Last night was Patti Smith at the State Theater. I was prepared for intensity and awesomeness, but not for the depth of emotions that some of the songs stirred for me. I hadn’t realized, I guess, the extent to which Gone Again is one of those few albums that have somehow taken up residence inside me. You know how that happens sometimes: with most music, you bring yourself to it but it remains outside of you, something you press yourself up against for awhile. Maybe you revisit it, maybe you don't. But a few albums are a permeable barrier, and they transform you into one too, and eventually the music crosses over and into and down to the depths of you, perhaps behind your heart, perhaps to the left of your liver. And maybe after awhile you forget it’s there, but it never really leaves.

I had forgotten about Gone Again, although I never forget about Patti. It isn’t her all-time best record, but it is rich and strange and honest. I listened to it constantly after it came out in the summer of 1996, on into the winter and through to the next summer. Then as now, I did most of my album-length listening in the car as I drove to work. That commute was about 30 minutes, through swamps and over the wide, slow Arkansas River. Last night, during an amazingly primal, drawn-out version of Beneath the Southern Cross, I was suddenly 20 again, driving through the waters and scrubby trees at dusk. I was deeply discontented at that age, wary of the corporate job I was stepping deeper and deeper into, wondering if I would ever manage to leave Little Rock. Patti was a voice from an unknown spot out in the wide world, someone so foreign who knew things that I had never touched. Which is as it should be, given the fact that that album is entirely about death and loss and the life that comes afterwards for the living, about becoming a widow and losing close friends. It’s not an album for a 20 year old, but it was the right thing for me that winter.

I also never realized how much winter twilight figures into my memories of other songs of hers. The winter that I began seeing the then-Mister Boyfriend, I had hauled Easter out of my dusty stacks and was listening to it again. I studied all day and then headed over to his apartment most nights. It was often twilight when I pulled into the lot, and through a fluke of timing “Because the Night” was often on. Hearing it last night put me right back in the lavender dusk, sitting in my car and feeling a wee bit nervous, watching the last streaks of orange leave the sky before I went in to the apartment.

I really haven’t liked Twelve quite so much. I advance-ordered it, listened to it a couple of times after it showed up, and then got distracted. I’m not the only one who felt this way, and I really hoped that she wouldn’t be playing much from it last night. It turns out, though, that several of the songs work much better live than they do on the album — “Smells Like Teen Spirit” being one of the best examples. Followed by “People Have the Power” and interspersed with a classic Patti rant about complacency and war, it becomes more than the sum of its parts.

She gives an excellent show, and I would see her again in a hot second. Most impressive is her ability to read a crowd and bring the band along to adapting to the circumstances of the venue and the vibe. This crowd was wildly appreciative — they clapped for dimming the lights, they clapped for her taking her hat off. But they were Minnesota Polite, and their politeness was exacerbated by the venue, which provides theater seating all the way up within five feet of the stage. Everyone remained politely seated and clapped nicely. I’ve never seen a rock audience so well behaved, and it clearly drove her nuts. Eventually, she left the stage as the band played and then appeared out in the audience, dancing in the center aisle and then running up to the edge of the stage and pounding along with the band. After the audience saw that they had her permission, they came up to the edge of the stage and communed. The Minnesotans, they don’t wish to be seen as unruly. Never mind that they were there to see a fabulously unruly woman who is happy to prove that 60 is not at all too old to be flinging mic stands and playing Rock n Roll Nigger.