Yeah, I'm beginning with the finale here, but Patti's declaration in that song, insisting that "outside of society" is where she wants to be - particularly now more than ever, in our violence-and-greed-fixated culture topped off by a government cluttered with crooks, sociopaths, and charlatans - is exactly the sort of Holy Holy I'll gladly take home with me, thank you very much, and I can think of no better way to kick off this post-show comedown than to remind myself of the greatest lesson to take from any Patti Smith performance. Honestly, what better way to live your life than by Patti's Golden Rule: don't be one of those assholes who's fucking up the world? Talk about a religion I can get behind!

Listen to me, making it sound like it's work! Hardly. Not for me, anyway, not for the audience. Patti and Lenny Kaye and the rest of the band: they're the ones baring it all. The audience simply needs to be open and vulnerable and mercifully unironic to let the healing happen, and the Fillmore crowd was more than willing to oblige. As a result, the two-hour show was nothing short of transcendent, a performance for which the word communion really does feel entirely appropriate. Recalling an anecdote about watching a YouTube clip of Christina Aguilera - charmingly mispronounced several times as "Aguileria" - performing a James Brown cover at the Grammy Awards, Smith confessed, "That woman, she makes me want to work harder." Enter the thud of jaws dropping - not necessarily because of who she was talking about, but rather the fact that I don't think any of us could fathom the idea of she herself working any harder than she already does. Probably the most memorable sentence of the night, in fact.

But the performances - oh, the performances! Where to start? A veritable greatest hits spectacular, along with a lavish assortment of numbers from her recent covers album, Twelve. Horses' "Kimberly" and "Redondo Beach" made for a formidable one-two opening punch, but momentum really took off with the covers selections, most of which appeared in even more fully-realized versions than those that appeared on Twelve. Hendrix's "Are You Experienced?" - truly mesmerizing, as was George Harrison's "Within You Without You." Maybe calling them covers isn't quite right. Nah, let's call 'em interpretations. The thing with Smith is: she doesn't just take a song and do it, she inhabits it, and somewhere along the way an ecstatic mutation pops out. Witness the full-on overhaul she and the band wrought upon Them's "Gloria" all those years ago, keeping the chorus of the song but then spiraling off in a million different directions from there. Seriously, who at this point thinks of Van Morrison first, upon hearing the title? Not me, anyway.

How's this for a tangent, but worth every second of it: while we're on the subject of reappropriating songs, let's head back to the finale again. "Rock & Roll Nigger" is winding down and tearing up (thanks in part to the riffage being churned out by a little pre-teen in a Dead Kennedys T-shirt pulled out from the crowd and handed a guitar), church is almost over, and Smith pipes up in a faux-dramatic, nearly-Shatner-esque au revoir, "You / light up my life / you give me hope / to carry on." Yes, waves of chuckling cringes follow, and while there surely must have been at least a blip of irony on Smith's lips at the mention of that Debby Boone saccharine overload, let's take a trip on the way-way-back-machine, shall we? Back in the early '80s, Smith appeared on the children's show Kids Are People Too, and pulled off quite the unapologetically-irony-free rendition of that lil' chestnut. No, really. YouTube, take us away:

Got your proof? Back to the covers. While they didn't quite enter that same stratosphere on Twelve's interpretations as they did with "Gloria," these new takes come in shapes not given to them by their songwriters. Better yet, the songs appear to have transformed once again, morphing and sprawling onstage, floating away from those studio versions recorded mere months ago. Alchemy, before our very eyes and ears, my dears!

And when it came time to feed our heads, Smith launched into raconteur mode with an elaborate yarn involving The X-Files, a childhood dessert called "poor-man's cake", her mother, and a bunny, thus constructing a fittingly surreal gateway into Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit." Being far too young to have ever experienced the Airplane first-hand (but old enough to have caught Grace Slick's cruel Mach III hybrid Starship performing a wet-noodle rendition of the song in the mid-'80s…oh, a sad, sad story for another time), it was a magnificent sight indeed to behold Smith parading on stage with such fire burning bright. Kaye took the mic on a riveting cover of the Seeds' "Pushin' Too Hard" (not on the album), Smith vamping it up all the while.

But as I'd expected, Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was the evening's highlight; to me, her version of this song is the most Patti-fied on the album, launching into a head-swimmingly swirling meditation which brings Cobain a few steps closer to two of her touchstones, Rimbaud and Blake. Live, it's a stunner - a glorious whirlwind to get lost in for a while, and most of the crowd seemed to do exactly that. Truth be told, methinks I'm still whooshing around in it somewhere.