“I was proud”: Patti Smith’s nerve-wracking first performance in front of Bob Dylan
The first time Patti Smith performed for Bob Dylan wasn’t really the first time.
The first time actually came in 1975. Patti Smith was riding high after the release of Horses and was performing a run of shows at The Bitter End, a small venue in her adopted home of New York. The city’s music scene was buzzing, eager to see her at that moment of rising fame.
One night, Smith simply felt something different in the air. She didn’t dare to look out into the crowd that evening, but she was hearing the whispers: Bob Dylan was there. Everyone was tense.
“There was an electricity in that room,” she remembered as he came backstage to meet her, and she descended into a pool of nervousness. “I acted like a teenage boy when he sees the girl that he likes come in, and he… acts like he doesn’t like her,” she said, but it seemed to work as Dylan became a fast fan.
The first performance Smith actually knew about in advance, and consciously set out to impress Dylan, came later. It happened that same year, when Dylan invited her to join him at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village. However, in classic Dylan fashion, the invitation came so late that Smith barely had time to prepare.
Smith didn’t know that, really, this was an audition, as Dylan wanted to invite her on his Rolling Thunder Revue tour. But she didn’t need to be told, as the nerves and the desire to impress were already there.
“I showed up, and as he was sitting with his people, including Sarah, Joan Baez, Rambling Jack Elliot and Allen Ginsberg, I manoeuvred on my own. There were a lot of well-known musicians there, and the atmosphere was mysteriously electric,” Smith recalled of the moment. Unable to play an instrument to be able to do a song, she instead improvised a poem about her sister. After, she was offered a spot on the tour, but Smith, feeling odd about the entire thing, famously turned it down.
However, that day and that performance remained important to her. “That night, though difficult, validated that I could think on my feet, and provided me with an unexpected gift,” she said. It gave her confidence as she explained, “It was quite an experience. Bob Dylan treated me well, and I was proud that he saw something in me, which I held as a secret weapon through the challenging times ahead.”
But it also gave her the start of something, adding, “The lyric refrain, initially spit out as an act of improvisational survival, developed as a propelling build in the song ‘Ain’t it Strange’.”
This would go on to be a pattern – when things changed in Smith’s life, and she needed a boost of assurance, Dylan seemed to materialise. Decades on from that initial audition, after Smith had made her name, somewhat retired and now grieving the loss of her husband, it was Dylan who coaxed her back onto stage, inviting her to tour with him as her return to live performance, but also as a reminder of her strength, and a redo of those old times.
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