Patti Smith today looks as striking as the 28-year-old instant icon who defiantly out-stared the viewer from the cover of Horses. With her strong nose and thin, rangy frame, she's still androgynous, but her appearance, 30 years on, now has something of a 'ragged glory' aura.
Like the saddle-sore outlaws of The Wild Bunch, Smith is a battered survivor of a freer era, rock'n'roll's lost frontier. Life has given Smith a bit of a battering over the past 15 years. Life, or more accurately, death: her dear departed include husband Fred Smith, best friend (and Horses photographer) Robert Mapplethorpe, brother Todd Smith, and long-time piano player Richard Sohl (all of whom died much younger than they should have), along with both her parents and close friend William Burroughs. In the early days, many of her songs were dreamed into being, but nowadays, Smith notes, 'my dreams are populated by people I've lost'. So she's a survivor in another, sadder sense.
I meet Smith at a Greenwich Village cafe that she has haunted for more than four decades. The first time was in 1964, when she was a wide-eyed visitor to Manhattan from rural south Jersey. She points across the street to a red door several houses down. 'I was sitting here and I looked over and Bob Dylan stepped out - that's where he lived.' Eleven years later, in the summer of 1975, she would meet her idol for the first time after she performed at the Bitter End, a club on Bleecker Street just a few blocks away. 'Backstage after the show, somebody taps me on the shoulder and says, "Any poets around here?" I turn around and it's Dylan. Unbelievable! A few days later we ran into each other on the street and Bob pulls out a page from the Village Voice and it's a big photograph of me and him backstage. And he goes, "Do you know these people?"'
Patti Smith's an icon, alright, but she started out as an iconographer, developing her presence through close study of her heroes - Dylan, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and, implausible as it may seem, TV host Johnny Carson. From this seemingly middle-of-the-road figure, Smith learnt techniques of grace under pressure that helped her deal with the hostile audiences she faced early on. 'If I was making my stew, there's a big chunk of Johnny in there,' she chuckles.
In some ways, the closest parallel for Patti Smith is David Bowie. Both emerged in the early Seventies, the point at which rock had built up enough history for it to be possible for artists to play games with the genre's own myths and archetypes. As much as it was Smith announcing herself to the world, Horses also served as homage to her godstar pantheon. 'What I wanted to do in rock'n'roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes, and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.'
Her 'thank you' began with a debut single, a cover of 'Hey Joe' recorded at Electric Ladyland, the studio Hendrix built in the West Village but never got to use. In the summer of 1971 Smith had briefl y met Hendrix at the studio's opening party. Too overawed to enter, she was loitering on the steps when Jimi came out and sat beside her. 'I said I was too shy to go in and he laughed and said, "I'm shy, that's why I'm leaving." He told me all his plans, then he went to catch a plane to England for the Isle of Wight Festival. But he never came home. So going into Electric Ladyland to record "Hey Joe", and later Horses, I felt a real sense of duty - I was very conscious that I was getting to do something that he didn't.'
The Hendrix obsession resurfaces with Songs of Experience at the Royal Festival Hall on Sunday 26 June. It's the final night of the Smith-curated Meltdown Festival, a fortnight of events honouring other inspirational favorites such as William Blake and Bertolt Brecht, and which involves a host of performers she admires, among them Television, Yoko Ono, and Sinéad O'Connor.
The highlight of Meltdown, though, is the 25 June performance of Horses in its entirety and original sequence (something Smith has never done before), with a band that includes Television guitarist Tom Verlaine and the album's producer John Cale. She tells me she has just learnt that the night sold out immediately. 'I was overwhelmed. To tell the truth, it brought tears to my eyes. Horses pretty much broke as a record in England. I always think of us as a semi-English band because we were so maverick in America and then we went to London and played that first date at the Roundhouse in May 1976, and the response gave me my first sense that "wow, we're really doing something."'
Pipping the Ramones' first album to the post by five months, Horses is generally considered not just one of the most startling debuts in rock history but the spark that ignited the punk explosion. Except that, apart from the opening cover of Sixties garage band classic 'Gloria', it's not actually that punky-sounding. Indeed its two peaks - 'Birdland' and 'Land', both nine-minute excursions of incantatory poetry over improvised noise - are about as distant as you can imagine from Ramonesstyle two-chords/two-minutes. Unlike Jim Morrison, a rocker who craved acceptance as a serious poet, Smith was a published bard with two slim volumes of verse under her belt who started to incorporate electric guitar (provided by her rock critic friend Lenny Kaye) into her readings. The initial concept was 'Rock'n'Rimbaud'. Gradually, they added a pianist, Richard Sohl, and then a bassist, Ivan Kral. Around this point, Smith met a fellow poet-bohemian, Richard Hell, then still a member of Television.
The two bands 'agreed to platoon our energies', resulting in a legendary double-bill two-month residency at CBGB in spring 1975. 'We played for weeks, it was packed, and we built up an energy.' The still-drummerless Patti Smith Group wowed the critics, and the buzz caught the attention of Clive Davis, formerly president of Columbia but then looking for artists to launch his new label, Arista.
Transforming the free-form nature of the live Smith experience into something as fixed as an album was going to be a challenge. She picked Cale to produce, not so much for the Velvet Underground connection as for the raw sound of his Seventies solo albums such as Fear. 'We had so many arguments in the studio, one day John asks, "Why did you choose me?!" I said "Because your records sound so good" and he laughed, "You bloody fool, you should have picked my engineer!"' Smith has often described the experience as a 'season in hell' for both singer and producer, and in the years immediately after the album's release was wont to claim that she and the band ignored all of Cale's suggestions.
Today Smith is much more gracious about the Welshman's contribution. 'I was young, inexperienced, but I had a lot of balls. I literally drove John crazy. But the thing is, he stuck with it.' Cale himself has described the relationship as 'a lot like an immutable force meeting an immovable object.'
Horses starts with what might be the most arresting opening line of any album ever: 'Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine.' It's from Smith's poem 'Oath', a declaration of what she dubbed 'positive anarchy'. The insolent saunter of the band slowly builds into a canter and the poem mutates into a song, an exhilarating dash through 'Gloria'. Originally sung by Van Morrison in his first band Them, this horny rasp of white R&B became a standard for American garage bands in the mid-Sixties. These original 'punk' groups - Shadows of Knight, Count Five - had been all but forgotten until Lenny Kaye pulled together his Nuggets compilation in 1972. Ogling a 'sweet young thang', Smith throws herself with such swaggering rapacity into lines like 'I'm gonna uhnuhn make her mine' that most listeners assumed she was purposely subverting 'Gloria' into an anthem of lesbian lust.
Au contraire, says Smith. 'Sexually I'm really normal,' she says, confessing to be if anything somewhat strait-laced. 'I always enjoyed doing transgender songs. That's something I learnt from Joan Baez, who often sang songs that had a male point of view. No, my work does not reflect my sexual preferences, it reflects the fact that I feel total freedom as an artist. On Horses, that's why the sleevenote has that statement about being "beyond gender". By that, I meant that as an artist, I can take any position, any voice, that I want.'
Given her 'third gender' aura on the Horses cover, though, it's easy to see why 'Gloria' was taken as a sapphic love song. 'Redondo Beach', the song that immediately follows it, was also widely interpreted as the lament of a woman whose girlfriend has committed suicide and whose body washes up on a Los Angeles beach popular with lesbians and gays. Actually, says Smith, it's a song about her sister Linda, a sort of morbid fantasy rooted in remorse: the pair, rooming together in the Chelsea Hotel, quarrelled, and Linda disappeared, causing Patti much anguish. Written in 1971, the verses languished in a drawer for several years, until they were pulled out and given an incongruously jaunty reggae backing.
With rock culture at a lull in the mid-Seventies, many looked to the 'roots rebel' sound of Jamaica, anointing Bob Marley as a kind of dreadlocked Dylan surrogate (the other Bob then being in a state of semi-retired seclusion). Smith was among those smitten. A year after Horses, she even plunged into a full-blown infatuation with Rastafarianism. 'I can't say I was a Rasta but I went through a period when I was studying all aspects of Rastafarianism, including smoking a lot of pot while reading the Bible!'
Strangely, despite being a New York bohemian whose idol was the French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, Smith had hitherto shunned drugs. She attributes this partly to her constitution (her childhood having been stricken by one illness after another - bronchitis, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, 'three different kinds of measles'), and partly to her Romantic respect for consciousness-altering substances. 'I regarded them as sacred and secret, something for jazz musicians or Hopi shamans. I hated the suburbanisation of drugs in the Sixties.' This was another source of friction with Cale during the Horses sessions ('John, at that time, had certain substance problems' ).
Still, she credits Cale for creating the conditions that led to 'Birdland' - 'my greatest experience, as performer, on Horses' - if only by getting her so wound up she needed catharsis. The song was inspired by The Book of Dreams, the childhood memoir of Peter Reich, son of radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. 'There's a section in it where Peter describes a birthday party not long after his father died. He wandered outside and became convinced his father was coming down to get him and take him off in a spaceship.' But what he thought was a squadron of UFOs revealed itself to be a flock of blackbirds. 'This story haunted me, and when we recorded "Birdland", which was totally improvised, that's where the track went to.' Starting with the young Reich hallucinating his father at the controls of the flying saucer, there's a motif running through the song: 'You are not human' turns to 'I am not human' and then 'we are not human'. Smith says 'that's really talking about myself. From very early on in my childhood - four, five years old - I felt alien to the human race. I felt very comfortable with thinking I was from another planet, because I felt disconnected - I was very tall and skinny, and I didn't look like anybody else, I didn't even look like any member of my family.'
Born in Chicago on the last day of 1946, Smith spent the bulk of her childhood in the southern part of New Jersey. The area's eerie landscape of swamps and pig farms contributed to her sense of alienation. She recalls being freaked out by the strange gruntings and shrieks of the hogs. The children were often alone, because both parents had to work, her father in factories and her mother supplementing the income with waitressing. 'I had a really happy childhood - my siblings were great, my mother was very fanciful, and I loved to read. But there was always financial strife.
My parents had three kids right after the Second World War, and we were all sort of sickly. Then I had a fourth sibling, with very serious asthma. The medical bills... So my parents always struggled.' Horses's fourth song, 'Free Money', was inspired by growing up poor. 'It's really a song for my mom. She always dreamed about winning the lottery. But she never bought a lottery ticket! She would just imagine if she won, make lists of things she would do with the money - a house by the sea for us kids, then all kinds of charitable things.'
'Kimberly', a tender song named after her sister (the fourth sibling), gives a glimpse of Smith's childhood environs. 'Housing developments were a new thing, postwar, they'd build them for poor people in areas that nobody wanted. Ours was literally on a swamp. We lived across the street from an old abandoned barn that got hit by lightning shortly after Kimberly was born. I went outside and I was holding her, watching this barn in fl ames. Hundreds of bats lived in it, and you could hear them screeching, and see bats and owls and buzzards flying out.'
One line in 'Kimberly', in which Smith likens herself to 'some misplaced Joan of Arc', gives an insight into her vision of rock as a spiritual crusade. Raised as a Jehovah's Witness, and at various points an investigator of Catholicism, Islam, and Buddhism, Smith has long celebrated rock'n'roll in religious terms. But she also went through a phase of seeing it as a form of war, with 'electric guitars as our machine guns'.
She studied TE Lawrence for tips on how to maintain morale among her band and crew, nicknamed herself the Field Marshal, and even wore aviator goggles. Just as being in a touring band has the camaraderie side of combat without the carnage, likewise rock, in Smith's view, off ered all the positive aspects of religion (collective uplift, ritual, ecstatic release) without the dogma. 'Rock'n'roll for me in the Sixties was a true salvation,' she says. 'But by the early Seventies, it felt like our greatest voices were snuffed out. Dylan had a motorocycle accident and retreated. Hendrix and Morrison were both dead. The new artists coming through were very materialistic and Hollywood, not so engaged in communication. As a citizen, I was deeply concerned about what was happening to my genre.'
The last three songs of Horses plunge into full-on rock mythography. They can be seen as an attempt to work through the legacy and burden of the Sixties, figure out the meaning of what happened then. Inspired by a dream of Jim Morrison in which the dead singer is half-encased in marble - literally trapped by being turned into an icon - 'Break it Up' sounds like a great lost song from Television's Marquee Moon. As well it might, having been cowritten with Tom Verlaine (then Smith's lover). But it's 'Land', a three-part songcycle comprising 'Horses', 'Land of a Thousand Dances', and 'La Mer (de)', that is the album's tour de force.
Smith says 'Land' is a paean to Jimi Hendrix, but that's not easily gleaned from the lyrics, which move from a strange,sexually-charged encounter between two rock'n'roll bad boys, into a celebration of the teenage dance crazes and renegade nonsense of early rock'n'roll ('d'ya know how to pony/ like Bonie Maronie'), into an imagistic delirium that swirls together horses, the ocean ('the sea of possibilities'), and suicide, while also touching on the Koran and the Tower of Babel (Smith liked to call her poetic raps Babelogues).
But the section subtitled 'La Mer', all multitracked Smith voices and wafting shimmers of sound, does nod sonically to Hendrix's '1983 (a Merman I Should Turn to Be)', and according to Smith, Jimi himself appears at the end with the lines 'in the sheets/ there was a man/ dreaming/ of a simple/rock'n'roll/ song'. 'That's Jimi, 'cos sadly he died in his sleep.' The album's final track, 'Elegie', is straightforwardly 'a requiem for Hendrix', she says. It was recorded on 18 September 1975, the anniversary of his death. 'The last lines - 'I think it's sad, just too bad, that all our friends can't be with us today' - are borrowed from "1983 (a Merman)". I didn't think Jimi would mind!'
In retrospect, it's hard to draw the dots that connect 'Land', with its Sixties invocations and song-cycle structure redolent of the Doors' The Soft Parade, to the punk convulsion that ensued. Lenny Kaye once declared: 'Sometimes I think of us as the last of the Sixties bands. We liked those long rambling songs, we liked 20 minutes of improvisation.' He compared the PSG to the Detroit guerrilla-rock of the MC5: 'We had a lot of that revolutionary "kick out the jams, motherfucker" fervour.'
But Smith herself says she saw Horses as being 'more concerned about the future than the past'. That's how the album was received on its release in November 1975: as beacon, portent, and catalyst. From its 'naked and exposed' sound (the band playing live together in the studio, hardly any overdubs) to the pitch-wobbly yowl of Smith's vocals, Horses was seen as an epoch-defining moment of rebellion against the slick, slack West Coast softrock that dominated FM radio.
Smith herself compares it to 'Paul Revere, waking up the people'. REM's Michael Stipe heard the album as a 15-year-old and has described the experience as life-changing and galvanising: 'It pretty much tore my limbs off and put them back on in a different way... I decided then and there that I was going to be in a band.' Smith says her mission was precisely to reach out to people like Stipe (now a close friend), 'disenfranchised persons, whether they were nerds, or the one gay kid in the school.
Because as a teenager I was the worst wallflower weirdo. So I knew what it felt like to be an outsider, and like Walt Whitman saying "young poet standing there, I am reaching out to you through time", I wanted Horses to say "if you feel like you don't belong anywhere, hopefully this will inspire you or give you some respite."' Horses was received ecstastically, especially in Britain, where it influenced bands like the Clash.
Smith befriended the group on her early visits to Britain and recalls tramping around Portobello with Paul Simenon, looking for the house where Hendrix died. 'Our mission was to make space for the new guard,' she says. 'And they came rather quickly, and when they did, me and my people were almost instantly obsolete. But I was asked to do more records, and so I wound up doing a few more.' Then, at the end of the Seventies, Smith went 'civilian', controversially dropping out of music and devoting herself to raising a family with former MC5 member Fred Smith.
She returned to making records at regular intervals through the Nineties, a time when her legacy could be seen with performers like Sonic Youth, PJ Harvey, and Hole. Her own favourite band of the past 15 years, though, is oceanic rockers My Bloody Valentine, whose Kevin Shields she has invited to participate in The Coral Sea, one of the Meltdown events.
Of the Horses recreation, Smith says, 'I wanted to do it while I'm still physically able to execute it with full heart and voice. 'I had nicer hair back then, but my voice is actually stronger now! I'm 58 years old, but I haven't lost anything, 'cos I've learnt to take good care of myself. I want to be around a really long time. I want to be a thorn in the side of everything as long as possible.'