Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [47]
The Village Voice, September 3, 1979
Patti Smith:
Horses
Patti Smith will survive the media blitz and everybody's hunger for another “superstar,” because she's an artist in a way that's right old-fashioned. Horses lunges with raw urgency but her approach is very methodical. She could have done this a long time ago, and has been building steadily, paying dues and learning music fit for the reaches of her poetry so as, when the song is finally delivered, to fulfill all her promises.
What must be recognized is that she transcends bohemian cultism to be both positive and mainstream, even though her songs go past a mere flirtation with death and pathology. She just saw that it was time for literature to shake it and music to carry both some literacy and some grease that ain’t jive. The combination makes her an all-American tough angel, street-bopping and snapping her fingers, yet moving with that hipshake which is so like every tease you slavered after in high school.
Her sound is as new-old as her look. You hear the Shangri-Las and other early Sixties girl groups, as well as Jim Morrison, Lotte Lenya, Anisette of Savage Rose, Velvet Underground, beatniks, and Arabs. Meanwhile, the minimalism of the band forces her sound out front along with the poetry, and that sound stands. This is not a “spoken word” album, it's a rock ‘n’ roll album, and even if you couldn’t understand a word of English you couldn’t miss the emotional force of Patti's music. And you’ll love it when she makes mistakes (in this era of slick, predigested “rock” as Muzak), when her voice goes ragged (but right), like the perfect act of leaping for something precious. Who needs the other kind of perfection?
Which brings up one of the truly ballsy things about this album: she is meeting the Mademoiselle articles and Earl Wilson columns not with some licked up tech-mech superproduction (which John Cale is certainly capable of) but the finest garage band sound yet in the Seventies. The band cooks primarily because, with certain momentary exceptions (Richard Sohl's beautiful piano intro to “Free Money” Allen Lanier's ghostly guitar in “Elegie”), they’re all used either as percussion instruments or (as in halcyon days of the Velvet Underground) for the sustenance of one fortifying drone. Lenny Kaye gets off some of the best one-note distorto guitar since the Stooges’ “1969,” and the general primitivism makes you realize you’re a mammal again and glad for it, licking your chops.
Which is not to say that there's not musical sophistication working here; it's just that it's gut sophistication, unfaltering instinct rather than the clammily cerebral approach of the old “poetry and jazz” albums. Horses is a commanding record, as opposed to demanding— you don’t have to work to “understand” or like it, but you can’t ignore it either; it refuses to be background music, stops the action in the room when it's on, and leaves its effects when it's over whether the listeners like it or not.
Each song builds with an inexorable seethe, a penchant for lust and risk that shakes you and never lets you forget you’re listening to real rock ‘n’ roll again at last. Meanwhile, every song contains moments that go beyond raunch into emotional realms that can give you chills. In “Birdland” it's the breathtaking “It was as if somebody had spread butter on all the fine points of the stars and they started to slip;” in “Break It Up,” Patti's truly cosmic sequence of “I cried ‘Help me please’/ Ice it was shining,” and suddenly through that line you can actually hear her hitting her chest metronomically with her fist, leading into “My heart it was melting …”
Throughout, she plays with roles and masks, combining sulky