Night of the legends
Thursday, December 14, New York City.

This is the big night of the tour, the originally scheduled New York date, and all the legends and starfuckers are showing up tonight.

Boy, I'd love to get backstage. I bring my dear friend Johanna Lawrenson -- widow of my mentor, Abbie Hoffman -- who has generously let me use her downtown apartment for this tour. She's helping me navigate the sea of celebs at the Beacon: Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Richard Gere, Phoebe Snow, Tim Robbins. Arista president Clive Davis is here, and he's all over Verlaine, who is self-producing his next album to maintain creative control. Maybe Clive will see the wisdom of paying Tom lots of money while granting him an artist's authority to produce his own work.

And there's Aaron Kaye, the 300-pound Yippie pie man, in a huge tie-dyed tent of a T-shirt. He's now got an e-mail address (pieman@calyx.com), which means that, from now on, with a few strokes of the keyboard, I can order a pie in the face for any tyrant on earth. Aaron's nailed Pat Robertson and all kinds of folks with whipped-cream pies over the years. "Hey Aaron! Do you know what William Weld looks like? He just vetoed the medical-marijuana bill!"

"He did?"

"He lives near Brattle Street in Cambridge," I say. "I hear he likes Boston cream pie."

Patti's cold has disappeared, and she's completely in control. She leads the entire theater in a shared dream-trance tonight, and gets a roaring standing ovation.

Dylan plays "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" for the first time on tour, and gets wild cheers with the closing line: "I'm goin' back to New York City. I do believe I've had enough."

After the show, I grab Johanna and we slide up to the side of the stage. Raymond comes out and escorts us backstage, upstairs to the sixth floor, where Patti holds court.

As we get off the elevator, Lenny Kaye is telling Richard Gere about meeting the Dalai Lama with Patti in Berlin last September. "What you're doing for Tibet is so important," he says.

Patti is on her way out of the theater, and stops when she sees Johanna. "I know you, don't I?" she says. They re-establish their shared role as Widows of Charleville. Then Patti comes up and kisses me! "Good night, Al." Sigh.

The artist Lisa Bowman walks up to Johanna. "I know you," she says. "We met in the '70s, when you were underground with Abbie."

"We did?"

"Yes, it was around '79, you and Abbie were looking at apartments in LA, and I showed one to you."

"You must have been a good friend," says Johanna. "You didn't turn us in."

Patti Hudson and I drive through the Holland Tunnel, across the Meadowlands, a couple hours south to the little cyclone-fence-surrounded home of Grant and Beverly Smith. Grant is in the front yard with their boxer pup, Sheba. He greets me with a firm handshake. Bev serves us homemade potato soup and coffee.

We turn on WXPN, the University of Pennsylvania radio station, which, coincidentally, is airing a one-hour interview that Patti taped the last time she was in town. Grant listens to his daughter's singing voice, and cracks, "Gee, she never indicated that kind of talent as a child." He chastises me for my smoking, and then recalls the time, in the '70s, when he was backstage at a show and tried some of Lenny Kaye's marijuana. "I think he was just trying to be welcoming to me. I didn't feel anything from it, though."

"I remember that," says Beverly. "I walked in and said, `What are you doin'?' "

Patti's voice is on the radio: "A lot of my earliest cultural revelations came in Philadelphia," she explains to the interviewer. "I was 10 or 11 years old when my father took us to the Philadelphia art museum. It really changed my life. The idea that a human being could express himself in this mode was so enlightening to me that, more than anything else, that was what I wanted in my life."

I say to Grant, "Patti says you introduced her to the concept of `craft' at that museum. You used to tell her, `See, Dalí is a craftsman.' I think that's where she gets her focus on craft."

"Well," Grant says, pleasantly self-effacing, "she probably remembers it more clearly than I do."

The radio station plays Patti's 1988 tune, "People Have the Power," a political-spiritual anthem. "That's my favorite," says Bev. "I especially like that part about `wrestlin' the earth from fools.' "

I encounter Beverly again a few hours later at the Electric Factory in Philly, where the last three gigs of the tour are about to happen. It's a cavernous old warehouse, barely remodeled, with a 50-foot Les Paul-type guitar overhead, and a video screen over the stage. There are no seats except in the balcony section that holds the bar. Up there, a half-hour before the show, there's already a hard-drinking crowd. The diehard Smith fans crowd in front of the stage downstairs.

Beverly goes backstage before the show, and Patti's boys fall all over her. "It's been a long time," says Tom Verlaine, giving her a big hug. "The last time I saw you was after Patti fell off the stage, in '78."

Michael Stipe comes up to Beverly, who has headed the Patti Smith Fan Club for 20 years. "I wrote you a fan letter when I was 16 years old, and you answered it," he says.

"That just goes to prove, you never know who's gonna become famous." Beverly says to me. She adds, "I get a lot of mail sayin', `You have no idea, Mrs. Smith, what she has meant to me and my life.' "

I'm at the posh Bellevue Hotel, in the room next door to Lenny Kaye's. Thirteen-year-old Jackson Smith has arrived from Detroit, and the prodigal guitar player of the family is crashed out in Lenny's room. I'm trying desperately to reach Tom Verlaine, who's in a room downstairs. I've got to get an interview with him before this tour is over. Oh, shit. It's over tomorrow. I gotta really hump now.

Later, in the darkness of the Electric Factory, there is a tap on my shoulder. Whenever that happens, it's an omen. I feel something of import coming on. Before I can turn around, a woman's voice whispers to me, in a beautiful German accent: "What is your name?"

I turn around to find this mysterious gal I've watched at some of the other shows on this tour. I've privately dubbed her the Bird in Space Girl, because she reminds me of the sleek Brancusi sculpture by that name. She's the most beautiful woman on the planet, I've decided. And now she's asking me my name.

"Hi," I say. "I'm Al."

"I'm Jutta," she says. "Jutta Koether. I've seen you."

"In Danbury," I answer. "You're Thurston's friend."

"Actually," she replies, "I'm really Kim's friend."

We chat. She's a writer and artist. And she brings up the Brancusi exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Unbelievable. This is too perfect.

"I'm Tom's girlfriend," she says.

"T-tom?"

"You know Tom. Tom Verlaine? He's been looking for you all day."

The tour is knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door. This is it. The final day. And I'm feeling nostalgic already.

I hang out with Lenny Kaye in his hotel room, talking about what has been accomplished on -- and demanded by -- the tour.

"We haven't done this in a long time," he says, "the rock-and-roll thing, even longer. It's really like learning from scratch. We had no preconceptions. All that really counts is the show that evening, or the recording we're doing that day. We're not only improvising on stage, we're figuring out how to present ourselves so that we feel contemporaneous with ourselves, so it's not some nostalgia thing."

"You've created a space where Patti can step out and begin her ad-lib poetry-glossolalia again," I say. "That, I think, is the most significant news from this tour."

"That's a really big part of what Patti does, and probably the most unique," Lenny replies. "It's like free-form jazz. I'm glad that's started to open up, because it means those things are still within us."

Lenny will turn 49 on December 27, three days before Patti does the same. But he's in better shape than I, 13 years his junior. Here they are -- two parents with family obligations -- and they can still rock with the youngest among us.

At 5 p.m., this last night, I take Verlaine out to dinner and get my interview with the master. Now, finally, I can relax and enjoy the show.

Tonight, for the first time on the tour, Dylan plays "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" -- as an encore. Patti walks onstage next to him, in a black velvet dress with white fringe. Dylan is singing, "Ma, wipe these tears off my eyes," and Patti is gently touching his cheek. She sings her verse, and Dylan plays a lilting guitar lead. They trade lines ("knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door") back and forth.

As the refrain builds, Dylan cracks a smile. It grows each time Patti sings, until he is overcome by a sublime, joyous laughter.

As the Men in Hats band colors the final bars of the tune, Patti Smith, her resurrection fulfilled, turns around again, and slowly, step by step, fades back into the darkness, walking . . . out . . . into . . . the . . . world.

Click to read Al's short interview with Tom Verlaine.