- Included among the Record Descriptions of Favorite Albums (Part 1).
- Horses would be a landmark album in anybody’s book if the artist were a male rock band, but the album is all the more startling coming from a woman.
Patti Smith – Horses (1975): Looking back, most people cite the release in April 1976 of Ramones by the band Ramones as the birth of punk rock. The debut album Horses by Patti Smith – unquestionably the most enduring figure in punk rock – complicates this pronouncement, since the album was released several months earlier, in November 1975. The popular perception of punk rock as an unvarying anarchic barrage is undercut by how different Horses is from Ramones, yet both albums are undeniable punk-rock milestones. Patti Smith grew up in Chicago and is of Irish descent. She moved to New York City in 1967 and met photographer Robert Mapplethorpe; they had a tumultuous romantic relationship that was exacerbated by their poverty and Mapplethorpe’s struggles with his sexuality.
In her multiply-award-winning 2010 memoir Just Kids about their time together, Patti Smith refers to Robert Mapplethorpe as “the artist of my life”. His photographs of her became the covers for the Patti Smith Group records. Patti Smith began performing rock music with music archivist and guitarist Lenny Kaye in 1974 – another year that popular music changed irrevocably, much like 1963 with the Beatles and the rest of the British Invasion. While not actually inventing the term “punk rock”, Lenny Kaye had popularized it in his liner notes for Nuggets (1972), the first compilation album of garage rock and psychedelic rock music, so this was most appropriate. The band that became the Patti Smith Group was created when Ivan Kral (guitar and bass), Jay Dee Daugherty (drums), and Richard Sohl (piano) joined Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye. The piano player’s name is fitting, since his understated work at the ivories is in many ways the soul of the Patti Smith Group. Many years ago, I wrote of Patti Smith that she resembled nothing so much as the Beat poets of the 1950’s; but that really is only one side of her persona. She is a rocker pure and simple, as well as a poet and a first-rate vocalist and one hell of a writer besides. Patti Smith is renowned for reworking well-known rock standards to fit her vision and also of adding shock value to her music that surely made Alice Cooper smile; and that was true of the band’s first single from 1974, “Hey Joe” b/w “Piss Factory”. Patti Smith included a monologue about newspaper heiress Patty Hearst (who had been kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army earlier that year) in the middle of her rendition of the 1960’s standard; while the latter song relates the salvation she received from the helplessness of her job on an assembly line after discovering a book by French poet Arthur Rimbaud (Jim Morrison of the Doors was similarly enthralled with Rimbaud). Patti Smith Group was signed by Clive Davis to a major-label contract with Arista Records; and their debut album Horses was released with the artist name Patti Smith. The album producer is John Cale of the Velvet Underground, who previously produced the proto-punk–rock masterpiece The Stooges (1969), the first album by Iggy Pop’s band the Stooges. The more refined sound on Patti Smith’s later albums resulted in hit songs like “Frederick” (written for her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith of MC5 – the joke at the time was that Patti Smith married him because she wouldn’t have to change her last name) and “Because the Night” (where she reworked a Bruce Springsteen song that the Boss had decided not to include on his album). From the spoken-word opening salvo “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine”, Horses is a fascinating amalgam of free-verse poetry, vocal and instrumental improvisation, a primitive style that approaches the minimalist, and joyful abandon on classic rock and roll songs like “Gloria” and “Land of a Thousand Dances”. Horses would be a landmark album in anybody’s book if the artist were a male rock band, but the album is all the more startling coming as it does from a woman.