Patti Smith Shows Up at Station to Station's St. Paul Event in Union Depot

Josh and Justin, the on-board engineers from the recording car, slink onstage with Patti Smith. We’re halfway through Patti Smith’s set at the St. Paul Union Depot. Justin plops down behind the drums and Josh picks up a bass. Patti was supposed to play a solo set with her son, Jackson, accompanying her on guitar. But Josh, Justin, and a few other guys hop up on stage behind her, and all of a sudden they’re a full band.

“This is the spirit of Station to Station,” Patti tells the crowd. “Jackson and I came alone and then we multiplied…”

Then they dive into a rendition of “Because the Night.”

Patti Smith and her Station to Station band finish up their set and head backstage. Francis, the flame-haired drummer from White Mystery, steals a kiss from Patti as she’s walking by. He spends the next five minutes lying on the ground, in the fetal position, giggling. Patti has this effect on people. She disappears into the depths of the backstage and the house lights go up. But the crowd won’t give up. They want an encore.

“We don’t know any more songs,” Josh from the recording studio car tells me. “All the ones we played we learned this afternoon. That’s all we’ve got.”

But the audience won’t quit.

We are four stops into the cross-country Station to Station train trip. Things are finally starting to congeal. It usually takes a while for strangers to open up. Riding through America on a beautiful train filled with instruments and booze speeds up the process.

During the after party in Chicago, Randy Randall from No Age picked up the Levi’s® Soundcloud guitar and played an off-the-cuff rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” for the entire train car. The next day, as we hauled from Chicago to Minnesota, the band White Mystery spent a few hours playing around in the recording studio car. Pretty soon they were joined by Chris, the whip-cracker, on tambourine. A pink-haired European artist named Tobias commandeered a Moog synth and they all started to jam.

White Mystery opened the night at St. Paul Union Depot, followed by No Age and Eleanor Friedberger, from the Fiery Furnaces. No Age will be splitting off from the train after Minnesota and catching back up later, so this was their last performance for a while. The audience wandered through the yurts, watched bands, and got their photos taken for a portrait collection connected to Levi’s®. But when Patti Smith came onstage, everybody dropped what they were doing. The press photographers flooded into the open space designated for them between the front of the audience and the stage. I squeezed my way up there, too. Patti kicked us out after the first few songs.

“When a photographer pays $25 for a ticket, then they can stand at the front,” she said. Then the Station to Station family band joined her and they ran through the barely-practiced second half of her set. Somehow, they pull it off.

The last song ends and Patti waves and walks away. The applause isn’t dying down. The rumor going around backstage is that Patti has been on the road for the last three months and she’s exhausted. But the crowd won’t let her leave. She pulls her impromptu band into a huddle and convinces them to fake their way through a song none of them have ever played before.

“What’s the bass part?” Josh, the recording car engineer, asks.

“Just play D notes for a while,” Patti says. The lights dim again and the band follows her back on stage. To check out the rest of the collaborations and contributors, go to http://levi.com/makeourmark