Review | Patti Has the Power, at the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara

Deep into Patti Smith’s superlative concert at the Lobero Theatre last week, she steered the generous cover song portion of her set toward another living legend, Neil Young. After citing the relevance of his 50-year-old environmental cautionary tale “After the Gold Rush” in her introduction, she tweaked his infectious/ominous refrain: “Look at Mother Nature on the run / in the 21st century.”

Timeless relevance, as it happened, was a theme in the latest of a few local concerts in recent years by Smith, now 76 and going strong. It was a special night, musically and altruistically, as the event organized by promoter Earl Minnis benefitted the Council on Alcohol and Drug Abuse (CADA), Teddy Bear Cancer Foundation, the Bob Dylan Center and another worthy cause — the mighty and warming Lobero herself, currently basking its 150-year birthday glow. (Said in-house glow was recently enhanced by Architectural Digest’s declaration of the theater as one of “11 Most Beautiful Theaters in the World.”)  

Smith and her trio — longstanding ally Tony Shanahan on bass and keyboards and her nimble guitarist son Jackson Smith — treated the full house to a show that spanned stages of her musical life and was steeped in open-eared appreciation of recently passed musical friends and icons. She seized the stage, in a gentle yet robust way, nailing the notes and melodies but also with a sense of where to riff and depart from the script, as with her poetic abandon at the end of “All Along the Watchtower,” she began to howl. Spontaneous poetic license also fed into her paean to William Blake, “My Blakean Year.”