Moved to Rimbaud’s Anniversary: How a Vinyl Shortage and Eighteen Days at Electric Lady Gave Patti Smith’s Horses Its Date

Patti Smith’s debut album Horses was released by Arista Records on 10 November 1975, according to Wikipedia and Noise11, although a few other retrospectives give a December date. The November date matters for a reason that has nothing to do with the calendar. Smith had asked for 20 October, the birthday of the poet Arthur Rimbaud, and a shortage of vinyl pushed the release to 10 November, the anniversary of his death. For a record that opens by reworking a rock song through her own poem, the poet’s shadow was never far away.

Eighteen Days in a Hendrix Room

The album was recorded at Electric Lady Studios in New York, the room Jimi Hendrix had built in Greenwich Village. Wikipedia dates the sessions from 2 to 18 September 1975, which makes the whole record a matter of about two and a half weeks. Smith’s band was Lenny Kaye on guitar, Richard Sohl on keyboards and Jay Dee Daugherty on drums, with Ivan Kral also in the lineup, although sources disagree on whether he played bass or guitar.

The last session fell on 18 September, the fifth anniversary of Hendrix’s death, and the album’s Elegie is a requiem for him. Guest guitarists appeared too, with Allen Lanier of Blue Oyster Cult on Elegie and Tom Verlaine of Television on Break It Up.

The Producer Who Wanted Strings

John Cale, formerly of the Velvet Underground, produced the record, and the working relationship was tense. According to Wikipedia, Cale wanted a more arranged album with string instruments, and Smith strongly opposed the strings. Kaye has described the split as one between an arranged record and a spontaneous one closer to the band’s live sound. The band’s instruments were also in poor shape at first, and Cale arranged replacements before recording began.

Smith later played down his part. In a 1976 Rolling Stone interview she said she had hired the wrong guy, though Kaye has called the collaboration very fruitful. Both accounts can be true. The record keeps its live attack, and it also has a shape that a band of friends playing straight through might not have given it.

One Guitar, Three Chords and a Poem

Horses is often called the first punk rock album, and part of the reason is how little it asks of the guitar. Kaye’s guitar sits inside a spare band sound that serves the words instead of competing with them. Gloria takes the 1964 Them song, which Van Morrison wrote, and wraps it around lines from Smith’s poem Oath. Land adapts the first verse of Chris Kenner’s Land of a Thousand Dances and imagines Hendrix as its protagonist.

The sleeve carried as much attitude as the music. Robert Mapplethorpe photographed Smith in natural light at Sam Wagstaff’s Greenwich Village penthouse, in a plain white shirt with a black jacket over her shoulder. Arista wanted changes and Smith overruled them, and the label’s boss Clive Davis approved the cover after initial doubts.

What It Did and What It Left

The record peaked at number 47 on the Billboard 200, a modest result that sat beside near-universal acclaim from critics. It finished second to Bob Dylan and the Band’s The Basement Tapes in the 1975 Village Voice Pazz and Jop poll. It was later added to the National Recording Registry, and its influence is cited by R.E.M., Siouxsie Sioux, Courtney Love and PJ Harvey among others.

For a station that lives on guitars, Horses is a useful anniversary. It shows how a punk record could be built from a poet’s obsession, a band of regulars, a room with Hendrix’s name on it and a fight about strings. The date moved because of a vinyl shortage, and the record still arrived on the day that suited it.

Cover photo: Jhsounds, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons