I have a confession to make. I was very late – embarrassingly late – to the Patti Smith fan party. Being just barely one year old when Horses was released, I was obviously not old enough to have experienced her classic era the first time around. Though my lifelong musical obsession certainly crossed paths with her work at multiple points, most of the time it just didn’t click with me.  By middle school, my classic rock radio had grown tired, save for Neil Young and the Who, who I listened to almost exclusively. They both quickly led me to punk rock.  But I started with the Clash, et. al., in the UK, not the Ramones, et. al., in NYC.  So no Patti Smith yet, except for hearing the name mentioned as a legendary influence.  A late 1980’s Neil Young tribute benefit album introduced me to the world of indie rock, including covers of Neil Young songs by the Pixies, Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, the Flaming Lips, Victoria Williams, Nikki Sudden, and others. That, combined with my growing fondness for the Cure (because he sang what I felt!), led me for the first time to pay attention to music made contemporary to my own lifetime.

But then 1991 hit. My senior year of high school. Nirvana. “The Year Punk Broke,” Kim Gordon had memorably called it. Broke in two senses, of course, seemingly causally related. Punk broke into the mainstream, and it seemingly became permanently broken in the process. Every new band was a progressively worse iteration of Nirvana clone, and my favorite indie rock bands seemed to either break up or sign to a major label and release what appeared to be the absolute worst albums of their career.  I retreated from contemporary music again to the past. I went down every music obsessive’s clichéd rabbit hole. The deep blues of Muddy Waters. The experimental weirdness of Captain Beefheart. The post-bop jazz of Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Peter Brotzmann, Charles Mingus, Sun Ra, and John Coltrane. The dub reggae of Lee “Scratch” Perry. The Brazilian tropicalia of Os Mutantes, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, and Caetano Veloso. The classic outlaw country of Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, and Johnny Paycheck. The funk and soul of Funkadelic, Curtis Mayfield, and Marvin Gaye. The krautrock of Can, Neu, Faust, and Amon Duul.

And of course a return to punk rock, but this time a much more expansive and inclusive return. I chose sociology as an undergraduate major simply because I’d read that the Clash were managed by a sociologist, even though I didn’t even know what the term meant. I read every book written on punk rock I could find, and wrote most of my undergrad course papers on it. Even my writing sample for my grad school application was on the insights of Frankfurt School critical theory for punk rock. I chased down obscure records from all the different scenes. For the UK, I scoured mail order catalogs and indie record stores for postpunk legends like This Heat, the Pop Group, and Subway Sect. For the States, I tried to hit all the right bands from all the right cities: Los Angeles’ Weirdos, Zeros, and Dils; San Francisco’s Crime and Nuns; Cleveland’s Pere Ubu, Electric Eels, Styrenes, and Mirrors; Detroit’s Stooges and MC5. So of course I hit New York. And Patti Smith.

But New York seemed too obvious to devote much attention to it. And while I liked the Velvet Underground, the Ramones, and Television, most of the others left me cold. The Talking Heads were too eccentric. Blondie was too rock star glamorous. And Patti Smith was too pretentious and arty. Too much poetry. I always hated poetry. Horses especially puzzled me. I felt like I had to have spent my teen years reading Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Genet to appreciate it. Like Patti did. I hadn’t, so I didn’t. Honestly, the Robert Mapplethorpe connection only made things worse in that regard. I kept the album of course, but I barely ever listened to it.

I eventually caught up with contemporary music. The UK shoegaze bands like Slowdive, Ride, and the Pale Saints. The American lo-fi of Pavement, Guided by Voices, and early Yo La Tengo. The New Zealand bands like the Dead C, the Clean, and the Tall Dwarfs. The postrock of Tortoise, gastr del sol, and Slint. The hip hop of Public Enemy, Arrested Development, and NWA. The insurgent country of Alejandro Escovedo, the Waco Brothers, and the Old 97’s.  I eventually landed on the artists that I saw as having long careers that were ultimately in some way connected to punk but never confined by it: The Fall, Pere Ubu, Half Japanese, the Ex, NoMeansNo, Mike Watt, and especially my beloved Mekons.

It was only in the past few years that I was able to return to Patti Smith. I’d never disliked her per se, but I’d always written her off. My feminist icons were the UK postpunk bands like Essential Logic, the Slits, Delta 5, the Raincoats, and Liliput/Kleenex, or American indie icons like Barbara Manning or Carla Bozulich. Even Kathleen Hanna. I didn’t seem to have a need for Patti Smith. She was what Bono and Michael Stipe needed when they tried to demonstrate their indie punk rock cred. I had no such hangups.

Yet I always had this nagging suspicion that I was missing out on something I should be paying closer attention to. It was other artists that brought me back to Patti Smith. No, not U2 or R.E.M. The Walkabouts’ cover of “Free Money” was always one of my favorites. But there were two things in particular that led me to finally pick up Radio Ethiopia. The Dead C had built an amazing drone around a sample from the noisy title track. Antietam had done an amazing live cover of the poppy anthem “Ask the Angels.” I figured any album that could inspire such a great anthemic pop song on the one hand and such a noisy dirge-y drone on the other hand was worth checking out. Kind of to my surprise, I loved it. I went back and listened to Horses again, but this time really listened. It blew me away. I picked up the rest of her catalog and could finally call myself a fan.

I apologize for the autobiography of my own musical fandom here. In Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music, Sociologist, English Professor, and Music Critic Simon Frith writes about how we tend to not talk about our musical likes and dislikes in the academy, even though we spend all of our time talking about them to our friends over beers. He argues that both conversations can, and should, be enriched by the other. Our musical tastes are more than just name-dropping, one-upsmanshipping, identity-staking, status claims. They’re expressions of personality, articulations of ethical ways of being in the world, means of flirting and fighting with potential new friends and enemies, statements of allegiance, political critiques, and ultimately definitions of a social self. In short, they matter.

I don’t know. You either get it or you don’t. This biographical excursus has made this blog entry about 5 times longer than it should be, however. The rest will be shorter, promise.

So, a few random thoughts on the first couple sections of Just Kids. First, Patti Smith is a tremendously gifted writer. That same poetic sensibility that first put me off to her music is very much evident here. But it’s no mere arty affectation.  There’s no pretentiousness.  It’s genuine, and pure, and honest, and quite beautiful.

So far, I am most struck by a very interesting dynamic that exists between Patti and Robert. At one point, she describes it as Robert saying that he was a good boy trying to be bad, while she was a bad girl trying to be good. At another point, she mentions how they were both praying for Robert’s soul – him trying to sell it to the Devil and her trying to save it from damnation. This dynamic seems to permeate everything about them: both their own individual lives as they struggle to discover and formulate their fledgling selves, and also their friendship together. Take Patti’s seemingly natural ability to steal, putting off the guilt for later: her childhood friend’s pin, the books that meant so much to her, the money she needed to get to New York. Contrast that with Robert’s strong desire to steal the William Blake piece for Patti, but his complete inability to go through with it. It’s an interesting dynamic, and one I can relate to. I don’t at all see it as a comment on some sort of essence within each person, mind you. In fact, it seems to be twin sides of the same coin, a coin we all have in our souls, a coin that was flipped up only slightly differently in each of their lives, perhaps merely due to their different families of origin. Again, the contrast between when Patti took Robert home to her family and when Robert took Patti home to his family was very revealing.

Another random musing: how long it takes us to find ourselves. Perhaps my own need to describe my own musical journey in this blog was prompted by the long journeys of self discovery Patti and Robert are displaying in these pages. Note how the main artistic media both of these icons are known for – music for Patti and photography for Robert – are only hinted at in these pages so far. Robert’s mostly doing drawings and Patti’s just doing occasional poetry writing while mostly reading the works of others. I also find it curious how much detail Patti provides about Robert’s art and drawings, yet she provides no details at all about her own formative poetry. Perhaps that will change in the coming chapters.

Finally, on a much more somber theme, I note the air of death and loss that hangs over this pair’s early relationship. There’s not just the eerie foreshadowing of Robert’s death in Patti’s dream about his body turning to ashes. The key moments in their lives seemed to be marked by the deaths of others – John Coltrane, Robert Kennedy, and Brian Jones – or near death in the case of the shooting of Andy Warhol. When I started reading the book, I was listening to Radio Ethiopia (still my favorite Patti Smith album). Yet when I got to the part about John Coltrane’s death, I put on Albert Ayler’s funeral song for Coltrane. I followed that with Ayler’s Music is the Healing Force of the Universe.  The album begins with Ayler’s partner pleading with him, “Be Healed,” over and over again while he utterly destroys first his saxophone and then a set of bagpipes.

Albert Ayler committed suicide a year later.

Somehow, this song about the healing power of art – a reminder that the destructive nihilism that art sometimes embodies is often more an affirmation than a negation, yet simultaneously a reminder that the healing art provides is often not quite enough – it just seemed appropriate.