The elegy and optimism of New Year's Eve came early this year -- on December 29th, the opening night of Patti Smith's traditional Christmas-week stand at New York's Bowery Ballroom. The first hour of the show was a complete first-time performance of Smith's 1988 album, Dream of Life, the only record she ever made with her late husband Fred Smith of the MC5, who co-wrote and co-produced all of the songs and played all of the guitars. Dream of Life is best known now for its flagship anthem, "People Have the Power," which has been a closing highlight of every Patti Smith show I've seen since her return to active duty in 1995. But the entire album -- a luxuriant-pop life cycle of fighting spirit, grieving memorial and new birth -- deserves rediscovery, and this show was an exciting, if sometimes rickety, reminder of Dream of Life's obscured greatness.

Indeed, many of the record's eight songs had never been performed live before, and Smith admitted that thanks to back pains earlier in the week, she was under-rehearsed for this premiere. But she recovered quickly on the couple of occasions when she blanked on a lyric, and her band -- including her son Jackson, representing his father on guitar -- put a garage-rock edge on the album's original sheen. It was strange to hear "People Have the Power," which opened the record, at the start of the night. But Dream of Life, made during Smith's full-time-mom years (she was pregnant with her daughter Jesse during the sessions), always had plenty of rock to go around, and that energy bloomed at the Bowery. For every pause to reflect on loss or pray in gratitude -- "Paths That Cross," the title song, "Going Under" -- there was the galloping send-off of "Up There Down There" (recorded the night Andy Warhol died), the prescient firefight of "When Duty Calls" (with its references to Lebanon, Iran and jihad) and the high-speed desire of "Looking for You."

After playing the album's final lullabye, "The Jackson Song," and the autumnal outtake "Wild Leaves" -- the 1988 B-side to "People Have the Power" -- Smith continued to sing for those who had been so important to the record and passed on after it: "Frederick" from Wave (for Fred) and "Beneath the Southern Cross" from Gone Again (for friend and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe). Smith also made sober note of the news that night of Saddam Hussein's execution, warning that this was nothing to celebrate and singing "Peaceable Kingdom" from Trampin' -- a stubborn vision of wisdom, peace and dignity for an Iraq drowning in blood.

Then, as if she'd finally had enough of worry, Smith did an ecstatic U-turn into a closing Bo Diddley-James Brown medley (celebrating the departed Godfather with a bizarre, slightly rewritten snatch of "Living in America") and returning for an atomic encore of the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" -- a wild end to a special night in which Smith's Dream of Life finally came true.