50 years ago, Patti Smith’s Horses fused poetry and punk, rewriting rock's rule book

A startling fusion of poetry, punk and raw, rapturous artistic purpose, Patti Smith's 1975 debut Horses isn't just one of the most important and enduring albums in the history of rock music.

It also boasts an all-time iconic cover: a never-been-cooler androgynous portrait by Smith's soulmate Robert Mapplethorpe.

With her tousled hair and after-hours chic, Smith looked unlike any other women in music at the time, leering rebelliously out from the sleeve.

The contents inside were equally defiant, beginning with one of the greatest album-opening lines ever:

Gloria is both a radical makeover of Van Morrison and Them's 1964 classic of the same name, and an adaption of one of Smith's own early poems entitled Oath.

The song begins the album softly, with a lone piano accompanying Smith's distinctive vocal burr but both the music and lyrics build to momentous intensity.

It transforms a simple, three-chord garage-rock song into a complex statement of intent, a subversive, gender-flipping sermon on sex, identity, freedom, and self-empowerment.

Its arresting mix of the sacred and profane was deemed sacrilegious but Smith insisted it was a "declaration of existence".

"It was not against Jesus Christ," she explained in a 2013 TV interview.

"What I was saying back then was, 'I'm taking responsibility for my own actions… my own transgressions. Because I wanted to explore. I wasn't ready to not make mistakes; I wasn't ready to walk a straight line.

The youthful, maverick spirit of Gloria, and Horses as a whole, was primal enough for the rockers, but also had an ardent intellectual streak that struck like a religious awakening for generations of artists.

It was the spark that ignited an explosion of punk, new wave, riot grrrl and even a wave of '90s indie and alt-rock bands.

U2's Bono, Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift, Mick Jones from The Clash, and Sonic Youth are among Smith's countless admirers.

Without Horses there is arguably no R.E.M., The Smiths or PJ Harvey.

It tore up the rule book on how female artists could look and act, paving the way for everyone from Debbie Harry and Madonna to Courtney Love and, closer to home, singer-songwriters Deborah Conway, Courtney Barnett and Jen Cloher.

"There are not many people who drop a debut album as confident as Horses," Cloher told Double J in 2015.

"She had some pretty big ideas about the world and what she believed in. She was forthright in communicating her beliefs and you can hear that confidence."

Not bad for a lanky New Jersey runaway who originally held no desire to front a rock band.

"I wasn't interested in being a musician," she revealed earlier this year. "I just wanted poetry readings to be more exciting!"

Learning to trot

In 1967, Smith dropped out of college and left behind her working-class family to depart for New York City, her bus fare funded by finding $32 in a phone booth.

A voracious reader obsessed with Bob Dylan and enchanted by the social promise of the '60s, Smith embedded herself in NYC's vibrant East Village.

There, the 20-year-old met Robert Mapplethorpe, beginning a pivotal relationship (as documented in Smith's critically acclaimed, best-selling memoir Just Kids) and together, they took up residence at the infamous Chelsea Hotel.

There, Smith mixed with cultural figureheads Janis Joplin, poet Allen Ginsberg and literary mentor William S. Burroughs.

In 1971, Smith met guitarist Lenny Kaye — showing up at the record store he worked after reading an article he'd written for Jazz And Pop magazine — enlisting him to accompany her poetry readings by asking: "Could you play a car crash with an electric guitar?"

Kaye obliged, and three years later led the formation of the Patti Smith Group — joined by pianist Richard Sohl, bassist Ivan Král and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty.

Gigging regularly around town, the group began a residency at legendary NYC club CBGB in 1975 (with pioneering art-rockers Television) where they caught the ear of Arista Records mogul Clive Davis, who immediately signed them.

The Patti Smith Group entered New York's iconic Electric Lady Studios in August 1975 to begin recording Horses with producer John Cale, pre-eminent co-founder of The Velvet Underground.

Smith hand-picked the Welsh musician based on the sound and look of his solo albums, particularly 1974's Fear ("Now there's a set of cheekbones", she once remarked). She wanted Cale to simply capture the band's live show, but sessions became tense.

"He's a fighter and I'm a fighter so we're fightin'," she said in a 1975 interview with Crawdaddy. "Sometimes fightin' produces a champ. "

Saddling up for a revolution

From the reggae-tinged Redondo Beach to the dramatic Free Money and Kimberly, these are performances that pulse with the emotional urgency of a band in close synchronicity.

"When I listen to Horses I hear a very young band straining at the reins, suddenly discovering they know how to gallop. I hear our youth." Cale told The Guardian in 2011.

The album is also rife with allusions to Smith's heroes: the literature of Burroughs, French poet Arthur Rimbaud and then-recently fallen rock idols Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.

Break It Up, punctuated by Kaye's squalling guitar flourishes, is an ode to The Doors frontman while closing track Elegie quotes Hendrix lyrics and — on Smith's insistence — was recorded on the fifth anniversary of his death.

The early 70s was disenchanting for the rock faithful, like Smith. Beyond losing icons to the 27 Club — as Smith told Jon Parales of The New York Times in 2012: "Bob Dylan had his motorcycle accident. The Rolling Stones had changed and [become] a stadium band."

As '60s figureheads were "retreating or regrouping," glam rockers like David Bowie, T. Rex and Kiss rose to stake their cultural claim. And Smith was sceptical of all the theatrical spectacle.

"I just felt that rock'n'roll was becoming, instead of the people's forum and our cultural voice where politics and art and poetry and sex and dance and all these things… belonged to the people. It was moving in this weird direction of these mega rock stars with these disgusting lifestyles.

Smith honoured her inspirations but also transcended them, elevating traditional rock'n'roll elements into a new sphere with her commanding vocal presence.

A groundbreaking combination of ardent spoken-word and snarling attitude, her voice was a huge influence on one of Australia's most acclaimed musical exports, Courtney Barnett.

"It made me rethink singing," she told Double J in 2015 in anticipation of performing Horses live with Cloher, Adalita and Gareth Liddiard to celebrate the album's 40th anniversary.

"I'd always been a really shy and nervous singer because I thought I had to sing in a particular way — in a really pretty, girl voice. I didn't have that."

A timeless classic

It is Smith's unassailable voice that drives the album's two epics, which established her career-long love of long-form composition.

Name-checking the NYC jazz club and Chubby Checker song, Birdland builds to a climax where the instruments corkscrew and collapse around Smith's wild improvisations, charged by death and rebirth.

A counterpoint to Gloria, Land is a shamanic narrative loosely based on Burroughs's The Wild Boys by way of Wilson Pickett's Land of 1000 Dances.

We follow "Johnny" through a three-part, nine-minute hero's journey whose hairpin sonic turns are as bracing as its surreal imagery. There's violent homoeroticism, hints of suicide but ultimately hopeful ascension toward a "sea of possibilities".

Another artist who drew from that creative wellspring is Carrie Brownstein. "The sheer amount of references in that song… it's so inspired," the Sleater-Kinney singer-guitarist, author and Portlandia co-creator said in 2024 podcast.

"We have taken the unconventional nature [from] it but also the belief in music. The belief that even the stuff that is a little wrong works. I love that statement, that purpose.

Horses was championed by critics and achieved moderate commercial success. More significantly, it was the apotheosis of Smith's pursuit of fusing poetry, rock and artistry

"I really believe that what my band has always done is represent the man alone," Smith told triple j's Richard Kingsmill in 1998.

"The misfit, the outcast, the weird nerd, the young gay kid, the indigenous person — just people who are perhaps socially mutated."

Horses was a clarion call for all outsiders, laying down the kind of stirring legacy Smith herself saw in the orthodoxy-skirting visionaries before her.

Case in point: Walt Whitman's 1856 poem Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.

"[He was] saying in this poem, 'Young poet 100 years from now, I'm talking to you, I'm speaking to you … I am thinking of you who will be born 100 years later and need someone to talk to you. I am talking to you right now.'

"And in that way, somebody is always there, speaking to us, even in the abstract."

Half a century after its release, Horses still speaks to us. In another 50 years or beyond, it will still be there, its bold, brilliant voice echoing across the timeline.

Revisit some of the best albums of our time on Double J's Classic Albums with Caz Tran