A Celebration of Patti Smith, Carnegie Hall, March 26, 2025

This week was the 20th “music of…” tribute concert assembled by City Winery’s Michael Dorf, and this year’s honoree was none other than Patricia Lee Smith. I covered the show for Variety so you can read that over there. 

I have now been to 10 of these Carnegie Hall tribute shows over the years and my favorite element has always been figuring out what songs the artists decide they want to perform and how they interpret them. I still recall with great fondness Kimya Dawson’s modern dance and toy xylophone presentation of “World Leader Pretend,” or Adam Weiner entering the house from the back of the room while singing “Here Comes The Night,” or the Roots’ jaw-dropping rendition of “Down By The River.” 

I always talk about the bones of songs, of how you see their inherent strength when someone else picks them up and works with the words and the notes and the melody and the arrangement. Great songs will allow themselves to be deconstructed, provided that whoever is doing that work has the guts, the vision, and the talent to pull it off. Not everyone at these Dorf tribute nights has had those elements, or they have and have just totally missed the mark. I just re-read a bunch of my old blog posts about several of them (where I am way more unvarnished than I would have been in print or on assignment) and there have been some absolute doozies. 

On my way to NYC I went through the list of artists and tried to guess what song they might choose to perform. I wasn’t throwing darts at the wall, I really tried to take their repertoire and style into account against Patti’s catalog, so in the spirit of not repeating myself I thought it would be interesting to talk about each performance based on what I thought they’d do versus what they did do. Artists are in alphabetical order.

PAUL BANKS | Prediction: "Redondo Beach" | Performed: "Mother Rose"

Admittedly I am not a huge Interpol fan; most of my exposure was their opening slots for U2 and then going back to their records to see if I liked them better on vinyl. I felt that rhythmically and the way the lyrics were delivered on the original might have made this a good match. I do have to tip my cap for his selection being drawn from the back half of Patti’s career because that’s not where most folks understandably went.

COURTNEY BARNETT | Prediction: “Dancing Barefoot” | Performed: “Redondo Beach”

I love Courtney Barnett and thought “Dancing Barefoot” would have been a fantastic match for her range and her vocal delivery style, and I was also super interested to hear her deconstruction of the melody on guitar because it’s not a song on which Patti played an instrument. “Redondo” owes a lot to reggae and I’m not sure it worked as well as a straight-ahead rock song. 

Matt Berninger | Prediction: “My Blakean Year” | Performed: “Piss Factory”

I knew “Blakean Year” had to make someone’s list but as I wrote for Variety, it’s deceptively straight-ahead and it needs a strong interpreter. I still have no doubt he would have killed it but instead he gave us one of the most heart-stopping moments of the show. At the rehearsal on Tuesday, on the small City Winery stage, it was even more frenetic. I’m glad he let himself feel his triumph on Wednesday night. Oh, watch me now indeed.

Body/Head [Kim Gordon + Bill Mace] | Prediction: “25th Floor” | Performed: A reading from Witt and a lot of noise

I wanted to hear Kim spitting out the words to this one, but the flex of bringing out your own copy of Witt and then issuing several minutes of intense noise was not a disappointment. I wrote “She just should have played ‘Radio Ethiopia’” and then my old friend George, a Patti regular, who was sitting across the aisle came over to whisper the exact same thing.

Glen Hansard | Prediction: “Beneath the Southern Cross” | Performed: “Beneath the Southern Cross”

I’ll never stop saying that this is one of Patti’s greatest songs, certainly her greatest song of this side of her career, and live it is less a song than it is an opportunity to raise energy. Hansard treated it like a poem and shape shifted the air in his own particular way, and you saw the connection between each artist’s individual path. “Soul of a poet knows soul of a poet,” I wrote in my notes. He should just add this to his own set now. It’s his if he wants it. 

Ben Harper | Prediction: “Ghost Dance” | Performed: “Ghost Dance”

I don’t even think I’ve seen Ben Harper live since the last time I saw him at Bridge School but I knew enough about him to think he’d like to try this one on. It’s another shape shifter, and he clocked that dead on. Another stellar moment both nights.

Susanna Hoffs | Prediction: “Frederick” | Performed: “Kimberly”

“Kimberly” is absolutely perfect for her, and she clearly adores the song, so it was fantastic. It’s a song about Patti’s sister and she adds a certain relish to the lyrics that Hoffs either knew because she’d listened to some live shows or just added herself, either is possible. It is hilarious that I literally switched what Susanna and Maggie Rogers were going to perform.

Jim Jarmusch | Prediction: “Spell” | Performed: he read a poem

Since “Spell” is essentially Allen Ginsberg’s “Footnote to Howl” over a drone, Jarmusch could have totally done it. But he was warm and delightful, pulling out his phone to read a little bonus Rimbaud was such a fanboy move! One of us!

Scarlett Johansson | Prediction: “We Three” | Performed: readings on Robert Mapplethorpe

I am absolutely neutral on the subject of ScarJo but I have heard her Tom Waits covers and she could have absolutely sung Patti’s torch song for Tom Verlaine. But after Jarmusch her reading was the best because she was obviously focused and prepared.

Karen O | Prediction: “Gloria” | Performed: “Gloria”

This wasn’t even hard, COME ON

Kronos Quartet | Prediction: “Radio Ethiopia” | Performed: “Elegie”

This was beautifully done, no surprise, but I really wanted someone to bring the noise.

Jesse Malin | Prediction: “Pissing In A River” | Performed: “Free Money”

I’m realizing how many of these picks had to do with vocal approach of the artist vis-a-vis the cover material. In my Variety piece I mention that it was these performances of Jesse’s that I really saw for the first time the connection between his quasi-beat-poet cadence and everything that Patti has done but, I mean, doh.

Alison Mosshart | Prediction: “Till Victory” | Performed: “Ask the Angels”

One is more martial in delivery than the other but they were both firmly in Mosshart’s wheelhouse!

Angel Olsen | Prediction: “Wave”| Performed: “Easter”

Again, we are talking kissing cousins, but it was obvious that she would pick something with a more experimental sound field – and she did!

Maggie Rogers | Prediction: “Kimberly” | Performed: “Frederick”

It’s not that I underestimated Rogers -- “Kimberly” is a hugely important and under-rated song in the canon (IMHO anyway) -- but that I didn’t see the potential in “Frederick.”

Bruce Springsteen

We all knew what this was going to be, although if you ever made yourself listen to that 1976 Patti Bottom Line show where Bruce essentially freestyle jams the entire night there was a lot of potential for the delusional (hi, it’s me) to dream about. (I asked him about it when I interviewed him for my Patti book and he didn’t remember much but he did confirm that it was not planned and they did not rehearse in advance, to which every guitar player in the world will side-eye me, but I like getting primary sources to confirm things or not.)

If you are looking for more information about Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith I invite you to read the book or join me over at Radio Nowhere whose subscribers will be receiving a deep dive on this subject later this week.

Michael Stipe | Prediction: “Birdland” | Performed: “People Are Strange” (rehearsal)/”My Blakean Year”

“Blakean Year” was great because Stipe is still an amazing frontman whose voice is in spectacular shape and I am not pining for a R.E.M. reunion but I wish he’d do more with both of these skills than he currently is!

Sharon Van Etten | Prediction: “Break It Up” | Performed: “Pissing In A River”

“Break It Up” is a more conventional composition and probably less of a challenge to someone as dynamic as Van Etten but there’s so much space in that song to embody and inhabit it, which is why I gave this one to her.

I am not offering commentary on the other readers because I really don’t have much of an opinion on what they could have done vs what they did do. And there’s an obvious omission for Reasons. 

The original list: