The New York studio that turned Patti Smith into a legend
For Patti Smith, New York City meant something a lot more than being the biggest city in the country.
She had first grown up in Pennsylvania, and after breaking out of her hometown to find something bigger and better, there was a certain romanticism about ‘The Big Apple’ that no one could have found anywhere else in the country. It was the perfect place for someone who had something in their heart that they wanted to express, and while it took her a while to become one of the greatest poets of all time, all she needed was the right place for her to feel welcome.
Because you have to remember how grimy Manhattan would have been if you didn’t know where to go. Sure, it might look like the epicentre of all things fashionable in many respects, but even looking at the artists Smith followed, none of them was exactly happy-go-lucky. Everyone from Bob Dylan to Lou Reed to Nina Simone didn’t take any prisoners whenever they sang, but Smith figured that it didn’t matter if someone could believe her words whenever she got up onstage.
But in the grand scheme of things, Smith’s ascent wouldn’t have happened quite the same way without Robert Mapplethorpe. He was one of the unsung heroes of her entire career throughout her salad days, and even if they went their separate ways in the late 1970s, there was no way that she would have had the same kind of push to make art without him encouraging her through it all.
Then again, it’s not like Smith needed that kind of push anyway. She was going to be the consummate artist come hell or high water, but when she first heard people like Jimi Hendrix, she realised that rock and roll was about more than making a few catchy tunes. Hendrix was showing people musical visions that they had never heard of before, and by the time he settled in New York City to build Electric Lady Studios, it was practically a church for Smith when she first walked by.
She had already been given some words of encouragement by Hendrix when she was too scared to go in at the beginning of her career, but after he passed away, a lot of Horses was about trying to immortalise the feeling that music gave her when she fell in love with it for the first time. Hendrix had started that fire, and she was going to do everything she could to keep it burning with people like Lenny Kaye by her side.
And when she first entered the studio years later for her debut album, she couldn’t help but reminisce on the emotional journey that brought her to that moment, saying, “As I descended the stairs. I could not help but recall the time Jimi Hendrix stopped for a moment to talk to a shy young girl. Jimi Hendrix never came back to create his new musical language, but he left behind a studio that resonated with all his hopes for the future of our cultural voice.”
But even though Horses was a far different album than anything Hendrix had done, it’s not lacking in the passion that all great art is supposed to have. No one was going to have the same experiences that Smith did whenever she sang songs like ‘Elegie’, but even if you didn’t connect to any of the words that she was saying, you could feel the true human emotion behind every single thing she played.
This was a woman who had music driven out of her every single time she played, and her work still stands as a lesson for what all great artists should be looking for. Anyone can try to make the most cookie-cutter decisions possible in the music industry, but whether it was music, poetry, painting or all of the above, Smith taught everyone that great art isn’t something that’s made on command. It’s something that’s driven out of you, and Electric Lady helped her find the perfect outlet every time she sang.
