Just Kids

Patti Smith was a major figure in 1970s rock, a punk poetess who recorded emotionally raw records (more about her music in an upcoming post). She is also a terrific memoirist, as her book Just Kids, about her younger days, specifically her relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, won the National Book Award.

I found it charming, if at times a little too sprinkled with pixie dust. There is also a tremendous amount of name-dropping, but that is to be excused because it seems that the New York City Smith lived in the late 60s and early 70s was a small village of Bohemians who constantly traveled in the same circles. On one night at her local hangout, the El Quixote, she spots Grace Slick, Janis Joplin, and Jim Hendrix. She meets and befriends Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Sam Shepard (with whom she would have a short romance and co-write the play Cowboy Mouth). She would hang out at Max's Kansas City, and end up playing gigs with Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine. It was like a long magic carpet ride.

But if Smith makes that time sound magical, she doesn't cover up the hardships. She grew up in South Jersey, took the train to New York with no money and ended up meeting Mapplethorpe, a struggling artist. They would work menial jobs, Smith mostly in bookstores, and shared artistic aspirations. Smith displays an almost obsessive hero worship, especially for poets like Blake, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire (she will refer to days as being "Rimbaud's birthday," and went to Paris just to stay in a hotel he lived in). She also had a keen music sense, worshipping Bob Dylan and The Doors. I found her description of attending a Doors concert interesting: "I had a strange reaction watching Jim Morrison. Everyone around me seemed transfixed, but I observed his every move in a state of cold hyperawareness. I remember this feeling much more clearly than the concert. I felt, watching Morrison, that I could do that."

Smith and Mapplethorpe lived in near poverty, sharing grilled cheese sandwiches. They moved into the legendary Chelsea Hotel. There's a wonderful moment where they go to the Whitney Museum, but only have the money for one to go inside. Mapplethorpe tells Smith to go in, because they will be exhibited there soon. It was at the Whitney that Mapplethorpe's notorious exhibit would be staged, which I had the privilege to see.

For as punk as Smith appeared in her earliest musical incarnations, she turns out to be quite the family person, tied to her parents and siblings. She reveals a very soft, sensitive side, and you can feel the confusion she must have felt when Mapplethorpe came to realize he was homosexual. She also writes well about her eventual evolution from a poet to a rock star, where she eventually plays a gig that had none other than Boy Dylan in the audience, and she would have a song hit number 13 on the charts ("Because the Night," a collaboration with Bruce Springsteen). Mapplethorpe chided her, "You became famous before me!"

But I found the greatest strength of the book her ability to capture the zeitgeist of a time and place--New York during the hippie-to-punk Warhol years. Consider this lovely paragraph: "I spent the evening checking out the action on St. Mark's Place. Long-haired boys scatting around in striped bell-bottoms and used military jackets flanked with girls wrapped in tie-dye. There were flyers papering the streets announcing the coming of Paul Butterfield and Country Joe and the Fish. 'White Rabbit' was blaring from the open doors of the Electric Circus. The air was heavy with unstable chemicals, mold, and the earthy stench of hashish. The fat of candles burned, great tears of wax spilling onto the sidewalk."

Smith ends her own story as she releases her first album, but jumps ahead to Mapplethorpe's struggle and then death from AIDS in 1989. It's hard to keep a dry eye while reading it.