‘Horses’: Patti Smith’s perfect tribute to her heroes
All great musicians are always built on the shoulders of those who have stood before them. Although there’s a mantle of pressure for anyone to stand in the same shoes as their heroes, it’s never impossible to make something that lasts forever as long as you have the right idea behind everything. While Patti Smith may not have considered herself one of the fiercest rockers of her time, Horses was the moment that she managed to take every one of her idols and put them under one roof.
While many people consider her debut to be the moment where punk rock was born, that’s selling her criminally short. Before she had even touched an instrument, Smith was far more interested in the written word, and all of her heroes were the great rock and roll poets, whether that was waxing poetic about what Lou Reed was saying in Velvet Underground songs or hearing about the great poets like Rimbaud and Allen Ginsberg.
She may have been a poet first and a musician second, but who says they have to be mutually exclusive? The whole point behind any great artist is to blend different mediums together to get all of their ideas out into the world, and when Smith descended into Electric Lady Studios in New York, she had also been taking note of all of the legends that were bound to walk through those doors before and after her.
Jimi Hendrix had sanctified the grounds by going there in the first place, and while Smith had a far different approach than the rock and roll guitar legend, she was no less passionate about what her music could do. Just like Hendrix could make people weep throughout every solo he played, Smith could also take her words and make her audience see the genuine person behind everything she sang.
But despite fans wanting a love letter to the great legends of rock and roll, Horses proves that heroes can come in all different forms. A lot of the issues that Smith confronts on this record have to do with mortality, and listening to her talk about saving her baby sister from a fire or describing a man coming back home from his father’s funeral are perfectly juxtaposed. One minute, there’s the sadness of realising that heroes don’t last forever, and without getting time to recover, she understands that she has to eventually become that hero for a whole new generation that comes after her.
That can seem like a Herculean task for anyone to take on, but Smith toes that line absolutely perfectly. The whole point behind all of her greatest moments was about leaving bits of her soul in her words, and when listening to the way that she cries out in pain on ‘Gloria’, it’s easy to feel every word she’s saying.
As the album reaches the climax in its final moments on ‘Elegie’, Smith finally acknowledges all of those people who couldn’t be here with her to see her reach this milestone. The sad reality is that some truly great people can get lost along the way while artists are making their masterpieces, but even if they can’t be here to see the fruits of their labour, it doesn’t mean that they still shouldn’t be remembered.
If anything, this is the kind of statement that keeps growing more relevant every time Smith sings it. Just Kids brilliantly captures the friendship that she had with Robert Mapplethorpe throughout her formative years, but even if he and Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith have reached the other side of reality, their spirit lives on whenever ‘Elegie’ is played.
While the thought of one’s heroes falling by the wayside may have seemed like a morbid way for someone to start their career, it never feels depressing when in Smith’s hands. There are still many icons that have come and gone that she may have never been able to know, but she knows that all of their influence congealed into the woman standing on that album cover.
