Sex. Death. Divinity. Violence. Grief. Money. Family. Art. Defiance. Ecstasy. Transfiguration. Dancing. Destruction. Rock ’n’ roll conjoined to singular visions.
They were all essential to “Horses,” Patti Smith’s 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 — Smith’s sometime boyfriend — had discovered the venue and inaugurated the scene with its early gigs; Smith brought her fledgling band there soon afterward.
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 “Nuggets,” which doubled as an aesthetic manifesto; it gathered noisy, rowdy mid-1960s garage-rock tracks that he grouped as “punk-rock.”
From top: Lenny Kaye and Patti Smith.
Gus Stewart/Getty Images
Smith’s 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.
Weekslong residencies at Max’s 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’s sound system, completed the band in June 1975, and with a major-label contract from Clive Davis’s Arista Records, they recorded “Horses” in September.
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 “Horses” decisively captured Smith and her band in a burst of inspired self-invention.
“Robert [Mapplethorpe] took one roll of film on his Hasselblad,” Smith said. “After the eighth one, he said, ‘OK, I got it. That’s the one with the magic, but we’ll finish the roll of film.’ The contact sheet had 12 pictures and it was the eighth one.”
Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
The now-iconic Robert Mapplethorpe cover photo for “Horses” projects Smith’s boldness, with her androgynous outfit and calmly defiant stare. And if Richard Sohl’s opening piano chords in “Gloria” hint at cabaret, Smith’s first words shatter any preconceptions: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine,” she declares, then goes on to exult in sexual boasts about G-L-O-R-I-A and how she “made her mine.”
“Horses” is far more about connections than conquests. In “Kimberly,” she sings about the birth of a cherished sister on a stormy night; in “Birdland,” a boy mourns his father with phantasmagorical visions. In “Redondo Beach,” 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’s vocals can be yearning, fervent, swaggering, jaded, sarcastic, offhand or impassioned — anything but artificial.
The album doesn’t hew to later definitions of punk-rock as terse, driving, guitar-centered and simplistic. Smith wrote ad copy for “Horses,” calling it “three chords merged with the power of the word.” While most of the music does, indeed, revolve around three chords, the songs feel rhapsodic, spontaneous, live and impulsive. Two of the album’s eight tracks, “Birdland” and “Land,” stretch past nine minutes — not with the digressive, show-offy jams that punk-rockers despised, but with shared, attentive, volatile support for every turn and tangent of Smith’s storytelling and imagery.
“We did the cover photo in an afternoon with no assistant,” Smith said. She was in what she’d worn for a May 1975 event in Central Park. “I had the same shirt, same pants.”
Teresa Zabala/The New York Times
This year’s 50th-anniversary reissue of “Horses” 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.
“Horses” wasn’t a commercial smash. But it reached, and continues to reach, the people who needed it. In her liner notes for “Horses,” Smith wrote about “new risks etched forever in a cold system of wax,” and the album has been an example for generations of songwriters — some to emulate its sound, but many more to take up its insistence on self-discovery, its “sea of possibilities.” Below, Patti Smith, her band and their musical heirs offer some insights on half a century of listening to “Horses.”
