Dec. 18, 2020
For the sake of this post, let's just say rock music became a thing when DJ Alan Freed coined the term in 1954. It was rebellious music for kids, intended to alienate their parents. Twenty years later, I was a callow teenager who couldn't imagine why "old people" (over 40) would still go see those pathetic Oldies nostalgia acts like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Bo Diddley. The music my parents liked was twenty years old! It seemed as antiquated and irrelevant to me as the big bands and crooners it had replaced.
A short moment later, the music I came of age with in the 1960s & 70s began to seem equally outdated, though nobody I knew would say so. But then punk and hip-hop happened, and for a minute everything seemed vital and dangerous and new again. That was forty-five years ago, depending on your landmark. Some of it still sounds pretty great. One of my landmarks that still sounds pretty great is Horses, Patti Smith’s first album, released forty-five years ago this week. I was sixteen then. I have clearly become a pathetic old person.
A few months after this came out, in the Spring of 1976, I went to Santa Barbara for a few days to visit my friends Arthur and Joe, who had moved there for college. It could have been during Spring Break, I’m not sure. What I do remember is that my life was forever changed. I could write a screenplay about that week, or at least a short story. It was the archetypal Before/After moment. And not just because it was my first introduction to psychedelics; that was interesting but proved to be short-lived. What really changed my life was the music I was introduced to on that trip.
In less than one academic year, Arthur and Joe had moved well beyond the limited musical palette of our So Cal suburban youth. Gone were CSNY and Buffalo Springfield, Yes and ELP, Jethro Tull and Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Genesis, Jackson Browne and the Allman Brothers, and whatever else we had thought was “good” music. In the span of several days my mind was crammed full of classics previously unknown to me – Velvets/Reed/Cale/Nico, Stooges, Dolls, Bowie, T-Rex, Roxy Music/Ferry/Eno, Soft Machine/Matching Mole/Robert Wyatt, Kraftwerk – along with a ton of newer things like Henry Cow, Hatfield & the North, Neu!, Faust, Modern Lovers, and of course that first wave of punk rock. All of it made a huge impression on me and forever altered the course of my musical tastes, along with my overall life trajectory.
One of the records I heard that made the biggest impression on me was Horses. I know I didn’t consciously grasp all that it contained or implied, but it felt like a gateway to something vast and ecstatic, using rock and roll to lure me into the greater mystery of Art. Patti obviously wasn’t the first to approach rock as a poet, but she was the one doing it in my own moment. I didn’t have to inherit her as a hand-me-down from an older generation. And yet she was full of reverence and reference for those she had grown up on: Dylan, both Morrisons (Jim and Van), the Stones, Hendrix, Wilson Pickett. But her cosmology extended far beyond rock music: Rimbaud and Verlaine, Breton, Artaud, Genet, Falconetti, Jeanne Moreau, Edith Piaf, Nina Simone, Coltrane, Burroughs, Jackson Pollack and so many more were all in her personal pantheon. Patti was my first Art History teacher. And she had cojones. Still does.
She was also one of my first music teachers. I spent hours playing guitar along with that album. It taught me about playing with a band and holding down the rhythm, about dynamics, backing off and building up, tension and release, how to listen to everyone else and sense those shifts, how to improvise within the confines of a fairly limited form in a way that had nothing to do with flashy guitar solos. It made the idea of playing in a band with others seem possible.
Which brings me to Break It Up, the second song on Side 2. That was the one song I couldn’t play along with. I don’t think I even tried to learn it. Partly because it was quite a bit more complex than the other songs, but mostly because it is filled with Tom Verlaine’s glorious lead guitar, and I couldn’t bring myself to sully it with my own ineptitude. The way he weaves around and through Smith’s voice, like a second vocal line made of pure, unbridled electricity. The way she pounds her chest as she sings the third verse, as if she is literally trying to free herself from her own body: Ice, it was shining / I could feel my heart, it was melting... To me it reads as a gender-reversed answer to Hendrix’s Angel (an homage to whom ends the album), a plea for transcendence.
Patti’s done a lot of great work over the years, but this song gives me goosebumps every time I hear it. Even right now, forty-five years later.