Patti Smith's Horses (17 page)

With her wealth of promise and the most incandescent flights and stillnesses of this album she joins the ranks of people like Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, or the Dylan of
“Sad Eyed Lady” and Royal Albert Hall. It’s that deeply felt, and that moving: a new Romanticism built upon the universal language of rock ’n’ roll, an affirmation of life so total that, even in the graphic recognition of death, it sweeps your breath away. (1976)

Thus, while the record company provided the requisite capital to disseminate Smith’s product in the marketplace, publications like
Creem
supplied much needed
cultural
capital, encouraging consumers to locate the artist in the same prestigious spheres as Dylan, Mingus, and Davis. John Rockwell’s review for
Rolling Stone
reciprocated Bangs’s admiration for Smith’s high art credentials, in this case pointing out comparisons with the literary and musical avant gardes: from Allen Ginsberg to La Monte Young, and from Terry Riley to Merdith Monk (1976). And in a similar vein, Tony Glover, in
Circus
, described the record as the aural equivalent of a William Burroughs book (1976a).

In Britain meanwhile, Charles Shaar Murray of the
New Musical Express
hailed the album as “better than the first Roxy album, better than the first Beatles and Stones albums, better than the Doors and Who and Hendrix and Velvet Underground albums.”
Horses
, he goes on to argue, is a “definitive essay on the American night as a state of mind … it’s strange, askew and flat-out weird. It’s neurotic and unhealthy and dank, a message in a bottle sent from some place that you and I have only been to in the worst moments of self doubting defeated psychosis” (Shaar Murray, 1975). Between them, Bangs, Shaar Murray, Rockwell, and indeed Smith herself, created the template for an entirely new genre, a form of music that was intelligent and self-conscious, yet visceral and exciting, and that would receive a range of names
over the coming months and years: art rock, punk rock, new wave; and thereafter: alternative, grunge, college rock, and indie. With the accent falling on feeling, rather than technique, and on passion, rather than polish, the
art brut
aesthetic of Smith’s
Horses
is sustained in the work of numerous contemporary musicians, from Nick Cave to P. J. Harvey, and from Kim Gordon to Kristin Hersh.

Praise for this new genre was not unanimous, however. In Britain, for instance, a number of critics, including Angus McKinnon (1976) and Steve Lake (1976) of the
Melody Maker
, argued that Smith’s rise to fame was entirely the result a cleverly orchestrated media company. Lake, in particular, came to advance the idea that Arista had engineered a “‘fame-association’ situation,” drawing attention to Smith by promoting her alongside established artists such as Bob Dylan, with whom she had been recently photographed at the Other End Club. As fans of English progressive rock, Lake and McKinnin were quick to dismiss the studied minimalism of
Horses
as amateurish, decrepit, musically incompetent, and just plain “bad. Period” (Lake, 1976). Lake’s antipathy to Smith’s music culminated in a confrontational meeting with the band during their British tour the following May. Yet despite Lake’s best efforts,
Horses
received a warm reception from the
New Musical Express
and from
Sounds
. But it was Smith’s remarkable appearance on BBC-2’s
The Old Grey Whistle Test
followed by two memorable sets at London’s Roundhouse theater on May 16 and 17, that confirmed her reputation among British fans. On
The Old Grey Whistle Test
, the band performed a coruscating version of “Land.” Citing Oscar Wilde alongside the recently disgraced former Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe in her introduction to the song, Smith remained true to the radical political agenda
that she had demonstrated in her St. Mark’s performance and on record on “Hey Joe” (Whitely, 2006).

In America meanwhile, toward the end of December ‘75, Smith and her band played a series of gigs at the Bottom Line club in New York. As Lisa Robinson noted, the gigs had been sold out for weeks and the “ambience at Mercer and Fourth Streets was not totally unlike that when Springsteen played there some months ago.… The energy level was intense … it was amazing … not since the Velvets has this city known such a performance” (1975). In all, the band played seven shows over a three-night period, marking a return to the relaxed, residency feel of their CBGBs days. At the Bottom Line, the evenings began, typically, with Smith appearing alone on stage to chat with the audience and read from her poems. As Robinson observed, Smith was starting to become a visually expressive performer, punching the air with her fists, swaying with the music, and bending down on all fours. She had become a rock ’n’ roll star.

In addition to the
Horses
songs, the band played several numbers that would appear on their follow up album
(Radio Ethiopia
was released a mere ten months later), alongside versions of “Pale Blue Eyes” (reportedly observed by a “stunned” Lou Reed), “Time Is on My Side,” “Louie Louie,” and “My Generation.” No mere covers, the performances tapped directly into the primal, urchin-like spirit of rock’s renaissance, effortlessly bypassing the self-indulgence, the frippery, and the waste of rock’s more recent baroque period. No longer enmeshed in cultural or corporate logic, Patti Smith enters the realm of the simple present. It is a moment of pure indulgence, a temporary yet, for me, vital suspension of the drive to critical accountability—all the time I am mindful that what
I am listening to and what I am describing is documentary evidence, that I am listening to events that happened a long time ago, and that I am trying to reconstruct them, fruitlessly no doubt, in “the present time of playback” (Auslander, 2007). In closing, however, I should like to imagine what it might be like to reawaken the spirit of the past.

At the end of the show on December 27, 1975, the singer announces, “Rock ’n’ roll … goes through creepy times. We made it up, so we can make it better again.” As the band launches into “My Generation,” Smith picks at her guitar, a Fender Duo Sonic reputedly owned by Jimi Hendrix, adding dissonant, scratchy noise to the rumbling, bass heavy, chaos—the latter supplied by John Cale. Egged on by the baying crowd she loses herself in the moment, issuing a deluge of fucks, shits, and goddams, as the song lurches toward an explosive end. “I’m so young, so goddam young,” she screams. “I’m so young, so goddam young.” Shouting hoarsely at the limits of expression it seems as though the artist has reached another realm. Perhaps it is possible to exceed the law, to be something other than male/female, hetero-/homosexual, poet/rock singer, artist/product. Meanwhile, the crowd shouts for more, chanting her name over and over.

When she returns, it is to end where she began, with a poem:

to have no need of the apparatus

of the operating room

to be safe from all bodily harm

to know love without exception

to be a saint in any form
(Smith, 1994)

“Hey Joe” (Version) / “Piss Factor” (1974). Mer Records, #601 (US).

“Gloria” / “My Generation” (1976) (“My Generation” recorded live in Cleveland on 1/26/76). Arista Records AS 0171 (US) Arista Records/Pathe Marconi/EMI 2C.010–97.523 (France) Arista Records ARISTA 135 (UK) (twelve-inch 45 RPM single) Note: Early issues of the British single were released with “My Generation” censored.

Horses
(1975). Produced by John Cale. AL 4066 (US). ARTY 122 (UK). 201 112 (Germany). 18RS-7 (Japan).

Horses
(2005). 30th Anniversary Legacy Edition CD. B000BKDOB6

Land 1975–2002
. Arista CD. B00005YVQN

Bootleg recordings of readings and concerts are listed at
http://www.oceanstar.com/patti/
(see Web Sources below)

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