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This year’s Spoleto Festival features a potentially budget-busting array of popular musical choices. To wit, Mavis Staples, Patti Smith, Jeff Tweedy, Lucinda Williams, MJ Lenderman, Band of Horses, and Yo La Tengo. 

For the sake of solvency, I’ve limited myself to two performances, Patti Smith and Lucinda Williams. 

First up was Patti Smith, who appeared Wednesday at the Cistern, a splendid outdoor venue located on the College of Charleston’s campus.  

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I love Patti Smith. Her injecting high art references into three chord rock inspired me back when I was a wastrel grad student in 1975, a mere half century ago.  The album was Horses, its cover photo shot by Robert Mapplethorpe, her housemate.  What I love about that record is its expansive allusiveness, its juxtaposing via a sonic collage high and low art, Rimbaud and Boney Maroney, bats with baby faces doing the Watusi like Bela Lugosi. But, most of all, what I love is that it rocks.^[1]

In my old age, I purchase expensive concert tickets that put us way up front.  For Patti, my wife Caroline and I sat on the third row.  I was under the false impression that Patti might perform the songs of Horses in order, but she only sang one song from the album, “Redondo Beach,” a lilting reggae number whose light-hearted melody belies the lyrics’ first person account of a gay lover’s suicide. 

Why try to explain when you can listen to a snippet yourself.

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Anyway, the concert was laidback, with Patti filling up deadtime with friendly anecdotes while her band tuned and retuned their instruments in Kingston-Jamaica-grade humidity. 

Caroline was blown away, and so was I, though I really would have loved it if she had included “Gloria,” a mash-up of the Van Morrison/Them classic and some badass self-assertion:

I walk in a room, you know I look so proud
I move in this here atmosphere where anything’s allowed
Then I go to this here party and I just get bored
Until I look out the window, see a sweet young thing
Humping on a parking meter, leaning on the parking meter 

Oh, she looks so good, oh, she looks so fine
And I’ve got this crazy feeling that I’m going to, ah-ah, make her mine.

G-L-O-R-I-A!!!

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photo credit I-and-I

So tonight, we’re headed back to the Cistern to see Lucinda, which for me will be the third time.  She’s had a stroke, which she says affects her guitar playing, but I bet it hasn’t diminished that beautiful distinctive Southern vowel-rich hoarse voice of hers.

I certainly hope not.

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^[1] You can read a tribute to Patti by clicking HERE.