Artists as unconventional as Patti Smith rarely got to release a major-label record in 1975, and "record" is exactly what producer John Cale made: Horses is less a typical rock album than a snapshot documenting the artist's performance poetry set to music. What Smith and her cohorts — guitarist Lenny Kaye (also a music journalist, but a lifer, not a short-timer), pianist Richard Sohl, guitarist/bassist Ivan Kral and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty — created was a feminist life force, a world of vehement independence barely linked to established form. Yelping "G-L-O-R-I-A" in a track that begins and ends "Jesus died for somebody's sins…but not mine" means nothing in the realms of garage punk or Top 40; Smith simply hotwired the Van Morrison song as a vehicle to joyride. Compared to the commercial preening of then-labelmates Eric Carmen and the Bay City Rollers, the spare and airy Horses — in which everything is held in check except for Smith's overflowing energy — is closer to folk music, a postcard from the urban art underground. If Smith sometimes gets carried away with the melodrama of her jabbing declamation, her words are reliably affecting, a roiling sea of imagery… read more »