So said Patti Smith in a telephone interview I did with her in 2003. She had played Fuji the previous two years, and at least one of those years she played multiple shows. This summer will be her first time at the festival since then and she's something of a natural in such a setting. A genuine child of both the 50s and the 60s, Smith understands how pop music and specifically rock music is meaningless without a context, which is why she considers all her songs to have a political dimension. When she played a free-form set at the Field of Heaven, augmented by her poetry, she made use of the natural setting, pulling the trees and the mountains into the lyrics. (She did the same thing once on the Green Stage but made the somewhat forgivable mistake of referring to the mountain in front of her as "Fuji") This quality also makes her act the kind of thing that jam band aficionados miss at their own peril. Once she gets going, she's pretty unstoppable.

But another reason her rock'n roll connects so well is that, as she pointed out above, she likes people a whole lot and isn't happy unless she's interacting with them, either on stage or off. I remember hearing a story that at one of the Fuji shows she confronted a black security guard who apparently objected to her song "Rock and Roll Nigger," and engaged him in a sincere conversation about her reasons for writing the piece. I'm not sure if she won the guy over, but she went out of her way because that's what her music is all about. In that regard, she's a true friend of Fuji.

-Phil