How a pre-fame Patti Smith gave Blue Öyster Cult some of their darkest anthems
In 1975, Patti Smith released her debut album, Horses, a beautiful blend of poetry and rock, which became a seminal recording of the punk era, significantly inspiring artists such as Viv Albertine of The Slits, Siouxsie Sioux, PJ Harvey and many more successful artists.
Horses was proof that a woman could be a rock icon, with Smith unselfconsciously allowing herself to be whatever she wanted to be. She didn’t fit into any preconceived role, and neither did her music. Blending minimal instrumentation with rich lyrics, taking inspiration from Jim Morrison of The Doors, Horses is an odyssey through raw power and poetics.
Smith’s brilliance stems from her origins as a writer. Obsessed with literature from an early age, Smith found herself drawn to poets such as Arthur Rimbaud, Jean Genet and William Blake, and upon her arrival in New York, she started working in a bookstore. Immersing herself in books, plays and poems, she naturally began writing her own, joining the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in the early 1970s.
It wasn’t until 1974 that Smith released her first single, ‘Hey Joe/Piss Factory’, accompanied by Lenny Kaye, Richard Sohl, Ivan Kral and Jay Dee Daugherty. Yet that wasn’t Smith’s first appearance on record – she performed Jim Morrison’s poem, ‘I Wake Up Screaming’, on Ray Manzarek’s album The Whole Thing Started with Rock & Roll Now It’s Out of Control a few months prior.
However, before she had even committed her voice to tape, some of Smith’s lyrics were immortalised in wax. In the early 1970s, Smith found herself in a relationship with Blue Öyster Cult’s Allan Lanier, and the band were impressed by her poetic abilities. Subsequently, they offered her the role of lead vocalist, but she chose to pursue her own path, instead contributing several of her poems for the band to set to music.
On the band’s 1973 album Tyranny and Mutation, Smith contributed the lyrics to ‘Baby Ice Dog’, which opens with the brutal lines, “I had this bitch you see/ She made lies to me.” Additionally, Smith provided the lyrics to ‘Career of Evil’ from 1974’s Secret Treaties, as well as a handful of other tracks released by Blue Öyster Cult over the 1970s. She co-wrote ‘Debbie Denise’, ‘Shooting Shark’ and ‘Fire of Unknown Origin’.
Once Smith had started her musical career, she provided vocal accompaniment on the band’s 1976 song ‘The Revenge of Vera Gemini’ from Agents of Fortune, duetting with Eric Bloom. The pair sing about murder, with reference to Smith’s debut album, “Oh, no more horses, horses/ We’re going to swim like a fish/ Into the hole in which you planned to ditch me/ My lovely/ Vera Marie.”
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