Vinyl Reviews

Review: Patti Smith, 50 years on

Ned Lannamann

12 Nov 2025 — 6 min read

The 50th anniversary reissue of Horses includes an all-analog cut of Smith’s 1975 debut and a second LP of outtakes.

Few debuts are as striking and complete a statement of purpose as Horses, the first full-length from Patti Smith, released on Arista Records precisely 50 years and two days ago. Simultaneously presaging the coming punk movement and providing fuel for it, Smith and her band wielded a vision that existed well outside what would eventually become the hidebound confines of genre, possessing a loose, romantic sound that wasn’t afraid or embarrassed to pay homage to rock ’n’ roll’s then-short history. If punk’s primary ethos was one of breaking with the past—a convenient reduction that was more typically espoused by journalists than by any of the actual musicians involved—Smith and her cohort were determined to locate the connective tissue that tied the past to the future.

Smith’s poetry and performance style were inextricable from each other, taking inspiration from the Beats, Rimbaud, Dylan, Jim Morrison, and the simple messaging for change that characterized the youth movement of the 1960s. Her band—guitarist Lenny Kaye, bassist Ivan Král, drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, and pianist Richard Sohl—were well steeped in the building blocks of garage rock; Kaye, a music writer by trade, had actually codified the genre with his Nuggets compilation album in 1972. They aimed for spontaneity above all else and, with Smith’s incantatory recitations on the mic, became beacons of the fledgling CBGB’s scene of the mid-1970s. When Clive Davis signed them to Arista, Smith requested John Cale as producer, instantly (if unintentionally) tethering whatever they ended up recording to the legacy of the Velvet Underground and the downtown New York art scene. She further solidified the connection to rock’s past by recording at Jimi Hendrix’s Greenwich Village studio, Electric Lady. As it turned out, the final day of sessions landed on the fifth anniversary of Hendrix’s death.

But Horses doesn’t live on merely because of what it represents. It’s the experience of hearing it, rather than contextualizing it, that is so bracing and so eternal. At this point in her career, Smith was not an intuitive melodist, often repeating a single note over and again through a sermon of words, or shifting minimally around the axis of basic chords provided by the band. For their part, the band were not the virtuosos that their contemporaries in Television or Blue Öyster Cult were. Tom Verlaine (of the former band) and Allen Lanier (of the latter) each made important contributions to Horses, of course—and ended up in fisticuffs on the last day of recording sessions. There was conflict of a less physical kind between Smith and Cale, too, who didn’t quite have matching visions of what the record should be. Whatever the struggle might have been like in the moment, it clearly brought out the best in both of them.

For Horses’ 50th-anniversary reissue, the album was recut from the master tape by Ryan K. Smith (whom I’ll refer to as RKS going forward, to avoid any confusion with Patti herself) at Sterling Sound in Nashville, resulting in an all-analog pressing that I found genuinely revelatory. The band’s punk-predicating rawness, rather than sounding riotous and scattershot, is perfectly harnessed in service of the music. The sound is stunningly warm at moments, and while the band never accumulates an artificially weighty presence within the soundstage, that leaves plenty of room for Smith’s voice, which is lifelike and full of shade and nuance. It’s so well recorded that you can’t fail to notice her beating her chest during the build-up to the third verse of “Break It Up.” And RKS’s cut is transparent enough that you can hear how some tracks were better recorded than others: “Free Money” and “Kimberly” sound remarkable, for example, while “Land” suffers—particularly Daugherty’s drums, which sound distant and compressed. In other spots, his crash cymbal just verges on breaking up sonically, although I admittedly have a bright-sounding system, so your results may vary.

There’s also a second disc that contains almost entirely unreleased material, although some of it has been bootlegged. Smith fans will be happy to learn that all of it sounds incredible here, more than worthy of sitting alongside the album proper. It contains three songs from Smith’s audition recording for RCA Records in February 1975, two additional demos recorded at A-1 Sound Studios in May 1975, and four outtakes from the Horses album sessions at Electric Lady in September 1975. I believe the earlier recordings are from before Daugherty joined the band, as they’re performed without drums. The RCA recording is exceptional, with a spine-tingling early rendition of “Gloria,” a bluesy cover of the Marvelettes’ “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game,” and an embryonic version of “We Three” (later to resurface on 1978’s Easter). But the real gem is the stealthy, propulsive “Snowball,” recorded at A-1 and bizarrely left in the vault until now.

The inner gatefold and sleeves for the reissue of Patti Smith's Horses.

The Electric Lady outtakes are illuminating as well, consisting of an early version of “Distant Fingers” (re-recorded for 1976’s Radio Ethiopia) and alternate takes of “Kimberly,” “Break It Up,” and a fascinating, less freeform “Birdland.” The second disc, also cut by RKS, was assembled digitally from a variety of sources; a small army of engineers, restorers, and archivists are credited, and they’ve all done good work. Surprisingly, the worst-sounding sources are the album outtakes, which sound a couple of generations removed from the multi-tracks.

That leaves the final variable to the pressing itself. Copies sold in the US were pressed at GZ’s Memphis Record Pressing, while European copies were pressed at Pallas in Germany. My US copy had several bits of noise, clicks, and ticks, some of them light but some distressingly persistent, with the album-closing “Elegie” being particularly egregious. I’m finding these issues, disappointingly, are to be expected more often than not on Memphis-pressed vinyl. However, each disc came inside an intensely glossy paper inner that fiercely clung to the record due to static electricity—and I suppose it’s possible that the mere act of removing the discs from the inners created additional scuffs, which in turn could also have contributed to the noise. Furthermore, the intense static drew all kinds of debris onto my discs before I was able to clean them in the ultrasonic. Those paper inners look awfully nice, with Smith’s handwriting looping around the die-cut circle window for the label, but they are murder on the vinyl. The jacket is a good-enough gatefold on standard card stock, featuring a wonderful picture of the band by Frank Stefanko on the inside and some technical info that covers the basics but falls well short of actual liner notes.

All told, anything bad here is far, far outweighed by the good: a superlative, all-analog cut of Horses and a second disc of terrific supplemental material. If you can get a clean pressing and successfully extract the discs from the inner sleeves without doing additional damage, you’ll probably have never heard this album sound so lifelike and vital. I’m not sure it’s a necessary exercise to locate the exact intersection where rock music of the ’60s and early ’70s—the rock of the past, the rock of Woodstock and Beatles and Hendrix and Dylan—fully turned over to the punk and new wave sounds of the future. But Horses could well be it. More importantly, it stands on its own terms as a showcase for a writer and performer who was dedicated to locating more significant intersections: those of poetic phrasing and turned-up volume, of off-the-cuff spontaneity and deliberate meaning, of Dionysian rock ’n’ roll excess and come-one-come-all inclusivity. At 50, Horses sounds as young as ever.

Horses | Arista/Legacy 2-LP 33 RPM • lacquer cut by Ryan K. Smith from analog tape (disc 1) and digital file (disc 2) at Sterling Sound, Nashville • pressed at GZ’s Memphis Record Pressing • black vinyl