(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Patti Smith has always believed in the spiritual side of rock and roll. While working in the New York City music scene and her various works of literature, Smith has never lost her passion for music, knowing that it could take a great song to touch something inside a person’s soul. Although Smith was happy to celebrate any rock triumph, she admitted that one subgenre signalled the end of the genre as she knew it.
When Smith started out, she wasn’t necessarily looking to music as her first outlet. Even though The Beatles may have sent shockwaves through America when they first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, Smith was coming at music from a poet’s perspective, having more respect for artists that focused on their eccentric side, like Lou Reed from The Velvet Underground.
After trying her hand at performing poetry around the local New York scene, it didn’t take long for Smith to start forming her band. While she didn’t claim formal training, pairing up with guitarist Lenny Kaye led to the first Patti Smith Group making their first landmark statement on the album Horses.
By the time the album had been released, though, the rock and roll sounds Smith had started with had felt like a distant memory. As opposed to the free expression that went on in the 1960s, the next phase of rock and roll saw musicians graduating to playing stadiums worldwide, with acts like Led Zeppelin getting by with a handful of guitar riffs and an intense presentation everywhere they went.
Even when Reed struck out on his own on Transformer, the scene had transformed into a glam aesthetic, with bands focusing on their appearance instead of the music they were playing. While true artists like David Bowie were able to emerge from the glitter scene, Smith remarked that she thought rock and roll was starting to cave in on itself.
When talking about that period, Smith later said that that era of rock music was one of the worst moments for the genre, telling Rolling Stone, “I seriously worried that I was seeing the decline of rock and roll. It was stadium rock and glitter bands. It was getting square from Peter Frampton on up. So I started aggressively pursuing what we were doing…My design was to shake things up, to motivate people to bring a different type of work ethic back into rock and roll.”
While much of what would turn up on Horses may have been considered primitive by various stadium rock acts, the emotion on the record couldn’t be touched by anyone. By the time Smith opens her mouth to sing ‘Gloria’, there’s no questioning her authority, having the power to cut to the root of what music was supposed to mean to people.
By playing a primitive form of rock, Smith also inadvertently opened the door for various punk bands to come afterwards, creating songs about going against the status quo to make way for something new. While Smith could rightfully claim to be one of the first punk rockers if she wanted, it was never about being a punk. It was about bringing music back down to Earth, and Horses was the prime example of music that could touch someone’s heart again.
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