’t think of anybody it applies more readily to than Smith. Two years ago, she toured the UK for the first time in more than five years; the sheer variety present in the twenty-song sets that she typically played said everything you needed to know about what a career she’s had. She lent heavily on Banga, her most recent record, and played a handful of tracks from her classic Easter; thereafter, she plucked just one song each from a slew of her best-known albums, including Horses and Radio Ethiopia. A clutch of covers, too, proved that she’s not immune to taking cues from elsewhere herself, but honestly, you have to imagine she could have read the phone book onstage and had the audience enraptured; they turned up to see an artistic legend, and that’s precisely what they got.

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