"Horses, Horses, Horses, Horses"

A long-time record collector finally encounters Patti Smith's art-punk debut

To be a music fan, or more pointedly, a record collector, is to be curious. For me, that means always trying to expand one’s listening horizons and to keep learning more about music and, in so doing, continue to replicate that feeling of hearing something that could be life changing.

Recently, I picked up a copy of Patti Smith’s Horses, an album firmly canonized as a classic and one I had barely heard prior to buying it. Since then, I have listened to it five times and wrote an essay about the experience.

I hope you like it and will let me know what you think too.

Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

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“Horses, Horses, Horses, Horses”
By: Robert C. Gilbert

What are your music blind spots? Those places where you dare not or chose not to go. We all have them, even those whose tastes run wide or whose collections run deep or even in the areas of music with which one has been long well-acquainted. Here are a few of mine: Louis Armstrong beyond his album-length collaborations with Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker outside of his recordings with strings or the famous Massey Hall concert in 1953 with Dizzy Gillespie or anything by Joni Mitchell after 1980’s Shadows and Light. Here are a few more: I own no recordings by Chuck Berry or the Kinks or Nina Simone or B.B. King or Nick Drake.

The reasons for these holes in my musical soul, so to speak, are varied. Partly, it’s a practical matter like waiting for Mitchell’s Archives series to tackle the eighties and beyond or that a box set of Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings is not easily available. Sometimes, it’s a matter of my taste. I’ve never felt too compelled to dig beyond the hits of the Kinks or have warmed to the sound of Simone’s voice. Another reason is that there’s only so much time to listen to music and only so much room someone has to store it and there’s only so much money to lay out on this wonderful obsession called music.

There’s also that the whim simply hasn’t been there to pick up a classic Berry session, for one example, even as there is no denying that there is a certain shame to have spent almost 40 years building a record library that still doesn’t have even one cut by Chuck Berry in it.

I suppose that glaring omission is at least partly understandable if one considers that it’s not as if I don’t know his music or that it wasn’t a foundational part of my musical education. Anyone raised on fifties and sixties rock and roll as I was knows about the deeply American travails of ‘Johnny B. Goode,’ the futile longing for ‘Nadine (Is That You?)’ or that the time had come to ‘Roll Over Beethoven.’ So some blind spots in my collection are not filled as they wouldn’t necessarily satisfy the continued longing to stretch further, go deeper and gain the widest knowledge and appreciation of music. That’s not an excuse, it’s just a rationalization of where the collecting path has taken me.

And so then there are albums that I am long acquainted with that many others have never heard just as there are albums that others know front to back, back to front and every other way about which I know little. In both instances there lies the possibility of that first listen. To hear a recording with fresh ears. To measure if one’s notions about the music are equal to the reality, way different or ideally, far better than could have possibly been imagined.

That was the position I was in when a few weeks ago I decided to order the 50th anniversary of Patti Smith’s Horses. It seemed like the perfect way to finally hear the album, long known as a major statement, if not the major statement, of gritty, seventies New York. I had once heard the opening cover of ‘Gloria’ on the radio, recalling that I was impressed by its in-your-face quality but that was it. It was time to hear Horses for myself.

As I loaded the compact disc of the original album, newly remastered, into my player and got ready to press play, I posted a note here.

Among the responses I received were: “Welcome to the cult…,” “You’re in for a real treat!!!,” “Well, this should come as a shock to the system, in a good way,” “Oh to hear this with fresh ears again” and “Won’t be your last.”

The opening line of the album is “Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine.” It’s provocative and confrontational. It’s also like the revving of an engine, which then roars for the next minute and 40 seconds while still stationary. Smith then shifts into drive as she proclaims, “here she comes” and ‘Gloria’ begins in earnest.

What’s interesting here is the antic energy, an anticipation of the song’s rush of a refrain, colliding against the polish in which Jay Dee Daugherty’s drums, especially the bass drum, in synch with Ivan Král’s bass sounds not far removed from the lockstep of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie that was one of the many defining elements of the Buckingham-Nicks era of Fleetwood Mac.

That crispness is unexpected. Nineteen seventy-five bohemian New York—the crucible in which Horses was created—does not, on the surface, seem to lend itself to such well-manner sonics but I think they’re central to the album’s potent power. That comes mostly from Smith, creating an art rock that’s not too dissimilar from Yoko Ono’s double LP Approximately Infinite Universe from 1972, but is something earthier, something one can dance to. In other words, unlike Ono’s albums, I can play Horses on my stereo without having to put on headphones.

As an outsider to this type of music—one label given to it is art-punk—but genuinely fascinated by the do-it-yourself, flipping-off-convention ethos of the movement that Horses was heralding, the glean of accessibility or maybe more accurately, an easy entry point to gradually understand and appreciate the album, was not something I had counted on. If John Cale, Horses’ producer and one of the antecedents of the way the album was pointing, had his way, there would have also been strings on it.

The album’s clean sound isn’t my only way in here. These are others more substantial, including a fascination with rock music that balances a view quite askew with a deep foundation in the mechanics and craft of pop songwriting. Here, I think of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s Safe as Milk, the Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out! and parts of The Velvet Underground and Nico. I am also predisposed to strong female singer-songwriters like Laura Nyro, Judee Sill and Joni Mitchell. Of the three, Nyro is the best comparison to Smith and her go-for-broke dynamism. Another is that Wilson Pickett’s recording of ‘Land of 1000 Dances’ is one of my favourite recordings.

That song, written and originally recorded by Chris Kenner, is part of Horses’ centrepiece, an almost 10-minute thrill ride that sandwiches it between two pieces by Smith, the title composition and ‘La Mer(de).’ Like ‘Gloria,’ there is anticipation. How will ‘Land of 1000 Dances’ fit into all this? What is it even doing here? Its presence is not so unexpected considering Smith’s interest in getting back to the beating heart of rock and roll not to mention bandmate Lenny Kaye’s bona fides as a music preservationist through his creating the Nuggets compilation in 1972.

The shift to ‘Land of 1000 Dances,’ after Smith repeats the word horses four times, is perfect. It becomes a familiar sight, a chance to get one’s bearings recalibrated. Again, it’s contrast at play. The callbacks to the days when dances like the twist or the watusi were all the rage act as an leavening to Smith’s poetic flights of fancy. All of it is delivered by her coolly, announcing a difference from Bruce Springsteen—his Born to Run vying with Horses as the album of the moment in 1975—who was just as exuberant but in a far hotter manner. ‘Free Money’ is the one time Smith and Horses reaches the ecstatic heights of the Boss’ breakthrough even while it keeps its hipster framework intact.

He’s an artist I appreciate but I’m sure I would consider myself a fan of his. I have his first four albums. The music is often overwhelming, so plugged in it is to the day-to-day struggle and the longing to transcend it that I need to be in a special mood in order to be able to be planted in my seat to receive it for about 45 minutes straight. No surprise then that my favourite Springsteen recording is ‘It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City’ from Greetings for Asbury Park, N.J. where he’s more detached.

That would not exactly be the word I would use to describe Smith on the reggae-like ‘Rendono Beach’ or on the street-wise beat of ‘Kimberly.’ Disaffected may work better here. Her voice is deep and full. It’s neither coarse nor pretty. But it is the sound of someone who knows all the angles and while she’s not going to spill them, one can possibly guess at some of them simply by listening hard to her.

‘Break It Up,’ on which Allen Lanier of Blue Öyster Cult and Tom Verlaine of Television guest with Smith, Kaye, Král, Daugherty and Richard Sohl on piano, is the most expressive moment on Horses. A song about Jim Morrison, ‘Break It Up’’s refrain is unforgettable, the moment in which the precision of the album’s sound seems most unsettling, even dangerous.

I see albums like Horses as ultimately being provocations, weeding out those unwilling or unable to give it the attention it needs. The path from attention to rapt interest is fairly swift for the six tracks I’ve already written about. The remaining two: ‘Birdland’ and ‘Elegie’ don’t permit such instant gratification. Horses’ isn’t just an album of balls-to-the-wall rock. It’s also one of poetry. The former, with Kaye’s screeching guitar and Smith’s almost spoken-word vocal underlines the lineage, if Cale’s participation wasn’t enough to do so, back to the Velvet Underground, especially to something like ‘Heroin.’

The closing ‘Elegie’ had a floating quality. It is mournful yet also suggests a steely determination—particularly the lines “trumpets, violins, I heard them in the distance / and my skin emits a ray.”

I feel that may be Horses’ primary emotive quality. A cry of the rebel announcing something new and different. It’s about time I got hip to Horses’ call.

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