100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Gloria Part I: In Excelsis Deo Part II: Gloria

02 Redondo Beach

03 Birdland

04 Free Money

05 Kimberly

06 Break It Up

07 Land
Part I: Horses
Part II: Land of a Thousand Dances
Part III: La Mer (De)

08 Elegie

Robert Mapplethorpe’s photo of Patti Smith on the cover of Horses is one of the most iconic images in rock & roll. Smith’s slightly dishevelled appearance is very rock & roll, but the coat slung casually over the shoulder is pure Sinatra in downtown Manhattan. Her gaze is defiant and confident. Then there is the famous opening line – ‘Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine’.

The album arrived hot on the heels of another New York record with a black & white cover. If Bruce Springsteen was billed as the future of rock & roll, Patti Smith posited another future. Like Born to Run, Horses was a collection that drew its power from channelling the past. Smith dropped names like a drunk halfback drops the ball: Dylan, the Beat Generation, Rimbaud, Hendrix, Keith Richards, Jesus. Ornette Coleman and other jazz giants were a strong influence in the harmonics on the album. Patti Smith may have been a prophet of punk rock, but she didn’t come to destroy rock & roll, she came to save it.

Patti Smith started out as a poet. Completely self-taught, Smith grew up on Top 40 radio and she sought out poets both literary and musical. In that sense she harked back to early Bob Dylan, seeing no distinction between rock & roll and ‘art’. Smith found an early home at CBGB – the Patti Smith group were one of the first to play there. She was the first of the CBGB artists to get a record deal. With her literary influences and encyclopedic knowledge of rock history, Smith’s references to pop culture history made her more explicable than, say, Television or Talking Heads.

The choice of Velvet Underground cellist John Cale as producer – not Smith’s first choice – was inspired. He added to the album’s pedigree while also respecting the band’s raw qualities. But it was not an easy record to make – Smith recalled one night when Cale was banging his head against the mixing desk trying to deal with the craziness.

‘I didn’t know how to sing, I don’t know about pitch,’ she said recently. ‘But the band’s adolescent and honest flaws – I wouldn’t say weaknesses – John always left them in. But if he could subtly teach us to enhance what we were doing, he did that. It was a very beautiful, tortuous excursion.’

The songs had been worked up over the previous two years, some starting out at poetry readings that Smith did with only guitar accompaniment from Lenny Kaye. This is how the poem ‘Oath’ was morphed with Them’s garage rock anthem ‘Gloria’ into a complex hymn to both a higher power and the raw power of rock & roll. ‘It didn’t have a category,’ said guitarist Kaye. ‘It was an attitude.’

Other songs like ‘Redondo Beach’ about a fatal lesbian affair or ‘Elegie’, a tribute to Hendrix, suggest new sonic realms for this garage band, embracing the chaos of switchblade guitars. ‘Land’, the album’s epic, borrowed heavily from the soul classic ‘Land of a Thousand Dances’. Smith was taking the past and rewriting it.

Not all of Smith’s gambits came off, but the courage behind the album and its vision were undeniable. On tracks like ‘Land’ the Patti Smith group embraces and then transcends its limitations. For those very reasons, Horses remains one of the most influential records in rock & roll.

‘It’s time to figure out what happened in the ’60s,’ she announced. By the mid-’70s, when this album was released, most of the superstars of the ’60s were burnt out. Rock & roll needed Patti Smith like the French needed Joan of Arc.