In Damnation of...Horses by Patti Smith

P'haps you should (re)read Steve Lake's olden review of Horses too, Alex? ;)

(Quite literally in my case - I was so taken with the record when I first heard it, that I wrote an essay about it for my college entrance application).

ps) Horses is also way better than any album that Sleater Kinney, Bjork, Tori Amos, Sinead Oconnor, or PJ Harvey ever did. So there.

Patti's great and all, but Johnny is otm. Horses is 'important' in that it laid the foundations for what was to come, but none of her greatest songs are on it.

I thought the band rocked harder on Radio Ethiopia but the songs weren't as interesting.

i think people maybe expect something radical or strange from this record, given the hype. and it is sometimes(eg birdland).

So does that make Horses the best album recorded by someone with a vagina (or is there another connection between these artists that I am missing)?

(I nominate anything by the Cramps)

Bahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

I'm giving this another shot later today.

Ah yes, of course. You know, when you first posted that, for a split second I was sure it was a picture of David Johansen.

― Wrecka Stow Ralph (James Redd and the Blecchs),

lol yeah

At some very early, often overlooked, period in his solo career, when he still hadn't transitioned to putting the Dolls dress code fully behind him, and had elements of that mixed in with his incipient new look.

funky funky but chic!

Ou est la boutique?

It kinda makes sense that 2 guys in awesome rock bands would be into awesome rock bands like the Doors

MC5 were such bros

Speaking of some people's disappointed reaction to finally hearing Horses and how not "punk" it was, I actually like em a lot now but first hearing MC5 who I'd read about as the fathers of punk at 19 was more damn this kinda sounds like Steppenwolf

Why would it pain you? Jim Morrison is a brilliant rock singer. My turn to quote a quote I am constantly quoting, Iggy saying that he'd borrowed so much from Jim Morrison and Mick Jagger that "you might as well call me Jim Jagger or Mick Morrison".

The only thing that quote that you quote is missing is a mention of Clem Cattini.

I think a lot of Patti Smith's "punk" cred came from her live performances, which were high-energy and frenzied and of course fronted by a woman with an unconventional voice/appearance who had never really done that sort of thing before. So in that sense Patti Smith was "punk" the same way Lenny Bruce (or hey, Mapplethorpe) was punk, by dint of doing anything out of the box. Anyway, I think there were clearly two strains of punk, the dangerous, radical scare your parents punk (or proto punks) and the no less radical but maybe less overtly confrontational free to do something different punks (which is where you'd slot , say, Talking Heads or Television). Smith probably split the difference.

Keep in mind, just a few years later no one knew where to file Tom Petty! And a few more years after that Los Lobos was sharing bills with PiL and Dwight Yoakum with Husker Du, which shows how easy it was for the longest time to stick out just by doing something a little bit different.

Anyway, sure, Smith's touchstones were the Doors and Dylan and Jimi Hendrix and a whole bunch of classic rock warhorses, but who else would they be at that time?

Right.

Ou est la boutique?

decades old battles
http://www.dangermouse.net/blog/images/trek/LetThatBeYourLastBattlefield.jpg

Steppenwolf > MC5 x 1,000,000

MC5 Wayne State University live footage >>>>>>>>>>>>>Steppenwolf.

"it must've been a pretty original, striking thing at the time."

radio ethiopia definitely struck me. well, not in 1976, but it was the first thing i heard/bought by her around 1981. "pissing in the river" was what i loved about it. so big and dramatic and goth. and i was a doors fan back then, so, maybe those elements appealed to me. a year or two before i was listening to joy division 24/7, the doors of their day. and then echo & the bunnymen, the doors of THEIR day.

i had always been aware of patti in the 70's because of the ads in magazines and i would see the records in stores and i read rock scene in the 70's so i stared at endless pictures of her canoodling on couches with lisa robinson and joey ramone, but she definitely still packed a punch in the early 80's. more so than joe jackson or elvis by that point. old hippie elvis showed his true trad colors soon enough. patti remained weird. and even disappeared from the rock life. which you weren't supposed to do if you had a name/heat.

Again, her most recent album Banga from 2012 is rather great, which was an absolute surprise. It goes downhill (sadly) when she goes all Doors-y, though in some ways she now sounds like Lee Renaldo doing his beat thing circa Ghosts and Flowers. Anyway, I'm not sure who else from the 70's NYC scene has put out anything so good in recent memory.

http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a82/bobbysixer/pam-ayers-orses_zpsset1rci9.jpg

Wha?

Came to post that I just saw Patti Smith on the Roky Erickson doc posted on Good online documentaries about music... saying she was a huge 13th Floor Elevators fan.

"Anyway, I'm not sure who else from the 70's NYC scene has put out anything so good in recent memory."

not new york, but beloved by new york: i'm always impressed and surprised when i hear latter-day pere ubu/david thomas/rocket from the tombs stuff. as far as pre-punk, proto-punk, punk, and post-punk people go. and they were all those things. i kinda ignored almost everything those guys did in the 90's. who knew the 21st century would be such a period of strength despite obvious physical frailty.

Just watching this video, and realized for the first time that Lisa Suckdog (Carver) was probably referencing it on Jokes About Women into Will I Ever Do Anything With My Clothes On. Weird. The beginning bit about "I'm an artist."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt0x8S6Ylqk

"I'm an artist. Rock and roll is my art. I'm a nigger of the universe. And I'm free because, I can leap up and scream, I can put my fist up in the air, I don't give a shit."

vs.

"I'm an artist, I don't mind if you call me one, but if you do, I...I just don't mind and if you think it's bad I'll beat the fucking piss shit out of you 'cause I know how."

Maybe it's a coincidence, but I'm thinking no.

i always loved that tick tock tick tock FUCK THE CLOCKS intro to live time is on my side by patti.

yeah, this. i like the whole thing really.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-cfUC4rP_g

I mean, she's stepping into the shoes of arguably the biggest rock icon of her generation, and I don't see a bit of hesitance or deference.

sorry to state the obvious but her continued insistence on referring to herself as a "nigger" is so idiotic and maddening

She was way ahead of her time, and she was wrong in her time, but she's kind of been vindicated in the long run. I don't really hold it against her.

I honestly don't know what you mean by that! For me tho, I'd be willing to let it slide (like anyone cares lol) if it was just one incredibly stupid song from roughly the era of songs called "mongoloid" and lou reed's outRAGeous comedy slurs about his backing singers or whatever but it just seems to go beyond never-quite-disowned youthful dumbshit "provocation" into something sincerely creepy. And she's still at it (per penman's mention of her talking about "spades" in the book, and she still performs rnrn right?)

maybe I'm just trying to revive the spirit of overheated race relation debates since nakh revived that thread lol

can't stand that song by The Avengers for the same reason and i really like that band. i kinda love "we are the one" more than any patti song and it definitely stands up their with any 1977 Brit punk.

Agreed on Pere Ubu recent stuff, them and Wire are really consistently great

i kinda love "we are the one" more than any patti song

I had never heard this before, it's good! (I don't particularly care about punk tbf)

(haha yeah I will pass on that other song)

"up there"

kesha is the patti smith of our generation, discuss

no

I'm pretty sure I prefer Radio Ethiopia to Horses actually. Easter I've never got into if only because the song mentioned above is so collossally misguided and wrongheaded.

i thought it was pretty badass when i was younger, and musically it still is, but yeah

It's actually interesting that the Patti Smith and Frank Zappa threads are going on at the same time. Both kind of interesting, smart people from the 60s and 70s (respectively) who weren't quite up to transcending their times. I like her more than him, but that's just personal taste.

Did Patti ever have any difficult interaction with Weird Al or his band? Because then that would tie this thread with the Zappa thread and the Prince RIP thread as well.

Or else we could just discuss her jazz bonafides for the same result

oh she has those in spades

Um...

there is a book from the 70's called Rock 100 that Lenny Kaye co-wrote and i know there is a Zappa entry, but i don't remember what they wrote about him.

I'd be willing to let it slide (like anyone cares lol) if it was just one incredibly stupid song from roughly the era of songs called "mongoloid"

don't drag Devo into this!

but yeah, for me, it's the cringe-inducing "skip this track" thing like with Morrissey's "Bengali in Platforms"

It's way more aggressively cringey than Bengali, though Bengali's core message is way worse and meaner, but like when I was young I didn't even have the cultural literacy to know what Bengali meant in UK culture plus the song kinda drifts by in a haze whereas RnRN is so instantly like damn white lady pump yr brakes on the n word

did she ever wear that lester bangs t-shirt? did lester bangs make that t-shirt? he had a lot of homemade t-shirts.

Remember when that was a viable business model? When I was a kid, I had a friend whose parents ran a T-shirt printing store. I remember my whole third or fourth grade class went on a field trip and we got T-shirts printed there, so they'd be able to keep track of us all. I don't remember where we went, but I remember the T-shirts. They were green.

Oh yeah, I got a Let It Be t-shirt that way, to name one, from one of those places where they had all the imprints up on the wall so you could pick one, choose your shirt size and color and then they would use a press iron to meld it all together. The last time I saw something like that was late 70s.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/12/bf/c5/12bfc552bc9624ac0819fab5248b1806.jpg

As mentioned a couple of times above "Piss Factory"/"Hey Joe" is really great - pretty much the only thing I'll return to (slightly surprised Penman didn't mention it).

And then her voice was sampled in a Dead C track in World Peace Hope Et Al. Its only a couple of mins long but its the only other time I cared.

Was enjoying listening to this this am, has a brief snippet of smith. Her magnetism is apparent (and yeah the assertion that she might be reacting against the beat lineage in any way is mildly baffling)