Patti Smith - Horses, 50 Years Later

Do you want to shatter the sky? Patti Smith Horses

Patti Smith: vocals, principle songwriter

Patti Smith Band:

Lenny Kaye: lead guitar

Ivan Kral: guitar, bass

Richard Sohl: piano

Jay Dee Daugherty: drums

Guests: Tom Verlaine, guitar on “Break It Up;” Allen Lanier, guitar on “Elegie”

Produced by John Cale

art by Robert Mapplethorpe

White shining silver studs

“Whenever I look at it now, I never see me. I see us.”

quoted from: Patti Smith, Just Kids (2018 ed.)

How does one describe the relationship between Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe? They weren’t friends, they weren’t lovers. they were...a third thing. Something around the platonic soulmate range, but even that feels reductive.

They were each others’ muses; living together for a time at the Chelsea Hotel. She was his first model. He encouraged her art. She went to Paris in hopes to learn the craft, but left with something else entirely. “...I came back wholly involved in words and rhythms.” These words were the basis of her debut album, Horses.

Pictured: outtake for Patti Smith's Horses album cover (photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe, 1975)

Think of how female singer-songwriters were being marketed in the mid-1970s. Joni Mitchell, Melanie, and Carole King; with their long hair, longer skirts, and sophisto-pop. “The cover (of Horses,) then, was the first victory in Smith’s war on conventionality,” author Philip Shaw asserts in his 33 1/3 volume on Horses. Patti wears a now-iconic getup: a white linen shirt with cuffs cut off, a skinny black tie, black pants, ballet flats, a black jacket, and a horse pin given to her by Allen Lanier. And there’s the haircut; modeled after Rolling Stone Keith Richards. “Someone at Max’s asked if I was androgynous. I asked what that meant. ‘You know, like Mick Jagger.’ I figured that must be cool. I thought the word meant both beautiful and ugly at the same time. Whatever it meant, with just a haircut, I miraculously turned androgynous overnight.” The Patti haircut has been copied endlessly by girls and boys alike in the half-century since Horses first graced store shelves. Look around on your next train ride to the grocery store – you’ll find at least one zoomer channeling Patti.

By the time Patti and Robert got to friend Sam Wagstaff’s apartment, they were losing light. Robert put Patti next to a prism in the apartment in hopes it’d throw a little more light. He was right: it cast a nice big triangle over Patti’s shoulder. He had her take her jacket off and put it over her shoulder to follow that visual line. In just twelve shots, Robert got the winner: the perfect visual union of artist-muse and artist-muse.

Pictured: Robert Mapplethorpe's self portrait in front of Horses cover print. This in and of itself would make a fantastic album cover.

Rock and Rimbaud

“Rock ’n’ roll is dream soup, what’s your brand? mine has turned over. mine is almost at the bottom of the bowl, early arthur lee. smokey robinson. blonde on blonde, it’s gone, the formula is changed…its not for me but its there, its fresh fruit, its dream soup.”

quoted from: Patti Smith, “Edgar Winter After Dark” Creem, 3/1973.

(Brace yourselves, there is going to be a lot, and I mean a lot, of quoting Patti here. For all the thousands of pages written about Patti Smith, no one’s better at talking about Patti Smith than Patti Smith.)

While the sentiment of that Creem quote might feel familiar, ladies and gentlemen, cretins of caves, and Johnny, we are not in Kansas anymore. The formula is changing. Gone are the days of happy hippie Laurel Canyon paradise, the Fab Four and their followers, and the proggers. We’re stepping into New York City in the early 1970s.

Pictured: Patti Smith at the Chelsea Hotel (photographed by Judy Linn, c. 1971)

Patti Smith came to New York during the Summer of Love and pretty immediately began networking. By the turn of the decade, she was fully accepted – even essential to – the Chelsea Hotel crowd.

She spends her days writing, working at whatever book store will have her, and her nights hanging around Max’s Kansas City with Robert in hopes of getting Andy Warhol’s attention. Her artistic endeavors included acting, but “After failing as a believable lesbian in Identity, I decided that if I was going to take the stage again, it would be as myself.”

It’s ironic that her transition to rock-and-Rimbaud began with a character that was pretty much herself.

While writing a piece on the Holy Modal Rounders for Crawdaddy, Patti struck up a relationship with Rounders drummer “Slim Shadow.” “Slim” was actually playwright Sam Shepard, and he was actually married! Patti had no idea until a friend at Max’s pulled her aside. They wrote a play about said affair that Sam cast his own wife in, then he fucked off to Nova Scotia. At the same time, Patti met Bob Neuwirth in the lobby of the Chelsea. He mentors her, later introducing her to Bob Dylan. (She was almost on the Rolling Thunder Revue, but that’s a story for another day.)

Though her focus is shifting, Patti keeps one black Capezio flat firmly in the realm of writing. This was how she linked up with future Patti Smith Band guitarist Lenny Kaye; she was impressed by his his “Best of A Capella” essay for Jazz & Pop. She recruited him with, and I quote:

“Could you play a car crash with an electric guitar?”

He could, in fact, play a car crash with an electric guitar.

Patti and Lenny bonded over their love of the single; sitting around the record store he worked at for hours just spinning records and shooting the shit. They also found common ground in being children of the sixties. They each wanted to return rock-and-roll to experimentation and inventiveness. Patti's dream soup? Setting honest-to-goodness poetry to rock-and-roll.

Bob Dylan’s a poet. That much is generally accepted. But Bob’s work is meant to be in the context of a song. Jim Morrison flirted with it on “The End,” “Horse Latitudes,” and the like. Dylan, Jimbo, and the other “rocker-poets” came to poetry through rock-and-roll. Patti came to rock-and-roll through her poetry. She took her writings and slowly, over the course of three years, enmeshed them with rock-and-roll arrangements. An unfamiliar context and unorthodox method with a terribly compelling outcome. The addition of pianist Richard Sohl really solidified the poetry-to-song journey.

About their early work, Lenny explained,

“I hesitate to call them ‘songs,’ but in a sense they were the essence of what we would pursue...it wasn’t really meant to be a band. It wasn’t meant to be anything more than just a performance, an artistic moment in time, but as it turns out, that was the moment where everything turned around for me.”

quoted from: Kembrew McLeod, The Downtown Pop Underground (2018.)

This may feel like a tangent, but stick with me. Longtime viewers of my YouTube channel will know Lenny Kaye’s name from his Nuggets compilation; which singlehandedly cemented garage rock’s importance in the rock-and-roll canon. Lenny’s friend Greg Shaw wrote the Creem review that put Nuggetson the map. In his thank-you letter to Greg, Lenny offhandedly mentioned he’d be playing guitar for Patti for a Bertolt Brecht birthday celebration at St. Mark’s Place.

St. Mark’s turned out to be pretty fucking significant. This was the night Patti Smith had officially arrived. Before a star-studded audience of the likes of Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Neuwirth, Jim Carroll, Danny Fields, and of course Robert and Sam, Patti opened with “Mack the Knife” and performed a verse called “Omen.”

The opening line sounds...familiar.

Ribbon of life, it was nearing...

“CBGB was the ideal place to sound a clarion call. It was a club on the street of the downtrodden that drew a strange breed who welcomed artists yet unsung. The only thing (club owner) Hilly Krystal required from those who played there was to be new.”

quoted from: Patti Smith, Just Kids (2018 ed.)

Come early 1974, the main players of the newly-minted CBGB's were Television and the germinating Patti Smith Band. This alliance proved advantageous for both groups and the club as a whole. The simple requirement to “be new” really got the ball rolling on Patti’s music career. She connected with manager Jane Friedman, who got her a gig supporting the New York Dolls at the Mercer Arts Center. Then she opened for Phil Ochs at Max’s. Through these gigs, “Harbor Song” was reworked into “Birdland,” and “Redondo Beach,” “Free Money,” and Smith-Verlaine collab “Break It Up” were added to set list.

These are the days of Bad Company and shit. Major record labels weren’t really interested in signing an androgynous poet-singer and her ragtag group of lost boys. So Lenny suggested Patti put out a single herself.

Above: Patti Smith’s cover of “Hey Joe,” with Patty Hearst monologue

A relative unknown jump-starting their own career by self-releasing a single was unheard of in the seventies. Lenny had done the whole Nuggets thing and produced other bands, he knew how records were made. With a little money lent by Robert, in June of 1974, Patti arrived at Electric Lady Studios to cut her cover of “Hey Joe,” backed with original “Piss Factory.” Biographer Victor Bockris called it “the most important record she ever made,” because this publicity plan totally worked! The single’s sales helped finance trip out to the Whiskey A Go-Go...though no one in California knew who the hell Patti was.

While on tour that summer, the band made a critical decision: they cut and pasted Patti’s “Oath” into a cover of “Gloria.”

After the group's "Rock and Rimbaud" gigs in November of 1974, Lenny and Richard determined they needed more man power. The ensemble’s music and Patti’s ability were growing past the point of what three people could do. They put an ad in the Village Voice and poached Ivan Kral from Blondie. A March 1975 CBGB’s residency with Television followed by the club’s Festival of Unsigned Artists got RCA on the line, but the band still needed a drummer. Either Tom Verlaine tipped Patti off to Jay Dee Daugherty or he sought Patti out himself. Either way, he made the newly-minted Patti Smith Band.

RCA didn’t work out, but in May, Clive Davis offered Patti a contract for his new label, Arista Records. He had a reputation for fostering female talent; having discovered Laura Nyro and snagged Big Brother and the Holding Company featuring Janis Joplin for previous label Columbia. The stage was set.

According to Patti in interview with Dave Marsh, she approached John Cale to produce Horses purely because he looked the part. John wanted to give her the 1967 Nico treatment; lush and pretty, with strings.

John soon discovered Patti was most certainly not a Nico!

He could lock Nico out of the studio when she pissed him off, but he could not do that with Patti. She would ignore his suggestions, he would ignore hers. “All I was looking for was a technical person,” she said in interview. “Instead, I got a real maniac artist. I went to pick out an expensive watercolor painting, and instead I got a mirror. It was really like A Season in Hell for both of us.” “Birdland” was especially taxing for all, but Cale and Patti did find common ground in bridging the gap between divinely inspired artist and disaster master.

Horses, coming in, in all directions

I first heard of Patti Smith through her cameo in Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue film. (Bob really wanted Patti to be on Rolling Thunder, but she declined: no Patti Smith Band, no Patti Smith.) I was captivated by Patti’s energy; a little nervous, yet magnetic. But like my initial discovery of the Velvet Underground, I decided, “I have to be older to truly ‘get’ this.” Six years after that Rolling Thunder strike, I’m in the position to engage with Patti’s work.

Above: Patti Smith's cameo in Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story (dir. Martin Scorsese, 2019)

Patti came from a boys’ club: Baudelaire, Camus, Coltrane, Dylan, Hendrix, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, and of course, her beloved Arthur Rimbaud. To paraphrase We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The True, Tough Story of Women in Rock author Gerri Hirshey, Patti was most comfortable collaborating with – and being inspired by – men, “a gender preference that still has feminists and riot grrrls scrapping over her alleged betrayals and/or revolutions.” You can’t ever really put a pin in Patti. And as you’d read fromPlease Kill Me, that inability to get a read on her really pissed some people off!

In that text, Penny Arcade quipped, “Patti lived her whole life pretending to be John Lennon or Paul McCartney or Brian Jones or some other rock star.” Considering other things she said about Patti, this was clearly meant as a dig. But it manifests in a really interesting way on Horses. Patti has always been comfortable naming her influences, to the point where it feels as though she’s got a deep well to pay back to them. On this record, we hear her grow out of idol worship in real time. Horses explores various comings-of-age through the idols of Patti’s own coming-of-age.

Despite Patti’s own assertions in the years following, Horses happened the way it did because of John Cale. He adopted the same attitude as Warhol acting as “producer” of the Velvets: sit back and let the showrun. John put the Patti Smith Band in the position where they had to fight for their music. Then, the visioncould take form.

But the vision is always shifting. Patti’s gift is that she can embody pretty much anyone. As put by Philip Shaw, “With each song, Smith presents a sort of photographic negative, her characters inhabiting a shadow version of the land of the free.”

Our first negative is Gloria – the title. It can be drawn to the silent friction between Patti’s atheist father and her Jehovah’s Witness mother. Gloria in excelsis deo, “glory to God in the highest.” “G-L-O-R-I-A,” Van Morrison. A down-low rock-and-roll song. Consider William Blake: “Without contraries there is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.” Patti understands this, and plugs it into the very fabric of “Gloria.”

“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.”

I held off on dropping this line for as long as I possibly could.

Shaw recounts his first experience with “Gloria.” “...recently confirmed and with a serious guilt complex to boot. The words seeped like acid into my brain and I was gripped by an impulse to take the record off the stereo and smash it to pieces.” It’s an immediate, iconoclastic statement that has lost not an ounce of its power over the past half-century.

We can see the darkened room. The figure in the shadows, hat tilted over their eye. The triangle of light illuminating the trail of cigarette smoke that slips out and snakes around those plaintive chords and blasphemous words, uttered low and detached: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.” These are the words of the hustler, the junkie, the whore, the mother, the gravedigger. This might just be the greatest opening line in rock-and-roll history. It’s instantly followed by a statement of autonomy, just as forward and blunt:

“Melting in a pot of thieves, wild card up my sleeve,

Thick heart of stone,

My sins, my own,

They belong to me.

Me.”

Patti plays a few different characters on “Gloria”...maybe? Break It Up author Mark Paytress insists it’s all one narrator, “an instant challenge to rock’s ceaseless phallocentricity. There is no man in Patti Smith’s ‘Gloria’…” I’m not so sure. “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine” are the words of every woman whose felt being born from the rib of a man. That much is true. But we’ve also got the dude at the party seducing Gloria in the red dress, the male rock star. They molt into one another and ooze with sexual energy; almost smarmy at times.

“Gloria” is the perfect thesis not for the album (we’ll get to that later,) but for Patti Smith the rock star. Her band eases up into a sway through “I-I walk into a room, you know I look so proud.” It swaggers like the character. The arrangement accentuates her delivery; a little breathy before sliding into the nasally, bluntPatti. The Jersey accent essential to all this. It intensifies through side plot with the bell tower (Richard mimicking the “ding-dong” of a clock is hilarious by the way) before “Gloria” just takes off. Patti’s slurring and totally caught up in the energy.

This band was perfect for Patti because they gave her feel for rhythm room to breathe. Lenny said it was why it was so easy to play with her. Lester Bangs was right when he said, “...even if you couldn’t understand a word of English you couldn’t miss the emotional force of Patti’s music.” Jay Dee Daugherty really helps this along. He’s on the mark with his short, clipped, effective fills. What writing device lends itself to rhythm? Repetition. Don’t make a drinking game out of how many times Patti repeats a line or phrase. You’ll fucking die. Patti uses the same words over and over because they sound good together. Who wrote lyrics purely because the words sounded good together? Bob Dylan, John Lennon.

After supposedly “failing to play a believable lesbian” two years before Horses, Patti tries the role on again on for wholly unexpected tonal shift Redondo Beach. The song is named after the gay community in the South Bay area of LA; Patti presumably heard of this place while touring California with her band. “Redondo”’s reggae twist is thanks to Lenny – and maybe Keith Richards too. We’ve even got the Harry Belafonte backing vocals in there, but goofier. Our narrator has had a lovers’ quarrel with her lady in their hotel room. She flees into the night to exact “sweet suicide,” and the next morning, her body washes up on the shore. Setting a story like this to reggae is oddly whimsical and totally bewildering; almost comical? It’s like a pantomime telling of the story. One can imagine Patti dabbing tears from her face with an oversized hankie. “Redondo” makes no sense when you really think about it, but it’s not the point to really think about it. You can’t help but get into it instead. The “are you gone-gone?” and turnaround is quirky and cute.

Another stark tonal shift arrives with the first of Horses’ nine-minute epics, Birdland. (You know I love an album with two nine-plus minute songs.) Patti adapted the story from Peter Reich’s Book of Dreams. A young Peter sees a spaceship flying over the family farm, believing his father to be on it, but the spaceship turns out to be birds? Or something like that? UFOs were on people’s brains in the seventies for some reason; John Lennon and May Pang claimed to have seen one from their New York apartment. Killer as the first line of this album may be and as much fun as “Gloria” and “Redondo” are, “Birdland” was the track that immediately grabbed me by the collar on my first listen through Horses. The band gives Patti all the space in the world to slip into the story. It’s so evocative. Patti breathes life into the empty orange-gray sky dotted with black crows over the tobacco barn after death.

“His father died and left him a little farm in New England,

All the long black funeral cars left the scene,

And the boy was just standing there alone.”

Patti’s voice sounds youthful, delicate, and fragile through “Birdland”’s exposition. She assumes the role of the scared child. I love atmospheric, I love empty, I love surreal. Richard’s deliberate steps down on the piano are as pretty as they are unsettling. “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.” What a beautiful way to articulate a bleak night falling on this kid’s world falling down around him.

I love atmospheric, empty, and surreal more when it transforms into mania. As the scene gets weirder, Patti gets to dry-heaving, “It’s me! It’s me! Take me up!” She lets her voice go where it wants to go; throwing it down, as opposed to tossing it up to the rafters. “Birdland” is such a moment for Lenny Kaye. Les was right, his one-note feedback solo is killer. It whirs and whips up the scene like a ship flying by. The grass parts, the wind stings your face.

Each rambling, babbling, fever-dream forever-verse speaking of helium, birds scattering like rose petals, and a fist piercing the sky is anchored by an absence of the “human.” “He was not human,” “You are not human.” “I am not human.” “We are not human.” These lines are certainly a little autobiographical. Patti was a tall and skinny kid. Speaking from experience, that’ll have you feeling like an alien. It's also a simple recognition that we’re all animals. I could tell you what I think makes us weird apes “human.” It’s the devotion to something greater. The feverish devotion to something greater is the thru-line of Patti’s writing on Horses. But who’s to say if I’m right? We aren’t immune to acting on animal instinct, especially when keening at the sky as we grieve.

Girl group “shoo-doo-wop”-ing concludes with slow, broken English: “We like birdland.” It’s a regression to a childlike state; self-soothing after this spectacular outburst.

Free Money is the working-class fantasy of winning the lottery. You sit in front of the TV set watching the game show contestant standing in the big cage where you catch the flying money. When you go to bed, you pray for that kind of ridiculous showbusiness crap to happen to you. As silly and exploitative as it is, shit. It’s money. It hurts to not have it, but it doesn’t hurt to dream. “We’ll dream it for free.” The music reflects an overwhelming want, a pursuit. “Moneymoneymoneymoney.” This is Lenny and Ivan as a slim, scratching, effective twin guitar attack. This song whips past you. After lengthy and intense “Gloria” and “Birdland,” “Free Money” seems to end as soon as it begins.

Patti named Kimberly after her youngest sister. Patti was often stuck babysitting - that’s just how it is when you’re the oldest and both your parents have to work. The lyric was inspired by twelve-year-old Patti seeing the barn across from her childhood home struck by lightning, and the rush of maternal instinct she felt to protect her baby sister.

“I knew your youth was for the taking, fire on a mental plane

So I ran through the fields as the bats with their baby-veined faces

Burst from the barn and flames in a violet violent sky

And I fell to my knees and pressed you against me...”

The barn fire becomes fire-and-brimstone religious psychosis, “crack the sky,” or maybe a woman seeing visions only men are “allowed” to see and become prophets and saints for. “I feel like just some misplaced Joan of Arc.” It’s another bizarre instance of the band setting serious shit to bopping music. I have to wonder: has no one caught that “Kimberly” is a hair’s width away from “Stay” by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs?

“Bound like Prometheus,” Jim Morrison in a dream “breaks on through” on Break It Up. Patti is able to follow his lead, freeing herself from whatever earthly-convention ties that bind her. After visiting Jim’s grave again in 1973, Patti had kinda “met” her idol and gotten over the worship. “I felt an uncommon lightheartedness, not sad at all,” she remembered in Just Kids.

“I couldn’t even cry. I just stood there, completely hollow. I went to Rimbaud’s grave afterwards, and stood there and felt totally cold. And then I just said, ‘Fuck it, I’m going home and doing my own work.’”

quoted from: Clinton Heylin, From the Velvets to the Voidoids: The Birth of American Punk Rock (2005 ed.)

As a woman who’s come from the boys’ club, it’s terribly freeing to reach the point of, “Fuck it, I’m doing my own work now.” I believe “Break It Up” is Patti freeing herself from the Jimis and Jims, even from her precious Rimbaud. She’s ready to find her own voice now.

This song is a cathartic experience you have to be ready for. Of course, there’s the dramatic guitars and the guys crying, “Break it up!” under Patti wailing, “Oh, I don’t understand!” But through the last ebb of the arrangement, you can hear her thumping her chest. She’s pretty thin, so the thumps jostle the extended notes of, “Ice, it was shining.” Something clamors inside her, trying to beat its way out. It’s such a physical representation of the actions of the song; the likes of which we rarely get to hear on record. “I tore off my clothes, I danced on my shoes, I ripped my skin open and then I broke through” A breathtaking stop-time pulls us up to meet her before the song...breaks (ha-ha) into the final round of “Break it up!” This choice slugs this song into victory. Patti’s voice cracks as she howls desperately. It’s violent like ripping skin open. And beautiful. This is a performance that warrants throwing roses.

Kids used to flock to CBGB’s to hear what happened to Johnny like they flocked in front of the TV set to see what happened to Superman.

Johnny’s is the American everyteen. Johnny B. Goode, Johnny in the basement mixing up the medicine, or that poor kid who dies in like every early sixties pop song. Our Johnny has a near-death experience, sees the horsemen of the apocalypse, then crosses into another dimension where he finds himself at a party. He breaks from this party. He steps through the looking glass; going out into the world on his own and losing his innocence.

In a recent Q&A session for her book launch, Patti said about Land,

“In fifty years, many things have changed. The things that Johnny saw and was concerned about fifty years ago...they seem like baby sauce compared to what Johnny is going through now...the world is compete fodder for the dark adventures of Johnny. But it’s also...Johnny is joyful to be alive. He’s happy to be alive. He feels his blood, he feels his energy, he feels his creative impulse. He feels his worth, at the same time seeing us destroy one another or destroying our planet...the devastation of countries and hunger and all the things we’re all seeing, Johnny sees.”

Different shit, same superstrange energy flow.

The band originally went about recording in the Doors’ self-titled album way, with the whole band in the round doing it live. But something weird happened with “Land.” First take: Patti did the singing fine, but when it came time for the middle section, she froze up. The instrumental was a keeper, so Patti would overdub her vocal. All three takes can be heard on the album version of “Land.”

“On the second take something weird happened. The Mexican boys and spaceships were gone – instead there was a black horse, and all those electrical wires and a sea – a ‘sea of possibilities’ – I didn’t know what direction the song was taking, there was all this strange imagery I didn’t understand...The song is like eight or nine minutes long so it’s obvious I’m gonna lose control sometime – but I felt like it was TheExorcist, or somebody else talking through my voice.”

quoted from: Philip Shaw, 33 1/3: Horses (2008.)

That’s when Horses as a whole opened up. Ladies, gentlemen, and Johnny, Horses is the only album I can think of where thesis statement is its finale. John Cale recalled, “It was not clear what persona this record was going to have until I had her improvise against herself. At that point, something clicked.” “Land” is a total loss of control, wherein a sea of possibilities – the subconscious – opens. It’s very similar to how “The End” functions. “The boy was in the hallway drinking his glass of tea” is Patti’s “The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on.” As Patti sets the scene, punctuating each line with Johnny’s name, the guitar slithers in. The overdubbing is so well done, it’s scary.

There’s this moment in Patti’s Rolling Thunder monologue where she kinda loses where she’s going with the archer and his sister thing. She gets nervous and rambles. Then you see it in her eyes. The thing just snaps together. He starts to move, in another direction, he starts to move, in another dimension. You can hear this moment on “Land.” “When suddenly, Johnny.” BANG! The command over that name. He starts to see the horses, the wah-wah comes up, the drums kick in. Where Patti captures the vision, that’s where the song “loses control.”

I am shocked by how deliberate each word chosen and delivered on “Land” seems. When you remember all this business about the sea and the pen knives is coming off the top of her head, it’s nuts. Then you think, “This delirium Johnny is in couldn’t be written.” It has to come from the recesses of the mind – and from an ode to the oh-so-sixties dance craze. “Land of 1000 Dances” rolled them all together, with a couple new ones. Even if you don’t know what the hell the watusi is, you can’t help but dance as this song just steamrolls through itself. The winding story comes back to humping the parking meter, about where we started with “Gloria.” Our raven-haired master of ceremonies gives us a benediction to send us off for the night. Perhaps this was the picture she was studying all along.

“In the sheets, there was a man, dancing around to the simple rock-and-roll song.”

Elegie is in kind of a shit position. It’s the epilogue of our yellow-mained wild horse gallop, but literallyhow do you follow up “Land??” It’s the uncomfortable, spooky in-between; having to come back down to the real world after the fantastical journey we’ve been on. The way Patti sings, really sings, is almost pretty.

Though most consider the Sex Pistols releasing “Anarchy In the UK” to be the starting gun, I believe Horses and Neil Young’s Zuma being released on the same day was the schism in seventies rock-and-roll. Both album covers reject the glitz, glamour, and excess rock-and-roll was caught up in by the mid-seventies. Though one is an improvised drawing and the other a posed photograph, both go monochrome and minimalistic. Sonically, Zuma is a cocaine album. It came from a bachelor pad in Malibu with coke and women all over the place. It’s pretty macho, even a little misogynistic at times (see “Stupid Girl.”) Horses possesses a distinctly different stimulant-ed manic energy, and is androgynous. Zuma is just one installment in a long line of succession of obsessive rebirths by an established figure. Horses was a new birth from a strong rock-and-roll family lineage.

When I struggle with a conclusion, I consult my library. Of course, Lester Bangs praise be father, pulled through. The man knew a fucking conclusion.

“With her wealth of promise and the most incandescent flights and stillnesses of this album she joins the ranks of people like Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, or the Dylan of ‘Sad-Eyed Lady’ and Royal Albert Hall. It’s that deeply felt, and that moving; a new Romanticism built upon the universal language of rock ’n’ roll, an affirmation of life so total...”

quoted from: Lester Bangs, “Stagger Lee Was A Woman” Creem, 2/1976.

If you ask me, nothing is an affirmation of life like the union of “low” and “high” art; “a bolt from the gutter that shot towards the stars,” as Mark Paytress put it. Patti and her boys’ arrival totally upended a set of sequined rock-and-roll conventions; not unlike the work of Warhol, whose attention Patti once vied for as a scrappy straw-hat-wearing kid hanging around outside Max’s. The lines of boy and girl, narrator, subject, and spectator, dreams and reality, human and aliens and religion and visions the real and the unreal are all blurred now. Nothing is black-and-white anymore. It’s all gray. Doesn’t upside-down and blurred sound an awful lot like our world now? Same shit, same superstrange energy flow.

Growing up is assuming the mantle of the gray area. Though Horses channels the energy of the adolescent so many times, it’s clearly the work of a fully-realized, determined, driven woman about to turn thirty. Patti had lived through the sixties. Here, she tries to make sense of all the feedback, cars, girls, and crazy dancing. Horses captures her living through the seventies, actively trying to make sense of the post-sixties state of the world, UFOs, and herself. “I am not human.” Now she’s in her seventies, still asking these questions as she performs this material live again. It shouldn’t be grounded. Oftentimes, the narrators of this album lose the fucking plot. But it’s grounded. The ship lands, the fist is thrust through the sky. Do you want to shatter the sky?

Fifty years later, Horses brings the fucking sky down to ground level.

Personal favorites: “Gloria In Excelsis Deo,” “Birdland,” “Break It Up,” “Land”

– AD ☆

Watch the full episode above!

Bangs, Lester. “Stagger Lee Was a Woman.” As published in Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader. Edited by John Morthland. New York: Anchor Books, 2003.

Bockris, Victor. Patti Smith: An Unauthorized Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. https://archive.org/details/pattismithunauth00bock

Heylin, Clinton. From the Velvets to the Voidoids: The Birth of American Punk Rock. Chicago: A Capella Books, 2005 ed.

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McLeod, Kembrew. The Downtown Pop Underground. New York: Abrams Press, 2018.

McNeil, Legs, and Gillian McCain. Please Kill Me: An Uncensored Oral History of Punk. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.

Moore, Thurston. Sonic Life: A Memoir. London: Doubleday, 2023.

Paytress, Mark. Break It Up: Patti Smith’s Horses and the remaking of Rock ’n’ Roll. London: Portrait, 2006. https://archive.org/details/breakituppattism0000payt

Rockwell, John. “Horses.” Rolling Stone, 2/12/1976. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/horses-90476/

Shaw, Philip. 33 1/3: Horses. London: Bloomsbury, 2008.

Smith, Patti. “Edgar Winter After Dark.” Creem, 3/1973. https://www.creem.com/archive/article/1973/03/01/edgar-winter-after-dark

Smith, Patti. “Jukebox Cruci-fix.” Creem, 6/1975. http://www.oceanstar.com/patti/poetry/jukebox.htm

Smith, Patti. Just Kids. New York: Harper Collins, 2018 ed.

Further reading:

J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde - Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop (2025.)

Patti Smith, M Train (2015.)