“When Dominik Bachmann asked whether I was there at the first concert by Patti Smith, and if I could tell him about it, I said no, I was still at a private boarding school high up in the Alps; but I remember a very beautiful, more recent concert by Patti Smith at the Rote Fabrik, the one in 2010, which took place outside at the lake in front of the Ziegel restaurant, now already fifteen years ago.

And I thought that I remembered how back then, in her intro, Patti Smith referred to that first, legendary concert at the Rote Fabrik in 1976, and mentioned that there had been a fire in the middle of her performance, and that the concert had to be stopped because of it. In reality—that’s how memory deceives us—it wasn’t a fire, but an act of sabotage, a small, relatively harmless teargas attack. And although the event hall had to be evacuated, after an interruption, the concert continued again.

However, this distortion of my own memory, also in terms of my time at the boarding school in the Alps, which had already finished a few years earlier, isn’t the point of this story, and also not the reason why Patti Smith told it in her intro. Instead, as Patti Smith said, she could remember her first concert amazingly well, but not very many people showed up, the audience on this legendary evening in the event hall was enthusiastic but also quite small, but then over the course of the years and legendary retellings—now here’s the punchline—the audience kept on growing. At some point, there must have been between 500 and 1,000 people at this mythical concert, which would be everyone in Zurich’s underground music scene who considers themselves to be someone, so to speak.