Read Patti Smith's Horses Online
Authors: Philip Shaw
Patti Smith's Horses
Horses
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Philip Shaw
2008
The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc
80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038
The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
Copyright © 2008 by Philip Shaw
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers or their agents.
Cover art reprinted courtesy SonyBMG Music Entertainment
Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer waste recycled paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shaw, Philip.
Horses / Philip Shaw.
p. cm. -- (33 1/3)
Includes bibliographical references (p.).
eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-6156-7
1. Smith, Patti. Horses. 2. Smith, Patti.--Criticism and interpretation. 3. Rock music--1971–1980--
History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series.
ML420.S672S53 2008
782.42166092--dc22
2007039204
Chapter 2: South New Jersey, 1946-1967
Chapter 3: New York, 1967–1972
Chapter 4: Rock ’n’ Rimbaud, 1973–1975
For Sarah
I was an edgy, nervous teenager in the summer of 1979. Something was afoot. My brother had turned me on to John Peel and I remember late nights with the radio, the volume turned down low so as not to disturb my sleeping parents, straining to catch the latest sounds from Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, and Liverpool. In my hometown nothing seemed to happen. This was the year of the great indie explosion, of Rough Trade, Step Forward, Fast, and Factory, of Joy Division, PiL, Gang of Four, and “the mighty” Fall, none of whom came from or to Nottingham. And even if they did, how would I, a mere fourteen-year-old, and a young-looking one at that, get to see them?
So for me, stuck in my lonely room, 1979 became a year of intense research. Every week I scanned the music papers, the accumulated ink on my fingers was an objective correlative of the information my head was absorbing. There were two figures that fascinated me: one male and one female. The first, Ian Curtis of Joy Division, seemed to be made of words.
In early articles by Mick Middles, Paul Morley, and Paul Rambali, Curtis was portrayed as a wistful, enigmatic loner. Obviously, I recognized my kin. In an effort to make sense of this enigma, the journalists piled on the literary allusions: to Kafka, Ballard, and Dostoyevsky, as a consequence of which I began to get an education. The secondhand overcoat, the carrier bags laden with paperbacks, the earnest expression—these were all to follow.
By contrast, the other figure, Patti Smith, was present only in image. By 1979 I was, of course, too late for
Horses.
Over three years had passed since the album’s release, but I remember seeing the sleeve in the racks in Selectadisc:
that
portrait in monochrome, the insouciant expression, cool and challenging; and for more than a year I lingered before it, weighing up the notes and change in my pocket before plumping, after all, for the latest new release: a long-forgotten album by Pink Industry or the Passage. Perhaps it was an early Jane Sucks article on Patti Smith bootlegs, or perhaps it was the cover version of “Free Money” by Penetration, but at some point I must have made the decision to stump up the readies and commit to taking this record home with me. In any case, what happened next is very clear. I was at my friend Sam’s house and I recall a moment of sacerdotal anticipation as the needle was placed in the groove and the record began to turn. I remember stealing a second glance at the front cover, then flipping it over to focus on the photo of the young man toying with a switch blade. These images, combined with the stream-of-consciousness prose, gave me a sense of danger, intrigue, and excitement. Yet none of this could have prepared me for the shock I experienced on first hearing the opening lines of “Gloria (in Excelsis Deo)”: “Jesus died for
somebody’s sins but not mine.” I was a member of a Church of England school, recently confirmed and with a serious guilt complex to boot. The words seeped like acid into my brain and I was gripped by an impulse to take the record off the stereo and smash it to pieces. But stronger than this impulse was the desire to keep on listening. Here was another kind of education, straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were, and for what remained of that year my world consisted, or so it seemed, of this album and no other.
In those early days I experienced
Horses
viscerally. Before I understood what was going on, I was touched by the majestic rasp of Smith’s voice, buffeted by the raw urgency of Jay Dee Daugherty’s drumming, moved by Richard Sohl’s expressive piano playing, and transported by the thrashing, keening guitars of Kaye, Kral, Lanier, and Verlaine. But by degrees, my acquaintance with the album and my growing knowledge of Smith and her works led to other forms of appreciation. Specifically, I was led to new forms of writing: to poems by Rimbaud, Eliot, and Blake, but also to the experimental prose rhythms of Lawrence, Joyce, and Woolf. There was, in all of this, vitality—a religious impulse, even, that I didn’t seem to get from my previous reading. True enough, I was still absorbed in the gothic gloom of Kafka
et. al
, but from Patti Smith I learned that the loss of control, a key word for Ian Curtis, need not lead to a suicidal walk “upon the edge of no escape” (“She’s Lost Control Again”). As “Land” taught me, the loss of control could lead, equally, to the sea of possibilities. There were other emotions, no less authentic than anger and despair.