In celebration of the 50th anniversary of her debut album, Horses, Patti Smith has just announced a unique tour which will see the pioneering album played in its entirety.
Smith successfully obscured the boundaries of rock music throughout the ‘70s which saw her dubbed the “punk poet laureate” as she emerged a giant of the New York punk rock scene. But, why was the city so influential and what else led to the prodigious Horses?
Smith was born into a working class family in Chicago in 1946, and after graduating high school, she worked in a baby buggy factory. This experience influenced 1974’s ‘Hey Joe / Piss Factory’, which was Smith and her backing band’s (The Patti Smith Group’s) first single. In ‘Piss Factory’, Smith refuses to let the factory break her spirit and sings “I’m gonna be somebody / I’m gonna get on that train and go to New York City” and that she did.
This single helped get her a two-month weekend spot alongside punk band Television at CBGB, the famous New York club founded in 1973 which also gave a platform to the likes of Blondie, The Ramones and Talking Heads.
While they made their name in the city’s punk scene, Talking Heads and Blondie’s debut albums branched off into new-wave, which was neater, more digestible and danceable with infusions of electronic and disco sounds.
In a 2005 interview, Smith said, “I came into music because I thought the presentation of poetry wasn’t vibrant enough”, the secondary reason being that, with Horses, she “wanted to pump blood back into the heart of rock’n’roll”.
Smith had admired how the likes of Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix had carried rock music in the ‘60’s, which spoke for a generation of young people who longed for drastic cultural and political change, and felt that rock music had become “corporatised”. She was defiant, relentless in her vision and used Horses to channel those feelings into musical poetry, which is why she naturally began to be referred to as “punk”. However, unlike The Ramones, who were more akin to their British counterparts: The Sex Pistols and The Clash, Patti Smith was not a nihilist.
The similarity between the nihilistic punks and Smith was that they all rejected how “soft” rock had gotten. The ‘Dancing Barefoot’ writer and singer has referenced glam-rockers KISS as an example, saying “the atmosphere at the time was going toward light shows and smoke bombs” because of bands like them.
Smith knew music well before making it herself: her mother was a jazz singer (as well as a waitress) and Smith was briefly a rock music journalist for Rolling Stone in the early ‘70s and coincidentally went to CBGB to write a review of Television years before she would be on the same stage with them.
Smith was raised as a Jehovah’s’ Witness, but despite her Christian upbringing, she makes clear on Horses’ first track ‘Gloria: In Excelsis Deo’ that she didn’t carry religion into adulthood with the incredible opening line: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine”. She thought that religion was oppressive, however she remains fascinated with the grandeur of religious imagery and repurposes it to her advantage.
Before ‘Redondo Beach’ was a song for the album, it was a poem from one of her collections. Reading the poem alone without the breezy, reggae beat is harrowing, but paired together, seems to exhibit a disturbing polarity between a superficial happiness whilst sadness and suicide lies beneath the surface as Smith so sadly asks, “Are you gone, gone?”
All of the tracks on Horses either fully or partially derived from her poems, including the remarkable 9-minute ‘Land: Horses / Land of Thousand Dances / La Mer(de)’ which the album’s name and overall theme originates from.
During the song, she screams “Go Rimbaud!” revealing one of her literary influences. Smith was obsessed with poetry and, considering she surrounded herself with works from surrealists like Rimbaud yet the disillusions of T.S Elliot, it is easy to see how fragments of influences shaped her own work.
‘Free Money’ also demonstrates what Smith meant by wanting to “reinvigorate rock and roll” by composing a galvanising track with layers of rebellious poetry. It crescendos into rolling drums as Smith’s cries become greater and “Free money” starts to sound like a demand: her political conscience shining through.
Back in the music world, she pays gratitude to Maria Callas, whose music showed Smith how to develop narratives within songs, and John Coltrane, who was an example of how to “be responsible to the audience”. She often cites Bob Dylan as an influence too, first admiring him before entering music herself, and later becoming friends and even performing with him.
On ‘Break It Up’, you can hear Smith punch her chest as she sings “Ice, it was shining / I could feel my heart, it was melting” over tense piano chords not long before she screams “Break it up, oh, please, take me with you” over shattering drums and a wailing electric guitar. ‘Break It Up’ is another prime example of what she wanted from rock.
Horses was not made for passive listening. Smith didn’t want you to get too lost in the music, but to focus on her powerful words. That’s why the album uses minimal chord progressions: to keep the instrumentation secondary and the poetry first and foremost.
Smith followed up Horses with Radio Ethiopia, Easter and Wave between 1975 and 1979. Easter spawned her most commercially successful single ‘Because The Night’, but it was Horses that made her feel satisfied: she had voiced her dissatisfaction with the world and her preference for the direction rock music should take.
Not only that, but the music scene she ascended to had few women in it: it was her and Debbie Harry catapulting the female narrative within the punk scene, although they had different attitudes towards it. Smith hated being referred to as a “female musician” and felt she gained equality by not being singled out, but always maintained her stance on matters, for example by refusing to shave her armpits on the Easter cover, whereas, Harry preferred her femininity to be more assertive as she took control of the male gaze and stared right back at them.
New York City has always been referred to as somewhat of a hotspot for musical creation. In the world of pop, Madonna loves to tell the story of how she arrived in New York in 1978 with nothing but $35 and dancing shoes (and in 2005 released the song ‘I Love New York’). Cultural changes happening amongst economic decline made the rawness of hungry, angsty artists like Patti Smith stand out amongst the noise. Smith herself has said “For me, New York meant freedom; I loved that people didn’t stop and question you because of the way you were dressed”.
The scene in New York City was the catalyst for the punk movement, but it really gave its members a place to find their voice and branch off into their own sub-genres: and in the case of Patti Smith, she’s since said she doesn’t even see herself as punk and just wanted to see if she could make a difference in the world.
It was clear then, and it’s clear now, that she succeeded.
Words by Kai Palmer
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