REMEMBER Patti Smith?

She was famous three months ago. Big stories in Rolling Stone, Time, The New York Times. And that album cover!

How easy is it to fall for somebody when you don't truly know what they stand for? A singer whose music you have never heard? The alluring glimpse of the pale square frame photograph of the girl with the switchblade thin elbows sticking out of a white shirt? Coat slung over her shoulder? Pale translucent cheekbones? Suspenders, providing that hint of a man's outfit? That casual elegance of the working man with sleeves rolled up--a takeoff on the cover of an early Frank Sinatra album? Coal black hair? The picture is all still, the energy curiously becalmed. A woman reed thin, when quiet just a sparkler in storage, but when she begins to sing or yell it's Bastille Day and all the pecan shops in Georgia have contributed M-80 cherry bombs to the chaos. The night sky fills with blue and pink pinwheels.

It's all hard to remember now, three months later, why everyone was standing in line on Boylston Street a half a block from the Jazz Workshop on Thursday January 8 at 7 p.m. in 16 degree weather hoping to earn the privilege of paying $4 to get into a crowded booze room to hear--what? Gender ambiguity?

The performer who recorded Patti Smith's Horses album is very different when she gets away from the vinyl. Backed by a very rudimentary R&Roll band with monotonous rhythms and very confined three chord 4/4 beat, with no electronic overtracking, overdubbing and overecho, she is very challenging and very real. She taunts the audience, she does battle with them, and she comes out ahead.

WORKING WITH no more pure vocal equipment than Dylan, she digs deep into her Pitman, New Jersey, garbage-cans-crashing-in-the-morning voice to come up with some sultry Piaf and sneering Jagger and belts it out with a kind of controlled epileptic frenzy. Gangfight scuzz. What's not so simple and brutal are the words. She is a poet and her rock and roll is all based on her poetry. A cultural groupie, it is clear that she has swallowed a lot of influences to have borne the devil child of her work. An article in Rolling Stone about her revealed a whole cast of romantics populating her attic.

Rimbaud. The Ronettes.

Renoir. Kenneth Anger.

Jimi Hendrix. Brian Jones. William Burroughs. Andy Warhol. Janis Joplin. Lou Reed. Edith Piaf. Baudelaire. Norman Mailer. Rastafarianism. Playwright Sam Shepherd.

Not a bad Whitmanian roll call.

As a child she was racked by scarlet fever, which spurred her imagination. She dreamed of whirlpools and premonitions of death. When she went to Paris in 1970, she thought she saw Jimi Hendrix and Brian Jones dying from regurgitation. She tried to warn them, but she wasn't famous enough to get through.

She returned to America, still an unknown, and carved her name into more small books of poetry. Seventh Heaven began with a lot of lesbian imagery. Then came another silver of a tome, this one more heterosexual bent. She hated her female body from the beginning.

Every since I felt the need to choose

I'd choose male.

I felt boy rhythums when I was in knee