Songs of freedom and truth

Sometimes it's enough to look cover.

And to face the gaze with which a female figure dressed in a white man's shirt and with a jacket slung over her shoulders stares at us. Challenging, as rock and roll has always been.

When Patti Smith stood in front of Robert Mapplethorpe's lens and told him it was a picture, he snapped only twelve times and by the eighth photo he already said, "I've got it." Indeed, a photo of Patti Smith on the cover of her debut album Horses (released on November 10, 1975) is one of the definitive manifestations of the rock and roll spirit. At the same time, it is one of the definitive manifestations of the new femininity. One record simultaneously changed the way we look at music, poetry, and what it means to be a woman. This is the moment when they are One mailing Rock and Roll.

WHITE SHIRT AND BLACK JACKET

More hungry than full for several years, having escaped from New Jersey determined to succeed at any cost in New York doing what she loves - Patti Smith (Patricia Lee Smith, b. 1946) was on the verge of finally doing something notable... After several years of reciting, then gigging and playing with a band, and a notable two-month permanent performance in the increasingly well-known underground club CBGB, she got a contract with Arista Records for as many as seven releases, with full artistic control - which would still be an unprecedented business feat. She just recorded her first tracks in the studio. All she needed was a good wrap.

That's how she found herself in the attic of an apartment in bohemian Greenwich Village with her best friend, the visionary artist Mapplethorpe. Everything was shot under ordinary daylight, without additional lighting, emphasizing its complete naturalness. Patty had no one to copy, nor in her need for originality could she - her appearance was her invention and it was a shame not to immortalize it as it is. Her wardrobe was collected from various sources rather than bought. She ardently wanted to pay tribute in this way to her hero Baudelaire, and also to the classic Sinatra, whom she knew were able to take the same casual, defiant, overbearing attitude with their bodies.

It's an understatement to say that the publishing house was shocked - they tried to answer and convince her not to put that photo on the cover, because it didn't fit the sugar-coated or sexualized way in which ladies were usually presented at the time. It didn't work, thankfully, and Patti Smith's legendary stubbornness won the first of the great victories that marked her career, made up of similar mini-cultural revolutions. And it's good, because Patti Smith in that photo represented all of us who felt different and didn't know how to express it. It's probably one of the first cases in pop culture that a woman has become role model and for boys.

HORSES FROM ALL SIDES

In the mid-seventies, rock music was a serious – read: manly – job. Huge money started to swirl around her. The life of a musician was considered physically difficult and tiring, too challenging for the "fairer sex". In addition, the pop star's career had to be adapted to the expectations of the widest possible audience, and she was dominantly party-archical at the time and supported only standard gender roles. Even the hippies did not deviate much from these set norms. It was almost impossible for a woman to break out of that vicious circle and remain authentic.

New York protopunk rock the team, which hung out in the aforementioned club CBGB, was made up of the trio "Television", "Ramones" and "Patti Smith", followed by "Blondie" and "Talking Heads". Even the equal presence of a female person in it was a novelty. And Petty soon managed to establish herself naturally as the undisputed queen of the scene there, a leader whose work defined the spirit of the time. She achieved success first, tirelessly acting as the ultimate example of a person who can no longer remain silent and has to spit everything in everyone's face with her personal street poetry - one of those talented, poor and therefore unwaveringly honest, who have nothing to lose, that the city was full of...

The producer - by her choice - was John Cale, the creative half of the New York heroes of the previous generation "The Velvet Underground" (along with Lou Reed), with whom she repeatedly had a hard fight during the recording in an effort to preserve the sound her band had live. Many years later, she will admit that it was his patience with the beginners - as she and the group were then - that saved those songs and preserved them in the form of the closest concert, just as Patty wanted. The album successfully imposed new priorities, close to her heart: suddenly it became more important what you have to say than whether you can play perfectly. On a case-by-case basis, once again, Patty completely single-handedly brought about the revolution that allowed the same idea to explode a year later under the name from punk - and only Iggy Pop at that time could take off her hat and say that maybe he understood her.

DICTIONARY OF MYTHOLOGY

Patti Smith's special contribution to rock music begins with the way she twisted words, stretched them, enjoyed them and at the same time changed their meaning through pronunciation, with an unforgettable passionate hiss in a cracked voice, as if she was arguing with the words themselves while saying them, arguing with the whole world. Nowhere can you hear it better than in the song "Gloria", which immortally opens the album Horses: in the arrangement of the famous hit of the Northern Irish group "Them" (by Van Morrison), Patti Smith inserted her poem "In Excelsis Deo" at the beginning, which starts the avalanche with the historic line: "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine" - one of the most important rock and roll expressions of all time, a manifesto of total individualism. The frenetic sequel tells about a passionate love encounter in which the girl is in the center of attention. Its counterpart is also the partial cover "Land: Horses/ Land of A Thousand Dances/ La Mer(de)", in which it further presents the program of ecstasy as a poetic-revolutionary means of self-liberation, but the pinnacle of that aesthetic is the cathartic "Free Money", about the eternally poor hope that buying a lottery ticket will lead to wealth.

The record also includes the story of Peta's broken family - "Redondo Beach" and "Kimberly" - capture memories of growing up and are dedicated to younger sisters, introducing autopoetry as her favorite means of expression already at the beginning of her career. All are portrayed as misfits, which is followed by "Birdland", with its lyrical improvisation that goes straight into jazz, dealing with a phantasmagoric testimony of the death of Wilhelm Reich, a renegade Marxist psychoanalyst who bothered all regimes (according to the book Book of Dreams his son Peter Reich; our Dušan Makavejev dealt with the same motif in an avant-garde film masterpiece a few years earlier WR Mysteries of the organism).

"Break It Up" features Tom Verlaine ("Television") on guitar, as Alain Lanier ("Blue Oyster Cult") contributes to the finale "Elegie". The first is a reminiscence of Jim Morrison, and the second is directly dedicated to the memory of Jimi Hendrix, recorded on purpose on September 18, the fifth anniversary of his death, in the same Electric Lady studio where he also recorded. And here we come to the special significance of the album Horses - he touches on rock'n'roll mythology in many ways, boldly building it further - Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, even Janis Joplin, appear before us for the first time as larger-than-life heroes, becoming a rock pantheon only on this record. Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire join them in riding towards the Apocalypse. Patti Smith is there as a witness to their ascension through the fall.

photo: salvatore di nolfi / keystone via ap

HISTORY OF THE FUTURE

Horses is a truly monumental moment in rock 'n' roll history, because it brought him back to his original promise that through rock music we would be able to win all the personal freedoms we want, repeating that promise at a time when it all seemed to have come to an end. Fascinated by the age of post-truth in which we live, we forget that cynicism ruled the world much earlier, and that the followers of public speech have been knowingly lying, probably forever. The 1970s were the years when lies once again began to tighten their grip around society, especially young people, who had just been lifted up by the temporary hippie with enthusiasm. It didn't exist yet. from punk to expose the prevailing falsehood to the end.

The appearance of Patti Smith was therefore a miracle.

By then, rock music had already made its home in stadiums and sports arenas, turning into entertainment for millions and no longer bothered anyone. The rebellion against the corporatization of rock and roll began right here, and will culminate in a brief explosion punk and the extended period of the "new wave". At first understood only as a furious poet accompanied by a loud rock and roll band, led by guitarist and musical erudite Lenny Kaye, Petty quickly showed that this was not an appropriate classification. Namely, the debut album was a superb and at the same time a radical poetic experience, the likes of which had never existed before. Not in that form in which the word poet and rocker are united in one expression. And not to be created by a woman.

I remember that moment when the secret called Patti Smith reached our region. Album Horses he was the harbinger of something different from what rock and roll had been before. Just when he seemed to be heading in a straight line, predictably, the way it suits those who wanted to turn him into fun music, Petty came to twist him again. I always thought that we differed in our understanding of that record - those who saw only a commissioned, ambitious poet who would not leave a deeper mark on rock, and those who immediately recognized the moment of a small rebirth of rock and roll, uncompromising and ready to question everything.

As a kind of bridge between the romantic hippie idealism and irony punk, Patti Smith is on Horses managed to foresee a different future for rock and roll. If "Jefferson Airplane" or "The Doors" were from punk bands - this is what they would sound like. From Horses they spring not only new wave but also an alternative deadline and grunge. That album is a place of moral instruction for all the rockers who came later, by it is measured whether you picked up the guitar for the right reasons or not - knowing that Aunt Patti Smith will watch over you until the end of the world and century and question whether you are on the right path.

When it appeared, the album Horses made it into the top 50 on Billboard's album chart, and hasn't stopped selling since. In 2009, the Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the National Recording Registry as a "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" work. It was reissued on October 10, 2025 as a double CD and LP, with the first disc containing the remastered album and the second disc previously unreleased recordings, including a 1975 demo prepared by Patti Smith for an audition at RCA Records.

TWO HEROINES

Once upon a time, when the truth was still spoken, Patti Smith spoke it with a passion that knew no fear. Istina is the first main heroine of this unique album. The second is freedom. Freedom to tell the truth. Freedom and truth are two heroines that we remember every time it's hard, and that Patti Smith immortalized in rock and roll format, carving them into the immovable rocks of time.