“Lousy”: The legendary 1975 album Patti Smith said sounded terrible
You’d be surprised how many classic albums are hated by their creators. Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, and the list goes on and on.
It’s easy for us as fans to hear an album and then feel instantly connected to it, as the first time that we’re exposed to it is when there is a finished product. However, with a lot of these records, the process of making them was so stressful that people wound up hating the finished product, no matter how much we as consumers enjoyed it.
For instance, when Bruce Springsteen started writing Born To Run, he did so with the intention of making one of the best rock albums of all time. His LPs before that had been good, but not commercially successful, and he was determined to rectify that. We would all say that he was successful; however, when he initially finished the album, he couldn’t stand what he was listening to, so much so that he almost didn’t release it.
“After it was finished? I hated it! I couldn’t stand to listen to it,” said Springsteen. “I thought it was the worst piece of garbage I’d ever heard. I told Columbia I wouldn’t release it. I told ‘em I’d just go down to the Bottom Line gig and do all the new songs and make it a live album.”
The same happened with Patti Smith and her classic album Horses. It’s a record which a lot of music buffs consider one of the greatest punk albums ever made, as excellent musicianship and poetry come together and give listeners one of the greatest records ever conjured. Her way with words, and the ability to create complicated narratives surrounding love, hate and all things in between is inspired. However, Smith isn’t a huge fan of the way the album sounds, as she has often criticised how poor the final mix sounds.
“To me, the saddest thing about it is that the album isn’t recorded well,” she said, “I’ll grant you that. It doesn’t sound good. We all know that. It’s badly recorded. It sounds lousy on the radio. But it’s cool, because it’s a document of how it was.”
That last sentence is pretty important. “It’s a document of how it was.”
Sure, Horses might not be the most perfectly produced album, but that was very much the atmosphere within the punk scene that Patti Smith was dominating. As she and a range of other bands were performing at CBGBs, they were carving out a brand new sound, one which was perfectly imperfect, crisp and crunchy, not the cleanest sound but still pretty gorgeous. As such, while it might not be the best-sounding album, it feels like a real reflection of its time.
There were a lot of people that Patti Smith could have worked with to make a great album, but she was happy to channel the authentic nature of her sound rather than compromise on as much. So, she may think her classic album sounds terrible, but it’s the greatest kind of sound that Smith could pine for.
“I mean, I know a lot of famous people. I could have had everybody in rock and roll on my f****** record. But I wasn’t interested in that,” she said, “I wasn’t interested in any big star syndrome thing. You can call the record f***** up technically. You can call it a piece of s***. I call it a naked record. Naked and exposed. And I really don’t feel that I have to defend it.”
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