Patti Smith may be rock & roll royalty, but the wine-and-cheese crowd that attended her Saturday night performance at Atlanta's Variety Playhouse made for especially unruly subjects. At first, the audience ignored with near-reverential silence the onstage committee meetings and note-by-note tuneups that made her set somewhat awkward. But as the night wore on and the pacing problems continued, one fan could take it no more: "Kick out the jams, motherfucker," he screamed. It was that kind of night.

Smith politely ignored the comment, especially rude for the way it conjured the ghost of Fred "Sonic" Smith, the singer's late husband, and his proto-punk outfit, the MC5. In any case, kicking out the jams wasn't especially high on Patti Smith's list of priorities. Though fans were eventually treated to fierce, biting renditions of "Because the Night," "Gloria" and the new "Don't Say Nothing," Smith's mood was more contemplative than combative. "What are you guys thinking?" she asked the crowd at one point. "It's distracting my mind." Unsurprisingly, she emphasized the brooding blues-tinged dirges that make up most of her new album, "Peace and Noise."

Still, Smith infused even those relatively quieter songs with righteous indignation. On the mournful "Last Call," on which Smith was joined onstage by longtime fan Michael Stipe, she sounded as though she were spitting out the words of a prayer. Less gripping was her tribute to Allen Ginsberg, "Spell." Though Smith contributed an inspired, free jazz-style clarinet solo, the poet's words, read from a well-worn copy of "Howl," seemed positively quaint. A second attempt at poetry reading was abandoned, when Smith confessed she wasn't "in the mood."

Apparently, neither was the audience, which shouted for "the real stuff" at every protracted interval. Finally, the singer grudgingly obliged, closing the night with an appropriately raucous "Rock & Roll Nigger." Joined onstage by members of the opening act, Smoke, Smith and her band engaged in some good-natured moshing and then opted for a more traditional show of rebellion -- guitar bashing. That concert-ending cliche, not to mention the passing of two decades, blunted the song's intensity considerably, but the crowd at last gave Smith what she so richly deserv