Patti Smith, Horses
Featured Album
An evocative postcard from the urban art underground
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 and emotion. Few albums are so verbal: "Gloria," "Birdland," "Redondo Beach" and "Land" (which interpolates "Land of 1000 Dances," the 1965 hit for Cannibal and the Headhunters) are short stories with accompaniment, delivered with much more passion than fiction usually gets. As the lack of a developed narrative in "Break It Up" (with guitar by Tom Verlaine of Television) does nothing to blur the evocation of loss, the lack of polished production does nothing to blur the strength of this unique debut.
