On one of my earlier trips to London, Horses was displayed right at the front of the new releases display at the first Virgin record store in the city. The NME, which I picked up two-weeks late at the kiosk in Zurich’s main station, raved about the epic poem. The elegant cover made buying it even more irresistible. Back home, at the Niederglatt railway station, Patti Smith’s debut album hit me full force. Actually, I found the second album, Radio Ethiopia, even more exciting. It was wilder, less full of pathos—today, Smith’s pathos drives me crazy—and somehow simply likeable. Of course, I immediately picked up tickets for the concert at the Rote Fabrik when they went on sale.

“If I remember correctly, a lot of the audience found the concert not so great or just ok. The problem was that Patti Smith was practically the first representative in Zurich of a new generation of musicians who couldn’t be comfortably put into one of the common boxes: progressive rock, blues, folk, or glam rock, etc. So. at the Zurich concert, various groups showed up who all had very specific expectations. For example, there were the fractions moved by politics, feminism, Rock, and Roxy music. Smith’s political position couldn’t be judged clearly enough by those involved with politics, and the rock music disturbed the feminists. Whereby the concert didn’t take place within the framework of the debut album, but in the wake of the much more anarchistic, seemingly improvised Radio Ethiopia.”

Press material for the Patti Smith Group, published in the 1970s in New York.

Hanspeter Künzler is a Swiss journalist and author who resides in London. He specializes in music, art, and soccer, and writes for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Swiss Radio, among others. Künzler has published several books and carried out more than 2,000 interviews with international musicians.