{"id":159400,"date":"2025-11-29T16:37:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-29T16:37:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/159400\/"},"modified":"2025-11-29T16:37:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-29T16:37:08","slug":"patti-smith-hasnt-lost-a-beat-in-50-years-and-neither-has-horses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/159400\/","title":{"rendered":"Patti Smith Hasn\u2019t Lost a Beat in 50 Years and Neither Has ‘Horses’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tInto your starry eyes, baby. Patti Smith<\/a> has been on tour all year, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Horses, her classic punk debut, released in November 1975. She brought the show to New York last week, and ripped it up at the Beacon Theater. She was having so much fun, she did \u201cGloria\u201d three times, which is insane, but it got wilder each go-round. And all three times she held back on the punch line. For the finale, she taunted the crowd: \u201cJesus died for somebody\u2019s siiiiins\u2026thank you, Jesus!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tShe knew the crowd came to see her strut, and she delivered for two nights. Still a dynamite dancer at 79, she came to flaunt the convulsive rock & roll rhythms in her bones \u2014 she\u2019s the punk who always said she learned to walk by watching Bob Dylan in Don\u2019t Look Back. She stretched out \u201cKimberly\u201d<\/a> into a long killer R&B groove so she and her guitar soulmate Lenny Kaye<\/a> could do the frug.\u00a0 The whole night was an exhilarating rush of G-LO-R-I-A in excelsis dea.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tHer band is a family affair all the way. Kaye has been by her side on guitar for her poetry readings in the early 1970s.\u00a0Jay Dee Daugherty was her drummer on Horses; Tony Shanahan has been with her on piano, bass, guitar, and vocals since her 1996 creative rebirth; the guitarist happens to be her son Jackson. Her daughter Jessie came out to play piano for the encore.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tShe\u2019s also just published one of her most powerful books, Bread of Angels<\/a>. She\u2019s written quite a few memoirs, but this one is her toughest since Just Kids, getting down and dirty about topic she\u2019s never discussed in such candor \u2014 her marriage to MC5 guitarist Fred \u201cSonic\u201d Youth, her years of isolation in Detroit, and her grief as a young widow of 48 after his death in 1994. She did a touching version of \u201cBecause the Night\u201d dedicated to her husband, recalling how she took Bruce Springsteen\u2019s demo and wrote her own words \u201cfor the great love of my life, Fred \u2018Sonic\u2019 Smith.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tHorses is a perfect album that never fades, the kind that few of her heroes even got close to. I don\u2019t know about you, but for me it breaks down to: 1. \u201cGloria\u201d 2. \u201cLand\u201d 3. \u201cKimberly\u201d 4. \u201cBirdland\u201d 5. \u201cBreak It Up\u201d 6. \u201cRedondo Beach\u201d 7. \u201cElegie\u201d 8. the one Sammy Hagar covered. (So why hasn\u2019t Patti tried \u201cI Can\u2019t Drive 55\u201d?) There\u2019s no way she could have stopped these rabid fans from chanting madly at peak lines like \u201cMake her mine! Make her mine!\u201d or \u201cI like it like that! I like it like that!\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShe made the dubious choice to add \u201cSo You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star,\u201d one of the lamest songs either she or the Byrds ever recorded, but at least she played some awesomely inept feedback guitar. She also ripped the current President a new one or three in \u201cBirdland\u201d and \u201cLand\u201d and the one-two finale of \u201cGhost Dance\u201d and \u201cPeople Have the Power.\u201d During \u201cLand,\u201d she proved that no-no-no-nobody can do the Twist, the Pony, the Watusi, or the Mashed Potato like she can do.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAt one point she departed the stage for a break, leaving the boys in the band alone to do a 15-minute medley of Television classics. As Kaye said, they wanted to celebrate not just the 50th anniversary of Horses, but the legendary six-week CBGB residency the Patti Smith Group in the spring of 1975 with \u201cour sibling band.\u201d They graciously dedicated \u201cSee No Evil,\u201d \u201cFriction,\u201d and the inexhaustible \u201cMarquee Moon\u201d to the memory of the late Tom Verlaine.<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut as Patti Smith proclaimed at one of those 1975 CBGB gigs with Television, she\u2019s got that \u201cassassinatin\u2019 rhythm.\u201d She did a ferocious version of \u201cDancing Barefoot,\u201d her mystic rant on sex and death and levitation, a heartfelt ode to Sonic Smith. She told a great story about \u201cDancing. Barefoot\u201d at her NYC book launch a couple of weeks ago \u2014 the record company wanted her to change the line \u201ccome on like some heroine\u201d because they assumed it was a drug reference. \u201cI said, \u2018You know, \u2018heroine\u2019? Like a female hero?\u2019\u201d she recalled. \u201cJust a little window of how tough it was to be a girl in the Seventies.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tHorses has never lost any of its fire over the years because her poetic voice was always rooted in the beats of doo-wop and R&B. When she first began performing with Kaye, she\u2019d do Fifties slow-dance classics like \u201cDown the Aisle of Love,\u201d turning it into the love song of Scherezade from the Thousand and One Nights, or the Motown oldie \u201cThe Hunter Gets Captured By The Game.\u201d But rock & roll rhythm always came first with her. Ranting in her South Jersey dirtbag voice, she came on more like the Shangri-La\u2019s than any Beat poet. She filtered her Rimbaud through Ronnie Spector, just as \u201cLand\u201d turned him into the Leader of the Pack, with a leather jacket, a switchblade, and a date with danger.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut the highlight of the show was the most underrated Horses classic: \u201cKimberly,\u201d a love song on the birth of her baby sister, set to the doo-wop shuffle of Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs\u2019 \u201cStay.\u201d <\/a>I would humbly submit \u201cKimberly\u201d as the best song anyone\u2019s ever written about having a little sister. You\u2019re just a kid, but then a new baby suddenly enters your world, and everything is different now. You hold her close \u2014 \u201cthe babe in my arms in her swaddling clothes\u201d \u2014 and it dawns on even your young mind that she is a permanent piece of weirdness and chaos and noise and mystery. Your world is suddenly so much more full of wonder and surprise. I love how there\u2019s no angst or drama in this song \u2014 how emotionally one-dimensional it is, the crazed psychedelic ecstasy in her voice as Patti gazes into her sister\u2019s starry eyes and sees the universe.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cStay\u201d was a wildly popular oldie in the Seventies, one of the decade\u2019s favorite Fifties tunes. Jackson Browne <\/a>scored a great Top Ten hit in 1978 by turning it into a rock star\u2019s plea to his audience. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band teamed up with Browne, Tom Petty, and Rosemary Butler for a knockdown live version<\/a> on the 1979 movie soundtrack No Nukes. But nobody rocks it like Patti and the boys. At the Smith tribute concert at Carnegie Hall this spring, Susanna Hoffs did a fantastic \u201cKimberly,\u201d <\/a>which is perfect since the Bangles turned it into their Eighties hit \u201cIf She Knew What She Wants.\u201d\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\tShe milked the egomaniac bravado of \u201cGloria,\u201d <\/a>with that great moment where she salivates over \u201c20,000 girls call their names out to me\u201d and climbs up on Shanahan\u2019s piano so he can join her in the boast, \u201cMarie! Ruth! But to tell you the truth!\u201d (It was a trip seeing her sing that line at Madison Square Garden, almost exactly 13 years ago in November 2012, for a packed arena of 20,000 fans there to see Neil Young and Crazy Horse.) She\u2019s never lost her devout belief that pop-music fandom is the ultimate gnosis. To be Patti Smith is to believe\u2014no, to know \u2014 that not even Rimbaud saw his own Illuminations as clearly as you can as a Rimbaud fan. And to be a Patti fan is to chase those illuminations in your own life, in any song you hear on the radio and claim as your own.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSeeing her raise hell with this band she\u2019s led for 50 years, playing the songs that really did turn the world into a stadium of Maries and Ruths calling out her name, it was like one of her teenage punk rock dreams come true. It conjured up the raw \u201cGloria\u201d<\/a> she did in 1975 on WBAI, the New York community radio station, from the legendary bootleg Free Music Store. She turns \u201cGloria\u201d into the fantasy of a rock star looking back on her early days. \u201cShe was standing in the stadium,\u201d Smith raves. \u201cAnd she looked back at the things that put her there today! She thought about when she wanted to talk about the power of the word! And she met a boy who would follow her!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThat would be Lenny Kaye, joined by her original pianist, the late Ivan Kral \u2014 \u201che could do the Watusi on the ivory keys!\u201d She prays over the radio for a drummer somewhere to come find them. (\u201cI know you\u2019re out there!\u201d Little did she know she\u2019d get so lucky with Daugherty.) But the sweet young thing she plans to conquer? The muse she wants to seduce and take up to her room and take the big plunge? That sweet young thing is rock & roll herself. \u201cOh, it\u2019ll feel so good! Oh it\u2019ll feel so fine! When I feel the day, rock & roll, I made you miiiine! Made you miiiine!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s an astounding act of hubris. Patti hasn\u2019t even released Horses yet \u2014 virtually her entire radio audience is hearing \u201cGloria\u201d for the first time. She\u2019s a complete unknown outside the Bowery. But the whole history of Horses \u2014 the whole epic story of Patti Smith and everything she\u2019s built over the past amazing 50 years\u2014 is already there in that moment. She\u2019s already looking back at how she conquered the world that she never even pretended to doubt was hers for the claiming. And look at her now. Made you mine. Made you mine. Made you mine.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tHer remarkable new Bread of Angels is a book full of grief. She did a NYC book launch a couple weeks before the Beacon shows, on November 4 \u2014 which happened to be Robert Mapplethorpe\u2019s birthday as well as her husband\u2019s passing day. In a nicely melodramatic touch \u2014 her specialty, right? \u2014 it was also the night New York got a new mayor who quoted Eugene Debs in the first line of his victory speech.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut she\u2019s way out of her comfort zone writing about her grief, which is why Bread is so moving. She discusses Gone Again, her album of intense bereavement, one she\u2019s never liked discussing or performing \u2014 as she admits in the book, it made her feel too exposed. Like Beyonc\u00e9 \u2014 her secret twin in so many ways \u2014 she prefers to play the superhero, not the victim, so her self-portrait of her idealized marriage was called Dream of Life just as Bey\u2019s was called Life Is But a Dream, yet both dreams sounded facile compared to the tough talk of Gone Again or Lemonade.<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s a story in the book I simply can\u2019t get out of my skull \u2014 I think about this detail several dozen times a day. Her 12-year-old son Jackson meets Bruce Springsteen, and they talk motorcycles. Jackson mentions that his late dad planned to take him for his first bike ride for his thirteenth birthday. So Bruce shows up at Patti\u2019s house and takes her son out for his first ride, taking up the promise Fred Smith didn\u2019t get to keep. Jesus. The easy move would have been to frame this as a cute \u201cisn\u2019t Bruce amazing\u201d story, but for Smith it\u2019s a defeat. It\u2019s just another painful memory from the worst era of her life. She didn\u2019t want to tell this story. (She buries it halfway through a paragraph.) Can you blame her? The youthful arrogance of a line like \u201cmy sins, my own, they belong to me\u201d\u2014that\u2019s one of the first things you lose as a widow. That\u2019s what makes the book so moving. But maybe that\u2019s why she kept refusing to give the crowd the final \u201cbut not mine\u201d climax they expected.<\/p>\n

\n\tAt her Horses show, she honored the grief in her music, with her poignant tributes to her husband, her parents, her brother, her absent friends, as well as dead rock-star heroes like Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and (for that matter) Jesus. But make no mistake \u2014 she made sure this show was devoted to joyful noise. She came out to rock and roll and hump that cosmic parking meter and bring a crowd to our dancing \u2014 though not bare \u2014 feet, the way only she can. The entire night felt like a historic celebration of how far she and her music have traveled, ever since she conquered the world and made it hers. Just like Patti Smith had it all planned out already when she was dropped Horses 50 years ago. G-L-O-R-I-A, forever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Into your starry eyes, baby. Patti Smith has been on tour all year, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":159401,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,85,46,96092,70282],"class_list":["post-159400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-lenny-kaye","tag-patti-smith"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159400\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/159401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}