Patti Smith Plots Virtual Performance With Music, Book Reading

Patti Smith will perform a special show featuring music and excerpts from her most recent memoir, broadcasting digitally September 4th at 9 p.m. ET.

Smith will film the performance at the Murmrr Theatre in Brooklyn, where she’ll read from her 2019 book Year of the Monkey and play a handful of songs with long-time bandmate Tony Shanahan. Cinematographer Matthew Schroeder will film the show.

The ticketed event is being billed as Smith’s only worldwide staged program of 2020. Tickets will cost $30 each and come with a new paperback copy of Year of the Monkey. They’ll go on sale on August 7th at 11 a.m. ET via the Murmrr website.

Year of the Monkey follows Smith’s previous two memoirs: 2010’s celebrated Just Kids, about her early career and friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, and 2015’s M Train, which chronicled the 40 years after her debut album Horses. Year of the Monkey, meanwhile, focuses specifically on the year 2016, much of which Smith spent out of the public eye following a string of New Year’s shows in San Francisco.

Per a statement describing the book: “For Smith — inveterately curious, always exploring — the year evolves as one of reckoning with the changes in life’s gyre: with loss, aging and a dramatic shift in the political landscape of America. Smith melds the Western landscape with her own dreamscape. Taking us from California to the Arizona desert; to a Kentucky farm as the amanuensis of a friend in crisis; to the hospital room of a valued mentor; and by turns to remembered and imagined places, this haunting memoir blends fact and fiction with poetic mastery.”

Earlier this year, before the COVID-19 crisis took root in the United States, Smith performed at the annual Tibet House benefit concert in New York City. In April, she partook in a virtual Earth Day livestream dedicated to addressing climate change.