Patti Smith - "Just Kids"
As anyone who’s seen her in concert can attest, Patti Smith knows how to tell a story. So it should come as no surprise how well she tells the story of Robert Mapplethorpe and herself and their separate comings of artistic age. It is a story that is part Proust (the story of vocation); part Joseph Mitchell (vivid scenes of the pre-rock and roll Max’s Kansas City and other 1970s arty enclaves); and part Oscar Wilde (controversial subject matter and the premature deaths of the many artists, poets, and hangers-on that cross Patti’s path).
It’s the part Proust part that interested me the most. Just Kids is the story of a girl who busses into New York City to the waning years of the 1960s to live the life of an artist and a boy who knows he is an artist. Robert Mapplethorpe doesn’t even own a camera yet but he knows he is going to be recognized someday. Smith is not yet a poet let alone the greatest female rock ‘n’ roller of all time. It is through their chance meetings that the chance they’ve taken is fulfilled.
During her first years in “a real city, shifty and sexual”, Patti Smith is rather naïve and the life she leads austere. She’s a novice devoted to art and – in time – to “Robert’s” success. It’s hard to believe but she comes across as being kind of boring. It’s as the director Tony Ingrassia exasperatedly says to Patti when she is flirting with theatre life: “You don’t shoot up and you’re not a lesbian. What do you actually do?” It’s the people intersecting her orbit that are far more interesting: Jim Carroll and Sam Shepherd and Allen Ginsburg. And the many significant rock and rollers. I mean icons: Janis Joplin … Jimi Hendrix … Jim Morrison.
One of Robert’s many temporary jobs includes working as an usher at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East long enough to give Patti a pass to see The Doors. As she writes, Patti “… had a strange reaction watching Jim Morrison.” and “… observed his every move in a state of hyperawareness.” She concludes that “… watching Jim Morrison, that I could do that.” She’s ashamed of this reaction and keeps it to herself, but this is her first inkling that she would one day lead a rock and roll band. And when you consider them, Patti’s concerts do have the ebb and flow of a Doors show.
When Patti Smith records her first 45 (‘Hey Joe’ b/w ‘Piss Factory’) at Electric Ladyland on East 8th Street – Jimi Hendrix’s studio – she remembers talking to the legendary left-handed guitarist on the occasion of the studio’s opening party. Hendrix is heading out the town to his Isle of Wight Festival appearance and the death awaiting him in London when he meets Patti hiding shyly in a stairwell: “When I told him I was too chicken to go in, he laughed softly and said that contrary to what people might think, he was shy, and parties made him nervous.” She remembers clearly Hendrix talking about what he wanted his studio to become and recording the “ … abstract universal language of music ….” And so when beginning to record ‘Hey Joe’ in Studio B, Patti whispers “Hi, Jimi into the microphone.” in acknowledgement of the one time they met.
When she’s in town, Janis Joplin stays at The Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street, where Patti and Robert have relocated after living in Brooklyn and fleeing a dumpy Manhattan hotel. Patti by this point in her metamorphosis is focusing on her poetry. In fact Janis refers to Patti as “the Poet” because that’s how Bobby Neuwirth (“… the peacemaker-provocateur. Bob Dylan’s alter ego.”) introduces her. Patti’s on hand at a rainy Janis Joplin concert at Wollman Rink in Central Park (I have no doubt Patti recalledf this at the rainy Patti Smith Group concert I saw at same venue in mid-August 1979), attends acoustic sessions where Janis works on new songs for Pearl, and even tries to cheer up the despondent blues singer when a good looking guy leaves her to spend the night with a more attractive woman. Given the memories, it’s surprising Patti hasn’t spoken more of Janis Joplin in the intervening years.
Beat poet Gregory Corso’s words – not of poetry but encouragement – has challenged Patti to take her poetry seriously. It is he that takes her to readings at Saint Mark’s Poetry Project. It is there that she learns an important lesson: poetry readings have to be performance art to be successful. So it’s no surprise that when Robert arranges for her to open for poet Gerard Malanga at St. Mark’s that she takes up Sam Shepherd’s suggestion that she add music and recruits fellow rock enthusiast and reviewer Lenny Kaye to accompany her on electric guitar because he can make his guitar emit car crashes. Music was unheard of at a poetry reading, even one full of “… the crème of the Warhol world, everyone from Lou Reed to … Andy himself.” Patti’s evening of poetry dedicated to criminals provokes cheers and jeers. And attention.
The slow accumulation and steady rise of the Patti Smith Group into one of five greatest rock bands ever is documented in the chapter entitled ‘Separate Ways Together’, a concept first expressed on Patti’s 1976 liner notes for Radio Ethiopia. The success that Smith and Mapplethorpe wished for and helped each other attain also separates them as their artistic triumphs ring out in different sectors of the art world.
The last pages of Just Kids are full of illness and photo shoots. Patti has ditched the rock ‘n’ roll life to raise a family with Fred “Sonic” Smith of MC5 fame in Detroit. Mapplethorpe has remained in New York City with his lover Sam Wagstaff and both have been diagnosed with AIDS. Those of us who remember those days each remember someone – a friend or a co-worker so inflicted – and we were all surprised when so many young men were passing away. Every one who was infected was so certain that they’d beat it. So when Wagstaff dies it is both a shock and an indication that Robert will not survive and he asks: “Patti, did art get us?” She doesn’t have an answer but upon reflection writes: “Perhaps it did, but no one would regret that. Only a fool would regret being had by art; or a saint.” True words.
When I first read the final chapter it felt fragmentary: a flaw in the book. But upon rereading these pages of remembrance, they felt so right. The relationship between the two “kids” during the 1980s is fragmentary and there’s no way around presenting it as such. It is what it was. And once I accepted that fact, Patti’s skillful and beautiful writing of Robert’s passing and its aftermath rose to another level and moved my soul.
