Felix culpas—“happy accidents”—make for mysterious ciphers. There they are, in genetics, fate, and free will. But in the first part of the “Hotel Chelsea” section of Just Kids, they seem to twist in helixes that confound the reader (or, at least, me) as much as they reveal about what Smith was ultimately to become: the godmother of punk.

The first of these came to me in a totally dim-witted revelation, reading about Smith’s early tenure at the Chelsea: Patti Smith was more hippie than punk. This much is old news to long-time students of Smith, who have pointed out—as has she herself—that she believed that the 60s counterculture had a great deal in common with the punk movement. But what really struck me was that, so far as I could see, it was not her voice, poetry, or ideas that propelled her into prescient punkdom, but rather felix culpa. Without her aquiline bone structure and ragged clothes—coupled with an impulsive, self-executed haircut that transformed her Joan Baez hair into her trademark shaggy, Keith Richards-y do—Patti Smith, it occurred to me, could very well have become a Joni Mitchell with a Rimbaud vibe.

This bummed me out. A lot. Perhaps because I was born in Berkeley, though equally perhaps because I am a member of the oft-reviled Generation X (born 1965-1980), I have always been obliged to hate hippies. I came to the second-wave of punk as a freshly minted teenager in the 80s. As a student of (and participant in) those later punk scenes, particularly DC hardcore—populated by such bands as Minor Threat (later, Fugazi), The Faith, Bad Brains, Black Flag, Government Issue, and so on—I’d sneered at what I considered hippies’ naïve, self-referential ideology and grandiose protest oeuvres. In my teenage mind, as well as my fellows who faithfully attended Rock Against Regan punk shows in the early-to-mid 80s, baby boomers were arrogant and self-serving, shaggy autocrats who insisted that their revolution be televised, to “change the world,” and to force everyone to be loving and peaceful, so long as it followed their prescription.

Latter day punks, however, were propelled by sheer fury. They attacked political and social issues head-on and created their own word-of-mouth grassroots movement. They were DIY-ing their own album covers and wheat-pasted show posters before such HGTV-appropriated acronyms existed. Cynics, for sure, but they were also clear-eyed realists. Hippies’ simplistic solutions had yielded nothing. Why offer anything but questions, rage, satire?

Patti Smith in the formative days of her burgeoning career was clearly neither full of punky spit and vinegar, nor did she cotton to the snooty hierarchies imbedded in the social milieus of Max’s Kansas City and Warhol’s Factory. She hated glitter (no glam-rock designation for her). Rather, Smith was a solitary wordsmith who still wore bell-clinking anklets, an artist in-her-own-residence, a nurse to the multitudinous social diseases (physical and psychic) attending Mapplethorpe’s hustlerdom, a devourer of poetry, an observer. One has the sense that, at this stage, Smith was everywhere but part of nothing.

Indeed, that she inhabited her singular idiom so completely seems to render her not so much like Joan Baez or Joni Mitchell as like Bob Dylan. As his own memoir ultimately revealed, Dylan was neither joiner, hippie, nor especially political: he loved words and traditional American worker-folk music. Also a loner (but for her abiding attachment to Mapplethorpe), Smith loved art, in all its media. But where Dylan landed in New York to launch an immediate campaign of live performances, Smith long remained a student. She needed to learn, she tells us, before she felt could produce anything of value, much less arrive at performing as her chosen path in life.

And she was hanging out a lot—and a lot like a college student. Smith seems to have spent her days at the Hotel Chelsea chatting and visiting with her hall-mates, offering and being offered careful critiques of works-in-progress, attending impromptu parties where she and her friends dabbled in parlor games and drugs, engaging in the kind of earnest, searching conversations that only college kids have the time, or newly-discovered ideas, to take to heart and to permit to brand their minds indelibly.

Enter felix culpa, part deux. The Hotel Chelsea emerges in these pages as the fertile campus of a freewheeling arts college whose professors emeriti are Salvador Dali, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and Bobby Neuwirth, and whose canteen (El Quixote) is invariably packed with visiting luminaries: Grace Slick, Jimi Hendrix, Country Joe and the Fish, and others.

Where else but in college do young people have such access, such shots at genuine mentorship nowadays? I wonder if there is, or even potentially be, an equivalent of the early 1970s’ Hotel Chelsea in contemporary life. Today, celebrities are attacked, whether by invitation or not, by a vast array of intruders—ranging from paparazzi, tabloids, and crazed fans—who are protected by an equally vast army of boots on the ground: handlers, body guards, press and talent agents, personal assistants.

No, the Chelsea, as it was when Smith lived there, doesn’t exist any more than CBGB’s or Punk itself. Indeed, reading about it, I felt as though I was privy to the unearthing of an artifact left over from period of American history in which a collection of relative amateurs—self-taught students, really—enjoyed a kind of steady stream of kismet: bumping up into the stars of their fields, to make lifelong contacts out of them, to network so easily and unguardedly. Try “bumping into” Eminem and see how many lawsuits you’re served.

So, though she and Mapplethorpe suffered horrors together and apart, Smith was nevertheless blessed by felix culpas critical to the development of her artistic persona. First, though she seems to have been born androgynous, forever preferring boyish garb, it was the single, arch comment of a manager at The Factory about her hair that ended in the iconic haircut that, she bemusedly confesses, opened doors for her at Max’s, The Factory, and would later inspire the rough, tailored couture of fashion designers, most notably Ann Demeulemeester. Second, and more importantly, she stumbled into a bona fide arts education vérité at the Chelsea at a time when American life was not so busy, so savagely Calvinist, that she was allowed time to discover, experiment, study, gestate, so that by the time she finally performed in public, Smith was ready to deliver herself: her words, her voice, performance style, and her trademark look—all down.

The “godmother of punk,” a moniker Smith has never adopted herself, was conceived by the mitosis of happy accidents.