50 years ago today: Patti Smith released Horses

Originally published in Hot Press in 2002:

If ever a record generated thirty-three and a third revolutions per minute, it was Patti Smith’s Horses.

By 1975, the singer was hardly an ingenue, but the force of persona exhibited on her debut album still had enough impact to shatter rockchick stereotypes, her lyrics battered down the boundaries between poetry and rock ’n’ roll (previously, only Dylan had taken automatic writing as far) and her voice challenged the very notion of a demarcation between sung and spoken word.

Even the cover portrait created a stir, a black-and-white shot by Robert Mapplethorpe which presented Smith as an androgynous cross between a young Sinatra, Keith Richards and Rimbaud, while her take on ‘Gloria’ (transformed from Them’s garage rock grind into a heretical hymn of polysexual emancipation) erased the line between interpretive singing and spontaneous composition.

Indeed, Horses key characteristic may be that it’s so transparent – by invoking Dylan, Hendrix, The Stones, Morrison, Blake, Rimbaud and Cocteau, Patti Smith audaciously set herself up as their successor. Equally, John Cale’s production remains almost undetectable – his job was to create the space for musicians and singer to interact, improvise and experiment... to happen. In ways that neither he nor Smith could’ve predicted, the ex-Velvet’s childhood experiences of fire-and-brimstone orators in rural Wales gave him perfect pointers on how to marry the twin disciplines of performance and scripture.

By all accounts, the atmosphere in the studio was not a tranquil one, a fact borne out by Smith’s searing fire-in-the-belly rhetoric and the fractious nature of the music. Much of Horses suggests a woman who has just been struck by lightning and is conducting that raw energy through her mouth in torrents of Babylonian babble-on.

Deprived of the range and technical prowess of a Caruso, Smith instead employed more primal vocal devices: speaking in tongues on the New England fantasia of ‘Birdland’ or plumbing the depths of her own squalor in the lust for ‘Free Money’. The surreal high school psychodrama of the title tune meanwhile, was James Dean directed by Pasolini, with a li'l help from Luis Bunuel.

Faced with such convulsions and conniptions, the band – Ivan Kral, Richard Sohl, Lenny Kaye and Jay Dee Dougherty – took the smart tack, providing Smith with solid Stones/Velvets structures on songs like ‘Redondo Beach’ and ‘Kimberly’, grounding her remarkable tirades, and simultaneously acting as a four-man cattle prod and safety net. The result was an unprecedented fusion of New York performance poetry and snot-nosed rock ‘n’ roll.

On Horses, Patti Smith made a deal with God: she’d shout, he’d listen. Over the next ten years, the likes of Michael Stipe, Bono, Kim Gordon and Courtney Love eavesdropped, transfixed.

STAR TRACK: ‘Land/Horses’

ACE LYRIC LINE: "Jesus died for somebody’s sins/But not mine" – ‘Gloria: In Excelsis Deo’

MAGIC MOMENT: The surge of momentum brought on by the lines "The boy looked at Johnny/Johnny wanted to run/But the movie kept moving as planned/The boy took Johnny/He pressed him against a locker/He drove it in/He drove it home/He drove it deep in Johnny" as the hormonal frenzy of ‘Land’ erupts into ‘Land Of A Thousand Dances’. Running a close second: Richard Sohl’s woozy Debussy piano figure melting under Smith as she intones, "It was if someone had spread butter on all the fine points of the stars/’Cos when he looked up they started to slip" (‘Birdland’)