MY MOST LOVED ALBUMS - Horses by Patti Smith - 1975

 

In this the penultimate album of the first series of My Most Loved Albums, we find ourself once more circling around and back to 1975. It was at this point in the Mid -1970's when the previous music press murmurings about punk finally landed at our shores. And so we have the intriguingly malformed beast that is Horses, and the arrival of Patti Smith. Not on the musical surface sounding all that trad punk - a very arty eclectic version perhaps. But her insouciance, well its all there in its stylish album cover. This iconic immaculately executed Robert Mapplethorpe photograph, captures the essence and feral spirit of his close friend. The look of indifference in those eyes stares straight at you, the confident swagger of that the jacket slung over her shoulder conveys. This is the quintessential performance poet and musician. She might have rode in on the wave of punk, but she doesn't feel remotely beholden to it, nor to anything really. Much more closely affiliated to Rimbaud than to The Ramones. She introduces a feverish level of artistic expressiveness into rock'n'roll that hasn't quite been matched since, by anyone, even by her.

I remember, on first hearing I was not at all sure I liked this alien species. Where was this woman coming from?  Introduced to punk in the UK by The Damned and The Sex Pistols, the New York CBGB's punk scene was producing these really idiosyncratic counter cultural punk bands, as diverse as Jayne County and Suicide. These weren't quite what anyone here thought of as punk in the UK. But they were defiantly so in attitude, and that made them interesting. I'm noticing as I comb through my music collection, looking for My Most Loved Albums that US Punk bands are still present. But UK punk. not a whisper, because our home spun version of punk was orientated towards independent singles, self promotion, punk magazines. There was an alternative ethos at work, in which albums felt middle aged and so out of fashion. Albums in the UK became closely associated with the corporate record industry, the behemoths of Progressive Rock and the West Coast hokey earnestness of singer songwriters. US punk bands seemed instinctively to be Post-Punk, years before anyone here understood what that might mean. Because punk, though it moved fast, became tired and ran out of road very quickly.

And here we have Patti Smith singing, well, more screaming, whelping and drawling, her half sung half spoken surreal hallucinatory poetry. Wildly expressive outbursts triggered, as though in the midst of a psychotic episode. 

'The boy looked at Johnny, Johnny wanted to run,

but the movie kept moving as planned
The boy took Johnny, he pushed him against the locker,
He drove it in, he drove it home, he drove it deep in Johnny
The boy disappeared, Johnny fell on his knees,
started crashing his head against the locker,
started crashing his head against the locker,
started laughing hysterically

When suddenly Johnny gets the feeling he's being surrounded by
horses, horses, horses, horses
coming in in all directions
white shining silver studs with their nose in flames.'*

So, yeah, that felt challenging. Patti Smith sounds so permanently wired throughout the entire proceedings, really worked up and pumped. These days when I listen to albums from this early punk period, I hear lots of potential, that generally is never subsequently fully explored. Rebellious creatively tends to have a very short fuse, before it inevitably enters the dominant mainstream. This is what punk did, quickly become a convention, and disappear up its own anally retentive clenched buttocks. And then, when I listen to Horses, I think, more music as as radical and as experimentally out there as this, that would have been really good.  Ah, the persistence of dreaming of what punk might have been.

Fifty years later Horses has attained and is now firmly grounded in its seminal, much lauded, status. In the same way The Velvet Underground and The Stooges had become godfathers of punk from earlier eras. You have to hand it to Patti Smith, she did single handedly make performance poetry legit, and launched a whole host of other performers as a result. Her subsequent artistic career is more than admirable, so today she is revered as this no nonsense rebellious feminist icon. Nothing, however, has quite equalled the derisory drawl of Gloria's much quoted, opening coda, being transgressively thrown in your face -' Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine.'*

*Lyrics by Patti Smith taken from the album Horses, released by Arista Records November 10th 1975.