Patti Smith to perform Horses live with Verlaine and Cale at Meltdown Fest

[BurtWorm]

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/omm/story/0,13887,1486833,00.html

The highlight of Meltdown, though, is the 25 June performance of Horses in its entirety and original sequence (something Smith has never done before), with a band that includes Television guitarist Tom Verlaine and the album's producer John Cale. She tells me she has just learnt that the night sold out immediately. 'I was overwhelmed. To tell the truth, it brought tears to my eyes. Horses pretty much broke as a record in England. I always think of us as a semi-English band because we were so maverick in America and then we went to London and played that first date at the Roundhouse in May 1976, and the response gave me my first sense that "wow, we're really doing something."'

Pipping the Ramones' first album to the post by five months, Horses is generally considered not just one of the most startling debuts in rock history but the spark that ignited the punk explosion. Except that, apart from the opening cover of Sixties garage band classic 'Gloria', it's not actually that punky-sounding. Indeed its two peaks - 'Birdland' and 'Land', both nine-minute excursions of incantatory poetry over improvised noise - are about as distant as you can imagine from Ramonesstyle two-chords/two-minutes. Unlike Jim Morrison, a rocker who craved acceptance as a serious poet, Smith was a published bard with two slim volumes of verse under her belt who started to incorporate electric guitar (provided by her rock critic friend Lenny Kaye) into her readings. The initial concept was 'Rock'n'Rimbaud'. Gradually, they added a pianist, Richard Sohl, and then a bassist, Ivan Kral. Around this point, Smith met a fellow poet-bohemian, Richard Hell, then still a member of Television.

The two bands 'agreed to platoon our energies', resulting in a legendary double-bill two-month residency at CBGB in spring 1975. 'We played for weeks, it was packed, and we built up an energy.' The still-drummerless Patti Smith Group wowed the critics, and the buzz caught the attention of Clive Davis, formerly president of Columbia but then looking for artists to launch his new label, Arista.

Transforming the free-form nature of the live Smith experience into something as fixed as an album was going to be a challenge. She picked Cale to produce, not so much for the Velvet Underground connection as for the raw sound of his Seventies solo albums such as Fear. 'We had so many arguments in the studio, one day John asks, "Why did you choose me?!" I said "Because your records sound so good" and he laughed, "You bloody fool, you should have picked my engineer!"' Smith has often described the experience as a 'season in hell' for both singer and producer, and in the years immediately after the album's release was wont to claim that she and the band ignored all of Cale's suggestions.