Patti Smith’s Horses: How Poetry Helped Invent New York Punk

Punk did not arrive in New York wearing a leather jacket and carrying a carefully prepared manifesto. In Patti Smith’s case, it arrived carrying a book of French poetry.

When Horses appeared in November 1975, Smith was not simply another singer waiting for the music business to discover her. She had already spent years inside Manhattan’s poetry, theatre and art underground. Rock and roll entered the equation almost as an accelerant: a way of making words hit harder, travel further and avoid the terminal respectability that can settle over a poetry reading.

That collision is why Patti Smith remains such an awkward fit for tidy labels. Poet? Punk singer? Rock critic? Memoirist? The useful answer is yes.

Before Punk, There Was Poetry

Smith arrived in New York in 1967 and gravitated towards the city’s downtown artistic world, developing a close creative relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and establishing herself as a poet and performer. Her influences cheerfully ignored departmental boundaries: Arthur Rimbaud could coexist with Bob Dylan, William Blake with the Rolling Stones, and literary symbolism with three-chord garage rock.

Guitarist Lenny Kaye initially accompanied Smith at poetry performances. The arrangement gradually expanded into a band, and something important happened along the way: the poetry did not become lyrics in the conventional sense. Instead, rock became a physical framework in which Smith could declaim, improvise, repeat and occasionally detonate.

CBGB Was the Laboratory

By 1975 the Patti Smith Group was playing at CBGB, the Bowery club whose stage was becoming a laboratory for a loose collection of bands that did not yet know they were supposed to constitute a movement.

The Library of Congress notes that Smith and her band honed the material that became Horses during a run of shows there. Around them were Television, the Ramones, Blondie and Talking Heads: groups with very different sounds but a shared impatience with the increasingly enormous, expensive and technically polished machinery of mainstream 1970s rock.

Hellwood’s Punk & Alternative T-Shirts collection is full of what happened next. Horses catches the moment just before the explosion.

John Cale Enters the Room

Smith recorded Horses at New York’s Electric Lady Studios with former Velvet Underground member John Cale producing. Electric Lady confirms that Smith had previously recorded her 1974 “Hey Joe / Piss Factory” single there before returning to Studio A for the album.

The partnership was productive rather than peaceful. Smith wanted the immediacy of her band captured without unnecessary decoration; Cale had ideas of his own. The friction helped produce a record that sounds simultaneously primitive and extraordinarily deliberate.

It opens by taking Van Morrison’s garage-rock standard “Gloria” and turning it into something closer to an invocation. Elsewhere, “Birdland” stretches into feverish spoken imagery, “Land” collides original writing with an old rock-and-roll refrain, and “Elegie” closes the record in mourning.

This was not poetry politely borrowing a backing band. It was language learning how to throw furniture.

The Record Before the Movement

Horses was released on 10 November 1975. Calling it a “punk album” is both correct and slightly misleading because the familiar punk rulebook had barely been written. The Library of Congress instead describes it as a proto-punk classic and selected it for the National Recording Registry in 2009.

Its importance lies partly in what it permitted. You did not have to choose between literary ambition and crude rock and roll, between high culture and a sweaty club, or between being an observer of music and climbing onto the stage yourself.

That makes Horses a useful gateway between both halves of Hellwood’s Music & Literature territory. Browse the wider Music T-Shirts collection for more beautifully difficult noise, or wander into the Famous Writers collection to meet some of the literary troublemakers who helped make this sort of collision possible.

Fifty years after its release, Horses has accumulated awards, anniversary editions and scholarly essays — precisely the sort of respectable furniture punk is supposed to throw through a window. Fortunately, put the record on and it still sounds dangerous enough to manage it.