Frighten the horses

I grew up with Rough Trade's Carole Pope creaming her jeans for some tease who, even as she did not exist, kept me awake late into the night. Although the band formed in 1974, it didn't get a disk out until a few years later.... making Patti Smith's 1975 "Horses" the "it" lesbo anthem album. And this year marks its 30th anniversary.

"'Horses' starts with what might be the most arresting opening line of any album ever: 'Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine,'" recalls this recent interview. "It's from Smith's poem 'Oath', a declaration of what she dubbed 'positive anarchy'. The insolent saunter of the band slowly builds into a canter and the poem mutates into a song, an exhilarating dash through 'Gloria'. Originally sung by Van Morrison in his first band Them, this horny rasp of white R&B became a standard for American garage bands in the mid-60s.... Ogling a 'sweet young thang', Smith throws herself with such swaggering rapacity into lines like 'I'm gonna uhnuhn make her mine' that most listeners assumed she was purposely subverting 'Gloria' into an anthem of lesbian lust."

Darn tootin'. Now Pope, at least, really was and is a lesbian -- back in the day, she was having a quiet but intense and messy relationship with Dusty Springfield. Smith is not a dyke -- but she played the game before lesbian chic made it cool. "Smith herself compares ['Horses'] to 'Paul Revere, waking up the people'. REM's Michael Stipe heard the album as a 15-year-old and has described the experience as life-changing and galvanising: 'It pretty much tore my limbs off and put them back on in a different way... I decided then and there that I was going to be in a band.' Smith says her mission was precisely to reach out to people like Stipe (now a close friend), 'disenfranchised persons, whether they were nerds, or the one gay kid in the school'....

Smith also says too many people see art as reality. "'Sexually I'm really normal,' she says, confessing to be if anything somewhat strait-laced. 'I always enjoyed doing transgender songs. That's something I learnt from Joan Baez, who often sang songs that had a male point of view. No, my work does not reflect my sexual preferences, it reflects the fact that I feel total freedom as an artist. On 'Horses,' that's why the sleevenote has that statement about being "beyond gender." By that, I meant that as an artist, I can take any position, any voice, that I want.'

"Given her 'third gender' aura on the Horses cover, though, it's easy to see why 'Gloria' was taken as a sapphic love song. 'Redondo Beach', the song that immediately follows it, was also widely interpreted as the lament of a woman whose girlfriend has committed suicide and whose body washes up on a Los Angeles beach popular with lesbians and gays. Actually, says Smith, it's a song about her sister Linda, a sort of morbid fantasy rooted in remorse: the pair, rooming together in the Chelsea Hotel, quarrelled, and Linda disappeared, causing Patti much anguish. Written in 1971, the verses languished in a drawer for several years...."

Oi. Frankly, back in the day, I needed to believe that art was truth. And that it was my truth. It certainly was life.


NPR's "All Songs Considered" features a cut from Smith's 30th anniversary performance of the "Horses" oeuvre. Go listen.