Patti Smith - Hors CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

of 1000 Dances" as chant them like a shaman with the hots. She expands the words yet stays grounded by the band's furious pounding; the liberating power of those classic three-chord riffs is never obscured.

"It's time to figure out what happened in the Sixties," Smith told ROLLING STONE in 1976. "I'm working on a link - to keep it going." But there's no trace of sentimentality here; behind the lilting reggae of "Redondo Beach" lies a resort where "women love women" and a suicide is shrugged off. "Free Money" isn't about burning dollars; its about a lover putting them to use "to buy you all the things you need." As "Free Money," "Kimberly" and "Elegie" all attest, Smith was also capable of stark, passionate romanticism and actual singing, too. Yet she thrived on confrontation, as exemplified by her choice of John Cale, a former member of the Velvet Underground, as producer.

"All I was really looking for was a technical person," Smith said in that interview. "Instead, I got a total maniac artist. I went to pick out an expensive watercolor painting, and instead I got a mirror. It was really like "A Season in Hell," for both of us. But inspiration doesn't always have to be someone sending me half a dozen American Beauty roses. There's a lotta inspiration going on between the murderer and the victim." "Horses"

Apart from Smith's revelatory demolition of "Gloria," Horses features the poetess/Keith Richards-worshipper at her freshest and most effective. Later records did some weirder stuff, but none of them had the perfection of "Redondo Beach" and "Kimberley." "Break It Up, "Free Money" and the bizarro title track are great, too.