A prelude to fame, Just Kids recounts the friendship of two young artists—Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe – whose passion fueled their lifelong pursuit of art. In 1967, a chance meeting between two young people led to a romance and a lifelong friendship that would carry each to international success never dreamed of. The backdrop is Brooklyn, Chelsea Hotel, Max's Kansas City, Scribner's Bookstore, Coney Island, Warhol's Factory and the whole city resplendent. Among their friends, literary lights, musicians and artists such as Harry Smith, Bobby Neuwirth, Allen Ginsberg, Sandy Daley, Sam Shepherd, William Burroughs, etc. It was a heightened time politically and culturally; the art and music worlds exploding and colliding. In the midst of all this two kids made a pact to always care for one another. Scrappy, romantic, committed to making art, they prodded and provided each other with faith and confidence during the hungry years—the days …
A prelude to fame, Just Kids recounts the friendship of two young artists—Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe – whose passion fueled their lifelong pursuit of art. In 1967, a chance meeting between two young people led to a romance and a lifelong friendship that would carry each to international success never dreamed of. The backdrop is Brooklyn, Chelsea Hotel, Max's Kansas City, Scribner's Bookstore, Coney Island, Warhol's Factory and the whole city resplendent. Among their friends, literary lights, musicians and artists such as Harry Smith, Bobby Neuwirth, Allen Ginsberg, Sandy Daley, Sam Shepherd, William Burroughs, etc. It was a heightened time politically and culturally; the art and music worlds exploding and colliding. In the midst of all this two kids made a pact to always care for one another. Scrappy, romantic, committed to making art, they prodded and provided each other with faith and confidence during the hungry years—the days of cous-cous and lettuce soup. Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. Beautifully written, this is a profound portrait of two young artists, often hungry, sated only by art and experience. And an unforgettable portrait of New York, her rich and poor, hustlers and hellions, those who made it and those whose memory lingers near.
I really enjoyed this one. I knew absolutely nothing about Robert Mapplethorpe, so it was interesting to learn about Patti Smith’s muse and the artist behind that iconic album cover.
The book is beautifully written, and reading about her accounts of casually hanging out with the likes of Janis Joplin and William Burroughs, the life at the Chelsea Hotel, or having Bob Dylan walk into her concert, makes you want to be there in that place and time
They're so very young when they meet up, seemingly the definition of wide-eyed idealists; Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe run into each other on a street corner in New York in 1967, both 20 years old. One would go on to reinvent rock music, being hailed as the godmother of punk; the other would become one of the most controversial photographers of the 1970s and 80s. Of course, they didn't know that then; they just knew they had to express... something.
Patti Smith's memoir begins and ends with Robert Mapplethorpe's death in AIDS in 1988, and is as much the story of Robert as it is of Patti, at least during the 10 years they spent as off-and-on lovers, friends, and collaborators before their careers took off for real and they went their separate ways (their actual careers are barely mentioned). But it's not just your typical "I'm a celebrity, …
They're so very young when they meet up, seemingly the definition of wide-eyed idealists; Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe run into each other on a street corner in New York in 1967, both 20 years old. One would go on to reinvent rock music, being hailed as the godmother of punk; the other would become one of the most controversial photographers of the 1970s and 80s. Of course, they didn't know that then; they just knew they had to express... something.
Patti Smith's memoir begins and ends with Robert Mapplethorpe's death in AIDS in 1988, and is as much the story of Robert as it is of Patti, at least during the 10 years they spent as off-and-on lovers, friends, and collaborators before their careers took off for real and they went their separate ways (their actual careers are barely mentioned). But it's not just your typical "I'm a celebrity, here's my life" story; it's very much a part of Patti Smith's ongoing work. There was always something transcendent about her writing, both as a songwriter and a poet; she wears her influences on her sleeve (Dylan, Rimbaud, Morrison, Ginsberg, Richards, Blake, Coltrane - for a supposed punk rocker, she was never so much a radical destroyer as a fundamentalist rebuilder) but she treats them not just as influences but as mythic writing to be ground up, mixed up and used to spell out herself. Just listen to her debut album Horses, with lyrics that freewheel dervish-like from poetry to r'n'b to prose to punk to religious visions, picking it all apart and putting it together in a brand new way that somehow makes them one.
When we got to the part where we had to improvise an argument in a poetic language, I got cold feet. “I can’t do this,” I said. “I don’t know what to say.” “Say anything,” [Sam Shepard] said. “You can’t make a mistake when you improvise.” “What if I mess it up? What if I screw up the rhythm?” “You can’t,” he said. “It’s like drumming. If you miss a beat, you create another.”
She's become more linear and slightly less intuitive with age, but that intensity and lateral thinking still remains. So in Just Kids we get the story, of course; Robert and Patti coming into their own both personally, artistically and sexually (Robert, as would become clear, is gay but raised so strictly it took him years to come to terms with it). But you also get the how and the why; the constant search for something that they can catch but never hold, flitting from idea to idea, from artform to artform, immersing themselves in one idea after another until they find their own voice to say what they need. And the way they depend on each other. And then he's gone.
Why can’t I write something that would awake the dead?
As Robert Mapplethorpe lies dying, he asks her "Did art get us?" He became a famous artist, he found his voice, he died barely 40 years old. Art makes promises of immortality, and in one way she can do that by writing the book, but in another he's still very much dead. Just Kids is a memoir by a rock star; it's an ecstatic exploration of what art is, should be, can't be; but at its heart, it's a very intimate story about two kids who, in various ways, loved each other. And as all of the above, it's one of the best memoirs I've read recently.
