Patti Smith: Horses

""It's a fine line on Horses between listening and believing. Even before the decades made Patti Smith 's debut album into rock'n'roll scripture, its eight-word opening salvo imbued its body and blood and grace and guts with a holy truth. "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine," sung-spoke slowly like smoke. Our story accordingly begins at church, on Bertolt Brecht's birthday, Lou Reed in the pews, full moon."

"Patti stepped to the lectern at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church on February 10, 1971, and dedicated her reading to crime. From the moment she opened her mouth, her brash South Jersey accent and out-of-step real talk demolished the fourth wall between performer and audience. The date marked Smith's first gig with guitarist Lenny Kaye, a music critic she befriended after he wrote about the early-'60s phenomenon of regional street-corner vocal groups"

Patti Smith's debut album Horses opens with the line 'Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine,' a defiant spoken-sung proclamation that sets a sacred, confrontational tone. The performance lineage reaches back to a February 10, 1971 Poetry Project reading at St. Mark's Church where Smith first performed with guitarist Lenny Kaye. Kaye, compiler of Nuggets, supplied garage-rock textures and answered Smith's request to 'play a car crash with an electric guitar.' The East Village church setting juxtaposed electric guitars with Beat-era readings and heckling from Gregory Corso. Smith transformed doo-wop memory, poetry, and raw performance into a new rock vocabulary that blurred the line between listening and believing.

Read at Pitchfork