Patti Smith

Since 1974 · United States

Patti Smith arrived in New York in the late 1960s as a poet and visual artist, close to photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and steeped in Rimbaud and Dylan more than any rock tradition. Their story

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Who they shaped

Behind them, left to right: The Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan.

In front, left to right: R.E.M., Sonic Youth, Jeff Buckley, The Slits, Perfume Genius, Violent Femmes, Cocteau Twins, of Montreal, The Sound.

Not in the photo: . Often assumed; they've said no.

The bigger the face, the stronger the proof: they said it themselvesreporteda critic, or widely accepted

Start here

Horses (1975)

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Horses opens with Smith rewriting Van Morrison's "Gloria" from the inside out, turning "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine" into a declaration of self rather than blasphemy. John Cale's production keeps the arrangements spare enough that Smith's voice, half-sung and half-recited, stays the whole point. "Land" stretches into a nine-minute suite that treats rock and poetry as the same discipline rather than two separate ones. Robert Mapplethorpe's stark, androgynous cover portrait of Smith became as much a statement of intent as anything on the record itself. Few debut albums have done more to argue that punk could be literature.

Sleeve notes

Patti Smith

Horses · 1975

Patti Smith arrived in New York in the late 1960s as a poet and visual artist, close to photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and steeped in Rimbaud and Dylan more than any rock tradition. She began setting her spoken-word performances to Lenny Kaye's guitar in the early 1970s, and the Patti Smith Group grew out of the same CBGB scene as Television and the Ramones, pairing garage-rock simplicity with a poet's disregard for song structure.

Their debut, Horses, arrived in 1975, produced by John Cale, followed a year later by the harder-edged Radio Ethiopia. Smith stepped back from performing after marrying Fred "Sonic" Smith of the MC5 in the early 1980s, raising a family away from music entirely, and returned to touring only after his death in 1994. She has continued recording, performing and writing prose since, including an acclaimed memoir of her years with Mapplethorpe, and remains punk's clearest bridge to poetry.

Played at

CBGB

New York · 1974–1977

On the bill

Came to the stage from poetry rather than from bands, and her 1975 residency with Television is what turned a bar with a booking policy into a scene people travelled to see.

The whole scene