Recorded at Electric Lady Studios, New York, New York. Originally released on Arista (8362). Includes liner notes by Patti Smith.

Personnel: Patti Smith (vocals, guitar); Ivan Král (vocals, guitar, keyboards); Lenny Kaye (vocals, guitar); Allen Lanier (guitar, keyboards); Tom Verlaine (guitar); Richard Sohl (piano); Jay Dee Daugherty (drums).

Liner Note Author: Patti Smith.

Recording information: Electric Lady Studios, New York, NY (01/26/1976); The Agora, Cleveland, OH (01/26/1976).

Photographers: Danny Fields ; Robert Mapplethorpe; Edie Baskin; Bob Gruen; Richard Aaron; Chuck Krall.

It isn't hard to make the case for Patti Smith as a punk rock progenitor based on her debut album, which anticipated the new wave by a year or so: the simple, crudely played rock & roll, featuring Lenny Kaye's rudimentary guitar work, the anarchic spirit of Smith's vocals, and the emotional and imaginative nature of her lyrics -- all prefigure the coming movement as it evolved on both sides of the Atlantic. Smith is a rock critic's dream, a poet as steeped in '60s garage rock as she is in French Symbolism; "Land" carries on from the Doors' "The End," marking her as a successor to Jim Morrison, while the borrowed choruses of "Gloria" and "Land of a Thousand Dances" are more in tune with the era of sampling than they were in the '70s. Producer John Cale respected Smith's primitivism in a way that later producers did not, and the loose, improvisatory song structures worked with her free verse to create something like a new spoken word/musical art form: Horses was a hybrid, the sound of a post-Beat poet, as she put it, "dancing around to the simple rock & roll song." ~ William Ruhlmann

With the exception of Bob Dylan, few rock n' rollers explored poetry within the rock format as thoroughly as Patti Smith. By the mid-70's, Smith had been a regular poetry-reader in New York City clubs for years, and with a deep admiration for The Rolling Stones, it was only natural to set these poems to music. With an exciting rock band to back her up (including renowned music critic Lenny Kaye on guitar), Smith built up a following on the strength of the band's trance-inducing live shows and her thrillingly liberated vocal style, which built on Dylan's mid '60s expressiveness with ecstatic, octave-jumping yelps.

Produced by ex-Velvet Underground bassist John Cale, HORSES was considered 'punk rock' when it was first released, but there was much more to it. Smith had a gift for being able to paint vivid pictures with her prose, as evidenced by a pair of 10-minute long epics, "Birdland" and "Land" (which consisted of 3 sections--"Horses," "Land of A Thousand Dances," and "La Mer"). Other tracks are more conventional, yet just as gripping--a cover of "Gloria," "Free Money," and "Kimberly," plus a ragged live cover of The Who's "My Generation" (included on the '96 remastered CD edition as a bonus track). HORSES is a classic.