Horses

1	Gloria: In Excelsis Deo/Gloria Van Morrison Version 5:56
2	Redondo Beach 3:26
3	Birdland 9:15
4	Free Money 3:52
5	Kimberly 4:27
6	Break It Up 4:04
7	Land: Horses/Land of a Thousand Dances/La Mer (De) 9:25
8	Elegie 2:56
9	My Generation Live / Bonus Track 3:17

Barnes & Noble

"Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine," growls Patti Smith in the opening seconds of her 1975 classic, Horses. Her words belong to a cover of "Gloria" that its composer, Van Morrison, probably never imagined. Smith was a devout believer in the spiritual abandon of rock 'n' roll and the intellectual catharsis of poetry, and her '70s work was intensely focused on bringing the two together. She had previously recited a Jim Morrison poem on a Ray Manzarek solo CD, and had been reciting poetry backed by Lenny Kaye on guitar at various New York venues, most notably St. Mark's Church. Armed with a full band and with former Velvet Underground member John Cale as producer, Smith's Horses is a raging assault on the staid status quo of mid-'70s rock. She turns Wilson Pickett's "Land of 1,000 Dances" into an incantation, and "Redondo Beach" is a reggae-ish tune about lesbian love (a fairly radical idea back then). The recording made the media take notice of the CBGB's scene and inspired artists to break the rules in pursuit of their vision. Smith made three more albums before retiring in the early '80s to raise a family with former MC5 guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith. Martin Johnson

All Music Guide

It isn't hard to make the case for Patti Smith as a punk rock progenitor based on her debut album, which anticipated the new wave by a year or so: the simple, crudely played rock & roll, featuring Lenny Kaye's rudimentary guitar work, the anarchic spirit of Smith's vocals, and the emotional and imaginative nature of her lyrics -- all prefigure the coming movement as it evolved on both sides of the Atlantic. Smith is a rock critic's dream, a poet as steeped in '60s garage rock as she is in French Symbolism; "Land" carries on from the Doors' "The End," marking her as a successor to Jim Morrison, while the borrowed choruses of "Gloria" and "Land of a Thousand Dances" are more in tune with the era of sampling than they were in the '70s. Producer John Cale respected Smith's primitivism in a way that later producers did not, and the loose, improvisatory song structures worked with her free verse to create something like a new spoken word/musical art form: Horses was a hybrid, the sound of a post-Beat poet, as she put it, "dancing around to the simple rock & roll song." William Ruhlmann