You've Never Heard Patti Smith's Horses?!

I was loosely aware of two things about Patti Smith and her 1975 album Horses when I signed up to write about them for this feature:

The first was her status amongst rock’s elite, which was mysterious to me. The first major event in my development as a listener happened early in the ninth grade — 2003 or 2004 — when my Dad bought me a copy of Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” issue, a pithy exercise in antiquarianism that proved to be as much a musical roadmap as it was an affirmation of the sensibility I’d gotten from my household. The top ten records on the list were things I’d grown up with: the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys, etc. The next 490 instantly became priorities on my trips to Tower Records (doesn’t that seem like a long time ago?), and became the albums of my adolescence. I listened to “Ramble On” from Led Zeppelin’s II (#76) on repeat before my first real date with a real girl. I kept Otis Redding’s Otis Blue (#74) in my CD alarm clock for most of my sophomore year in high school and couldn’t listen to it for years afterwards because it gave me a Pavlovian feeling of not getting enough sleep. Other kids might have found their favorite music from friends or the Internet or radio, but I discovered The Strokes’ Is This It (#367) and D’Angelo’s Voodoo (#480) from an increasingly ratty issue of RS… read more >