Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, Lillian Roxon, Sam Shepard, Todd Rundgren and Allen Ginsberg were all in the hushed congregation of St Mark's Church, New York, on February 10, 1971.
Today, listening to that gig via YouTube, a young Patti Smith sounds fearless at her first public poetry reading. She's bold, brash, blasphemous. And Lenny Kaye has her back.
"Could you play a car crash with an electric guitar?" she had asked the guy at her favourite Bleecker Street record store.
"Yeah, I could do that," Kaye replied. So began one of the most inventive and enduring partnerships in rock 'n' roll.
The arrival was far from the beginning for either of them. Smith's years of artistic incubation at the Chelsea Hotel are documented in her book, Just Kids.
At the time, Kaye was documenting his own journey for the 1972 compilation of lost American pop singles, Nuggets. Later a four-CD set, the Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era would be handed down from Ramones to Tame Impala like the Old Testament of underground rock.
"It was not as well conceived as it seems in hindsight," the guitarist and music writer explains as he embarks on his final Australian tour with Smith.
"I worked in a record store, Village Oldies, and on Saturday nights I'd have a beer or six and just pull from the stacks and have my own little disc jockey set for people wandering into the store. That became the basis of the album."
Many of those same 45s, packed into a scuffed green box, are with him today. Ahead of his DJ set at Melbourne's Ding Ding Lounge this Sunday, he's as excited as ever about slipping them from their paper sleeves.
And yeah, he knows about USBs and iPads. "For one thing, 45s sound better. And another thing, I've had these records for so many years they're like old friends and I like giving them a whirl on the turntable."
Though Nuggets has become synonymous with garage rock, listeners will know that Kaye's curation was broader than that, reflecting a passion for music that goes back to the street corner doo-wop of his native Brooklyn.
By Smith's account, it was his "warm yet knowledgeable [magazine] piece on a capella music" that first led her to the Village Oldies store.
The journalist for Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy was already a veteran player by that time, having formed the Vandals at college in New Jersey in the updraft of Beatlemania.
"I was kind of a mutant kid," he remembers. "I didn't really fit in a lot of places. I wasn't tall and handsome and athletic and I wasn't, as they said at the time, 'college material'. I was on the fringes and into subcultures."
In that light, his first recording session is best understood as inspired casting. It was his uncle Larry Kusik, prolific songwriter of A Time For Us fame, who invited him to sing a novelty single titled Crazy Like A Fox in 1966.
"They call me neurotic and say I'm psychotic because I let my hair grow long," is the opening line of that long-deleted 45.
"The record wasn't a hit," he recalls, "but it gave me a sense that perhaps this world that I aspired to wasn't as out-of-reach as I thought. I really didn't think that 50 years later I would still be banging this guitar and coming to Australia."
Nor did he imagine, probably, that his passion for music history would encompass books about Bing Crosby and Waylon Jennings as well as definitive musings on rock 'n' roll. His latest, Lightning Strikes, will document geographical flashpoints of pop culture from Memphis '54 to New York '75.
As a record producer, he's ecstatic about Psalms, the alleged "psychedelic Christian album" by Jennings' widow, Jessi Coulter. It may be a stretch for garage rock fans, but "it's well within what I believe, in terms of opening yourself to the light beyond denomination," he says.
His relentless schedule recalls the line from Crazy Like a Fox that goes, "While they're workin' and savin', I'll get by without slavin'". But the one he likes most is, "While they're working on the inside, I'm having fun on the outside".
"I think of that in terms of being outside of society," he says. "I get up each day and I work. I think about music, I write about it, I live music until I go to bed. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing.
"I feel very privileged working with Patti. She is so inspirational in terms of what she expects of you and the idealism she espouses. But I'm just so happy I can get by without slavin' because as a slave, you're not in control of your fate. Thankfully I'm in control, which is really remarkable."