Patti Smith, "Just Kids' and the '60s

Patti Smith deeply deserves the National Book Award she won last year for Just Kids, the story of her life with Robert Mapplethorpe, and how that life and their mutual commitment to their separate art, led them to fulfillment, and to Mapplethorpe's early death.

I read Just Kids with a lump in my throat most of the time, occasional tears slipping down my cheeks. There was so much to identify with, so many dim memories fanned to life.

Her story of a gangly, withdrawn South Jersey suburban chrysalis, her mind fixed on a life beyond rosebushes and mortgages"“ a life unabashedly of art— breaking herself out and away, eons away, to the blessed squalor of New Yawk City in the heat of the breakout '60s, lifted me up and through time and space and let me feel again the wonder and courage of those years, lost now and grieved by the wind of time.

But not forgotten. I too came slowly and drunkenly out of South Jersey and Philadelphia was finally my last stop and my home forever, no matter where I am. There was New Yawk and San Francisco and Key West and the magic continent in between, but I came to rest in Philly and it's where I'll always be most comfortable because I made my feeble stand there, swinging at rainbows with a Wiffle ball bat.

Palace of dirt and blood

Patti Smith, though, made the Big Time, became a living legend, first in fabled Gotham, then took it all the way to the fucking world. And I felt so privileged in my little easy chair, wind stirring the budding trees out my window, to be brought along for that ride, to coattail Patti Smith from poor in Brooklyn to poor in the Chelsea Hotel— oh, Christ, the Chelsea, that faded palace of dirt and blood and dreams and death but mostly a citadel of the art, the multifarious on-the-fly above all ART, that lurked there behind every quiet door.

When some people talk about art— a-r-t, ART, whatever— it has the embarrassing sanctimonious whiff of cheap religion. But Patti Smith speaks of art with the guileless belief of a child's faith in wood fairies.

Her salad days, and mine

Patti Smith has the recall of a witch or a saint, and I thrilled to the roster of names and places that turn up on page after page of this log of her travels through those strange and singular times, times whose dim footprints we can still occasionally make out even in today's shifting sands. They were better times for me, times of hope and caring and daring, every day another scale peeled from my dangling eyeballs.

And I was amazed because Patti Smith, like me, was at times oblivious to the obvious, was so enmeshed in her own struggles, so preoccupied with her inner voices, that it didn't really occur to her that at one point there was a literal summit meeting of the shooting stars of rock "'n roll in the El Quixote, the bar next to the Chelsea. Witness:

"At the table to my left, Janis Joplin was holding court with her band. To my far right were Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane, along with members of Country Joe. At the last table facing the door was Jimi Hendrix, eating with his hat on, across from a blonde…. They were here for the Woodstock festival, but I was so afflicted with hotel oblivion that I wasn't aware of the festival or what it meant."

Hotel lobby as classroom

The Chelsea was Patti Smith's cultural college; its lobby, where she spent countless hours scribbling in a cheap orange composition book and watching the passing celebrity parade— "the filmmaker Shirley Clarke and the photographer Diane Arbus entered separately, each with a sense of agitated mission"— her classroom. "Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs were all my teachers, each one passing through the lobby."

And nearby Max's Kansas City was her life laboratory, the aura of Andy Warhol still hovering in the smoke over his round table, even though he had abandoned Max's. Witness again: "In recent memory the round table had seated such royalty as Bob Dylan, Bob Neuwirth, Nico, Tim Buckley, Janis Joplin, Viva and the Velvet Underground."

There were so many cultural casualties from those times, but Patti Smith and Dylan, anyhow, are still out there doing it, flexing their art muscles after all these incredible years. Robert Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith's true soul-mate— best remembered, unfortunately, for his sado-masochism photo studies— was an early AIDS victim, but in Just Kids she has rehabilitated his image, in my estimation, and humanized him as best one can humanize such a shifting, dodging personality.

Talent plus sensibility

Just Kids might be a little insular early on, reflecting the life Smith and Mapplethorpe shared then. But when Smith and the book get rolling, it's absorbing as both a double rags-to-riches tale and the documenting of a seminal time in American life and culture, told by a woman who was in the thick of much of it and who has been blessed with the sensibility and literary talent to bring it to high definition life.

I found especially fascinating Smith's recounting of how she came to be her own version of a rock 'n roll star. She can't really sing, and her guitar playing is, charitably put, adequate. But her breakout album, Horses, ranks among Rolling Stone's top hundred rock albums of all time.

Smith has been called "the godmother of punk," but, as Just Kids demonstrates, she's far beyond that neat and limiting label. She's the artist she set out to be.♦


To read a response, click here.