Young And Smith Bring Solid Rock To The Gorge

Neil Young and Patti Smith: Now there, as Guy Clark would say, is a hand to draw to, boys.

Young and Smith are two of rock’s great iconoclasts, and both will travel to The Gorge Saturday for a show that promises much musical drama.

Young and Smith are kindred spirits: Smith’s 1976 LP, “Horses,” is a hallmark of early punk, and Young is sometimes called the Godfather of Grunge for the drive, power and raw grit of his guitar work.

Fortunately, neither one of them knows how to act their age.

Smith recently returned to the public eye after a long hiatus from performing and recording. After marrying Fred “Sonic” Smith, bass player from the classic Detroit punk outfit MC5, she retired to a Detroit suburb to raise kids.

But in the past two or three years, she lost three of the most important people in her life: the photographer and her one-time lover Robert Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS, and her husband and brother, both of whom died of heart-related problems.

In response, Smith earlier this year released an elegiac comeback album, “Gone Again.” It received strong reviews but has failed to capture the public’s fancy.

That still could change, though. She’s receiving tremendous exposure for her visible role in the new R.E.M. single and video, “E-bow the Letter.” That appearance, plus a new single of her own, “Gone Again,” may put Smith back in the limelight.

Smith is a transcendent live performer. A poet and spoken-word artist, she often ascends, midperformance, into a trance-like state where she improvises dazzling vocal riffs, something like a jazz player solo.

Young is one of the few rock musicians powerful enough to comfortably follow Smith onstage. He draws from a body of work that reaches back more than 30 years, and his music can be both fragile and brutal. Onstage, he is a dervish: stomping and pounding with long hair flying, he flails at his guitars, drawing feedback-drenched chords that go straight to the heart.

He is rock’s great primitivist, an instinctual musician who pulls brilliant melodies from thin air and anchors them with an attack so earthy it seems poured of heavy metal.

For this tour, Young has reassembled his long-standing backup band, Crazy Horse. They have been playing a collection of favorite blasts from the past.

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MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Neil Young and Crazy Horse will perform Saturday at 7 p.m. at The Gorge Amphitheatre. Patti Smith and Sponge open. Tickets are $33.10, available at Ticketmaster outlets or call (509) 735-0500.