Under Your Command (Patti Smith Does Lollapalooza)

Lollapalooza. Patti Smith took the stage, in every way the unabashed crone I was expecting, dressed in an oversized peace symbol-emblazoned t-shirt, a limp and wrinkled sport jacket and a wide-brimmed hat. The costume at first humorously (if lovably) hippified transformed before me, with each layer shed -- first the hat and then the jacket, a momentary flash of joyful bralessness as the shirt untucked (referring back to "Easter" and that infamous album cover shot of the sweaty underarm, the sexiness of the natural and the unkempt) -- into how for her it must feel on a daily basis. Neither ironic nor nostalgic. This was her. This was us. Somewhere along the way, I realized I was experiencing my first real rock show.

"Because the Night" came somewhere around the 3/4 mark. I wasn't expecting it, couldn't imagine that after decades of singing it she could be anything other than sick of it, let alone equally intense and perhaps even more invested than when she first recorded it, this song that, with its co-mingling of desperation, despair, adulation and ecstasy more accurately captures the tensions, the immediacy of physical intimacy than anything else I've ever heard/seen/read.

love is an angel
disguised as lust
here in our bed
till the morning comes

She closed with "Rock and Roll Nigger," knocking down her mic stand at least twice -- like all her motions, not choreographed or a pose, but an outgrowth of a genuine, internal ferocity. Our collective arms flung into the air, across a broad spectrum of ages, gyrating. My own tears welling.

I recognized- the true rock star understands they're a medium as much as they are the spectacle. They channel, transferring kinetic energy through their body into those of the audience, suddenly tethered to one another by electromagnetic bonds.

She shouted, "No more war! A clean environment! Protect our freedom!"

I realized that this wasn't about living in any mythologized past. This was about the moment, about the future, and my intellect, although still present, questioning, "What exactly do we mean by freedom?" was for once marginal, barely registering. I was body and un-inhibition.

The rain baptized me, showered through the spotlights like a motion painting, and it occurred to me that perhaps the answer to that question -- what is freedom? -- might have something to do with what I was feeling.

Lesson learned: Rock and rtoll is more than just singularity and a badass strut. It's also, paradoxically, sincerity and community.