Patti Smith's Horses Read online

  At the close of “Land,” Smith begins to declaim an extemporized poem, sections of which would find their way into the prose poem “neo boy” (Smith 1984). Its opening statement, “everything comes down so pasturized … the past projects fantastic scenes / tic/toc tic/toc tic/toc …,” which was eventually used to preface the band’s version of “Time Is on My Side” (1964), picks up on Smith’s dissatisfaction with contemporary rock ’n’ roll. What follows is a roll call of the great and the good: a mythical killer shoots down Baudelaire and Rimbaud, they fall down on one knee; the sequence shifts to the United States: Jan and Dean, Chuck Jackson, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, the Rolling Stones, Arthur Lee, all fall down on one knee, heralding the arrival of the “black angel” Jimi Hendrix, whose set at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 climaxed with the rock legend going down on both knees to set his guitar alight. As Smith intones “a new language … a new rhythm is coming … it’s not dead!,” Kaye strums the by now familiar opening to “Hey Joe.” The cabaret, it seems, was over: it was time to celebrate the rebirth of rock ’n’ roll.

  Chapter 5

  Horses, 1975

  Moving Forward

  The trio wound up 1974 with a brief tour of California, playing shows to small but committed crowds in Berkeley and Los Angeles. Since their residency at Max’s Kansas City the previous summer, several new songs had been added to the repertoire: “Break It Up,” “Birdland,” “Distant Fingers,” “Free Money,” “Space Monkey,” “Redondo Beach,” “Snowball,” and a version of Them’s “Gloria” (1964). With the addition of these songs, the cabaret elements that had defined their earlier performances began to recede. Although Smith continued to preface the performances with poetry readings, the trio were becoming, almost despite themselves, a rock ’n’ roll act. This shift in emphasis necessitated a reconsideration of their live sound. On at least one occasion during their Californian tour, the trio had played with a drummer (reputedly Jonathan Richman, of the Modern Lovers), but more pressing, from Kaye’s point of view at least, was the wish to add a second guitar player. Following auditions, a young Czechoslovakian émigré named Ivan Kral was recruited. Although not technically gifted, Kral impressed the trio with his ability to sustain a rhythmic “field,” enabling Kaye to focus on lead lines. Smith, meanwhile, was garnering notice as a poet once again, following a triumphant performance at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project New Year Extravaganza. The event, which included readings by Yoko Ono, John Giorno, and Allen Ginsberg, was hailed by the Village Voice as a cultural landmark, with Patti Smith singled out as a name to watch. By the close of 1975, this prediction would, of course, come true. But it would be rock ’n’ roll, not poetry, that would establish her fame.

  Following performances at CBGBs, the band began to attract some serious record company interest, even going so far as to record a demo tape for RCA in February 1975. To date, only two tracks from this session have merited official release, but “Redondo Beach” and “Distant Fingers,” both included on the second disk of the 2002 Land compilation, mark a noticeable advance, in terms of performance and production values, on the two tracks recorded at Electric Lady the previous summer (though how much of this is down to the 2002 digital remix is uncertain). And yet, while the vocals on “Redondo Beach” sound fresh and intimate, the players, in the absence of a drummer, are clearly struggling to sustain the song’s reggae rhythm. Despite Sohl’s best efforts, the lack of hi-hat and snare renders the performance somewhat flat. In live shows, this deficiency could be masked by Smith’s charisma and the sheer gung-ho attitude of the band, but on tape the lack of a solid rhythmic base is acutely apparent. It would be several months before the band would recruit a permanent drummer.

  Yet despite such gaps, interest in the band would continue to grow. From the late 60s onward, Clive Davis had a reputation for nurturing strong female talent. As president of Columbia records, he had signed Laura Nyro and Janis Joplin; now, as president of the newly created Arista records, he had Patti Smith in his sights. Back in 1971, following the St. Mark’s show, Davis had tried to secure Smith for CBS. Smith, wisely it seems, turned this offer down. Four years later, noting RCA’s interest, and encouraged by Lou Reed, Davis sprang once again into action, reputedly offering her a $750,000 contract by way of incentive. The deal was apparently clinched mid set at a CBGBs gig in March. Despite the stringent terms of the contract, which called for seven records of new material within a four-year period, Smith was eager to sign, reportedly informing Davis, at one of their first meetings, “I’m not getting any younger [Smith was twenty-eight]. I have to be in a rush—I don’t have the strength to take too long becoming a star” (Hiss and McClelland 1975). This attitude chimed well with the fledgling company’s aggressive demands. As Bob Feiden, Davis’s second in command stated, “If artists are not willing to kill themselves selling themselves, why sign them? It’s not worth it” (ibid.). But while Smith was willing to work, she was also careful to maintain artistic control, even to the point of dictating the terms of her own marketing campaigns. As Bockris notes, it was Smith who came up with the line “three-chord rock merged with the power of the word” and who pushed for the “beyond gender” tag (1998). The singer also ensured that the contract recognize her right to exercise control over the production of her records. This clause, as we shall see, would prove decisive during the recording of Horses. Smith’s deal with Arista was announced by John Rockwell in The New York Times on Friday, March 28, 1975. Reviewing one of the CBGBs shows, Rockwell predicted a glittering future for Davis’s new star: “Miss Smith has it in her to be as significant an artist as American pop music has produced.” Sensing a change in the air, the esteemed critic urged “that anyone who wants to see Miss Smith in the ambience in which she has heretofore flourished—the seedy little club—had better hurry on down to CBGB.” Protected, for now, from the grosser aspects of record company interference, throughout the following month Smith and her band continued to play sets in the Bowery, appearing, as always, alongside Television. Still without a drummer, the three instrumentalists continued, in Rockwell’s words, to supply a “compensating percussiveness.”

  A live recording from the WBAI studio in New York City, dated May 28, presents what may well have been the last incarnation of the four-piece Patti Smith band. Opening with the customary “We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together,” the show highlights Smith’s ease with her newfound position as rock’s premier great white hope; the between-songs banter is worth the price of admission alone. The set is notable for several startling performances: a shorter, sharply focused “Birdland” and a rhythmically assured “Redondo Beach” showcase the guitar interplay of Kaye and Kral, while Smith’s voice throughout is rich and secure, a stride away from the chanted monotone of her early performances. While the concluding “Land” builds more exactingly on the sacrificial imagery explored in earlier performances, with Smith urging herself to “move forward, move forward,” the most accomplished number is undoubtedly “Break It Up.” Inspired by a dream about Jim Morrison, which Smith, with Verlaine’s help, had documented the previous December, the song is delicately performed, with Smith and the musicians intuiting the subtle dynamics of the piece.

  “Break It Up” is followed by “Gloria.” Like the other Horses numbers, the song closely resembles the recorded version; Smith’s vocals on this performance are notable for their uncanny depth and maturity. Midway through the performance, however, the singer departs from the song’s familiar lyrics to deliver an extemporized account of the band’s evolution from duo through trio to four-piece, ending with a plea for a drummer to complete the line-up (“I know you’re out there”). Whether Jay Dee Daugherty was in the audience at WBAI is unknown, but he was familiar with Smith and her band, and, in addition to running the PA, had taken to sitting in for occasional performances at CBGBs. Although already a member of the Mumps, Daugherty actively courted Smith and her entourage, and with Jane Friedman’s support he was eventually recruited as a full-time memb
er at the beginning of the summer. With Daugherty on board, the Patti Smith band became a fully fledged rock ’n’ roll group.

  Electric Lady

  Given their positive experience the previous summer, it seemed natural for the band to return to Electric Lady. Situated on Greenwich Village’s then seedy Eighth Street, the historical studio, with its wallpapered basement, psychedelic murals, mood lighting, and curvaceous, womblike interiors, provided an appropriate setting for a band embarking on the difficult task of reinventing itself. Initially, the task seemed clear enough: transpose the live sound to vinyl. But the band were savvy enough to realize that only the most experienced producer would be able to recreate the spontaneity of a live performance within a studio setting. After some deliberation, Smith decided to approach John Cale. Later, in conversation with Dave Marsh (1976), Smith claimed, “My picking John was about as arbitrary as picking Rimbaud. I saw the cover of Illuminations with Rimbaud’s face, y’know, he looked so cool, just like Bob I looked at the cover of Fear [Cale’s 1974 record] and I said, ‘Now there’s a set of cheekbones.’” Cheekbones aside, Cale seemed an appropriate choice for a band weaned on the art brut aesthetic of the Velvet Underground. Jay Dee Daugherty, moreover, had spent time with Cale in the late 60s during his tenure as Stooges producer, and had warmed to his affability and his no-nonsense approach to the recording process. That both assumptions were wrong became rapidly apparent. Since leaving the Velvet Underground, Cale, inspired by the example of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, had developed a much more symphonic approach to music-making. On records like Paris 1919 (1972), he had opted for a lush, orchestral sound, and for the Patti Smith album he was keen, initially at least, to push the band in a similar direction. From the outset, however, his attempts to recreate the multitracked opulence of recordings like Pet Sounds met with fierce resistance. In the studio he found Smith to be domineering and single-minded; the singer, for her part, objected to Cale for precisely the same reasons.

  On one point alone did Cale’s desire for sonic perfection meet with band approval; noting that the band’s equipment was irredeemably road-worn—the warped necks of Kaye’s and Kral’s guitars were of particular concern—he insisted that a sizeable portion of their advance be spent on new instruments. Once the band plugged in, however, the arguments continued, with the battles of wills stemming particularly from the relationship between Smith and Cale. Alternating between bouts of manic energy and moments of near-violence, Cale and Smith had become creative sparring partners, as she informed Crawdaddy. “How am I getting on with John Cale? It’s like a Season in Hell. He’s a fighter and I’m a fighter so we’re fightin’. Sometimes fightin’ produces a champ” (Shapiro, 1975). To Rolling Stone’s Dave Marsh she added, “All I was really looking for was a technical person. Instead, I got a total maniac artist. I went to pick out an expensive watercolor painting and instead I got a mirror” (1976). A few months later, Smith sought to distance herself further from Cale’s influence, claiming that “he had nothing to do with anything. I mixed the record myself.… The album was spewed from my womb. It’s a naked record. We ignored all Cale’s suggestions” (Jones, 1976). The words are telling: one way to read the record is as a documentation of Smith’s struggle to occupy, possess, and displace the order of the phallus. As we shall see, her claim to have “spewed” the record from her “womb,” without Cale’s assistance, signifies to some extent the artist’s frustration at not being able to do away, entirely, with the phallic regime.

  But amidst this frustration we encounter glimpses of what it might be like to upset this regime, as Smith went on to explain to Tony Glover: “in some of my songs I take on different personas.… Cool thing was that John [Cale] was into the chameleon thing, the changeling aspect—and I wasn’t made to feel guilty or nervous about any of the subject matter” (1976). Isolated in the subterranean confines of the studio, with sessions running from five in the morning to eleven at night, resuming the next day at noon and running through to six AM, the band and their producer thus became “caught in the common obsession of getting it down.” As Glover reflected, “it don’t take many times of working all night and leaving, wasted in the dawn, only to find the streets full of sunshine and people going to offices before all that’s real is the mania of the sound you’re making” (1976). Out of this mania a shared vision began slowly to emerge, and the key to this vision was performance. By playing the songs over and over again, the band began to tighten up; once this end was achieved, Cale, in a moment of Zen-like creative provocation, encouraged the musicians to disassemble the songs, extending and improvising just as they had done in their Times Square rehearsals and on stage at CBGBs. The strategy, as Smith explained to Rolling Stone, drove the band to its limits, but, she added, “there’s a lotta inspiration going on between the murderer and the victim. And [Cale] had me so nuts I wound up doing this nine-minute cut [‘Birdland’] that transcended anything I ever did before” (Marsh, 1976).

  Smith’s emphasis on a shared feeling of transcendence provides a clue to the underlying meaning of Horses. As I shall go on to argue, Horses is concerned with the testing of limits: the boundaries between the sacred and the profane; between male and female; queer and straight; the poetic and the demotic; self and other; the living and the dead. Just as the recording process forced its participants to their limits, so the songs collected on the album push the listener to question, though not necessarily to overcome, received ideas and attitudes. To listen to Horses is thus to hold oneself in suspense; it is to reconsider all that one knows to be rational and real. I understand that these are weighty claims to make of a “simple” rock ’n’ roll record, but, as I hope to show, Horses, for all its pared down minimalism, is far from simple. In the reading that follows I shall consider the album as a material artifact, the finished form in which it is encountered by the listener, and as the result of a set of historically determined processes. Thus, where necessary, I will make reference to alternative performances, technological details, and marketing decisions. If the record is to be read as an artifact, however, we must begin not with the songs but with the image that greeted consumers of the record on the day of its release in November 1975.

  Black Tie White Shirt

  She could have chosen any number of fashionable photographers for the album cover, but she chose her close friend and former collaborator Robert Mapplethorpe. The brief seemed simple enough: to convey a sense of glamour while avoiding cliché. Glamour, however, proved to be a contestable term. While Mapplethorpe at this stage was basing his understanding of the word on conventional images from the world of high fashion, Smith looked back to the underworld dandyism of her late-nineteenth-century literary heroes Rimbaud and Baudelaire. The photograph, in other words, would be a document of the androgynous look—white shirt, black jacket, black tie—that she favored both in her everyday life and on the stage. But Smith was also eager to convey something of the glacial minimalism of the French New Wave. She had in mind Jean-Luc Godard’s work with Anna Karina in Vivre sa vie (1962), where the actress is portrayed as cool and enigmatic, intellectual yet sensual.

  The resulting image was a triumph of artistry over technical deficiencies. Lacking the resources for supplementary lighting, Mapplethorpe was constantly on the lookout for interesting natural light effects, for subtle shadings and striking contrasts. A friend’s recently purchased apartment provided a solution. Located in Greenwich Village, near Washington Square, Sam Wagstaff’s place was empty, bare, and white. The photographer noticed how at a certain point in the afternoon the sun created a triangle on one of the walls and knew that he wanted to use it in some way for the forthcoming session. On the day of the shoot, Smith arrived at the apartment tired and dishevelled; she refused to comb her hair. The light was beginning to fade as Mapplethorpe anxiously maneuvered his subject into place, taking twelve shots in a rapid space of time. At just the right moment, Mapplethorpe caught the fading triangle, glimmering like an angel’s wing on her lefthand side. S
he had draped a jacket over her shoulder, on the lapel of which was mounted a small silver pin of a horse. An unknotted black tie completed the ensemble, but it was the poised, inscrutable look on the singer’s face, coupled with the hint of vulnerability in the hands, that created the most striking effect.