Posted: 02/28/07

An album you should own:

Patti Smith
Horses, Arista 1975.

Mike Morris | managing editor
mmorris2@smcvt.edu

Robert Mapplethorpe was a photographer operating in the late 1970s and 1980s known for exploring homosexuality and pushing the limits of taste with explicit imagery. In the late 80s, many Christian organizations opposed his funding by the National Endowment of the Arts.

Before all that he shot the cover for Patti Smith’s debut album Horses in 1975. Androgynously, she graced the cover, looking strangely like the male members of her band, who themselves appeared without gender. Smith was still treading in the territory of men with her early brand of punk rock, though her album did much to change the later landscape.

Horses is Smith’s earliest attempt at marrying her beat poetry with the to-be-invented punk rock. Wailing guitars (and in some cases, pianos) and pushing bass coalesce around her voice—chanteusey at times, banshee at (most) others. Smith was more innovative with her voice alone than most bands are together—there’s a reason she’s being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this March. Modern female rock musicians are hugely indebted to Smith’s willingness to push music, not just by her being a female musician, but with her upheaval of traditional lyric structures and themes. Joan Jett may have loved rock and roll; Patti Smith skewered it.

Gloria, the opening track is a ripping take on Van Morrison’s garage rock hit of the same name, with an intro song appended. When Van Morrison sings it, he sounds a bit like Eric Burdon, a bit like Ray Davies. Smith channels titans and demons and maybe even an angel or two. Guess which version I like more?

Smith opens with the biting line “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine,” and doesn’t let up until the end of the song. She snarls, barks, shrieks and even sings through the radical reinterpretation of the original song, turning it into a lesbian free-love anthem. There’s a manic energy to the track that connects with the listeners on the most visceral of level.

It may go without saying that the rest of the album isn’t as good as Gloria. It doesn’t have to be. Gloria is the kind of track that could stand on its own against some of the best albums of its time and still outshine them. It captures and condenses the energy and frustration of not only Smith, but everyone, and stands for an era.

This is not to say that the rest of the album isn’t any good. The second track, Redondo Beach, is, appropriately enough, a sunny island sounding number about a beach. What’s different about this beach in particular is the suicide of a close friend (maybe a lover) that was all but predictable.

Desk clerk told me girl was washed up,
Was small, an angel with apple blonde hair, now.
I went looking for you, are you gone gone?
Picked up my key, didn't reply.
Went to my room, started to cry.
You were small, an angel, are you gone gone?

Down by the ocean it was so dismal.
I was just standing with shock on my face.
The hearse pulled away, and the girl that had died, it was you.
You'll never return into my arms 'cause you were gone gone.

Birdland and Land are two tracks that stretch beyond the nine minute mark, but organically so. The Velvet Underground’s John Cale’s production helps here, allowing the band space to work around the free verse poetry of Smith’s lyrics. Land features an interpolation of Chris Kenner’s Land of a Thousand Dances (the song that mentions knowing how to pony like Bony Maronie and has a lot of ‘na’s’ in it), but as with Gloria, the original song’s playfulness is subverted. Here, a song about dancing falls in after verses of a high school student bashing his head into a locker, rhymes “do the twister” with “I want your baby sister” and name-drops Arthur Rimbaud, a precocious late 19th century French poet known for his long hair, homosexual relationships and drug induced behavior. Land ends with a combination sex/suicide scene with an extend metaphor of horses and is where the album gets its title from. It may be the only place where the manic energy of Gloria reappears, and is deserving of several listens to absorb the song.

After a sprawling track like Land, the follow-up and album closer, Elegie is disappointing, though its lyrics have resonance that the song itself never achieves.

Trumpets, violins, I hear them in the distance
And my skin emits a ray, but I think it's sad, it's much too bad
That our friends can't be with us today.

For the Johnny of Land, who appears in both the locker bashing-scene and is the victim in the sex/suicide scene? For the numerous contemporaries of Smith’s, whose heavy drug use made possible their great music but lead to many a downfall? In hindsight, maybe, especially when considering the bonus track added to CD releases of Horses , a cover of The Who’s My Generation.