Trumpets, violins, I hear them in the distance

Patti Smith - 'Elegie' (Horses - 1975)

Many albums finish with a metaphorical send-off, a summation of the album’s themes or a definitive ending.

Patti Smith

’s debut album, Horses, finishes¹ with a literal send-off. - ‘Elegie’.

Usually, we expect to see the song titled ‘Elegy’, but that’s not how Smith does things. She has always liked to add her mark on her work, and a different spelling is another part of that Smith tapestry. Looking back from almost fifty years after the start of her career, we can see that elegies and the process of mourning are themes she comes back to time and time again. From close friends and family to fellow artists, she has dedicated songs to her late husband, her brother, Jerry Garcia and Kurt Cobain. She even marked the finale of Aqua Teen Hunger Force in 2015.

Elegies can often be as much about the person delivering them as the subject. Smith’s is arguably in this category as it starts with “I”, and the focus is on her experience and how she is processing her grief for the departed. It isn’t until the song's last line that it becomes clear that it is about someone who has shuffled off this mortal coil.

We also don’t get direct details on the departed individual or their relationship to Smith. In the same way that the reveal of a grieving Smith is held back until the end of the song, so is the clue that this is an elegy to Jimi Hendrix. It sounds nothing like Hendrix; it is much closer to the spoken word poetry and jazzier end of the spectrum than some of the reggae, rock and punk that also feature on the album. There is a haunting element to how her words hang in the ether, stalked by Ivan Kral’s near-predatory bassline.

The pull quote for this entry about trumpets and violins is a direct quote from The Jimi Hendrix Experience song ‘Are You Experienced?’, the title track from their first album². This isn’t supposition; Smith told The Guardian as much in 2005.

[Horses]’s final track, “Elegie,” is straightforwardly ‘a requiem for Hendrix’, she says. It was recorded on 18 September 1975, the anniversary of his death. ‘The last lines – 'I think it’s sad, just too bad, that all our friends can’t be with us today’ – are borrowed from “1983 (a Merman).” I didn’t think Jimi would mind!'

It is suggested that Smith met Hendrix in the summer of 1970, not long before his death at his new Electric Lady Studios, and he outlined his ambitions for the studio that he would never see after his death in September of that year. Five years later, Smith recorded Horses there and claims that she felt his spirit as she recorded the centrepiece of the album’s first side, ‘Birdland’ She even managed to record ‘Elegie’ on the 5th anniversary of Hendrix’s death.

In 2015, around the 40th anniversary of her debut, Patti Smith told Mojo that the song had become harder and harder for her to sing. A piece to her fallen idols such as Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Brian Jones carries more and more emotional weight as more and more people exit her life. Even Allen Lanier, an ex-boyfriend who co-wrote the song with her, has added his name to the list of the departed. In 2015 this even meant that one wag at a Horses anniversary show in Manchester added via interjection Frank Sidebottom to the list of fallen that Smith recalled.

1. Even though my CD version of Horses from the late 1990s finishes with a live cover of The Who’s ‘My Generation’ it has never seemed like anything more than a tacked-on effort to fill a bit more of the CD.

2. One that will feature on here soon, as it is also the closing track.