Why was Patti Smith’s debut album called ‘Horses’?
In November 1975, an album hit record shops that blew the doors off the stultifying landscape of post-1960s rock. Patti Smith, a gonzo journalist, poet and veteran of the burgeoning music scene around venues CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City, had arrived. The album was Horses, her debut LP and the dawn of a new musical epoch.
Smith had self-released her first record the previous year, featuring a cover of ‘Hey Joe’ and an original ballad called ‘Piss Factory’, which added music to a poem she’d written. She’d also gotten to know local New York art-rock band Television, whose line-up at that time was fronted by Richard Hell alongside Tom Verlaine. Television were fellow frequenters of CBGB’s and performed alongside Smith at the club, which by that point was hosting punk rockers Ramones on a regular basis.
But before Verlaine’s group, Hell or the Ramones could have their say, Horses was the album that changed everything. It brought rock and roll back to its roots while tying it to New York’s underground art scene. It introduced a new way of doing things to musicians around the world, making what you had to say more important than the musicianship involved in how you said it.
The album includes some of Smith’s greatest songs, from the ‘Gloria’ suite that opens the record with a radical reinterpretation of Van Morrison’s proto-punk classic to her own personal favourite ‘Birdland’. And two of the best tunes she ever wrote, the reggae-infused ‘Redondo Beach’ and the full-throttle ‘Free Money’.
But what does its title mean?
At first sight, the title Horses feels at odds with a record born in the bowels of the Big Smoke, a city record with more horsepower than a thousand horses could muster. But Smith saw it differently. For her, it summoned up the wildness of the music and art that defined her youth.
“We had to pull the reins on ourselves to recharge ourselves,” she told the Los Angeles Times when the album was released. “We’ve gotten ourselves back together,” she said, referring to the music scene at CBGB’s. “It’s time to let the horses loose again. We’re ready to start moving again.” Specifically, she summoned her dead heroes, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix, who she saw as wild stallions emblematic of musical freedom and rebellion.
And to be precise, she took the horses metaphor of the album title from a poem-song she wrote about the protagonist of The Wild Boys, a 1971 novel by Beat Generation leader and Smith’s personal friend William S Burroughs. In Burroughs’ novel, protagonist Johnny is a highly sexualised participant in a youth movement hellbent on bringing down Western civilisation.
Smith’s poem ‘Horses’ became the first part of her second suite on the album ‘Land’. She begins it as a spoken-word piece before accelerating her recital of the words as they turn into an ecstatic melody, culminating in her repetition of the word “horses”. Johnny is “suddenly” surrounded by “shining silver studs with their nose in flames”, Smith sings urgently.
In this verse, the enflamed horses symbolise the wild passion overtaking the character Smith is describing, as well as the sense of sexual liberation he’s experiencing. For the album as a whole, they symbolise the impassioned musical liberation Smith and her crowd at CBGBs are experiencing, and all the freedoms that go along with it.
Wild horses were dragging them away from a stagnant musical past, unleashing a vital, seemingly limitless new beginning. It was the end of Western civilisation as people knew it.
