Celebrate 50 years of Patti Smith’s debut studio album with the release of “Horses” (50th Anniversary). The 2-set features the iconic album remastered direct from the original master tapes and previously unreleased outtakes and rarities – including Patti Smith’s 1975 RCA audition tape. The Punk poet’s landmark debut celebrates half a century with an expanded anniversary edition produced by bassist Tony Shanahan.
Originally released in 1975, “Horses” was the introductory statement from Patti Smith, her debut album recorded at Electric Lady Studios and produced by John Cale of The Velvet Underground.
Five decades later, it remains a music and cultural linchpin, a release that made her an icon among the New York City punk community and eventually led to her induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007.
On October 10th, “Horses” will be revisited by Legacy Recordings, the catalogue division of Sony Music Entertainment, for a 50th anniversary reissue packed with bonus material.
On February 3rd, 1975, ex-Animals singer Eric Burdon headlined two shows at the Main Point, a 250-seater coffeehouse in Bryn Mawr, a Philadelphia suburb. The opening act was singer-poet Patti Smith, making her first hometown appearance (she partly grew up in the city) after a year of New York nights with guitarist Lenny Kaye and pianist Richard Sohl and a 45 of primal blues and incantation, “Hey Joe/Piss Factory”, released at the end of ’74. Smith was also showing off a combo with more groove and boom; bassist Ivan Kral joined four days earlier. I was there as the Main Point’s PR guy and keen to see what I had wrought after urging my boss to book Smith for the gig.
On February 6th, Smith was headed for her own transcendence, her debut LP, “Horses”, recording demos at RCA’s 6th Avenue studios with Kaye, Sohl and Kral, an event so newsworthy in the early ferment of New York punk that John Rockwell of the New York Times mentioned it in his column the next day. RCA barely got a chance to pass on Smith. Rockwell soon reported that Arista’s Clive Davis had swooped in and signed her. There was another demo session with the quartet – then, in June, a drummer, Jay Dee Daugherty. Over five, sometimes contentious weeks with producer John Cale that fall, the quintet made “Horses” eight tracks of electric medicine dance, Brill Building yearning and frenzied, improvised levitation – at Jimi Hendrix’s 8th Street sanctuary, Electric Lady, where Smith cut “Hey Joe“.
On the final day of mixing, as “dawn broke over lower Manhattan,” Kaye wrote in his memoir, Lightning Striking, “we walked up the stairs, out of the studio, into the future.”
Released on November 10th, 1975, “Horses” is the punk-rock landmark that keeps on giving, a raging, renewing magic and dreaming made with rock’s fundamental bones by an insurgent bard who found her voice and mission at the crossroads of Leader Of The Pack, Like A Rolling Stone and Howl. Smith’s infamous refusal of easy salvation at the front of Van Morrison’s “Gloria” the nine-minute passage through grief to escape in the wah-wah mourning and doo-wop scatting of Birdland; the combined invocation of Smith’s pole star, the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, and Wilson Pickett in “Land“, the band reading her vocal moods and soaring with empathic stampede
This release will feature the iconic original album remastered direct from the original 1/4” master tapes, as well as previously unreleased outtakes and rarities, including Patti Smith’s 1975 RCA audition tape. Among the bonus material are eight previously never-before-released songs. One of those, “Snowball,” is available to preview the reissue:
Half a century after rewriting the rules of rock, Patti Smith is giving “Horses” the deluxe treatment it deserves. Out October 10th, the 50th anniversary reissue comes with demos, outtakes, and four unreleased tracks, including the newly surfaced “Snowball.” The record’s been remastered from the original tapes, which means John Cale’s production should hit even harder. On top of that, Smith is plotting a fall tour across the US and Europe and dropping a new memoir, Bread of Angels, in November. Punk may not have had a blueprint, but “Horses” came pretty close, and it’s wild that it still feels urgent in 2025
Hello, everyone. This is Patti. When we recorded “Horses” I hoped to communicate with like minds, the misfits, disenfranchised, those scraping away off the beaten track. I am quite moved that the community I hoped to find, found us as well and those that survived are still at work. In October Sony will release a 50th anniversary edition of “Horses”. There are 6,500 vinyls, including a double album compiled of unearthed recordings, live pieces from CBGB, youthful efforts scavenged from half a century ago. I am grateful to all who helped form it and the people who have supported it for five decades.
The Fat Angel Sings 