Review | Patti Has the Power, at the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara

Deep into Patti Smith’s superlative concert at the Lobero Theatre last week, she steered the generous cover song portion of her set toward another living legend, Neil Young. After citing the relevance of his 50-year-old environmental cautionary tale “After the Gold Rush” in her introduction, she tweaked his infectious/ominous refrain: “Look at Mother Nature on the run / in the 21st century.”

Timeless relevance, as it happened, was a theme in the latest of a few local concerts in recent years by Smith, now 76 and going strong. It was a special night, musically and altruistically, as the event organized by promoter Earl Minnis benefitted the Council on Alcohol and Drug Abuse (CADA), Teddy Bear Cancer Foundation, the Bob Dylan Center and another worthy cause — the mighty and warming Lobero herself, currently basking its 150-year birthday glow. (Said in-house glow was recently enhanced by Architectural Digest’s declaration of the theater as one of “11 Most Beautiful Theaters in the World.”)  

Smith and her trio — longstanding ally Tony Shanahan on bass and keyboards and her nimble guitarist son Jackson Smith — treated the full house to a show that spanned stages of her musical life and was steeped in open-eared appreciation of recently passed musical friends and icons. She seized the stage, in a gentle yet robust way, nailing the notes and melodies but also with a sense of where to riff and depart from the script, as with her poetic abandon at the end of “All Along the Watchtower,” she began to howl. Spontaneous poetic license also fed into her paean to William Blake, “My Blakean Year.”

Mortality and the importance of paying respects to fallen icons was another recurring notion here, starting at the start. To open the show, Smith dedicated her song “Grateful” to the late, great Jerry Garcia, who died on that very day in 1995, which she dubbed his “passing day.” She also dedicated songs to the late Sinead O’Connor (“Pissing in a River”), whose activist and outspoken character Smith clearly connects with, and a figure and longtime friend still underrated in the left-of-center annals of rock ‘n’ roll, Tom Verlaine, of “Television and Tom Verlaine” fame. Her version of Verlaine’s Television song “Guiding Light” was one of the night’s surprise highlights.

Fresher on everyone’s mind, in terms of fallen legends, was Robbie Robertson of The Band fame, to whom she paid tribute with her hypnotic lament “Beneath the Southern Cross,” ending with a chant of “cross over, cross over…”

Smith brought the setlist spotlight squarely back to her own songbook for a run through her two most widely known tunes. She closed out the show with the radio-kissed and Bruce Springsteen–co-written and immortalized “Because the Night” and returned for a rousing encore of the vague-yet-inspirational anthem, co-written with her late husband Fred “Sonic” Smith, “People Have the Power.” The people happily joined in on the chorus, literally obeying Smith’s final life advice to the crowd: “Use your voice!”

As of now, Patti Smith is riding a self-designed wave of timeless self-reliance and cultural cross reference. That, along with her charismatic voice, added up to the makings of one of the finer musical evenings in our town this year.