Ken Tucker

Patti's print poetry was flatly derivative, but Smith's creative breakthrough came in collaboration with guitarist Lenny Kay.

Together, they set her poems to music, with Lenny plugging in to accompany her words at readings.

Very quickly, they were welding electric guitar to epic creations, as in this nine-minutes-plus opus combining one of her poems with a cover of Chris Kenner's Land of a Thousand Dances.

It's the song that gave the album its name.

Patty quickly went full-on rock star, getting signed to Clive Davis' then-new Arista Records alongside unlikely label mates such as Barry Manilow and Lou Rawls.

At once a punk and an artiste, Smith had to grapple with the question of what it meant to be avant-garde when you also love the Marvelettes.

That's The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game, a 60s hit for Motown's Marvelettes, written by Smokey Robinson and adored by Smith, who has always had juicy taste in oldies.

The new 50th anniversary edition of Horses includes some alternate takes of songs from this album and others that would appear on subsequent releases.

The one previously unreleased song is called Snowball.

It's pretty easy to hear why Snowball didn't make the horses cut.

It's a more conventional pop song, one that doesn't possess the grand delirium Smith was going for.

Right from the start, she knew how she wanted a sound and reportedly fought with her producer, the Velvet Underground's John Cale, to achieve the sounds she heard in her head.

These days, Patti Smith is still touring.

She has a sub-stack newsletter to chronicle her dreamiest thoughts and has a new memoir called Bread of Angels.

The reissue of Horses fits right into her current context, sounding as urgent and immediate as it did a half century ago.

Fifty years on, Patti Smith's Horses still sounds like nothing else before or since its arrival in 1975.

At the time, Smith had one foot in poetry, the other in rock and roll.

Her spirit animals were the French surrealist Arthur Rimbaud and the Doors demigod Jim Morrison.

both bad boys who died young, they inspired Patty as self-mythologizing, rebellious innovators.

But they also served as warning lessons in the self-control and discipline necessary to be a long-lasting, prolific artist, which the 78-year-old Smith has indeed become.