PATTI SMITH on what’s happened to Rock & Roll:

After being away from the music scene for more than a decade and a half, Smith said she’s glad to have found, upon returning to the stage, that rock ‘n’ roll is anything but dead.

“I think that in the current state of rock ‘n’ roll, we actually have two states,” she explained. “Obviously, the state of the music business is in shambles, but … the state of the people, I think, is fine.

“We’re in a very democratic era of rock ‘n’ roll. It’s not an era of rock gods. You don’t have the, you know, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Grace Slick — there isn’t really the pantheon of rock gods and goddesses that we had in my time. But we have something equally as interesting, and that’s the fact that rock ‘n’ roll is really, more than ever, the people’s cultural voice.

“You go on MySpace or different websites, and there’s thousands and thousands and thousands of people making their own music, expressing themselves, exchanging files and deciding how they want to hear music and how they want to distribute music. Everything is changing, and I think that’s fine. Rock ‘n’ roll was a revolutionary cultural voice that was people-based, and I think the people have taken it over.”

Power to the people! You could write a book about that phenomenon.