By Warwick McFadyen
In the beginning was the word. Then the music. Then the recording. And it was good. It was very, very good. Its name was Horses. Its author was Patti Smith.
This year marks its 40th anniversary. On September 2, 1975, Smith and her band of Lenny Kaye, Richard Sohl, Ivan Kral and Jay Dee Daugherty, (along with producer John Cale) walked into Electric Lady Studio (built but barely used by Jimi Hendrix) and emerged five weeks later with a classic. It was their album debut. It marked Smith as a visionary/revolutionary of rock. The poetry coiled and writhed, soared and swooped within the power of the electric guitar and the deep well of a struck piano.
Cover photograph of Patti Smith's album.
About this time, Bob Dylan was preparing to storm America on his Rolling Thunder Revue tour, Bruce Springsteen was being labelled the future of rock, in London, Johnny Rotten (nee Lydon) a toerag with bad teeth and a snarling distaste for the world was enjoined to become part of the Sex Pistols, Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody was conquering the world, and a small but influential scene was developing in New York that would see the rise of bands such as Television.
Into this swirl, came the raw poet. Horses begins with a proclamation of war. Over a slow keyboard chord sequence, Smith intones a statement of artistic and personal intent: "Jesus died for somebody's sin, but not mine."
Horses has endured because of this stance. To Smith, to be truly an artist one must live inside society and create outside of it. Horses is a work of art, wrapped in rock and roll and Rimbaud.
Smith will be touring the album from later this month, beginning in Paris. In the first half of October she is promoting her new book M Train, which is released on October 6. In Melbourne, two concerts – featuring Courtney Barnett, Jen Cloher, Adalita and Gareth Liddiard – are being held on October 18 to celebrate the album that has been named in the industry as among the best in rock. It has also been included in the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress. The cover – photographed by Smith's lover/friend/soulmate, Robert Mapplethorpe – is regarded in its stark monotone as one of rock's iconic images.
As Smith writes in Just Kids: "There was never any question that Robert would take the portrait for the cover of Horses, my aural sword sheathed with Robert's image. I had no sense of how it would look, just that it should be true. The only thing I promised Robert was that I would wear a clean shirt with no stains on it." (She went to the Salvation Army on the Bowery and bought several white shirts for the shoot.
With portraits of the band on the back cover, there is also a stream of poetry, wisps of imagination and imagery: "Compacted awareness ... the feel of horses long before horses enter the scene ... only histoire is responsible for the ultimate cannonizing ... as for me I am truly totally ready to go ... charms sweet angels – you have made me no longer afraid of death."
Her next album Radio Ethiopia would use Andre Breton's dictum: "Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all."
Her convulsions, her spasms of creating beauty, began in her youth. Genesis was a childhood among books.
In Just Kids, Smith writes: "My mother taught me to pray; she taught me the prayer her mother taught her: 'Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.' I knelt before my little bed as she stood, with her ever-present cigarette, listening as I recited after her. I wished nothing more than to say my prayers, yet these words troubled me and I plagued her with questions.
"I soon petitioned my mother to let me make my own ... Thus freed, I would lie in my bed by the coal stove vigorously mouthing long letters to God ... My small torrent of words dissipated into an elaborate sense of expanding and receding. It was my entrance into the radiance of imagination."
The latter is an apt description of Horses. The opener Gloria sets the tone, temper, torrent and rhythm for the album. In its merging of poetry and primeval rock and roll (Them's Gloria, written by Van Morrison) it opened the doors of perception.
Rock could be literate, surreal and sweaty all within a five-minute song. Jim Morrison was like that, embracing such a trinity. Bob Dylan, for all his genius, could not.
Smith again: "Lenny showed me how to play an E and as I struck the note, I spoke the line: 'Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine.' I had written the line some years before as a declaration of existence, as a vow to take responsibility for my own actions. Christ was a man worthy to rebel against, for he was rebellion itself.
"Lenny started strumming the classic rock chords E to D to A, and the marriage of the chords with this poem excited me. Three chords merged with the power of the word. 'Are those chords to a real song?'
" 'Only the most glorious,' he answered, going into Gloria, and Richard followed."
And thereafter, the world of music and letters followed her unto this day.