FEATURE:
Elegie
Patti Smith’s Horses at Fifty
__________
TURNING fifty…
IN THIS PHOTO: Patti Smith in 1975/PHOTO CREDIT: Lynn Goldsmith
on 10th November, Patti Smith’s Horses is one of the defining albums of the 1970s. I want to spend some time with it ahead of its fiftieth anniversary. I am writing this feature nine days before the release of an anniversary edition. Not only for Patti Smith fans and those who love the 1975 album, this is a release I think everyone should get. One of the greatest albums of all time. Horses is a singular and spectacular vision from one of music’s greats. An undeniable masterpiece that is influencing artists today:
“New York, NY – August 22, 2025 – Legacy Recordings, the catalog division of Sony Music Entertainment, announced today a vinyl and CD release in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Patti Smith’s Horses. The album, originally released in 1975, will be released as a 2-LP and 2-CD on October 10. Pre-order is available now here.
This release will feature the iconic original album remastered direct from the original 1/4” master tapes, as well as previously unreleased outtakes and rarities, including Patti Smith’s 1975 RCA audition tape.
The release of Horses (50th Anniversary) will feature eight never-before-released songs, such as “Snowball” and “Birdland (Alternate Take)”, along with RCA demos. “Snowball” (here) will be the first single available on all streaming platforms today.
“The poet may stand alone, but in merging with a band, surrenders to the wonder of teamwork. Thus joined, we birthed Horses together.” – Patti Smith, Bread of Angels
On November 4, Patti Smith will publish her long-awaited memoir, Bread of Angels, via Random House Publishing. In Smith’s most intimate and visionary work, she describes her post-World War II childhood in working class Philadelphia and South Jersey, her teenage years when the first glimmers of art and romance take hold, her rise as punk rock icon to her retreat from public life when she meets her one true love and starts a family on the shores of Lake Saint Clair, Michigan. As Smith suffers profound losses, she also returns to writing, the one constant on a lifelong path driven by artistic freedom and the power of the imagination.
Bread of Angels Pre-Order: LINK
Order and Listen Link: https://PattiSmith.lnk.to/Horses50
Even though it was not a huge commercial success, Patti Smith’s Horses has this enormous and vital legacy. It is one of the most spectacular debut albums ever. Not only igniting Rock music but also fuelling and igniting Punk and New Wave. This is what critics have observed retrospectively. You can hear bands of today like The Last Dinner Party that nod to Patti Smith. Her music definitely has this impact and resonance. Horses is widely considered to be her best album. I am starting out with a 2015 article from Chris Charlesworth, and his recollections of his 1975 interview with Patti Smith for Melody Maker:
“Her band has been increasing in size over the years. Four years back it was just Patti and her guitarist Lenny Kaye, an occasional rock journalist and walking encyclopaedia on the last two decades of pop in America. Kaye, who three years ago, incidentally, compiled the Nuggets album of relatively obscure US singles for the Elektra label, might be described as a free-form guitarist, as he plays random notes at will according to the prompting of Patti’s dialogue. They understand one another and, as such, it’s doubtful whether any orthodox guitar player would fit.
Pianist Richard Sohl is a similar performer. Like Kaye, nothing he plays can be predicted beforehand. Recently two other musicians have been added: a second guitarist, Ivan Kral, who, like Patti, bears a striking resemblance to Keith Richards, and drummer Jay Dougherty. There is no bass player — Patti feels a drummer is ample rhythm.
John Cale was brought in to produce her first Arista album, Horses, which is released this month. It was on this topic that we began what turned out to be a very lengthy conversation last week. “It’s a live album,” she informs me, squatting on the floor. “There’s hardly any overdubbing at all. We just went in and did the songs straight away.
“In the studio we went through hell. I asked John to do it for me, I begged him to, and we had nothing but friction, but it was a love-hate relationship and it worked. At first I wanted an engineer producer, somebody like Tom Dowd, but Atlantic wouldn’t let him go, so I figured I’d get a top artist producer who would act as a mirror.
“The whole thing in the studio was us proving to John that we could do it the way we wanted, so we fought a lot but it was fighting on a very intimate level.”
The result is an album that’s actually far more melodic than the half dozen or so occasions I’ve watched Patti perform in various places in New York. The inclusion of a drummer – Dougherty was brought in immediately before the sessions began – tightens up Patti’s style no end. Before, it was often shapeless and lacked discipline of any kind. Now you can even dance to Patti Smith, or at least some of the tracks.
Even words were improvised in the studio, she says. “I’m not into writing songs. I find that real boring. All our things started out initially as improvisation, but doing them over and over again got them into a formula. I can’t play anything at all, so Lenny and I work out tunes as they go along. I have words and know how I think they should go, so we just pull it out and pull it out further until we get somewhere.”
She and Kaye first got together in 1971. This followed a period of Patti’s life when she lived at the Chelsea Hotel, writing poetry and spending time with rock musicians in what she describes as a “tequila split life”. Before that she was at art school, which followed work in a factory in New Jersey, where she was brought up. It was Dylan cohort Bobby Neuwirth who introduced her to the changing musical inhabitants of the Chelsea Hotel. (Neuwirth is currently playing on Dylan’s tour of New England with Joan Baez.)
“Neuwirth recognised my poetry and immediately introduced me to everybody he knew in rock and roll and kept pumping me to work at it. I studied Rimbaud, too, but being surrounded by these rock and roll rhythms the two moved simultaneously.”
It wasn’t until 1972 that Patti started making regular appearances in New York.
In 1973 Lenny Kaye appeared following a reading Patti gave on the anniversary of Jim Morrison’s death, and from then on things accelerated. Pianist Richard Sohl joined the ranks and gigs followed at anywhere manager Jane Friedman could book them.
Which just about brings us up to where we began: the ‘Hey Joe’ single recorded at Electric Ladyland. It was a deliberate choice of studio, for Patti strongly allies herself with Hendrix, another artist who took his art beyond contemporary strictures.
“We had three hours of studio time, but I just did it like we were on stage. Eventually we had ten minutes left and no ‘B’ side, so I recited this poem and the musicians just joined in and we had it done”.
Patti Smith is currently performing some Horses anniversary dates across Europe and the U.S. I am going to finish up on a couple of other reviews. I want to start out with The Observer and their 2015 celebration of Horses. Forty years after its release, they heralded its staggering genius:
“The word “punk” would later be attached to everything CBGB-related, but Horses is more punk in its attitude than in its sound. It takes a cabaret approach to rock, and by cabaret I mean Brecht/Weill, not the Sweeney Sisters. Richard Sohl’s graceful keyboard work drives the arrangements more than Lenny Kaye’s scratchy guitar, and although the band can work up a good head of steam, it tends to do so in a knowingly theatrical way. This music has a deeper affinity to Van Morrison lapsing into animal noises on “Listen to the Lion” than to the primal power of the Ramones.
While we’re on the subject of animal noises, it must be acknowledged that Horses is not always a pleasant listening experience. Smith didn’t intend it to be. Over the course of its 44 minutes, she bleats like a goat, yelps like a cat whose tail has been stepped on, howls like an abandoned toddler and pounds her chest while she sings to give her voice a guttural gulp. All for what? Like a shaman (a word and a concept she loves), she’s always reaching for the transcendent, trying to slip past the borders of her own self, enter the spirits of others, and meld with the mysterious force that binds us all together. She doesn’t always attain this transcendence, but she knows where she can find it: in rock and roll.
That is the abiding message of “Gloria” and “Land,” the garage-recitative suites that are Horses’ two centerpieces. The message is conveyed more through the music’s overall mood, the swells and surges of the band, and the sound of Smith’s voice—harsh edge, yearning center—than it is through her words (which, truth be told, verge on gibberish at times, especially during “Land”). And that message further confirms that this album could only have been made by people who were young and starstruck in the ’60s.
It’s true, you don’t have to be familiar with “Gloria” as rendered by Them (or any number of others) or “Land of 1,000 Dances” as rendered by Wilson Pickett (ditto) to appreciate what’s going on here. But it sure helps a lot if you are, and if you subscribe to the notion that three chords and the truth are really all that matters. To quote David Bowie, “Till there was rock, you only had God.”
These holy orgiastic moments are necessary to counterbalance the rest of the disc, much of which—“Redondo Beach,” “Birdland,” “Break It Up,” “Elegie”—is fixated on death. One curious irony about Horses is that an album so closely associated with the beginning of something (punk) is itself so concerned with endings. Its celebrated opening line, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine,” now seems far less significant than its closing ones: “I think it’s sad, it’s much too bad, that our friends can’t be with us today.”
All of which is a long way of saying that the kind of pretentiousness and self-indulgence on display in Horses is the kind everyone needs from time to time. It’s a positive thing to be reminded of Smith’s wild-eyed belief in the power of rock to provide catharsis, to soothe, to heal, to transform. Unlike many of her generation, she’s never given up that belief. She was still proclaiming it loud last Sunday through her very presence on stage with U2 in Paris. Would the world be a healthier place if more of us shared her faith? It could be worth a try”.
I am heading to 2011, and this NPR article from Charlie Kaplan. Highlighting how Horses is this towering achievement, though it is an album with some difficult and some sometimes dark subject matter. I think I first heard Horses a decade or so ago. Quite late in life, it will be interesting seeing how journalists mark its fiftieth anniversary on 10th November:
“The album's opening intonation, "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine" would feel like a stale trope or pose coming from someone else, but feels radical and terrifying when Smith says it. Part of what's so gripping about Horses' first track, "Gloria — In Exelcis Deo — Gloria" (an interpolation of Them's "Gloria") is how changeable and unpredictable Smith makes every element in the song. Nothing takes a single shape for long: not the tempo, the instrumentation, her accent, or the song's idea of gender. Smith sings from the perspective of a male narrator, all lupine lip-licking, but even his personality is in chaotic flux, distorting grotesquely as his libidinal advances intensify. Smith's narrator isn't rejecting atonement in his opening statement — he is relishing the depravity of what he can't wait to do, acts Jesus probably wouldn't have bit the big one to atone for, if he could take it back. And all this is coming from a woman, narrating as a man, preying on a woman. It really makes you rethink Van Morrison's early material.
The album then gets increasingly demanding and confrontational, and focuses on themes untouched in rock music preceding it. Disfigurement and escapism — surrealistic and almost one and the same here — emerge as prevalent themes. On "Break It Up," both the narrator and the boy she fixates on tear their skin off, turn into angels, and fly away from their hellish, earthly existence. On "Birdland," Smith's voice vacillates between beat poetry, Sprechstimme, and rock vocals as a boy realizes that his late father is, in fact, not dead but an alien, right before he is mutilated by a flock of birds, abducted by said aliens, and transported to another dimension. "We love birdland," she concludes.
Suicide also recurs as a theme. On "Redondo Beach," Smith settles into a stylistic form — peppy, jerky reggae — to sing about her narrator's girlfriend committing suicide. Suffice it to say, this juxtaposition is dissonant, dark, and left me feeling a little sick; in other words, it was effective. In the album's incredibly powerful and upsetting centerpiece "Land/Horses," — which reminded me of the band Suicide's "Frankie Teardrop," which would come out two years later — a boy named Johnny is raped, gets addicted to cocaine, and commits suicide. Smith's poetry is affecting here; Johnny's emotional collapse is a herd of horses, "white shining silver studs with their nose in flames," his ultimate act "a butterfly flapping in his throat."
"Land/Horses" also reprises lyrical themes from "Gloria — In Excelsis Deo — Gloria," again conflating rock references — particularly to dance — with sexual predators and assault. Close to the end of the song, Smith repeats a line from "Gloria," "humping on the parking meter, leaning on the parking meter," now transformed from an image of sexual appetite into a motif of victimization. This perspective and reinterpretation of the optimism and sexual liberation of the '60s is, to me, the central idea behind Horses. An outsider to that moment in time, Smith sees the injustice obscured by the pop patrimony.
Horses was hard to enjoy, but I think that was the point. Having been squired by Rolling Stone, whose '60s-centric sensibility was much of what Smith took aim at, I probably had a similar initial reaction to this album that critics swaddled in the Beatles and Stones did. Going back to the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time," for the first time I picked up on the obvious bias of the list; it was compiled, the issue's introduction proudly proclaims, by "An eclectic and stellar panel of experts — including the Rolling Stone editors, Fats Domino, Flea and Britney Spears," who "voted on the following albums, by everyone from Abba to ZZ Top, from Robert Johnson to the White Stripes." After listening to Horses, the Hands-Across-America diversity represented by "Flea and Britney Spears" and the faith-restoring ecumenism that somehow managed to place Robert Johnson and the White Stripes on the same list doesn't sound quite as impressive to me as maybe it did to Rolling Stone when they wrote it”.
I am ending with a review from Punk News. There are so many positive reviews for Horses. This is an album that received nothing less than effusive and ecstatic love and reaction. An album too potent and important to be half-hearted about! Fifty years later and its creator is touring songs from it. It is wonderful to see:
“Patti Smith had an equal love for poetry and 60's garage rock. She drew from both, showcased in her amazing lyrics (the best of any artist from the early punk days; compared to Bob Dylan's) and teamed them up with a three-chord rock and roll backing. The music shows the most dynamic range of the newborn genre, from songs with lengthy quiet sections with expressive spoken word vocals, to pounding rock and roll with Smith snarling, jabbering and yelping overtop. Smith shows intelligence and raw energy throughout, a deserving inspiration to generations of female rockers through her songwriting, performance, and by remaining androgynous, never relying on her gender to gain appeal (shown by the cover photo, taken by Robert Mapplethorpe). She was the first person to write a punk song with movements (no it wasn't Green Day) and the first female rocker- I believe- to fall off a stage while rocking out (no it wasn't Karen O).
Every track is great and it's inevitable that this review will be long, but I'll try my best. "Gloria" the opener pulls the chorus from the song of the same name made popular by Them, an early band of Van Morrison, and the rest is by Smith. It starts with the incredible opening line, "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine". "Redondo Beach" is a song mourning a girl who committed suicide, masked by the happy reggae tune supporting it. "Free Money" would be one of my favorites for being one of the most catchy and straight-forward rockers on the album. It starts with a quiet intro of twinkling piano with gentle bass and vocals, which soon takes off into a toe-tapper with a great ending full of back-up vocals and the title repeated rapid-fire.
"Land" is the focus of the album for sure, a 9 1/2 minute song with three connected movements. It starts with a powerful beat poetry section about a boy being attacked who, in terror, imagines as if he's surrounded by horses, and "Horses" also being the name of this first movement. The tempo builds up steam and then bursts into the second movement, another nod to Smith's love for old rock and roll with her take on "Land of a Thousand Dances." It seems like an odd transition, but it just seems to make sense here moving from chants of "Horses! Horses! Horses! Horses!" to "Do ya know how to pony like Bony Maroni? Do you know how to twist? Well it goes like this, it goes like this." By this mood change the song is in full swing and you will stomp your foot and sing along every time. The song winds down and returns to a possibly violated Johnny ("his sperm coffin") in the final movement "La Mer (De)" with dances reappearing occasionally ("Do the Watusi!").
The original album ends with the subdued piano-based "Elegie", but this release adds one more track. No it's not a waste-of-space demo version of a song on the album like on so many re-released classics, it's a worthy track. The Patti Smith group live in Cleveland in 1976. They perform a punk-as-hell version of The Who's "My Generation" complete with added profanity by Smith (rather than "Things they do look awful cold, Hope I die before I get old", she screams "I don't need that fuckin' shit, Hope I die because of it!" It ends with Smith chanting over top of the feedback, "I'm so young, I'm so goddamn young!" which later reappears as a lyric from "Privilege" on 1978's Easter. Also, it seems that John Cale from VU (also the producer of this album) is playing with them, because she yells "John Cale!" right before the bass solo. The song is a worthy addition and also works well to end the disc. As far as the album as a whole in reissued form, it looks great and sounds great so I have no complaints other than I wish the lyrics were included since they're so fantastic. Lyrics can be found easily online however”.
On 10th November, Patti Smith’s groundbreaking debut turns fifty. The word ‘masterpiece’ is perhaps the most commonly-used when it comes to Horses. Artists such as Viv Albertine of The Slits, Michael Stipe, PJ Harvey, Courtney Love and Johnny Marr have shared their appreciation for the album. How it has impacted them. Fifty years on, and Horses is touching a new generation. Musicians who will incorporate the sound of this 1975 album and influence those coming through. If you have not heard Horses in a while then spend some time with it now. Horses is one of the most important albums…
IN music history.