The venue Patti Smith always dreamed of playing: “Such a wonderful place”
When you’ve managed to reach the level of notoriety of someone like Patti Smith, then there aren’t going to be too many venues around the world where you either haven’t performed or wouldn’t be given the opportunity to perform.
Granted, Smith wasn’t exactly a huge household name from the outset of her career, and she had to spend large portions of her early years performing in small clubs rather than at large concert halls, perhaps only entertaining a measly crowd of 100 or so individuals rather than numbers in the thousands. There’s nothing wrong with this, and as is the case for many artists who have worked hard to reach the upper echelons, these grassroots clubs are still valuable parts of the learning experience.
However, no matter how integral these low-capacity dive bars or underground clubs might be, it doesn’t stop people from dreaming about the more grandiose places they could find themselves at in the future if they knuckle down and perfect their craft. Having dreams like this that you can chase throughout your career is often what can drive you to operate at the best of your abilities, and for Smith, there were a number of places that she always felt as though she ought to be aiming to perform at.
Of course, even though Smith’s ascent in the New York scene saw her play at many esteemed venues such as Max’s Kansas City and CBGB, the sorts of places many young artists would bite your hand off to have had the opportunity to perform at. However, once she’d conquered this domain, there were other places that she had firmly in her sights.
But, it wasn’t any of the notable spots in New York that Smith saw as the ultimate end goal, and it was a famous landmark on the opposing coast of the US that she had aspirations of gracing.
Speaking to San Francisco outlet The Mercury News in 2020, the topic of conversation came to touring, and how the last place she had performed prior to the nationwide lockdown and subsequent closure of venues in reaction to the coronavirus pandemic was the legendary Bay Area concert hall, The Fillmore. With the interviewer noting how there appears to always be a connection between the venue and Smith, she would go on to admit that she had always been enamoured with the idea of appearing there one day.
“As a young person, when I started performing, it was a dream to play the Fillmore,” she confessed, before stating that part of her dream was “to climb up those same steps that Jerry Garcia would climb”. As a significant part of the rise of some of the Bay Area’s most notable acts, with Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane having been some of the most notable acts to have had the pleasure to play there in the 1960s, the Fillmore is synonymous with San Francisco music history.
“It’s such a wonderful place,” Smith continued. “There’s just so much history. So many people have played there. And, at this point, so have I. I’ve played there so many times.”
While it’s now more than just an institution in San Francisco, with many franchise venues in various cities across America all bearing the Fillmore name, it still retains its cultural prominence in the area, and while there is a long list of artists who performed there in its 1960s heyday, it remains one of the places that artists of any level in the modern age hope to play one day.
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