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"Just
Kids" by
Patti Smith
; Ecco (304 pages,
$27
)
———
There's a
passage in "Just Kids,"
Patti Smith's
tender coming-of-age memoir of her love affair and
enduring friendship with the late photographer
Robert Mapplethorpe
, in which the aspiring rock 'n' roll poetess sits in on
the recording of the Band's album "Stage
Fright" in 1970, in
Woodstock, N.Y.
, with
Todd Rundgren
as the studio engineer.
"Mostly
everyone drifted off to some hard-core partying,"
Smith writes. "I sat up and talked with Todd until
dawn, and we found that we both had
Upper Darby, Pennsylvania
, roots. My grandparents had lived close to where he was
born and raised. We were also oddly similar — sober,
work-driven, judgmental, idiosyncratic
wallflowers."
All those
self-aware descriptors are precisely dead-on and borne
out throughout "Just Kids." The book is an
utterly charming, captivating, intimate portrait of a
late 1960s and early 1970s period of intense artistic
ferment in downtown
Manhattan
significantly shaped and keenly observed by rock
firebrand Smith, who was born in
Chicago
and raised in
South Jersey
before boarding a bus to find her future in
New York
.
It's a
wonderful book that, in many ways, recalls
Bob Dylan's
"Chronicles, Vol. 1." Like Dylan's 2004
memoir, "Just Kids" presents a poet-rocker
recounting the salad days in a clear, commanding prose
voice that's recognizably her own, but not quite so
mysterious and mystical as the one heard in the music.
That's
fitting, since Dylan looms large in Smith's narrative.
She describes how she and her friend
Janet Hamill
waited in line at Sam Goody's in
Philadelphia
to buy "Blonde on Blonde" (and searched for a
scarf to match the one their hero wore on the album
cover). And how, a decade later, the Bard himself walked
into one of her early gigs after her artistic
peregrinations finally found her fronting a rock 'n'
roll band at CBGB's.
Dylan is
one of many demigods that populate the universe of Smith
and Mapplethorpe, a pair of confidants and ambitious
soulmates born weeks apart in 1946. They meet shortly
after a penniless Smith arrives in
New York
, and live the artist's life together, first in
Brooklyn
and later at the
Chelsea Hotel
in
Manhattan
.
Smith and
Mapplethorpe remain intensely loyal to each other even
after the photographer, who would later inflame
conservatives such as
North Carolina
Sen.
Jesse Helms
with his sexually explicit sadomasochistic imagery,
comes to realize that he's gay.
As they
encourage one another — she urges him to focus on
photography, he nags her to speak her poems out loud —
the frequently flat-broke bohemians remain sure of their
artistic vision.
"Nobody
sees like us, Patti," Mapplethorpe says. And when
they live at the Chelsea, they mingle with a fairly
impressive coterie of artists and musicians. At one time
or another, that includes
Jimi Hendrix
and
Janis Joplin
,
William S. Burroughs
and
Allen Ginsberg
(who tries to pick her up, thinking she's a boy),
playwright
Sam Shepard
(with whom Smith has an affair) and legendary folklorist
Harry Smith
(no relation).
Throughout,
Smith is funny and compassionate, uncompromising in her
artistic principles and grounded by her working-class
roots. Early on, she reveals that in the days she worked
in a bookbinding factory in
Philadelphia
, immortalized in "
Piss Factory
," she became pregnant as a teenager and gave the
baby away.
Later, in
New York
, she's the arty chick who doesn't smoke pot and is as
much a fan of
Johnny Carson
and
Frank Sinatra
(whom she mimicked in Mapplethorpe's famous cover shot
for her first album, Horses) as she is of
Jim Morrison
and Arthur Rimbaud.
To find
her voice, she "listened to
Oscar Brown Jr.
and recordings of beat poets, and studied lyric poets
like
Vachel Lindsay
and
Art Carney
." She hangs out with
Jim Carroll
and
Johnny Winter
, listens to
Lotte Lenya
, and dances the "Bristol Stomp."
Not
finding poetry to be "physical enough" on the
page, she vows to "infuse the written word with the
immediacy and frontal attack of rock- and-roll."
That
leads Smith to achieve a measure of mainstream success
— she scored a hit with a reworked cover of
Bruce Springsteen's
"Because the Night" in 1978. With a touch of
envy, Mapplethorpe says, "You got famous before
me," confident that his ship would soon come in.
It did,
as he would become celebrated — and, in some eyes,
infamous — in the years before he died of AIDS in
1989. She believed in him completely, in the beginning
and the end. When his early work is rejected, she
compares him to "a young
Jean Genet
, showing his work to Cocteau and Gide. They knew he was
great, but they feared the intensity of his gift, and
also what his subject matter might reveal about
themselves.
"Robert
took areas of dark human consent and made them into art.
... He was not looking to make a political statement or
an announcement of his evolving sexual persuasion. He
was presenting something new, something not seen or
explored as he saw and explored it. Robert sought to
elevate aspects of male experience, to imbue
homosexuality with mysticism."
The book
takes its title from a remark a woman made upon seeing
Smith and Mapplethorpe together in
Central Park
in the 1960s. "Are they artists?" she asked
her husband. "No, they're just kids," he
replied.
In
"Just Kids," Smith and Mapplethorpe are just
that. Smith does skip ahead to record her experiences
with Mapplethorpe as he neared death, but she leaves out
her years of rock-star successes.
Instead,
she's concerned with the process of becoming, and
"Just Kids" is a sweet story of two luminously
talented outsiders awkwardly finding their way,
together.
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