Patti Smith sounded both young and old on her 1975 debut, Horses: young because only a young punk can slink into the spotlight and sell an opening line like, "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine"; old, because she was dead serious and sophisticated, an ur-punk but also a poet and a singer who knew to stop this close to overindulgence. Like her hero Jim Morrison she wrote absurd verses more fit for a diary than a rock 'n' roll record, but could also follow them with lines that genuinely terrified.
Smith is the fountainhead for the punks, grrrls, rockers, and artists that have worn the shit out of this record in their most raw, needy hours, and who study and mimic everything she does with that voice-- which is all rends, tears, and bite marks, and no clean cuts. So it feels cheap not to put this fully on a pedestal, even if "Land"'s meandering free verse makes a poor bookend for the enraged lust of "Gloria", and "Elegie" is a turgid closer. The flaws don't matter: Horses is an album of its time-- not because it's dated, but because it precariously captures a phase in Smith's life, and when all the raw elements fall in place, it feels miraculous.
Take "Birdland". Just like in a jazz ballad, you can practically hear the band breathing in sync, and the slightest misjudgment would screw up the flow of Smith's surreal-- but straightforwardly powerful-- poem. But Lenny Kaye's guitar stretches effortlessly from post-funeral ballad to ecstatic, crazy fury, and Smith's performance is fierce and horribly unbeautiful. "It was as if someone had spread butter on all the fine points of the stars/ 'Cause when he looked up they started to slip." Holy God is she a poet, and she hurls those words so accurately you want to scream and give up too.
That was 30 years ago. Today, Smith is unavoidably grown up, stuck in the canon, and well defined, and that's the artist we hear on the bonus disc in this package, a live track-by-track recital of Horses from the Meltdown Festival in London, this past June. She took the stage with old friends Tom Verlaine and Lenny Kaye on guitar and Jay Dee Daugherty on drums. They knocked the roof off-- but they don't match the original. "Birdland" is fitful and noisy, the segue from "Lands" back to a "Gloria" reprise seems like a cop-out, and Smith's wild poet thing has settled into something a little more, hey, settled, like when she complains about how much time we spend on email and Blackberrys. "Elegie" takes far more meaning now that she has a list of loved ones to commemorate, like Robert Mapplethorpe, or her own husband. But play it back to back with the debut, and instead of a transformative force, you hear an old familiar voice cranking about George Bush.
Here's the thing about growing up: You don't know when it happens until later, but if you could catch it, it would be an amazingly quick moment-- like the point where you toss a ball in the air and it comes to a complete halt before it starts to fall to the ground. When we talk about youth and rock and roll, we're looking for that moment, of not being one thing or the other but of straddling both, of making mistakes that are above and beneath us, of a crest of energy as the ball gets ready to stop. We're talking about Smith changing from the twentysomething poet who decided to add guitar to her readings, and about an artist who can ape the last generation even as she spawns the next one. Or a performance like her old take of "My Generation", where she and John Cale knock the shit out of the by-then-ancient Who classic and Smith wraps with the wail, "I'm so young, I'm so goddamn young"-- and she's still, barely, right.
