last Wednesday, August 27th marked, to the day, the 45 anniversary of NYC’s famed Electric Lady Studios which was originally built by Jimi Hendrix. To celebrate, Patti Smith, who was there the day it opened and recorded her classic “Horses” After recording her first single “Hey Joe/ Piss Factory” at Electric Lady Studios in 1974, in the facility’s Studio A, gave a private performance of “Horses” in its entirety to an celeb/industry crowd that included Michael Stipe, Alexander Skarsgard, Liv Tyler, Win Butler, Darren Aronofsky, Alison Mosshart, Dakota Johnson and more. Watching Smith and three-quarters of her original band, including guitarist Lenny Kaye and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, blaze through Horses live wasn’t a one-off experience; Patti Smith and her band has already been touring the globe doing just that, and will be coming back to New York’s Beacon Theatre on November 10 for a similar show. (She’ll also be touring with her new book, M Train, a collection of essays about her travels.) But there was something about being surrounded by Electric Lady’s ghosts that seemed to energize the singer.
But it’s spite of all the numbers and anniversaries, nothing felt nostalgic, or even comfortable, about the performance. From the moment Smith spat out the first G of “Gloria” (not to mention the multiple times she literally spit sizable gobs on stage and into the audience), the room — big for a studio but incredibly intimate for a concert — crackled with a nervous, exhilarating ecstasy. It’s thrilling enough to hear Smith’s uncompromising sneer on record; it’s awe-inspiring to see her bellowing a full-throated “Glooooo-reee-a!” into the microphone just feet away from you (btw, her voice hasn’t diminished with age). For the first time in my life, I understood what the Old Testament describes as the terrifying glory of God
Given the nature of the album and the event, the concert could have been a rather serious (albeit rocking) affair, but Patti Smith made sure it wasn’t. She joked about flipping over the record from side A to B after wrapping a fiery “Free Money,” and after mangling a word at the top of “Birdland” (which starts with, “His father died and left him a little farm in New England”), she told the band to start over and deadpanned, “His dad is gonna have to die again.”Before wrapping with “Elegie,” Smith explained how she wrote the delicate dirge after finding out about Jimi Hendrix‘s death — fitting, since the show was to celebrate the 45th anniversary of Electric Lady Studios opening (which Smith was present for, as detailed in Just Kids). She extended the three-minute album track into a longer tribute to lost rock warriors, respectfully reading their names — including her late husband Fred “Sonic” Smith and King of New York Lou Reed — into the microphone.
Despite ending with a list of the lost, the intimate concert from the peerless rock icon was full of more life, fire and spit than practically any other show I’ve ever seen. It will be interesting to see if that comes across on wax when Electric Lady Records issues the concert on vinyl as its first-ever release, or if it’s one of those situations where the electricity was more in the air than on the recording.
Four decades after it entered the world, Horses remains the most exciting union of rock and poetry on record — and its power to make you feel fully alive hasn’t diminished one iota.
If you were like us and not there, Patti Smith’s Horses performance will be released on vinyl and will be the first LP to come out via Electric Lady Records. Release date TBA. (She’ll also be performing Horses at the Beacon Theatre in November which is already sold out.
The Fat Angel Sings 