PATTI SMITH
“Springsteen on Broadway” has a rare off week, this week. But Bruce Springsteen made a guest appearance about 30 blocks uptown tonight, with Patti Smith at the Beacon Theatre.
He joined Smith and her band for “Because the Night” and “People Have the Power.” Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and Smith’s daughter Jesse Paris Smith also joined them for a rousing version of the inspirational “People Have the Power.”
You can watch the songs, below.
Springsteen and Smith co-wrote “Because the Night,” a Top 20 hit for Smith in 1978.
“This song always makes me think of three men: Fred ‘Sonic Smith,’ who inspired it; Jimmy Iovine, who produced it; and Bruce Springsteen,” said Patti Smith when introducing it at the Beacon. She was dating Fred “Sonic” Smith, a co-founder of the band The MC5, at the time she co-wrote it, and married him in 1980.
Patti Smith and Springsteen performed Smith’s version of the song — Springsteen usually sticks to his own version, when he does the song at his own concerts. And Springsteen took a brief a guitar solo.
The event was part of the Tribeca Film Festival, and combined a screening of the new documentary, “Horses: Patti Smith and her Band,” with a performance by Smith and her band. According to setlist.fm, Smith and her band also performed “Dancing Barefoot,” “For What It’s Worth,” “Pissing in a River” and “Land”/”Gloria” before “Because the Night” and “People Have the Power.”
The film, directed by Steven Sebring, was filmed at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles, at the last show of Smith’s 2015-2016 tour celebrating the 40th anniversary of her landmark debut album, Horses.
I have also embedded the documentary’s trailer, below.
