100 Best Albums
- 10 NOV 1975
- 8 Songs
- Unto the One · 2024
- Correspondences, Vol. 1 - EP · 2024
- Pasolini - EP · 2024
- Pulse · 2023
- The Perfect Vision Reworkings · 2022
- The Perfect Vision Reworkings · 2022
- The Perfect Vision Reworkings · 2022
- The Perfect Vision Reworkings · 2022
- The Perfect Vision Reworkings · 2022
- The Perfect Vision Reworkings · 2022
Essential Albums
- A few months after the release of their 1976 album Radio Ethiopia, the Patti Smith Group was on tour with Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band. As the openers, the PSG was confined to a small space at the front of the stage, at a venue much larger than the ones in which the group normally played. Together, those factors proved to be disorienting for Smith, and when she began to spin around during “Ain’t It Strange”, she lost her balance and fell off the stage to the concrete floor below. Luckily, the fall didn’t kill her—but the injury ended the tour, and vanquished any hopes at promoting the album. So when the time arrived to make Smith’s third album, she headed into the studio seeking more than just a hit—she was looking for redemption. She wanted her songs to sound good on the radio, and had made the acquaintance of a recording engineer she frequently spotted at the studio—a guy who was always there, no matter what time of day or night it was. His name was Jimmy Iovine, and Smith thought this hard-working twentysomething kid would be the perfect producer for her next album. As it turned out, Iovine already had a full-time gig: He was working as the engineer for Bruce Springsteen, who’d been recording the album that would become The River. Springsteen had been writing a lot of songs, not all of which were earmarked for the next album—and many of which weren’t even finished. Iovine had his eye on one of them, a song for which Springsteen had written the melody and chorus, yet hadn’t composed any lyrics. Iovine asked if he could bring the song to Smith, and while waiting one night for her boyfriend to call, she wrote some words for the unfinished track. “Because the Night”—which would become the lead-off single to 1978’s Easter—went to No. 13 on the Billboard charts, and gave Smith her commercial breakthrough. The album was stronger and more consistent than Radio Ethiopia, but it was still a full-on Patti Smith Group record, with songs that were written to rouse an audience, inspire curiosity, explore magic—and to piss a lot of people off.
- 100 Best Albums Calling Horses one of the first statements in punk begs the question of what punk is: A sound? An attitude? A political orientation? A stylistic one? In some ways, Smith was a traditionalist: She enshrined Bob Dylan, and once said that her blind love for her father was the first thing she sacrificed to Mick Jagger. In others, she was a radical—the resolve, the intensity, the way her performances stretch for a catharsis beyond sound. Reflecting on her label censoring her cover of The Who’s “My Generation” (she’d changed the line “Things they do look awful cold/I hope I die before I get old” to “I don’t need no f**king s**t/I hope I die because of it”), Smith said that that was the thing about rock ’n’ roll: It was total warfare, all the time. The duality of Horses is that it sounds both deeply steeped in the history of rock—its story, its symbols, its legacy—while also trying to convey the music as though nobody had ever heard it before. So, when she opens her adaptation of Them’s “Gloria” with the line “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine,” it’s to remind you that rock is the sound of heretics who will stake their life against orthodoxy. And when the apocalyptic visions of “Land” give way to the ’60s song “Land of 1,000 Dances”, it’s because teenagers expressing themselves through their bodies is a sacred, radical act. And when “Birdland” winds down with Smith singing doo-wop, it’s because sometimes feelings are so radiant that words fail. Even at her artiest, Smith doesn’t flinch or distance herself with irony, turning her internal ecstasy outward with a rawness and naiveté that feels daring, unguarded but deadly confident—a trust fall in sound. There are moments when the language soars and the music breaks challenging new ground. But ultimately, Horses doesn’t ask to be understood—it asks only to be felt. The duality of Horses is that it sounds both deeply steeped in the history of rock—its story, its symbols, its legacy—while also trying to convey the music as though nobody had ever heard it before. So, when she opens her adaptation of Them’s “Gloria” with the line “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine,” it’s to remind you that rock is the sound of heretics who will stake their life against orthodoxy. And when the apocalyptic visions of “Land” give way to the ’60s song “Land of 1,000 Dances”, it’s because teenagers expressing themselves through their bodies is a sacred, radical act. And when “Birdland” winds down with Smith singing doo-wop, it’s because sometimes feelings are so radiant that words fail. Even at her artiest, Smith doesn’t flinch or distance herself with irony, turning her internal ecstasy outward with a rawness and naiveté that feels daring, unguarded but deadly confident—a trust fall in sound. There are moments when the language soars and the music breaks challenging new ground. But ultimately, Horses doesn’t ask to be understood—it asks only to be felt.
- 2019
Music Videos
- 2016
- 2004
Artist Playlists
- From punk poetess to rock 'n' roll matriarch.
- The punk laureate's most evocative elegies and classic covers.
Singles & EPs
Appears On
- Soundwalk Collective
- Jesse Smith & Soundwalk Collective
More To Hear
- The missing link between poetry and punk.
More To See
About Patti Smith
Poetry, protest music, and punk rock synergize in Patti Smith. Born in Chicago in 1946, Smith grew up mainly in New Jersey before moving to Manhattan in 1967 and forming close artistic and personal relationships with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and playwright Sam Shepard. She wrote lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult (“Career of Evil”) and criticism for Creem before channelling her experience of working in a baby-buggy factory into the free-jazz poetics of “Piss Factory”, the B-side to “Hey Joe” released in 1974. The Patti Smith Group—consisting of guitarist Lenny Kaye and several others who would follow her into the 2020s—released their glorious debut, Horses, the following year. The record opens with Smith’s menacing interpretation of the Them/Doors garage standard “Gloria”, then explores the alienated yet ambitious spirit of Jim Morrison more deeply during the nine improvisational minutes of “Birdland” (1976’s Radio Ethiopia features an even longer title track). While Smith famously declared her desire to be “outside of society”, a co-writing fling with Bruce Springsteen yielded “Because the Night”, a Top 20 single from 1978’s Easter. After meeting and marrying the MC5’s Fred “Sonic” Smith, who contributed to 1979’s Wave, she retreated to Michigan for a domestic decade before releasing Dream of Life, containing “People Have the Power”, in 1988. She reignited her career after Smith’s death in 1994. Touring regularly again, she contemplated international politics on 2004’s Trampin’, paid tribute to her rock heroes on 2007’s Twelve, and found a subtle vehicle for her more spiritual impulses in 2020s alliances with the Soundwalk Collective.
- HOMETOWN
- Chicago, IL, United States
- BORN
- 30 December 1946
- GENRE
- Rock