Salvo: Despite numerous attempts to get a review copy of Just Kids, with shaking editors bagging our usual DYI approach (we like our contributors so much we buy such things as books and CDs for them to review), to take a shot at conventionality, playing it right and tight, on the company letterhead with faxes and so forth and whatnot and therefore and to whit, Harper Collins never did pay any attention to us.

That’s not very hip, we’re just saying—the editors

Just Kids

By Patti Smith

Illustrated. 279 pages

Harper Collins

Another writer once proclaimed Patti Smith to be the “Godmother of Punk,” and it would be tricky to dispute that she doesn’t deserve the title. Her 1975 debut album, the seminal Horses, uses an effective blend of well-crafted poetry and three chord guitar rock with beautifully placed feedback to set a standard for a generation of rockers. Bands such as R.E.M. and The Smiths, which fielded influential musicians of their own, have remarked on the impact of Smith’s music on their own development.

It could be argued that all good art, at its core, is no more than the amalgamation of the personal coming together in beautiful harmony with the vast world of technique and perspective that preceded it. Art is also a search for new ways to express our experience as humans. Success in artistic endeavors often relies on chance encounters and serendipitous intersections of lives coming together. It is this philosophy, in part, that Smith shared with the controversial photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe, who looms as an important and reassuring presence throughout Smith’s early career.

When she was barely twenty years old, Smith embraced the notion that dedication to one’s craft was essential to success. While her early material isn’t overly topical, history must play a role in the creative act; art happens in a particular time and place, in this instance New York City. Smith’s arrival to the New York art scene of the early 1970’s could not have been better timed and gave her access to a unique set of experiences. Perhaps, her integrity as a performer remains unquestioned because of her strict devotion to artistic values learned at the beginning of her development. While Smith’s success can be traced to a committed work ethic, she was able also to recognize important opportunities for growth as they happened. These factors allowed her career to culminate in a perfect storm with her first record, Horses, which propelled the poet/punker into the realm of serious artist where she remains today.

Smith’s recently released memoir, Just Kids, does a beautiful job of connecting the dots of her early career. The book walks us through her arrival and development as a hungry artist in New York City. It’s a familiar tale as she struggles with money and jobs. She has moments of clarity and doubt about her work. She meets lots of people, some already famous, some on their way to being so.

What may set Just Kids apart, however, from so many other memoirs and tell-all biographies is that Smith made a conscious effort to be frank about those early years in NYC, while forgoing the cheap confessional aspects that typify the genre. Just Kids isn’t concerned with the dysfunctional lives that may have been swirling about Smith at this time. Instead, it seeks something nobler than peddling gossip about the scene’s heyday. It wants to set the record straight about her development as a musician and to breathe new perspective into Mapplethorpe’s often misunderstood artistic vision.

While the agenda of Just Kids is to illuminate those heady days and to rehabilitate Mapplethorpe’s reputation as an important artist of that era, it reads as a valentine to the struggles she endured before earning her success. Indeed, it’s those struggles that Smith uses to define her life; it’s as if she sees herself wedded to Mapplethorpe as a newcomer to NYC’s established art scene, where Warhol looms large. Warhol’s achievements set the commercial bar at a ridiculously high level, his art worth millions, while starving artists like Mapplethorpe and Smith can barely scrape up the money to get one of them into MoMA.

There are many such anecdotes in Just Kids. The reader learns how Smith fed her imagination from a young age when she developed a voracious appetite for books. Her family, poor but thoughtful people, live in New Jersey, from where, through a stroke of luck, she is able to escape by bus to the Big Apple after being asked to leave the teacher’s college she was attending. In one of the more shocking moments of Just Kids, the reader learns that the move followed an unplanned teen pregnancy, where the child was brought to term and then given up for adoption.

She is still in a fragile state and desperate to make something of herself when she arrives in New York. She has vague ideas of staying with friends who have since moved, so she sleeps in the park and in doorways until she meets Robert Mapplethorpe. He helps extract her from a sticky situation and they eventually find a place to live together.

They draw, write and paint together and the reader gets a picture of domestic tranquility. They develop a strong bond and pledge to make it together as artists in a town at the epicenter of high culture. This bond, forged in the depths of poverty, forms the crux of the story told in Just Kids. And it’s a story about gratitude, a willingness to sacrifice creature comforts for the sake of art and a dedication to watch each other’s back.

Smith has chosen an interesting way to tell her story by detailing as much about Mapplethorpe’s evolution as an artist as her own. It’s the picture of the time she spends with him that makes Just Kids revealing— stories that don’t shock, but move with emotion instead. A great example is her account of their days in the Chelsea Hotel, which seems to have happened at a fortuitous time in their development as both people and artists.

At the Chelsea she begins to come out of her creative shell and find her poetic voice. Surrounded by influential writers and artists, she begins to gain confidence in her own talents. She befriends Gregory Corso, who becomes something of a poetic mentor to her. She writes a song for Janis Joplin, hails cabs for a drunken William S. Burroughs and is mistaken for a boy by Allen Ginsberg on the prowl. During this period at the Chelsea, it’s easy to see how her confidence would grow, being able to share her work and life among cultural icons

Mapplethorpe was an important guide to Smith. In a note she wrote to him before he died of AIDS in 1989, she sums up his presence in her life: “You drew me from the darkest period of my young life, sharing with me the sacred mystery of what it is to be an artist. I learned to see through you and never compose a line or draw a curve that does not come from the knowledge I derived in our precious time together.”

Smith also tries to shed some light on the often misunderstood art Mapplethorpe created in his short life. As a much-maligned target of right-wing fanatics like Jesse Helms, Mapplethorpe’s work became a symbol of all that was wrong with publicly-funded art in the 1980’s. While many of his photos dealt with homosexuality and tried to put a face on those who would become afflicted with the scourge of AIDS, he was branded a pornographer and worse by many conservatives looking to make a name for themselves in the culture wars. Smith humanizes the man as a tender, thoughtful friend and an inspiration to her own work.

Smith’s willingness to share the poverty of these early NYC years with the reader is palpable. Smith and Mapplethorpe’s constant lack of food seems to work as a metaphor for the hunger necessary to make it as an artist or musician in NYC. The description, while meaningful and detailed, left my stomach rumbling as I wished I could get them both a sandwich to tide them over. It was an aspect of the memoir that certainly had a visceral effect on me, no matter how romanticized.

Of course, to anyone interested in reading a rocker’s memoir, the famous figures mentioned in the pages are what give a book like this its cultural cachet. Just Kids doesn’t disappoint in this regard. The reader gets to mingle with famous Beat writers and drag queens, rock n’ rollers not long for this life and wealthy patrons that ease the burden of trying to create art without a steady income. The reader also gets a steady stream of Smith’s reading list of favorite authors that she uses to illuminate certain aspects of the life she has chosen to live. Arthur Rimbaud and Jean Genet are frequently referred to in the text and, at one point, she visits Rimbaud’s French birthplace.

Reading Just Kids, it is easy to think of both Smith and Mapplethorpe as outliers and rebels. As a writer, I am envious of their persistence in creating without self-doubt, without looking for the kind of immediate payoff that measures success most days. They pay their dues and Smith seems to relish the idea of transcending the poverty that she implies was a necessary component to developing her craft.

The memoir seems to be a way for Smith to express her appreciation for a life that was shaped not only by her talent and will, but the harsh reality of NYC and all the characters that come with the territory. When she quotes other writers, we get the impression that she is walking in the aesthetic footprints of those who came before her and embody the tradition of the creative outsider.

Smith clearly relishes the role of the quiet, artistic rebel, a throwback to another time. She regards the pursuit of art with a romanticized view, arguing that art and artists are necessary to society, if only out on its fringes. She’s after an ideal, something that happens on the edges of society where craft is perfected and moments of beauty occur before commoditization. Mainstream audiences won’t care about the poems or sketchbooks, won’t be impressed with altars or necklaces assembled from the cheap and the found. However, Smith wants the readers to better understand the artistic impulse that she and Mapplethorpe were working from, an attempt to find truth.

The epigraph to Just Kids concerns itself with this idea nicely. Here, Smith writes of Mapplethorpe, saying: “In the end, truth will be found in his work, the corporeal body of the artist. It will not fall away. Man cannot judge it. For art sings of God, and ultimately belongs to him.” Smith wants the reader to understand that trying to see “God” in the common experience is what makes art so worthwhile. Early in his artistic development, Mapplethorpe had success using found items to make new things from an open-eyed discovery of his surroundings.

Reading the memoir, it was easy to see how she could appreciate the artistic progeny she helped to influence, but could loathe the ruinous lifestyle of someone as talented as Kurt Cobain. His biography, Heavier Than Heaven, seems to have some parallels with Just Kids, as Cobain overcame his poverty through a single-minded approach to crafting songs and making music that felt both raw and polished. But Smith apparently feels that creativity should be a buffer against dependence, imbalance and emotional turmoil, for she is not satisfied merely to assess her ideals for an audience but rather seeks to show how she lived them. No poser or slacker, her dedication to imagination was the road less traveled. Towards the end of the book she discloses the fact that she knew well before the age of 30 that she would never have to punch another time-clock. That seems credible, especially for an artist who would go on to exert such influence and create such culture-shifting output.