Today, Thursday, at 2 p.m., the free tickets go live for Patti Smith's return to San Francisco, playing at the Stern Grove Festival next month with Bob Mould.

The great Patti Smith, who rose to downtown-style fame in New York in the 1970s and found a new Millennial audience after the release of her bestselling 2010 memoir Just Kids, is coming to play at Stern Grove on August 13 in one of the most anticipated shows of the festival's 2023 season. And since the pandemic, as you likely know, the festival requires people to sign up for their free tickets one month in advance of the show, and that's today.

At 2 p.m., the tickets for Smith's show with Hüsker Dü and Sugar vocalist and guitarist Bob Mould go live on Eventbrite. And this is your friendly reminder.

After the August 13 show, there's only one more Stern Grove concert left, the Big Picnic on August 20 with the Flaming Lips, and those tickets will be up next week.

Smith hasn't put out a new studio album in a decade, since 2012's Banga, but she's been collaborating in recent years with experimental group Soundwalk Collective, and you can hear that work if you look her up on Spotify.

She's also become a uniquely popular iconoclast among artists of her generation — I can't think of another one of her cohort who has 1.1 million followers on Instagram. She ranks at 47 on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. And everyone from Madonna to Courtney Love to Orville Peck count her as a major influence on their work.

Smith was last in SF promoting her latest book, A Book of Days, back in November.

Here she is performing with her quartet in Ulm, Germany last month.

And here she is in an interview with Harper's Bazaar in January.

Top image: Tony Shanahan (L) and Patti Smith perform on stage at Sentrum Scene on June 20, 2023 in Oslo, Norway. (Photo by Per Ole Hagen/Redferns)