These are obviously very sad pages. It’s not as if Robert’s death is a surprise. Not only are the historical facts well-established, but his impending death hangs heavily over the book from the very beginning. Nevertheless, it’s heart-wrenching to read, despite Patti’s beautiful, lovingly poetic tributes that surround all the details.

One of those details was Robert’s curious question: “Patti, did art get us?” It’s a complicated question, and Patti rightly shrugs it off, with no regrets. But the devotion of both Patti and Robert to art, and how it played out over their lives, reminded me of some of Robert and Patti’s interactions from earlier in the book. I was especially reminded of Patti’s early description of herself as the bad girl trying to be good and Robert as the good boy trying to be bad. This dynamic lasted to the very end, with Robert trying “everything but prayer” to heal himself, and Patti praying ceaselessly to make his suffering sufferable, convinced that Robert is still holding hands with God on his way toward death.

In an earlier section of the book, Patti talked about Robert describing himself as pure evil. “You don’t have to be evil to be different,” she’d told him then. “You are different. Artists are their own breed.” She goes on to tell us her readers that she “believed he would once again embrace the knowledge that there is no pure evil, nor pure good, only purity.” When I read that the first time, I wondered what it meant exactly. “Only purity.” Pure what, really?

The sacred and the profane loom large across the artistic bodies of work of both Patti and Robert. Given the horrendously immoral response to the AIDS crisis that came from the conservative, often Christian, establishment in the early 1980’s, it’s no surprise that Robert would embrace the profane in an attempt to undermine the sacred attacks on him and his fellow travelers (the horrible bullying of the beautiful human being of Marlon Riggs comes to mind). It’s a path that other artists have followed in his wake, embracing a posture of pure evil to challenge and expose the real evils of disease and intolerance and narrow-minded hatred and injustice. Diamanda Galas, for one, has made quite a notable career doing such things.

Yet it’s a posture nonetheless. During Patti’s (excellent, charming) afternoon performance for the students last week, she jokingly mocked her own cool artistic poses from the 1970’s. “There are no pictures of me smiling in the 70’s,” she laughed. “I was too cool,” she said, launching into a set of mock caricatures of her iconic photographs, most of which were taken by Robert. “Nowadays all my pictures are of me grinning like a big dork,” she went on to say, and ended her talk with an inspirational set of comments about not being afraid to be embarrassed in public, capped off with a brave a cappella performance of “Because the Night.” On the face of it, this admission of her former posturing seems to be at odds with “Only purity.” Is art a pose, or is it pure?

So I got to thinking about art that’s seen as pure evil, and art that’s seen as pure good, sticking with the traditional understandings of sacred and profane as defined by traditional Christian symbols. I’m no art historian, but I do know pop music, so that’s where my mind went.

On the pure evil side of the spectrum, I recalled the end of the (excellent) documentary Until the Light Takes Us, an examination of the Norwegian black metal scene known for its explicitly anti-Christian symbols, corpse-painted band members, real-life arson of historic churches, and ghastly murders and suicides. But even here, Darkthrone multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and black metal legend Fenriz looks sadly at the camera and says “A big part of me wishes that this whole thing didn’t turn into a trend. That’s what f&!#ing sucked, and sucks still. Then again, you know, people like to dress up.” The pose seems quite present here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EhasabiQGs

On the pure good side of the spectrum, I recalled conversations with friends of mine who play worship music in praise bands at Evangelical churches. One such drummer told me he had to quit the band because he felt guilty when congregants told him they’d felt the Holy Spirit move during a moment in one of his songs, knowing full well that it was his manipulative cymbal flourish that had produced such a feeling. The possibilities for posturing in such music is quite well known and frequently discussed among such musicians, as this video demonstrates:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJp98hoqy5I

So it appears Patti was right.  There is no pure evil and no pure good.  But where’s the “only purity”?

Again, my discipline of Sociology is happy to explode notions of purity and authenticity in art, personality, and elsewhere. Everything is fabricated, socially constructed, imagined, idealized, and performed. But this explosion is not meant to diminish what remains. The performances we try out in front of each other are the only reality that we’ll ever have. They may be posed, but they’re not fake.

Ruth Finnegan studied music making subcultures in the English town of Milton Keynes. As a good social scientist, she tried to map the obvious social categories of class, race, gender, and sexuality onto these musical taste communities. But nothing fit. She then realized she needed to reverse the causality. The social circumstances were not producing the musical tastes and practices. Rather, the activities and performances and musical expressions within these enclaves were in fact producing profoundly important social communities, identities, and moral pathways through life.

Simon Frith argues that engagement with music and art allows us not to discover who we “really are” (since such a thing doesn’t exist), but rather allows us to try on different identities and personalities to become who we wish to be. I think this is what Patti had in mind with her notion of purity. And I think this is what Robert and Patti succeeded at so admirably.

Kurt Vonnegut said that Mother Night was the only novel of his that he knew what the moral was: “We are who we pretend to be. So be careful who you pretend to be.”

“I did alright, didn’t I?” Robert asked Patti as he was dying. “Yes, you did well,” she replied.

This accusatory line is tossed at Patti as she visits Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris, uttered by a Parisian woman troubled by the tributes American tourists had left at the gravesite, tributes she saw as desecrations. As we’re about to honor Patti with a medal at a posh ceremony one week from tonight, now seems to be a good time to ponder the best way to honor our poets, poets like Patti. Thankfully, I think these pages provide us with some powerful clues.

The need to honor the poets that have inspired her is pervasive throughout Patti’s life and work, but especially evident in this section of the book. The episode at Jim Morrison’s grave comes at the end of a trip to France that was meant to provide research and inspiration for a book Patti intended to write about Arthur Rimbaud. Yet the words didn’t seem to come to her on this journey, leaving her frustrated and sad. Perhaps the poets are not best honored through such enshrinement.

Not to be deterred, Patti continues to seek connections with those who came before her.  She writes her own poetry while listening to The Pipes of Pan at Joujouka, solely because it was produced by Brian Jones and was itself the music that he had found so inspirational for his own creativity. While her first single is remembered mostly for her original song “Piss Factory,” Patti reminds us here that it was actually the b-side, the a-side being a cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe,” deliberately recorded to honor Hendrix, with “Piss Factory” added as an afterthought.

Alongside Patti, a number of other folks in this burgeoning scene are also seeking to honor the poets that inspired them, including some with uncanny connections to Patti’s same inspirations. She talks of seeing an early version of Television perform at CBGB’s, feeling a special connection with guitarist and vocalist Tom Verlaine.  Not only had he borrowed his last name from the same Paul Verlaine that Patti admired, the Verlaine who had such a tumultuous relationship with Arthur Rimbaud, but he had also grown up within 20 minutes of Patti, sharing similar geography as well as choice in idolized poets.

For the first time, Patti experiments with marijuana in an attempt to connect with Jamaica’s finest reggae poets, inspired by a viewing of the film The Harder They Come. Certainly unknown to Patti at the time, a group of London kids who would later form the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Slits, and the other foundational UK punk rock acts draw inspiration from this same film and these same reggae poets.

Lenny Kaye, Patti’s emerging musical collaborator during this period, had spent some of his time prior to meeting Patti assembling the influential garage rock compilation Nuggets, writing loving liner notes that were his own way of honoring his poets, notes that would contain one of the first usages of the phrase “punk rock.”

Ultimately, it’s the combination of Lenny’s love of garage rock with Patti’s love of poetry that seems to provide the key to the best way of honoring those who came before them. While improvising, Patti reads from her poem “Oath,” the same poem that she and Kaye had performed at their first reading together, beginning this time with her most famous lyric, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.”  Lenny begins to play the chords to one of his favorite garage rock classics, The Angry Young Them’s “Gloria,” one of the first songs to feature Van Morrison on vocals. This poetry, combined with this music, embodies the way forward: The best way to honor the poets is perhaps to desecrate them. Patti says that Jesus Christ was “a man worthy to be rebelling against, because he was rebellion itself.” She says this famous line was meant as a “declaration of existence,” and a “vow to take responsibility for [her] own actions.” The Angry Young Them’s song is best honored not by being played as a straight cover, but by being converted to the Angry Young Patti and Lenny’s song. The poets are best honored not by being enshrined in museums and treated gingerly and respectfully, but by making original poetry that is not afraid to boldly move beyond them. It’s no surprise that everyone tends to forget “Hey Joe” but remembers “Piss Factory.”

This transition is solidified as Patti’s band performs at a club when Bob Dylan walks in. Rather than feeling the need to stop playing or be nervous before the man she aspired to emulate, Patti instead describes the moment as feeling his power evidenced in her own worth and the worth of her band and what they were doing on stage. She may have aspired to emulate the poets she admired, but she did so ultimately not by cautious or timid imitation but rather by bold innovation.

And now it’s her turn to be honored. Though, to be fair, she and her fellow travelers have already been honored for quite some time. While reading this section of the book, I was listening to the Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime album, a totem from some of the poets I most revere myself. One of the songs on this album, “History Lesson – Part II,” contains some striking lyrical references to many of the folks described in these pages. “Mr. Narrator,” singer D. Boon says, “This is Bob Dylan to me. My story could be his songs. I’m his soldier child.” D. Boon goes on to list some of the folks he aspired to be in his own performances, beginning with Blue Oyster Cult’s E. Bloom (in fact, D. Boon’s stage name was deliberately chosen to resemble E. Bloom’s), the same Blue Oyster Cult that nurtured Patti’s early songwriting.  He then immediately name-checks Richard Hell, the very Richard Hell that collaborated with Tom Verlaine in the early days of Television at CBGB’s, alongside the early iteration of Patti Smith’s band.  Joe Strummer and John Doe round out his list.

But it was another lyric from this song that had a more enduring legacy: “Our band could be your life.” This line would eventually be the title to Michael Azerrad’s excellent history of American indie rock in the 1980’s, a testament to the many fans who eventually turned into artists themselves. The message and legacy of the Minutemen was the same as the lesson that Patti, et. al., had learned a few years earlier: We best honor our poets by desecrating them and creating original poetry in their place.

Just a couple of years ago, I saw the Minutemen’s bassist Mike Watt end a show with a glorious cover of Television’s first single “Little Johnny Jewel,” followed by his shouting exhortation to the fans from the stage: “Write your own songs.  Form your own band.”

And so the cycle continues. As we prepare to honor Patti Smith with the medal ceremony next week, let us remember these lessons. Our poets are not honored by being enshrined in museums or praised from podiums. They are honored by what we choose to do ourselves in their wake. The only way we can honor their legacy is to leave a legacy of our own.

Before reading this memoir, I always knew that Patti Smith spent a lot of time kicking around New York’s art and music scene before recording her debut album. I knew she’d written rock criticism for Creem and Rolling Stone. I knew she was connected to Sandy Pearlman and contributed songs to Blue Oyster Cult. I knew she’d published poetry. I knew she happened upon becoming a rock star by reading poetry while Lenny Kaye played guitar.  But reading about how it all happened has been revelatory, surprising, and ultimately inspirational.

I had no idea of the extent of the different activities Patti was engaged in during this period. In addition to the above, she also acted in plays at the Factory. She posed as a model for Robert’s photographs and others, even doing runway fashion modeling at one point. Before Blue Oyster Cult, she’d also written songs with Bobby Neuwirth and others. Together with playwright Sam Shepard, she improvised a play into existence out of sheer nothingness.

It was during this last endeavor that Patti says she found her key to improvisation, a key she has “accessed [her] whole life.” In the act of spontaneously creating this play together, Patti and Sam develop characters that invent their own poetic language. In a scene where they need to argue, Patti panics that she will be unable to improvise the argumentative poetry correctly. Sam tells her that it’s impossible to make a mistake when improvising. Patti says she’s worried about messing up the rhythm. Sam replies, matter-of-factly. “It’s like drumming. If you miss a beat, you create another.”

For me, that really does seem to sum up this period in Patti’s life. On one level, she just seems to be trying things out, the proverbial throwing of things up against a wall to see what sticks. Yet it’s this very experimentation that yields such productive fruit for her. A casual comment about how she looks like Joan Baez causes her to cut her hair to look like Keith Richards in an effort to “say goodbye to the folk era.” This immediately results in opportunities for acting and songwriting.

In his classic book Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige discusses how youth act as bricoleurs to spontaneously and experimentally construct an (accidentally) coherent cosmology of meaning out of the various clothes and hairstyles and pop cultural commodities that they have available. Their stylistic choices reflect a refusal to accept, and a revolt against, culturally dominant notions of meaning, especially related to race, class, gender, and sexuality. Above all, they express a right of youth to make their own culture out of the detritus that’s handed to them, rather than passively accepting the culture others wish to impose upon them. Patti’s deliberate attention to her hair and Robert’s carefully constructed outfits strike me as being engaged in exactly this sort of bricolage. Indeed, it is not surprising that her Keith Richards haircut signified that “I miraculously turned androgynous overnight.” Similary, Robert’s art works in this period are beginning to take on more and more of a stance that challenges notions of masculinity and gay sexuality, both from the mainstream and from the various subcultures that were emerging.

For Patti, I can’t help but notice a seeming paradox in her personality as she experiments. On the one hand, she reads in these pages as a shy, unassuming, humble, somewhat naïve, almost chaste person. She still seems to dread being dragged by Robert through the inner circles of the art world he so wanted to enter, taking little pleasure in the socializing and performance of it all. She does not use drugs (at least on purpose, and detests the hallucinations she experiences when dosed unknowingly), despite their ubiquity among her friends. She claims to not understand the plays she performs in, nor her roles in them. She seems content to stay in the background most of the time, awkwardly uncomfortable when too much attention is thrust upon her.

This personality is somewhat difficult to reconcile with her eventual public persona, one of sheer arrogance and direct confrontation. What else can you call someone who shows up at her first poetry reading in black snakeskin boots, with Lenny Kaye to accompany her on electric guitar, spouting lines like “Christ died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.” This is the Patti Smith music fans are familiar with, most certainly (especially as a slightly different version of that very line opens her debut album). But it’s a somewhat jarring contrast from the personality that seems to lay behind it in these pages. She mentions that even Robert is worried that her work is too confrontational.

Yet in the context of the experimentation and bricolage, it’s a paradox that makes sense. Patti had earlier said that she found the poetry readings she’d attended to be boring, and she promised to herself that if she ever did read publicly, she wouldn’t be boring. This desire to make a mark, this determination to make her own culture, was more powerful than her perhaps personal reluctance to grab the spotlight.

But even here in this triumphant moment, her humility wins the day.  My jaw dropped as I read about how she rejected the initial recording contracts and offers of fame that came her way in the wake of this performance.  She could not accept them because she said they came too easily.  Nothing came easily for Robert, and nothing came easily for anyone that she admired.  So she wouldn’t let anything come easily for herself either.

(At this point, I’m tempted to take on the persona of the grumpy old curmudgeon who complains about the “kids of today” who seem to latch onto their quick success as if it’s their birthright, without actually making any of their own real culture that matters first.  I’m tempted, but I don’t want to be that guy.)

In a keynote address at last year’s South by Southwest music festival, Bruce Springsteen closed his remarks by giving advice to young artists.  “Don’t take yourself too seriously,” he said, “and take yourself as seriously as death itself.  Don’t worry.  Worry your ass off.  Have ironclad confidence.  But doubt.  It keeps you awake and alert.  Believe you are the baddest ass in town.  And…you SUCK.”

It is this paradoxical mixture of arrogance and humility, of ambition and diffidence, that I read into Patti’s personality at this point in her life.  It’s what undergirds her experimentation and ensures it is so much more than just throwing things at a wall to see what sticks.  And it seems to be the reason she survives the continuing stream of deaths that seem to surround her.  This section of the book ends with her and Robert deciding to go their separate ways on one level.  But she says they kept their vow to stay together until they were able to stand on their own.  May we all stand as confidently, and as awkwardly.  If we miss a beat, we’ll create another.

“I lived in the Chelsea once on 7^th and 23^rd
We came to live inside the myth of everything we’d heard
The poets on their barstools, they just love it when it rains
They comb their hair in the mirror and grow addicted to the pain
And it makes no sense
And it makes perfect sense”

—Alejandro Escovedo, “Chelsea Hotel ’78”

The mythology surrounding the Chelsea Hotel is massive. It’s a mythology that Patti and Robert are keenly aware of as they move in, and a mythology that they seem eager to live into themselves (though perhaps Robert more so than Patti at this stage). Oscar Wilde, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Wolfe, Bob Dylan, and Edie Sedgwick all get casual mentions in these pages, names that scratch the mere surface of the hundreds of influential artistic icons who have lived at the Chelsea at one time or another.

Patti’s description of their arrival and early days at the Chelsea seems like it simply must be mythological. The first person they meet is Harry Smith, the eccentric polymath whose Anthology of American Folk Music was absolutely essential to jump-starting the mid-20^th-century pop-music revolution. They secure a room with apparently little more than a wink and a smile, with hopes of using their artwork as rent, hopes spurred on by the stories of others who had done so successfully. Allen Ginsberg stands behind Patti at the Automat, buying her food for her because he thinks she’s an attractive boy. Everyone they encounter is somehow connected to the creative arts, or talking about the creative arts. It all seems so unreal, so unlike most of our own mundane experiences, so unlike the Manhattan we encounter today. Yet, given the Chelsea’s mythology, it seems so nonchalantly believable at the same time. It makes no sense. And it makes perfect sense.

My discipline of sociology has a fondness for puncturing these mythologies, for exposing the mundane social structural conditions that produce them. It is standard sociological orthodoxy that great advances forward are the work of organized collectives rather than the singular achievements of unique individuals. This orthodoxy includes the work of Thomas Kuhn on scientific revolutions, Randall Collins on philosophical innovation, and Robert Wuthnow on the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European Socialism. Art is no exception here. Howard Becker’s classic book Art Worlds makes clear how art is the result of collective action on the part of an extensive network of collaborators following fairly routinized conventions, not the romantic vision of the isolated special artist. Richard Peterson has argued that the birth of rock and roll occurred not because uniquely gifted artists like Elvis Presley fell from the sky in the mid-1950’s. Rather, it was an act of Congress that regulated monopoly control of the music industry, the advent of television which changed the nature of radio, and a quirk of shoddy market research that over-emphasized the role of teenagers in these new radio formats. These social-structural conditions allowed upstart independent labels to sign and promote new artists on the spot, artists who were then played by freewheeling radio DJ’s responsible for forging new niche markets in American radio. Had these structural conditions changed earlier, popular music would have gotten far more interesting much earlier than in the mid-1950’s. Conversely, had these structural changes not paved the way, Elvis Presley would have been just another talented kid to whom nobody paid any attention.

What does that have to do with Patti and Robert at the Chelsea Hotel? If you can strip away the romanticized mythology that surrounds the Chelsea, it can be seen as simply one node in a profoundly important social network of support systems for artistic production that existed in New York City at the time. It stands alongside and in informal collaboration with the other places Patti and Robert begin to haunt in these pages: Max’s Kansas City, Brownies, the Factory, even Nathan’s hot dog stand at the pier or the Automat itself, suppliers of very cheap and easy food that artists must live on. These places are essential for artists to accomplish their work. They provide a tenuous material and physical security. They pass on insider knowledge and maintain the conventions of the trade. They allow the essential collaborations to emerge. They encourage and support (I’m struck by the number of times Patti says she had to tell Robert over and over again “You should take your own pictures”). They care for each other when sick. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine Patti or Robert even surviving into the 1970’s had these places not existed in the way that they did, let alone emerging as the artistic icons we now instantly recognize.

(As an aside, do these kinds of places even exist anymore? The Chelsea Hotel finally ceased operations for good last year, but I think the Manhattan it represented was over long before then. I’m curious where these crucial artistic incubators exist currently. The Wham City collective in Baltimore perhaps? The scene around Constellation Records in Montreal maybe? If you know of a good one, please mention it in the comments.)

At the same time, however, it’s clearly still a struggle to make it in these settings. Chelsea Hotel’s sometimes fearsome Mr. Bard does not accept their art as rent, and Patti reluctantly returns to her job at the bookstore and tirelessly scours other places for cheap used books that she can sell there for additional income. Robert’s ambitions and savvy in navigating the pathway through this particular art world lead them to make nightly pilgrimages to Max’s Kansas City, carefully dressing up in an intentionally constructed performance designed to catch the attention of Andy Warhol’s inner circle (which Patti seems to endure as a chore for her friend). The Alejandro Escovedo song quoted above also said that “The Max’s Kansas City light makes everyone a star,” yet it’s clear from the competitive jockeying for attention that went on there that only a few stars will eventually emerge from this art world. Just being a part of this scene is no guarantee.

Yet a transition is clearly about to emerge. Patti comments throughout this section on how the 60’s were ending. Retrospective accounts mention the murder at the Rolling Stones Altamont concert as the end of the 60’s, but she sees it as “punctuat[ing] the duality of the summer of 1969, Woodstock and the Manson cult, our masked ball of confusion.” While reading about Harry Smith and Allen Ginsberg and Brian Jones and Andy Warhol, I kept thinking that these were the precursors to Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, not their contemporaries. They seemed out of place. The wrong decade. But then I remembered.  Patti and Robert were Just Kids here after all. This section of the reading ends with them, both 23 years old, putting the 1960’s to rest and looking forward to the 1970’s. “It’s our decade,” Robert affirms confidently.

I was listening to this song in the car this morning while driving my twin 8 year old daughters to school. “This song makes no sense,” said my daughter Emma. “It makes perfect sense,” I replied.

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.