Horse Whispers

The Patti Smith Group, from left: Lenny Kaye, Jay Dee Daugherty, Patti Smith, Ivan Kral and Richard Sohl. Photo Platt Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Before I knew Patti Smith’s voice, I knew her face. I had memorized her haunted stare and her lithe figure, her thin arms and her long, porcelain hands. When I was 14, in the pre-dawn light of what would become my punk turning, back when all I had was a sense that I wanted something more, something fierce to abide by, before I had albums and a genre for my angst to hang upon, I had a picture postcard of Patti Smith.

I am not sure where I bought it, or if I got it from my dad, who was in the habit of sending me dozens of stamped postcards in hopes I would write. She stands in front of a burning metal barrel, soot mingling with her sweat; her cloud-coloured, see-through blouse is torn half off, exposing a black bra strap over her sharp shoulder, pitted against the pyre, Joan of Arc represente ton rue. Smith looks like she’s dressed up for a hot date with the apocalypse, tarry smudges on her drawn cheeks in place of rouge. It seems as if she has been awake for five weeks crawling through the gutters of New York City’s Lower East Side on her hands and knees. And yet, she is impossibly sexy, her cool self-possession boring a hole through the camera lens and directly into you. I knew she was an artist of some sort, I am not sure I knew she was a singer, all I really knew is that I wanted to be whatever it was she was.

It would be another year and a half before I got one of Smith’s records. Rather, the “Nice Price” cassette of Horses, her 1975 debut — now remastered and back in stores as a 30th-anniversary, double-disc special edition. Her voice was as tough and otherworldly and spooky as she looked on that postcard. I was scared to listen to it, it felt sacrosanct. When I found the courage, it was the most visceral thing I had ever heard, and my kid-mind was blown. Her Dylan-esque high whine charred with this molten slurring, witchy and perched on the edge of control, with a delivery that betrayed that she’d yet to be tamed by the world.

Courtesy Sony Music Canada.

Much has been made of Horses’ incendiary opening line, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins / But not mine,” but the dissonant third track, Birdland, was what did me in. There, over the course of nine minutes and 15 seconds, Smith’s small, almost girlish voice, burnished by a New York accent, careens from as delicate as a curl of smoke to a low, bastard doo-wop croon to psych-ward mania-spew. Breathless, she spits, “Like a black bouquet shining / Like a fist that’s going to shoot them up” — then slips rapid fire, repeating “up” another 28 times through the end of the verse, bulleting it to bits, decimating the memory of anything that came before.

Horses is often mis-claimed as one of punk’s first offerings, perhaps because of Smith’s f---k-you fervor, or her band’s proxy as a CBGB’s fixture; but punk fits it all wrong. Punk was too artless, too messy and avenging. Patti Smith was in love with rock ’n’ roll and all its reckless consequence; she peppered most every song with the word “baby,” she poached Gloria from Van Morrison and Land of a Thousand Dances from Cannibal and the Headhunters and curdled them righteously. She used all the same ingredients and cited the same influences as Jim Morrison, but the plain fact was that Morrison was a leather-clad California cad who thought himself a poet, whereas Smith was (is) an artist, expressing the unexpressed, excavating the primal from the everyday, while wrapped in a sheet playing old rock ’n’ roll’s ghost. It was 1975, and America was softly dying. Smith captured our Vietnam hangover with a diarist’s drift, her ache precise, her melancholy deep-felt, swinging sweet and violent. Her lyrics were redolent of American nostalgia, equal parts love and malevolence. In the title track, Horses, she howls for a rebel-boy on the precipice, a silky-haired Johnny, who sets himself free by slitting his own throat with a knife. The last two lines are as much eulogy as they are manifesto: “Everything around unraveling like some long Fender whine / Dancing around to the simple rock and roll song.”

Without so much as permission, Patti Smith became the first dangerous female rock ’n’ roll star. Fawning praise, three decades down the pike, may seem redundant, especially as Horses was canonized (rightly) at birth. But seeing as no one has made such a frightfully potent debut since, and that Smith is still all she was then and more; true-artist rock star, first-punk, feminist icon, radical rock revisionist, incandescent pure-poet — let us keep fanning the flames.

Jessica Hopper is a Chicago writer. Her work has appeared in Spin, Punk Planet and the Chicago Reader. This is her first piece for CBC.ca.

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