The album to start with
Horses (1975)
When, in 1971, the music producer and manager Sandy Pearlman approached Patti Smith and suggested she front a rock band, she laughed off the suggestion as ridiculous. She saw herself as a poet and a painter. Between shifts at the New York bookstore where she worked, Smith would perform readings of her verse at small clubs alongside Lenny Kaye, who provided blasts of feedback on guitar. Smith and Pearlman became friends anyway; four years later, she finally his took advice and made the landmark punk album Horses. REM’s Michael Stipe later said it “tore my limbs off and put them back on in a whole new order�?.
Punk is rarely noted for its literary qualities, though Smith was unapologetic in her love of the French poets Genet, Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Her songwriting on Horses revelled in intricate phrasing and imagery, and deliberately blurred the lines between punk and poetry. It also stuck two fingers up at punk’s self-imposed two-minute rule – a response to prog’s perceived self-indulgence – with some tracks exceeding nine minutes.
Gloria (In Excelsis Deo), a re-working of a Them song, with its immortal first line “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine�?, remains the perfect encapsulation of Smith’s spirit: transgressive, hypnotic, determinedly true to herself and her art. At a time when women musicians were expected to trade on their femininity, there was nothing pretty about her delivery. It was urgent, often incantatory, given to stretching vowels (“people say ‘bewaaaaaaare’, but I don’t caaaaaaare�?) and turning them into sneers. Elsewhere, there are tales of suicide (Redondo Beach), an alien visitation (Birdland), a lightning storm (Kimberly) and a boy who breaks out of his skin and flies away (Break it Up), many of them incendiary and intense, and anchored by the spiky garage rock of the era.
Similarly arresting was the famous cover photograph, taken by her then-partner Robert Mapplethorpe, depicting an androgynous Smith in a white shirt, her jacket slung Sinatra-style over her shoulder and looking insolently into the camera. When Smith’s label Arista asked that she airbrush out the hair on her upper lip, they might just as well have asked her to put on a spangly dress and a wig. She declined.
The three to check out next
Easter (1978)
If Horses gave the impression that Smith’s path would be unyieldingly left-field, her third LP set us straight. Produced by Jimmy Iovine, who would go on to work with U2 and Dire Straits, Easter was, by comparison, polished and accessible, and yielded a bona fide hit in Because the Night, a joyful, air-punching ode to hedonism and love – more Pat Benatar than Baudelaire. The song, partly written by Bruce Springsteen who happened to be recording down the corridor from Smith, irked some fans who accused her of selling out, but she didn’t care. “I liked hearing myself on the radio,�? she told New York Magazine. “To me, those people didn’t understand punk rock at all. Punk rock is just another word for freedom.�?
Gone Again (1996)
Smith took much of the 80s and 90s out to raise her two children, a decision she has said came easily given her reluctance as a rock star. But then a series of deaths brought her back to songwriting, including that of her friend and former partner Robert Mapplethorpe in 1989, and her husband, the MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic�? Smith, her brother Todd, and her friend Kurt Cobain, who all died in 1994. Unusually confessional, and more subtle and folksy than her previous works, Gone Again is a stunning elegy to those she lost as well as a document of her path to healing.
Banga (2012)
As you move through her career, Smith’s albums become increasingly hit and miss, though even the misses have their moments, each bearing testament to her dedication to profundity and poeticism. Banga, her 11th album, has no duds. The pleasingly in-your-face title track comes from the Russian novelist Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and features dogs barking in the background, while Constantine’s Dream is inspired by Piero della Francesca’s fresco sequence The History of the True Cross. Loosely themed around the concept of exploration, the album brims with poetic rapture, and is interspersed with tender songs such as April Fool, in which lovers “race through alleyways in tattered coats�? and This Is the Girl, a sweet tribute to Amy Winehouse.
One for the heads
Piss Factory (1974)
The infamous B-side to Smith’s first single was her first fully-fledged “rock’n’roll poem�?. A cri de coeur against production-line drudgery, it told of the time she worked, aged 16, in a baby buggy factory in New Jersey where she would hide in the basement and dream of a different life. Piss Factory is mostly spoken rather than sung, the words delivered against improvised, often frenzied piano. It tells of the futility of the job, the foul conditions and the workers who “got no teeth or gum or cranium�?. Smith didn’t see eye to eye with her colleagues, who were incensed by the copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations in her pocket and instructed her to leave it at home. When she reappeared with it the next day, they dunked her head in a toilet bowl of urine to teach her a lesson. Hence, “piss factory�?.
The primer playlist
Spotify users, use the playlist below or click here. Apple Music users, click here.
Further reading
M Train, by Patti Smith
Just Kids, Smith’s 2010 memoir of her youthful partnership with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, is obviously excellent but her 2015 book, M Train, offers a delicious insight into who she is now. Between tours and speaking engagements, her time is spent taking photographs, sitting in coffee shops writing in her notebook, basking in memories of dead loved ones and, for relaxation, watching re-runs of Morse.
Patti Smith: Dream of Life
This lyrical documentary, directed by Steven Sebring and full of terrific archive footage, is an intimate portrait of Smith in which she talks politics, love, grief and the compulsion to create. “I always felt something different stirring in me,�? the twentysomething Smith says of her move to New York. “I knew there was stuff inside me that would flower. Maybe it would ruin me.�?
Revenge of the She-Punks, by Vivian Goldman
Goldman’s examination of the hard-won achievements of women artists includes an illuminating chapter on Smith, whom she sees as “a new breed of autonomous, self-defined and uninhibited female rock star�?, and where, in 1976, the pair meet up and sift through secondhand clothes in Notting Hill. Unused to having money and keen to share the love, Smith ends up buying Goldman a jacket.
This article contains affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if a reader clicks through and makes a purchase. All our journalism is independent and is in no way influenced by any advertiser or commercial initiative. By clicking on an affiliate link, you accept that third-party cookies will be set. More information.
View all comments >