Horses (album)
Horses is the debut studio album by American musician Patti Smith. It was released by Arista Records on November 10, 1975. A fixture of the mid-1970s underground rock music scene in New York City, Smith signed to Arista in 1975 and recorded Horses with her band at Electric Lady Studios in August and September of that year. She enlisted former Velvet Underground member John Cale to produce the album.
Horses
November 10, 1975
August – September 18, 1975
43:10
The music on Horses was informed by the minimalist aesthetic of the punk rock genre, then in its formative years. Smith and her band composed the album's songs using simple chord progressions, while also breaking from punk tradition in their propensity for improvisation and embrace of ideas from avant-garde and other musical styles. Smith's lyrics on Horses were alternately rooted in her own personal experiences, particularly with her family, and in more fantastical imagery. The album also features adaptations of the rock standards "Gloria" and "Land of a Thousand Dances".
At the time of its release, Horses experienced modest commercial success and placed in the top 50 of the American Billboard 200 albums chart, while being widely acclaimed by music critics. Recognized as a seminal recording in the history of punk and later rock movements, Horses has frequently appeared in professional lists of the greatest albums of all time. In 2009, it was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation into the National Recording Registry as a "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" work.
Background[edit]
Through frequent live performances over the previous year, by 1975 Patti Smith and her band had established themselves as a popular act within the New York City underground rock music scene.[1][2] Further increasing their popularity was their highly attended two-month residency at the New York City club CBGB with the band Television early that year.[1][2] The hype surrounding the residency brought Smith to the attention of music industry executive Clive Davis, who was scouting for talent to sign to his recently launched label Arista Records.[2] After being impressed by one of her live performances at CBGB, Davis offered Smith a seven-album recording deal with Arista, and she signed to the label in April 1975.[3]
Smith's vision for her debut album was, in her words, "to make a record that would make a certain type of person not feel alone. People who were like me, different ... I wasn't targeting the whole world. I wasn't trying to make a hit record."[4] The title Horses reflected Smith's desire for a rejuvenation of rock music, which she found had grown "calm" in reaction to the social turmoil of the 1960s and the deaths of numerous prominent rock musicians.[5] She elaborated: "Psychologically, somewhere in our hearts, we were all screwed up because those people died ... We all had to pull ourselves together. To me, that's why our record's called Horses. We had to pull the reins on ourselves to recharge ourselves ... We've gotten ourselves back together. It's time to let the horses loose again. We're ready to start moving again."[5]
Musical style[edit]
Smith characterized Horses as "three-chord rock merged with the power of the word".[17] Describing the music on the album, Consequence's Lior Phillips noted a minimalist quality that "matched the tone of" the nascent punk rock genre.[18] Author Joe Tarr identified a punk sensibility in the music's reliance on simple chord progressions,[19] while William Ruhlmann of AllMusic cited Lenny Kaye's rudimentary guitar playing, the "anarchic spirit" of Smith's vocals, and the emotionally charged nature of Smith's lyrics as being representative of punk.[20] Tarr wrote that the band "proudly flaunted a garage rock aesthetic", and that Smith "sang with the delirious release of an inspired amateur", emphasizing "honest passion" over technical proficiency.[21] Smith's vocals on the album alternate between being sung and spoken, an approach that, according to Peter Murphy of Hot Press, "challenged the very notion of a demarcation" between the two forms.[22]
AllMusic critic Steve Huey observed that Horses borrowed ideas from the avant-garde, with the music showcasing the band's free jazz-inspired interplay and improvisation, while still remaining "firmly rooted in primal three-chord rock & roll."[1] He called Horses "essentially the first art punk album."[1] Smith and her band's propensity for improvisation differentiated them from most of their punk contemporaries, whose songs rarely diverged from straightforward three-chord structures.[19] Throughout Horses, they also tempered their punk sound with elements of other musical styles, balancing more conventional rock songs with excursions into reggae ("Redondo Beach") and jazz ("Birdland").[23]
Lyrics[edit]
Fiona Sturges of The Guardian described Smith's lyrics on Horses as being steeped in "intricate phrasing and imagery" that "deliberately blurred the lines between punk and poetry."[24] CMJ writer Steve Klinge found that the album's lyrics recalled the energy of Beat poetry and the "revolutionary spirit" of French poet Arthur Rimbaud, one of Smith's primary influences.[25] Smith drew on different sources of lyrical inspiration on Horses, with some songs being autobiographical and others being rooted in dreams and fantastical scenarios.[26] She left the genders of the songs' protagonists ambiguous, a stylistic choice she said was "learnt from Joan Baez, who often sang songs that had a male point of view", while also serving as a declaration "that as an artist, I can take any position, any voice, that I want."[2]
Smith's experiences with her family inspired certain songs on Horses.[27] "Redondo Beach", whose lyrics concern a woman who commits suicide following a quarrel with the song's narrator,[28] was written by Smith after an incident involving her and her sister Linda.[16] The two had gotten into a heated argument, prompting Linda to leave their shared apartment and not return until the next day.[16] "Kimberly" is a dedication to its namesake, Smith's younger sister, and finds the singer recounting a childhood memory of holding Kimberly in her arms during a lightning storm.[23][27] In "Free Money", Smith describes growing up in poverty in New Jersey and recalls her mother fantasizing about winning the lottery.[27]
Smith penned other songs about notable public figures. "Birdland" was inspired by A Book of Dreams, a 1973 memoir of Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich by his son Peter, and revolves around a narrative in which Peter, at his father's funeral, imagines leaving on a UFO piloted by his father's spirit.[29] "Break It Up" was written about Jim Morrison, lead singer of the Doors. Its lyrics are based on Smith's recollection of her visit to Morrison's grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery,[30] as well as a dream in which she witnessed a winged Morrison stuck to a marble slab, trying and eventually succeeding in breaking free from the stone.[31][32] "Elegie" is a requiem for rock musician Jimi Hendrix, incorporating a line from his song "1983... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)".[2][27] It was recorded, per Smith's request, on the fifth anniversary of Hendrix's death, which fell on September 18, the final day of recording.[13] Smith said that the song was also intended to pay tribute to other deceased rock musicians such as Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, and Janis Joplin.[33]
Two songs on Horses are adapted from rock standards: "Gloria", a radical re-imagining of the Them song incorporating verses from Smith's own poem "Oath",[34][35] and "Land", already a live favorite, which features the first verse of Chris Kenner's "Land of a Thousand Dances".[36] In "Land", Smith weaves the imagery of the Kenner song into an elaborate narrative about a character named Johnny—an allusion to the similarly named homoerotic protagonist of William S. Burroughs' 1971 novel The Wild Boys—while additionally referencing Arthur Rimbaud and, less directly, Jimi Hendrix, whom Smith imagined to be the song's protagonist, "dreaming a simple rock-and-roll song, and it takes him into all these other realms."[37] The characterization of Johnny in "Land" was also inspired by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe—who was a close friend of Smith and shot the picture of her used for the Horses album cover—and his experiences in the New York S&M scene; in her memoir Just Kids (2012), Smith refers to Mapplethorpe and Burroughs, sitting together in CBGB, as "Johnny and the horse".[38]
Release and reception[edit]
On September 18, 1975, the same day that they finished recording Horses, Smith and her band performed a live show in support of the upcoming album at an Arista convention, where they were personally introduced by Clive Davis.[13][47] They previewed five songs from the album: "Birdland", "Redondo Beach", "Break It Up", "Land", and, as their encore, "Free Money".[47] In a contemporary account, journalist Lisa Robinson reported that the performance was met with an "ecstatic" response from the Arista executives in attendance.[47] Horses was released on November 10, 1975.[48][49] Commercially, it performed respectably for a debut album,[50] despite receiving little radio airplay.[51] In the United States, Horses peaked at number 47 on the Billboard 200 albums chart, remaining on the chart for 17 weeks.[47][52] The album also managed chart placings in Australia, where it reached number 80;[53] Canada, where it reached number 52;[54] and the Netherlands, where it reached number 18.[55] To promote Horses, Smith and her band toured the US and made their network television debut performing on the NBC variety show Saturday Night Live,[56][57] then traveled to Europe for an appearance on the BBC Two music show The Old Grey Whistle Test and a short tour.[58] "Gloria" was released as a single in April 1976.[59] Smith's cover of the Who's "My Generation", performed live in Cleveland, served as the single's B-side.[60]
Horses was met with near-universal acclaim from music critics.[61] Music journalist Mary Anne Cassata said that it was roundly hailed as "one of the most original first albums ever recorded."[62] Reviewing the album for Rolling Stone, John Rockwell wrote that Horses is "wonderful in large measure because it recognizes the overwhelming importance of words" in Smith's work, covering a range of themes "far beyond what most rock records even dream of."[63] Rockwell highlighted Smith's adaptations of "Gloria" and "Land of a Thousand Dances" as the most striking moments on the record, finding that she had rendered the songs "far more expansive than their original creators could have dreamed."[63] In Creem, Lester Bangs wrote that Smith's music "in its ultimate moments touches deep wellsprings of emotion that extremely few artists in rock or anywhere else are capable of reaching", and declared that 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."[64] The Village Voice's Robert Christgau said that while the album does not capture Smith's humor, it "gets the minimalist fury of her band and the revolutionary dimension of her singing just fine."[65]
Horses had some detractors in the British music press.[66][67] Street Life reviewer Angus MacKinnon found that the album's minimalist sound merely reflected Smith and her band's musical incompetence.[68] Steve Lake's scathing review of Horses for Melody Maker attacked the album as an embodiment of "precisely what's wrong with rock and roll right now", panning it as "completely contrived 'amateurism'" with a "'so bad it's good' aesthetic".[69] Conversely, Jonh Ingham of Sounds published a five-star review of Horses, naming it "the record of the year" and "one of the most stunning, commanding, engrossing platters to come down the turnpike since John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band".[70] Charles Shaar Murray of NME called it "an album in a thousand" and "an important album in terms of what rock can encompass without losing its identity as a musical form, in that it introduces an artist of greater vision than has been seen in rock for far too long."[71] English television host and future Factory Records co-founder Tony Wilson was so enthused by the record that he made repeated attempts to book Smith and her band for an appearance on his Granada Television program So It Goes.[72]
At the end of 1975, Horses was voted the second best album of the year, behind Bob Dylan and the Band's The Basement Tapes, in the Pazz & Jop, an annual poll of American critics published in The Village Voice.[73] NME placed Horses at number 13 on its year-end list of 1975's best albums.[74] According to writer Philip Shaw in his 33⅓ book profiling the album, the enthusiastic reaction to Horses from the music press quickly assuaged observers' suspicions that Smith had sold out by signing to a major label.[50] The positive critical reception, along with substantial promotional efforts by Arista, ensured that Horses enjoyed healthy, if not particularly high, sales.[50]
Notes