Sex. Death. Divinity. Violence. Grief. Money. Family. Art. Defiance. Ecstasy. Transfiguration. Dancing. Destruction. Rock \u2019n\u2019 roll conjoined to singular visions.<\/p>\n
They were all essential to \u201cHorses,\u201d Patti Smith\u2019s debut album, which was released on Nov. 10, 1975. It was the first full-fledged, major-label album to emerge from the tiny but explosive New York City scene that coalesced at a proudly scuzzy Bowery bar, CBGB. Television, the band led by the guitarist, singer and songwriter Tom Verlaine \u2014 Smith\u2019s sometime boyfriend \u2014 had discovered the venue and inaugurated the scene with its early gigs; Smith brought her fledgling band there soon afterward.<\/p>\n
Smith had emerged in the early 1970s as a poet with a vivid stage presence. To stand out at readings, she tried musical backup; she chose her guitarist, Lenny Kaye, by asking him if he could sound like a car crash. Kaye had compiled the 1972 album \u201cNuggets,\u201d which doubled as an aesthetic manifesto; it gathered noisy, rowdy mid-1960s garage-rock tracks that he grouped as \u201cpunk-rock.\u201d<\/p>\n
From top: Lenny Kaye and Patti Smith.<\/p>\n
Gus Stewart\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
Smith\u2019s readings evolved into musical performances, glancing toward the Beat poets and the Doors. The duo grew into a band, adding more conventionally skilled musicians: the keyboardist Richard Sohl, whose improvisations encompassed jazz and classical idioms, and the guitarist Ivan Kral.<\/p>\n
Weekslong residencies at Max\u2019s Kansas City in 1974 and at CBGB in early 1975 let them hone and expand their songs before ever-larger audiences. Then things moved fast. The drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, who had soaked up the songs while running CBGB\u2019s sound system, completed the band in June 1975, and with a major-label contract from Clive Davis\u2019s Arista Records, they recorded \u201cHorses\u201d in September.<\/p>\n
Their producer, John Cale, gave them a direct link to New York City rock history. He had been a member of the Velvet Underground, the 1960s avant-rock band led by another poet-turned-songwriter, Lou Reed. Recording was done at the studio Jimi Hendrix built, Electric Lady. There was some artistic friction between band and producer. But \u201cHorses\u201d decisively captured Smith and her band in a burst of inspired self-invention.<\/p>\n
\u201cRobert [Mapplethorpe] took one roll of film on his Hasselblad,\u201d Smith said. \u201cAfter the eighth one, he said, \u2018OK, I got it. That\u2019s the one with the magic, but we\u2019ll finish the roll of film.\u2019 The contact sheet had 12 pictures and it was the eighth one.\u201d<\/p>\n
Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; Tony Cenicola\/The New York Times<\/p>\n
The now-iconic Robert Mapplethorpe cover photo for \u201cHorses\u201d projects Smith\u2019s boldness, with her androgynous outfit and calmly defiant stare. And if Richard Sohl\u2019s opening piano chords in \u201cGloria\u201d hint at cabaret, Smith\u2019s first words shatter any preconceptions: \u201cJesus died for somebody\u2019s sins, but not mine,\u201d she declares, then goes on to exult in sexual boasts about G-L-O-R-I-A and how she \u201cmade her mine.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHorses\u201d is far more about connections than conquests. In \u201cKimberly,\u201d she sings about the birth of a cherished sister on a stormy night; in \u201cBirdland,\u201d a boy mourns his father with phantasmagorical visions. In \u201cRedondo Beach,\u201d she learns that her lover, a woman, died by suicide after they quarreled. Her narrators are anything but selfish or antisocial; they strive for unforgettable experiences and higher purpose. And Smith\u2019s vocals can be yearning, fervent, swaggering, jaded, sarcastic, offhand or impassioned \u2014 anything but artificial.<\/p>\n
The album doesn\u2019t hew to later definitions of punk-rock as terse, driving, guitar-centered and simplistic. Smith wrote ad copy for \u201cHorses,\u201d calling it \u201cthree chords merged with the power of the word.\u201d While most of the music does, indeed, revolve around three chords, the songs feel rhapsodic, spontaneous, live and impulsive. Two of the album\u2019s eight tracks, \u201cBirdland\u201d and \u201cLand,\u201d stretch past nine minutes \u2014 not with the digressive, show-offy jams that punk-rockers despised, but with shared, attentive, volatile support for every turn and tangent of Smith\u2019s storytelling and imagery.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe did the cover photo in an afternoon with no assistant,\u201d Smith said. She was in what she\u2019d worn for a May 1975 event in Central Park. \u201cI had the same shirt, same pants.\u201d<\/p>\n
Teresa Zabala\/The New York Times<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s 50th-anniversary reissue of \u201cHorses\u201d includes early (drumless) demos along with alternate full-band takes of some songs. They reveal the arranged structures and internal landmarks of the songs. But even more clearly, they show Smith constantly taking chances, throwing herself headlong into the moment of performance.<\/p>\n
\u201cHorses\u201d wasn\u2019t a commercial smash. But it reached, and continues to reach, the people who needed it. In her liner notes for \u201cHorses,\u201d Smith wrote about \u201cnew risks etched forever in a cold system of wax,\u201d and the album has been an example for generations of songwriters \u2014 some to emulate its sound, but many more to take up its insistence on self-discovery, its \u201csea of possibilities.\u201d Below, Patti Smith, her band and their musical heirs offer some insights on half a century of listening to \u201cHorses.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sex. Death. Divinity. Violence. Grief. Money. Family. Art. Defiance. Ecstasy. Transfiguration. Dancing. Destruction. Rock \u2019n\u2019 roll conjoined to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33620,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[11634,9,11,10,20076,20078,20075,20077,3467],"class_list":{"0":"post-33619","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-horses","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-headlines","11":"tag-new-york-news","12":"tag-nineteen-hundred-seventies","13":"tag-patti","14":"tag-pop-and-rock-music","15":"tag-smith","16":"tag-vis-design"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33619\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}