‘Just Kids’ is a fascinating and poetic account of an era when beat culture evolved into punk rock.  It is also an honest and touching diary of a love affair and friendship between two unique artists.

Patti Smith met Robert Mapplethorpe in the Summer of 1967 and, although their ways parted in 1979,  their paths crossed again in 1986 when he was diagnosed with AIDs and she was pregnant with her second child to Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith.

The book begins with her hearing the news of Mapplethorpe’s death on March 9th 1989, aged 42.

Both were born in 1946 and although they came from different backgrounds they each had a rebellious bohemian spirit and Patti Smith jokes that she was “a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad”

Mapplethorpe’s dual nature is part of what fueled his creativity and made him such a fascinating figure . He is constantly represented as a walking contradiction driven by forces of light and dark so that he could appear as “handsome and lost”, “triumphant and troubled” and an artist-hustler  who loved to court controversy yet also “the good son and altar boy”

Patti’s own artist nature was primed by the discovery of “the mystical language” of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud at the age of 16 . (She stole a copy of Illuminations from a bookstall at a bus depot in Philadelphia).

She tells how in 1966 she had a child (passed to foster parents) and briefly had a dead-end job in a factory. Her account of her escape to New York brought to mind the incendiary (and prophetic) lyrics to Piss Factory:

I”m gonna go on that train and go to New York City
I’m gonna be somebody, I’m gonna get on that train, go to New York City,
I’m gonna be so big, I’m gonna be a big star and I will never return,
Never return, no, never return, to burn at this Piss Factory
And I will travel light.
Oh, watch me now.

Patti occasionally overdoes what she calls the “sacred mystery” of the artistic life such as when she makes a connection between lice in a seedy Parisian hotel room and the literary world of Rimbaud or when she describes her writing as a “string of words propelled by God becoming a poem”.

Fortunately she is for the most part self deprecating and modest and it is fascinating to read how she transformed from a  “gangly 22 year-old book clerk” into the iconic figure of rebel-rock we see on the cover of her astonishing debut album, Horses.

Artistically , Smith and Mapplethorpe followed separate paths – “I needed to explore beyond myself and Robert needed to search within himself”.

She did not share Mapplethorpe’s hero worship of Andy Warhol – “I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it” – although she was fascinated by the world of the legendary Max’s Kansas City nightclub and restaurant where Warhol’s Factory clan hung out.

The 1970s was when things started to take off and when their bond was at its most intense, “It’s our decade” said Mapplethorpe and he wasn’t wrong.

Patti cut her hair so she didn’t look so much like Joan Baez (“machete-ing my way out of the folk era”) and flirted with alternative theatre before gradually navigating to rock and roll – “The things I thought would happen didn’t . Things I never anticipated unfolded”.

Her brief relationship with Sam Shepherd gave her a vital insight into how to follow instincts and trust in improvisation as a means of unlocking the creative forces: “he understood more than anyone how it felt to be trapped in one’s own skin”. She also describes beat generation writers Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs as her teachers.

But it is Mapplethorpe who is her main muse throughout even if she didn’t always identify with the life choices he made. Many of his photographs of sado-masochistic sex were as shocking to her as they were to the general public and she didn’t understand why his images had become so dark and brutal.

But through him she learnt what it was to dedicate your life to art and how contradiction is the clearest way to truth:   “I never saw him through the lens of his sexuality. My picture of him remained intact. He was the artist of my life”

Soundtrack to the book:

The Excellents – Coney Island Baby
John Coltrane – A Love Supreme
Vanilla Fudge – You Keep Me Hangin’ On
Tim Hardin – How Can You Hang On To A Dream
Jimi Hendrix – Are You Experienced?
Velvet Underground – Waiting For The Man
The Rolling Stones – Sympathy For The Devil
The Beatles – Strawberry Fields
Bob Dylan – Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – Ohio
Janis Joplin – Me And Bobbie McGee
The Byrds – So You Want To Be A Rock And Roll Star
The Doors – Riders On The Storm
Marvin Gaye – Trouble Man
Television – Marquee Moon

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