Just Grown Ups

Last Friday night I was spitballing with a friend via text about getting some local musician to play old hippie songs on acoustic guitar at my upcoming book launch, and he laughingly suggested Bob Weir. 

Funny funny, right? Everyone knows I loathe the Dead with all my heart, but it was exactly as if by writing the words ‘Bob Weir’ in my feed, my friend had conjured the actual man up, much like that lake of ooze in “The Gone Away World” which, when people get dipped in it, their worst nightmares manifest in front of them. Because in true Gone Away fashion, less than 24 hours later I was sitting in an auditorium, awaiting that same artist’s appearance. 

Of course I was not really there to see Bob Weir. What had happened in the interim was that the morning after my text conversation, an ad popped up in my newsfeed saying there were still tickets to a Patti Smith appearance that night, and I went crazy and bought one. What the heck. It was Friday, I had nothing else to do, it was for a good cause, and I like Patti Smith. Of course, I’ve seen her perform many times, but not for ages: I think last time was at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, in 2010.

This particular show was a benefit for Pathways to Paris, a climate change initiative organized by the group 350.org, and it served also as a culminating event in the Global Climate Action Summit, a three day meeting of minds in San Francisco that is working towards the realization of the Paris Agreement and the ultimate decarbonization of the global economy. It’s an issue I care about, and I wasn’t able to go to the protests, so I felt the least I could do was throw money at it. It’s so obviously urgent, after all. On the night of the gig, two super storms, Florence and Makhut, were bearing down on the world. How long will it be til a climate disaster hits my own neck of the woods?

It was in that spirit that I decided to attend the concert, not because I thought it would be musically fantastic, but because sometimes you need to participate in social events like these to assuage your conscience. In my mind, Bob Weir was opening for Patti Smith, but when I arrived at the arena, the Masonic on San Francisco’s Nob Hill, it seemed it was the other way around. As I entered the building, I immediately saw a man in a floor length, tye dyed, crushed velvet hippie cloak, wearing a hat with a feather in it, selling Grateful Dead pins and yacking on his cell phone.  Plus, to add insult to injury, I  overheard him saying the dreaded word ‘chick,’ as in: “It’s by that chick over there.’ (The woman in question was well over 50, btw.) My ears felt soiled.

 In the lobby I stopped to take a picture of the 45 foot high “endomosaic’  mural, designed by Emile Norman. The 45 panels in it depict the history of California, or at least, Norman’s idea of it, circa 1958: as I was positioning my camera, a woman said to me, “I’m trying to decide if I should take a picture, but I’m really only interested in women’s issues.” She and I contemplated the panorama for a while, silently considering its version of the world.

Me (hopefully): “Maybe there’s a woman in the covered wagon?”

Inside the auditorium, things were less patriarchical but a lot more pious. The evening opened with a young girl, Rhiannon Hewitt, reading a poem she’d written about species extinction, and honestly, it was amazing poem, possibly the highlight of the entire proceedings. The next performer, Imany, was really good, as was the band from Greenland, Suluit. There was also a singer from Tibet, Tenzin Choegyal, backed by Tibetan children’s choir singing “Om Mani Padme Om,” as they do – they looked so sweet in their Tibetan robes, but later on I ran into the whole passel of them in the washroom and they were just as obnoxious as any passel of kids you’d meet in such a spot, covered in cheesecake crumbs.

Other moments, such as short speeches by Patti’s daughter Jesse Paris Smith (the organizer), by some teenagers who run a  youth activist group called Zero Hour, by climate scientist and 350.org activist Bill McKibben, who asked us to write postcards supporting the state’s divestment from fossil fuel industry to the next governor of California, and by actor Nikolai Coster-Waldau, who plays Jamie Lannister on “Game of Thrones” (“Winter is coming” yelled the audience, gleefully), were fine but less stellar, and I was particularly off put by the lady from the UNDP  that thanked the event’s sponsor, Salesforce.com. I’d spent a full ten minutes earlier in the evening driving up California street to the venue considering just how much I loathed the Salesforce building which now looms over the horizon wherever you are in San Francisco, like some kind of dark tower of Sauron. At night it flashes a giant green light show and it dominates every single angle of the city to an extent that makes it impossible to ignore. It’s existence couldn’t possibly be climate friendly, in any way, shape or form.

Another lowlight for me was Eric Burden, though I may be being unfair here. He performed two songs, beginning with Ledbelly’s “In the Pines,” and although I like that song, choosing to sing a song about domestic violence in that setting was not the best idea, I thought. His next song, “Mother Earth” by Memphis Slim, was less tin-eared, but it did nothing for me. I know, I know, all those 60s English guys appropriated black music like crazy, Nirvana did it too, it is what it is, but I just didn’t like it. So sue me.

After Eric Burden, the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson did an arty thing with these cute solar lamps that we all had under our seats (you can click on the link to see a picture and get a description of the project). And then, to my great joy and amazement, the next performer was Patti Smith. 

The joy wasn’t at her appearance, it was because it meant that I wasn’t going to have to suffer through Bob Weir, since he was going to close the show. Perhaps the organizers knew that Grateful Dead people are open minded enough to enjoy Patti Smith, but Patti Smith people don’t have the same forbearance for the Grateful Dead’s music. Or perhaps, like me, she just wanted to go to bed early. Anyway, Patti performed four songs, one dedicated to the activist Rachel Corrie entitled “the Peaceable Kingdom,” as well as “Pissing in the River,” from Radio Ethiopia, an abbreviated version of “People Have the Power” and finally, “Because the Night,” which I now know what it sounds like without drums and guitar. She was accompanied by Tony Shanahan on keyboards and Flea on bass. Yes, that Flea. I forgot to say he performed solo as well.

He didn't look like this in real life

In short, Patti Smith’s performance was a token gesture, at best, and while I appreciated her presence, it reminded me of the problem with these kinds of benefits, many of which I remember from my distant youth:  Bangladesh, No Nukes, the Secret Policeman’s Ball, Live Aid, Live Earth. They all cast this same super earnest veil over their issue that doesn’t feel all that helpful. Granted, I didn’t expect Patti Smith to recite “Piss Factory” or sing “Horses,” a song about male rape that stands alone in the rock canon for its blistering violence and its insistently honest gaze, but I suppose I must have been unwittingly hoping for something transcendent, because that’s the kind of thing I’ve always experienced in Patti Smith’s  presence. The first time I saw her, in 1978, it was on the hottest day of the year and I took the Caltrain from my suburb and my cousin Jeff picked me up at 4^th and Townsend on his motorcycle. It was so hot in Winterland that I took my top off and a bouncer threw me over the barrier and walked me out the side of the stage and I remember my terror in thinking I’d never see Jeff again. At that show she sang “Horses” and “Gloria” and “Rock n Roll N word,” and  “You Light Up My Life,” and I don’t think I understood a single thing she said or sang about, but I loved the show and the cadence and the beat. I believe that seeing that show changed who I am very profoundly.

This is from the Winterland show

But another thing that has changed since then, and that is Patti Smith’s role in culture.  She’s no longer just a punk poet from the lower East Side or even in the lowly world of Grammies and charts and world tours and such like; rather, she wins the National Book Award and accepts Nobel Prizes and is made a Commander of the French Order of Arts and Letters and has an honorary doctorate from Pratt. I am surprised and grateful that she has been recognized for what she is, but even though Patti Smith has all the cultural and symbolic power a single human can amass in one life time, it’s nothing compared to the power of a Jeff Bezos or a Mark Benioff or the GOP to ruin people’s lives and wreck the planet.

Does that sound sour? I’m sorry. That’s how the Pathway to Paris show made me feel. I fled it at 10:30, dropping off my protest postcard and my solar lamp in the big box at the door, and got in the elevator alongside 5 other Grateful Dead haters. It carried us to the bottom floor of the Masonic, so low that when you drive out there you’re at the very bottom of Nob Hill, in an area I’ll call Humble Valley, where the shadow of death is sadly in evidence in the wrecked faces of the bums and hobos and drug addicts who lie on the pavement all over it. They are a blatant reminder that the world’s gone horribly wrong.  Surely protesting, however one does it and for whatever cause, isn’t entirely futile. Yet I am afraid it is ridiculously naive of artists – and those who love them, like myself, for instance — to think that art can somehow save the day.