This post was written by Stranger Books Intern J.T. Oldfield

The thing about Patti Smith is that I could have listened to her do any of those things for the whole 90 minutes she was on stage. Hearing her poetry—the old stuff, like “Oath” (a poem she wrote about 6 years before Horses came out that starts out famously, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine…”) as well as her incredibly candid stories in Just Kids, seriously gave me shivers.

Cross asked a question submitted from the audience: Who would you like to collaborate with that you haven’t? “Russell Crowe,” she said. Cross asked her to clarify—musically, or acting? “As a girl,” she said.

But she also spoke of the inspiration she found from the ocean, of sitting around discussing books and smoking pot with William S. Burroughs, and of her great love, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, whose story, she says, is so intertwined with her own that she found it impossible to write solely about him.

If I got shivers when she read her poetry, I got a warm, glowing feeling when she started to sing. She started out with “Grateful”, a song she wrote about Mapplethorpe. She likened her inspiration—she says she wrote the song after seeing a vision of Jerry Garcia—to people who see Jesus on a potato chip. After the second song, she picked up Just Kids again and read the passage when she learned of Mapplethorpe’s death. Her husband, MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith, drove her and their children down to the ocean to get away. She writes about walking along the beach, and how much Mapplethorpe would have loved the image of the grey sea and clouds, and her solitary figure dressed in black walking along the beach.

And then she took off her skullcap, and shook out her hair (no one else can do this sort of thing so powerfully—generations of women have tried: Alanis Morrissette, PJ Harvey, Courtney Love wish that they were able to capture this, to be this) and she played “Beneath the Southern Cross”. Ever so coolly, after the standing ovation that inevitably followed, she didn’t leave the stage. She asked the audience to pretend she has gone off the stage and come back, because she thinks encores are corny. She read a little more, and then, instead of picking her guitar back up, explains that while Fred taught her some basic guitar, she’s not good enough to play this song…

And she started singing, a cappella, “Take me now baby, here as I am…”

Hipsters and grey-haired fans (who probably have loved her since before you were born) started murmuring the lyrics, and by the time the chorus came along, the whole audience was singing: “Because the night belongs to lovers/Because the night belongs to us.” Another standing ovation ensued, and strangers hugged me, and all we could say was wow. We felt special, part of something, blessed.

This story has been updated since its original publication.