It’s a fine line on Horses between listening and believing. Even before the decades made Patti Smith’s debut album into rock’n’roll scripture, its eight-word opening salvo imbued its body and blood and grace and guts with a holy truth. “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine,” sung-spoke slowly like smoke. Our story accordingly begins at church, on Bertolt Brecht’s birthday, Lou Reed in the pews, full moon.
Patti stepped to the lectern at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church on February 10, 1971, and dedicated her reading to crime. From the moment she opened her mouth, her brash South Jersey accent and out-of-step real talk demolished the fourth wall between performer and audience. The date marked Smith’s first gig with guitarist Lenny Kaye, a music critic she befriended after he wrote about the early-’60s phenomenon of regional street-corner vocal groups (“The Best of Acapella,” Jazz and Pop, 1969), the doo-wop of her own youth.
She recruited Kaye for St. Mark’s by asking, “Could you play a car crash with an electric guitar?” Having produced Nuggets—the 1972 garage-rock compilation of willfully unprofessional ’60s bands already dubbed “punk rock”—Kaye was game. The East Village church was not typically host to electric guitars. Smith had attended past readings at the Project alongside Beat scribe Gregory Corso as he heckled dull poets (“No blood! Get a transfusion!”) and she promised herself if she ever had a chance to read her own poetry, she would never be boring.
That night, she sang “Mack the Knife” and performed her poems—including “Oath,” the origin of her “Jesus died…” line—before a crowd that included Andy Warhol, Bobby Neuwirth, Robert Mapplethorpe, Sam Shepherd, and Anne Waldman. Afterward, her soon-to-be friend Sandy Pearlman suggested she front a rock’n’roll band, “but I just laughed,” Smith wrote in her 2019 memoir, Year of the Monkey, “and told him I already had a good job working in a bookstore.” Immediately, she was flooded with asks. A businessman offered a lucrative record deal hoping to make her into the Downtown Cher. Her response: “I ain’t never gonna do this shit. I ain’t never gonna do a record unless they let me do exactly what I want.”
She had fled rural South Jersey in 1967, ditching her family home across from a square-dance barn and her non-union factory job to “get on that train […] and go to New York City,” as she would chronicle on her first single, and “be somebody” and “never return, no, never return/To burn out in this piss factory/And I will travel light, oh/Watch me now.” New York was all eyes.
All these Patti Smith genesis myths have become as seismic as her music. The fable of her young bohemian existence—CBGB, Chelsea Hotel, Mapplethorpe, Cowboy Mouth—precedes her. It can be summarized by saying she believed in herself—a sickly child and the oldest of four to a waitress mother and factory-worker father who moved 11 times before her fifth birthday. As a young Jehovah’s Witness knocking doors on Saturday mornings, she got buckets of urine dumped on her and eventually dismissed organized religion when an elder told her there was no room for art in God’s kingdom. She communed with poems, fairytales, Dylan, Coltrane, and imagined a way out. “I grew up in a tougher part of Jersey than Bruce Springsteen,” she told Rolling Stone in 1976. Teen girls like her weren’t meant to escape. When she became pregnant and gave up a child for adoption at 20, “It developed me as a person, made me start to value life,” she said, “that I’m not down in South Jersey on welfare with a 9-year-old. ‘Cause every other girl in South Jersey who got in trouble at that time is down there.” Smith’s freedom was tangible. She left home with nothing in pursuit of everything, sharpening herself against the rock of experience and exalting the innocence of dreams.
Smith considered rock’n’roll the people’s art form. Having watched rock’s then-20-year history evolve in her lifetime—citing Little Richard and the Marvelettes as big parts of her childhood, cutting her hair like Keith Richards, learning to walk (she claimed) from Don’t Look Back—she feared that the music’s rawer roots were at risk of being lost in the ’70s to an increasingly corporate, commodified, arena-scaled industry. So Smith rose to the occasion. Alchemizing her poetry’s imagistic visions and Beat pulse with a sense of duty, she led a rock band. Their spring 1975 residency at CBGB attracted a seven-album deal with the new Arista label and complete creative control, which Smith used to speak straight to misfits. As Smith put blood into poetry, she stripped rock for parts: rhythm, attitude, intensity, delight. Her bandmates—Kaye, pianist Richard Sohl, guitarist Ivan Kral, drummer Jay Dee Daugherty—were with her. Part of the group’s project was to “always attempt something beyond what we can do” musically. Emitting the electricity of a woman excavating the reservoirs of her soul, Horses dares you, too, to go deeper.
To say Smith simply combined rock and poetry is like saying a tidal wave is made of salt and water. On Horses, her conviction that rock can change you sounds charged with missionary zeal; her free-jazz principle keeps the transformations alive. As Smith’s contralto delivers status-quo-skewering tales of sex, death, religion, money, Rimbaud, UFOs, nightmares, and dreams, her words crystallize the idea that we create and destroy our own reality, or at least we try. They expand and contract, sprawl and puncture, seduce you in and freak you out. They make you question what a rock song can do and how a person can be.
Anchored by her propulsive strength, lead by her rushing momentum, the band’s minimalist rock is gasoline to the engine of Smith’s rave-ups, ebbing and flowing between avant-garde reveries and pop elements like the episodic free-time of the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin.” The “place called space” echo of Sun Ra on “Land” seems not incidental to Horses’ constant improvisational energy. Smith rhapsodizes to reel the songs in, then catapults them to the cosmos. The whole atmosphere of Horses is anointed with the spirit of creation.
The preeminent New York art rock figure, John Cale, seemed like a natural fit as producer when the band entered Electric Lady Studios in September 1975. In Smith’s telling, their working relationship was like A Season in Hell. She wanted a spartan technical engineer to capture the band’s sound and presence live in the room, fast, spontaneous, without overdubs, but ended up with a “total maniac artist.” “He’s a fighter and I’m a fighter so we’re fightin’,” Smith said. “Sometimes fightin’ produces a champ.” Promoting the record, she said she chose him because his records sounded good, but also quipped that the pairing was somewhat arbitrary: “I looked at the cover of [1974’s] Fear and I said, ‘Now there’s a set of cheekbones.’”
Never failing to name her influences—in fact, stating her desire to pay back the debts she owed to them by making something great—Smith seized her heroes as deities, enthusiastically referencing her rock, soul, and jazz inspirations in song, letting the fervor of fandom stoke Horses’ fire. Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, and Mick Jagger were her holy trinity—or maybe it’s John Coltrane, Maria Callas, Arthur Rimbaud? And what of Jo March, Jim Morrison, Albert Ayler? In any case, “Elegie,” Horses’ mournful closing ballad, was for Hendrix, recorded at his studio on the fifth anniversary of his death. Smith quotes Hendrix’s lyrics on “Elegie”—“It’s sad, it’s much too bad, that our friends can’t be with us today”—but his spirit lingers through Horses, especially in Smith’s wild vocal improvisations, as if using her throat to mimic his metaphysical feedback-laden solos.
She also learned from fellow Chelsea Hotel denizen William Burroughs’s high-speed cut-up collage technique, evidenced in how she juxtaposed forms in her songwriting. “Gloria” opens with the poem, “Oath,” which she wrote in 1968, then flips to the simple, cathartic ’60s garage-rock staple penned by a young Van Morrison for his band Them—making it a bricolage of teen dreaming, a poem written without guile or fear, a full-throttle folk song that was a starting line for unknown legions of rock fantasies. As if instilling confidence by osmosis, Horses’ first eight words voice the unassailable fact that mistakes are a symptom of life.
Other times, Horses seems to hero-worship the sky. The nine-minute odyssey “Birdland” shares a name with the famed, by-then shuttered Manhattan jazz club, itself named for Charlie Parker. Smith’s lyrics were improvised in the studio, drawing from a book by Peter Reich (son of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich) who dreamed his dead father was coming to rescue him from earth in a UFO: “It was if someone had spread butter on all the fine points of the stars cause when he looked up they started to slip,” Smith sings in a wide-eyed rush as if each word were a celestial object pulling her “up up up” until a dream becomes a frenzied fight song; “Birdland” itself embodies the “What the hell was that?” energy of a sky-streaking flying object that only some people saw.
The DNA of Smith’s singing threads Shangri-Las tough talk and Stones menace into the swagger of a South Jersey girl cuttin’ the edges off her letters, punctuatin’ em. She chewed syllables, pulled them from the back of her throat, and made them up on the spot. She sings like a shadowboxer choreographed by her genius phrasings. At one point on “Break It Up,” the recording seems to capture the sound of Smith beating her chest in sync with her heart. Considering Smith’s sing-song declamations and crude vibrato, I recall a 1971 piece she wrote for Rolling Stone, outlining her adoration for the balladeering “sweet outlaw” and “trapeze artist” Lotte Lenya, best known for performing theater songs by her husband, Kurt Weill. “It was hard for me to face up to being a girl,” Smith concluded. “But Lotte Lenya showed me how high and low down you can shoot being a woman.” Smith stages this breadth whether chanting “Go Rimbaud! Go Johnny go!” or elocuting “The sky will split/And the planets will shift,” or punching out “ding-dong, ding-dong” or snarling each hard-boiled vowel of “People say beware/But I don’t care/The words are just rules and regulations to me.”
Smith struggled to accept the mores of her gender even in childhood, wanting to embrace both the feminine and the masculine within herself. On “Gloria” she lingers at a party—“I just get bored,” she sneers—then her eye catches a “sweet young thing” leaning against a parking meter, bellowing that she’s gonna—ah, ah—make her mine. The sparkling “Kimberly” is addressed to Patti’s little sister, 10 years her junior; in South Jersey, the child was often left in Smith’s care, including, as the song narrates, during a barn fire she watched while cradling Kimberly. “I feel just like some misplaced Joan of Arc/And the cause is you looking at me,” she proclaims in cool syncopation. It might be the first rock song with a lyric about rocking a baby; the tender way she sings “as long as you’re safe, Kimberly” undercuts rock cliches with maternal care.
The austere reggae of “Redondo Beach” is like a three-minute film treatment, a story of overcast beachgoers grieving a girl, the narrator’s beloved, lost to “sweet suicide”: “You’ll never return into my arms cause you were gone, gone,” she despairs, though the tune’s overall effect is bewilderingly playful. In live shows, Smith would reportedly introduce the song saying it was about “a beach where women love other women.” She rejected Horses’ queerness as autobiography, but the songs still created new paradigms, inventing roles in the schema of rock for women seducing women, women mourning women, women protecting women, women intoning “Ohh, she looks so good, oooh she looks so fine” and “20,000 girls/Called their names out to me,” aware that in its way it was radical.
“Free Money” was the first song Smith and Kaye penned together, and Smith wrote the lyric “Scoop the pearls from the sea, cash them in and buy you all the things you need” with another woman in mind: her mother. Smith had watched her parents struggle all her life. The song’s blazing dream of winning some fantastical lotto and making something from nothing feels rooted intuitively in a working-class consciousness. The steadiness and structure of “Free Money” mirror the relief she longs to deliver; its ecstatic build becomes the voyage she's desperate to share. As a kid, Smith’s own aesthetic inspiration was free, from trashed issues of Vogue, stolen poetry volumes, and public art museums. That Blondie eventually echoed “Free Money”’s message—dreaming is free—underscores its eloquent distillation of punk’s essence.
The apotheosis of Smith’s ambition, “Land,” is an epic nine-minute triptych and semi-apocalyptic hero’s journey, a cut-up of angels and ancient wisdom and a band called Twistelletes. The first act weaves three Smith vocal takes into an unnerving inner monologue about “Johnny,” a boy who is viciously assaulted, depicting the stampede of brutal reality as “horses, horses, horses.” Next a hairpin turn takes us suddenly to a dance hall. Smith quotes from the live-wire abandon of Chris Kenner’s 1962 classic “Land of a Thousand Dances,” a parade of teen dance crazes: “Do you know how to Pony like Bony Moronie?” she hollers. “Then you mashed potato!” “Do the alligator!” “Do the Watusi!” “Land” is ultimately an action painting of jaunty keys and single hammered chords and pure corporality, circling the fact that “life is filled with holes,” “full of pain,” Smith sings, but it’s worth living. (A Creem reporter, Tony Glover, was present for the Horses sessions, and after watching Smith spend seven possessed hours mixing “Land,” her fingers at the controls, he wrote, “I had trouble sleeping for several days.”)
Plenty of “Land” begets communion over comprehension per se. But when the middle section cracks open and pours down its incantatory “Sea of Possibilities”—“There is a sea up there,” the words refracting, “a sea of possibilities”—it dares you to find yourself in its chaos. Inspiration is a renewable energy source all around, it seems to say, just waiting to be grasped. The “Sea of Possibilities” became a fever-dream prophecy for the future of music, a rallying cry to incite people’s participation in rock or simply their own lives. It humanizes the process of art-making, which is what punk still is, a gauntlet thrown down, saying, “Here, you try.” As much as Smith reveres heroes, she doesn’t bow to them; “Land” invites you to become your own. On the B-side of the “Gloria” single was a cover of the Who’s “My Generation,” where Smith can be heard shouting, in the end, to the kids who powered youth culture and now stood in her audience: “We created it! Let’s take it over!” She reflected on the ripple effects of this sonic anarchy when Elvis died in 1977, her sorrow concurrent with the heyday of punk: “The King is dead. The People will rule.”
And they did. Horses signaled a nonnegotiable sea change, catalyzing a new cultural order. At CBGB, neither Ramones nor Television had released records yet, nor had London’s Sex Pistols or the Clash (Joe Strummer was still a 101er), not to mention the women of the Slits or the Raincoats for whom Smith was a revelation. If the point of punk is to embolden people who music might otherwise leave behind—if the future of rock belonged to women, as another famous Patti devotee, Kurt Cobain, would assert years later—then Horses was a moment of ignition, with keys freely distributed. Beyond its initial impact, Horses inspired practically every subsequent era of rock and helped shepherd in the alternative canon. Michael Stipe, Courtney Love, and Thurston Moore were but three of the most vocal musicians to credit Smith with setting them on the course of their lives (when Moore explained riot grrrl to Smith in 1995, she said, “That’s heartening to know. I hope there’s lots of them”). Even the Smiths met at a ’70s Patti Smith show.
