Patti Smith has been moved to tears at an event where she was reading an extract from her latest book after a fan helped to reunite the singer with items stolen from her nearly 40 years ago.

Smith was giving a reading in support of her new memoir M Train at Illinois’ Dominican University when she was approached by a fan named Noreen Bender, who gave her a bag containing items thought to have been stolen from Smith’s tour van in 1979 following a local show.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Bender had kept a sheer top, a Keith Richards t-shirt, a remembrance cloth and other accessories hidden away in a Bob Dylan merchandise bag for decades, waiting for the moment to return the items to her idol. The 56-year-old said she came in possession of the items through a male friend of her Chicago roommate at the time. “I knew I had to get it back to her. It’s not for a stranger,” Bender told the paper.

A clearly emotional Smith identified the top as the one she wore on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in July 1978, and the cloth as belonging to her brother and road manager, Todd Smith, who died in 1994.

“Before long, half the audience was crying with her … [Some] were asking where, how, why, but Patti just put her hands out and said she doesn’t care how, she’s just so grateful to have these priceless items back,” a witness described in an online forum. “The rest of the program, after she piled everything on the podium, she couldn’t stop touching them, eventually slowly slipping the bandana into her pocket . . and proceeded to do a ripping version of Because the Night with her son on acoustic guitar.”

Smith’s stolen items are thought to be connected to a Ryder rental truck theft that occurred in June 1979, after the punk rocker and her band played a concert at Chicago’s Aragon. The truck, which was carrying $40,000 in amplifiers, guitars and other musical equipment, was stolen outside of a Gold Coast hotel. Jeff Shaw, then a member of Smith’s stage crew, said: “We had to buy all brand-new equipment after receiving insurance money.”

The fate of the truck has remained unclear since that day. Bender said the man who gave her the items worked for U-Haul and brought a suitcase full of Smith’s goods to her home, where she and her roommate proceeded to divide them up. “I just thought, ‘Oh my god, these are her clothes and they still have her sweat on them,’ “ she said.

Bender added that it didn’t seem right to throw the clothes on stage during one of Smith’s concerts because she didn’t want the items to get lost in the commotion. So she waited until Sunday night, the moment she met Smith, to hand them over.



“The feeling of making your hero happy, it was a moment”, she said. “It was the highlight of my life.”