During a discussion with writer Jonathan Lethem at Cooper Union in 2010, Patti Smith was asked if it was possible for young artists to make it in New York City the same way she did. Smith responded, “New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city.”

Her response summarizes various thoughts I had while reading the first half of Just Kids, especially as I finished “Hotel Chelsea.” Because of the many artists who found success while in New York City like Smith, Mapplethorpe, and others mentioned in this book, a mythology and narrative surrounds it. New York is the place to “make it,” to become the person you were always meant to be. However, the city Smith describes is not the same city that exists today (even if the names of the neighborhoods are the same.)

Although moving to New York is a fundamental part of Smith’s journey, it is the community she finds that inspires her to write poetry and later pair that poetry with Rock n’ Roll. She’s encouraged by this community to express herself through visual art, writing, music, clothing; she is surrounded by people who allow her to be limitless. As I read, I started to believe that Patti Smith is not just punk because of music she creates; it is her willingness to try new things and her DIY (do it yourself) ethic that is punk; it is the idea that you do not have to be a genius or prodigy at something (anything) to try it, use it, or create with it that is punk. Smith writes a play during a sleepless night even though she never had before; she picks up a guitar and teaches herself chords. And it is Smith’s Chelsea community that encourages and fosters this innovation, free expression, and DIY mentality.

There are new cities where creative communities can be built; one does not have to be dependent on what was created by others when something new can be forged. There are people all over the country, some in the most surprising places, who are playing in bands, creating music venues, putting on zine fests, and making art. Here in Philadelphia I am lucky enough to know people who put on plays in living rooms, play punk music in basements, screen print beautiful designs in their homes, and write comics in coffee shops.

I don’t believe Smith’s response is meant to discourage young artists, but rather encourage them to find and shape their own spaces. New York may be filled with exciting people, places and things and it may not be impossible. But there are other cities and the people in those cities are doing something very similar to Smith and her friends in Chelsea: teaching, collaborating, and exploring with one another.

“My tears did not stop him, so I sat and watched him dress for the night ahead.”

Some of my favorite scenes in Just Kids are conversations between Patti and Robert ending with Robert gasping, “Patti, no!” in mock horror. It’s a charming glimpse of the gently contrary nature of the two.

But when Robert becomes increasingly involved in the world of hustling while maintaining an intimate relationship with Patti, I too said aloud, “Patti, no!” Admittedly, part of my reaction stems from a post-AIDS purview, but part is a struggle to empathize and understand Patti’s actions. In a relationship as deep and devoted as Patti and Robert’s, it is hard for myself as a reader to permit the entry of anyone else—especially anonymous anyone elses—even for the grand sake of art. I’ve grown to love their love story and, like both of them, am loath to let it go.

“My armor still had its vulnerable points, and Robert, my knight, had pierced a few, though without desiring to do so.”

The departure from the Chelsea Hotel—even just across the street—marks a major shift in Patti and Robert’s relationship. They now share the same living space separately and Robert’s hustling crosses a line when he sleeps with a man sans financial transaction. Still, he assures Patti, “there will always be us.” Shortly thereafter, Patti learns of Robert’s affair with David.

When she writes “Truthfully, I was involved in so many things that the question of Robert’s sexual persuasion was not my immediate concern,” it is one of the few times I questioned Patti’s otherwise—sometimes painful—honesty. Is the “truthfully” meant to convince the reader or the author? A clue, it seems, comes in Robert’s most unintentionally hurtful lines of the book: “Patti, none of this has anything to do with you.” Robert, no…

Robert’s concurrent sexual and social shifts obviously challenge the dynamic of his relationship with Patti. While a new haircut and forays into theater, poetry, and music still leave Patti’s “coarseness” intact, Robert constantly experiments and aligns his image with the Warhol crowd and New York art scene. Patti admits to feeling like an outsider in Robert’s social pursuits and it pains her a bit to see Robert selling his art to strangers. Members of the art world and patrons—strangers—now enter and hold a claim in their once private, shared sphere.

In leaving behind the idyllically bohemian world of the Chelsea Hotel—Patti’s “sacrifice” for Robert—their relationship alters fundamentally. As the romance crumbles Patti assures the reader true love endures. And while I may never be able to empathize with her patient, even loving, acceptance of a broken heart, I respect and admire her hopeful warmth towards an altered relationship with Robert:

“We needed time to figure out what all of this meant, how we were going to come to terms and redefine what our love was called. I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth.”

“We were just ourselves that day, without a care. It was our good fortune that this moment in time is frozen in a box camera. It was our first real New York portrait” (110).

I started to think about photography as I read through the first half of “Hotel Chelsea.” The Robert on the page is not yet the Robert Mapplethorpe he will eventually become, the photographer whose portraits and work are both controversial and iconic, the photographer who will take the the photo that will become the cover of Horses. Patti’s and Robert’s evolution into the artists they will one day be is just beginning; she is starting to think about the connection between poetry and song, he is still looking for the perfect medium to create the images he sees in his head.

“I asked him why he just didn’t take his own pictures. ‘Oh it’s too much trouble,’ he’d say. ‘I can’t be bothered and the printing cost too much money.’” He had taken photographs at Pratt, but was too impatient with the time-consuming process of the darkroom” (124).

If you’ll forgive me for saying something obvious, the technology surrounding photography has changed since 1969. Most cell phones have cameras, some cell phones can take impressive and high quality photos. Through social media, online blogging and other sharing platforms, anyone can be a photographer. The tedious process in a darkroom is not longer necessary (though I know some people still prefer it). The taking of a photo, multiple photos, hundreds of photos and then sharing them can happen inexpensively and sometimes for free. People are able to express themselves, create a visual identity, and share how they see the world in an instant.

The widespread availability of this technology is great for poor artists, artists of color, and other groups who, maybe before this time, couldn’t get their hands on the technology or go to school to learn the technical aspects of the craft. I also think about young folks and how they can now use technology that might have been previously out of reach. I currently work for a youth mentoring organization and I see first hand the amazing things they create when given the right tools.

As I read I started to wonder what kind of work Robert Mapplethorpe would have made in the late 1960’s if this new technology would have been available to him. At the same time, I also thought about how the world can feel overly saturated with photographs. I go back to the quote at the beginning of this post and think about how special that first New York portrait is and what it represents. I have many pictures of my loved ones on my cell phone, yet none of them feel like they have the same weight as the picture Patti Smith describes. Despite this, I still believe that the widespread availability of creative technologies to not only take photographs, but also make movies and record music, allows a more diverse group of people to explore their creativity and document their memories.

“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.

Shortly after settling into the Chelsea Hotel, Patti reflects on Robert’s future beyond their life together. “I knew one day I would stop and he would keep on going, but until then, nothing could tear us apart,” she writes.

In an archive interview clip in Crossfire Hurricane, a recent documentary about the Rolling Stones, guitarist and founding member Brian Jones casts a prediction about his future beyond the band: “My ultimate aim in life was never to be a pop star. I enjoy it with reservations, but I’m not really satisfied artistically or personally. Let’s face it; the future as a Rolling Stone is very uncertain.”

Ultimately, both predictions ring true – but with different paths for similar souls.

As much as Patti respects musicians such as Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, some of her most profound emotional moments and artistic inspirations link directly to the Stones—and Jones especially. A particularly prescient example is the effect Jones’ death—from drowning, at the age of 27—has on Patti, inspiring her to begin a cycle of poems dedicated to the musician, “for the first time expressing my love for rock and roll within my own work.”

Jones appears throughout “Just Kids”—in Loulou’s bracelet, as an obsessive character trait in one of Patti’s theater roles, as the hashish-infused soundtrack to Patti’s early forays into music performance, and as an echo in the death of Jim Morrison.

Patti’s depiction of Robert reflects some of the same things she loves about Jones; aside from fair physical characteristics and an obsession with their hair, both men share an adventurous sense of fashion, a willingness to experiment within their art, and a tendency toward a tragic darkness that scares and alienates Patti. Robert describes the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” as “my song” and Patti frets over Robert’s “fear that he had aligned himself irrevocably with darker forces, his Faustian pact”—if not sympathy for the devil, empathy at least.

Meanwhile, Patti’s own artistic development is guided by another Rolling Stone—Keith Richards. Her decision to cut her hair in the style of the Stones guitarist transforms her physically and artistically. “My Keith Richards haircut was a real discourse magnet,” she drily remarks. She is welcomed by the Warhol crowd Robert embraced, is offered and accepts theater roles, and finds the path to a career in music.

In the end, Patti is left to celebrate Robert’s life as flocks of seagulls gather above her at his memorial service; an echo of Richards taking the stage at London’s Hyde Park two days after Jones’ death as hundreds of doves are released in Brian’s memory. In the end, it is Patti Smith and Keith Richards who have written best-selling memoirs. Their memories help ensure Robert’s photos and Brian’s haunting slide guitar live on.

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.

Writing a memoir is a strange pursuit for sure, but even more elusive, at least for me, is reading one. On first read, I invariably forget that the memoir necessarily follows the trajectory of a narrative arc: beginnings that culminate in an early turning point; a series of obstacles and life events leading to a seeming solution, followed by a series leading to seeming disaster; a heightened, intense period racing toward resolution and denouement. It’s a novel!

No, it isn’t! I often have to re-read memoirs to remind myself that the writer lived through all this stuff and then tasked herself with deciphering and erecting that arc—how and why her life inevitably became what it is. In this way, probably every memoirist has to borrow a little from Oedipus. And Smith, in particular, could very well have rendered her narrative along a tragic arc.

All the signposts are staked early and brutally. Her family, though loving, is poor, and her parents work constantly, making outings rare. Her childhood friend dies; she is consistently forced to wear the dunce cap at school (literally); she becomes pregnant, is kicked out of college, ridiculed at her factory job, later by nurses during a harrowing labor, ending in an emergency C-section. At 20, she arrives in New York penniless, planning to stay with friends who never show; she is homeless, hungry, alone. “No one noticed me,” she writes, toward the end of the first chapter.

But she also writes this: “I could move freely…I had faith.”

There, for me, is no better summation of Just Kids. Having read it several times, I am still floored that its arc is firmly anchored on the axis of freedom and faith. Rather than transcribing a narrative that one might legitimately expect not just from a woman whose life is pocked by loss, but also from the very godmother of Punk—a genre and movement defined by fury, denunciation, and impulse—Smith describes even her most harrowing experiences with tenderness and unhurried reflection. Frankly, it feels almost subversive.

Then again, is it surprising that Smith’s story would be subversive? She built a persona of a ferociously independent thinker and performer, yet we learn that, even as a kid, she “dreamed of meeting an artist to love and support side by side.” Her famously tattered, unadorned look disguises a collector, even a thief, of beautiful, talismanic trinkets and lover of sumptuous fabrics. Her apparent sexual androgyny belies a fairly traditional monogamous woman.

“I was a dreamy somnambulant child,” she tells us early on in Just Kids. I wonder if that very dreamy somnambulance is what protected Smith from psychic devastation; what kept her open to ideas, art, and her complex, intimate lifelong relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. Indeed, I wonder if it helped form her bedrock of freedom and faith, seeing her life as having run the arc of possibility instead of tragedy.

A reverence for religion and prayer can seem jarring from a woman who famously declared that “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine,” but an earnest devotion lies at the heart of Patti Smith’s quest for vocation and salvation through art.

Patti and Robert are collectors: pieces of found art infuse much of their work. Both attach meaning, identity, and an element of the sacred to many of these objects; a discarded lamb from an FAO Schwartz Christmas display, a thrift store Jesuit cloak, crumbling portraits of Jesus and the Virgin Mary.

Smith’s childhood attraction to “talismanic charms” developed concurrently with her love of prayer. Many of her early treasures had direct religious connections: holy cards, scapulars, and damaged statues of saints. She even affirms her artistic “vocation” to a statue of Joan of Arc at the Philadelphia Art Museum.

Robert’s relationship with religion has a more foreboding undercurrent – his strict Catholic upbringing. Yet his relationship to the church centers on the recurrent “funny feeling in his stomach, the thrill of doing something forbidden.”

So it doesn’t seem a stretch to compare the altar boy’s thrill of tasting sacrificial wine (violation of church taboo) and affinity for mystical elements of church aesthetics, to the fascination with shocking visuals in Robert’s later work.

As Patti watches Robert working by the light of votive candles in a castoff monk robe, she worries he will cross the barrier she perceives between prayer and magic. To Patti, art is a two-way conversation with God: “…the string of words propelled by God becoming a poem, the weave of color and graphite scrawled upon the sheet that magnifies His motion. To achieve within the work a perfect balance of faith and execution.”

Devotion is a strong presence in Just Kids: to art, to religion, and Patti and Robert to each other. The letter Robert writes before he leaves for San Francisco is a devotional to Patti and to his acceptance of the fluidity between art and religion: “I stand naked when I draw. God holds my hand and we sing together.” Patti, upon receipt of the letter, “accepted those words as a communion wafer.”

Do these religious allusions add any new insight or understanding to your own view of Patti and Robert’s work?

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.

Even when given two chapters of Just Kids to focus on, the idea of Patti Smith feels too large, too massive to tackle. Looking back at my marginalia, the passages I underlined, scribbled next to, starred and check marked, I could see writing posts about Smith’s representation of gender and androgyny, the artist, even her descriptions of a New York that no longer feels real or even possible. I’m listening to Horses, my personal introduction to Smith years ago, for inspiration. But Smith exists in multitudes and we haven’t quite gotten to her transformation into the “Godmother of Punk” (thought it’s foreshadowed) in the text. Patti Smith is still just a kid.

I’ll try to focus on something more tangible.

Smith’s writing, on a sentence level, is beautiful. It’s romantic. It feels soft and delicate. And, for me, it’s most poignant when she describes her trinkets, her treasures, the things with which she surrounds herself. Her childhood comes alive when she describes the objects she coveted. Her story about Stephanie, a young friend dying of leukemia, though full of sadness and guilt, shows how a simple list of things can also describe the person who owned them and the moment in which they lived. Smith describes Stephanie’s treasures, “In her old cigar box were all the talismanic charms of 1953: a roulette wheel, a typewriter, and ice skater, the red Mobil winged horse, the Eiffel Tower, a ballet slipper, and charms in the shape of all forty-eight states” (7).

Some objects also have power and strength that they give to their possessor. I’m thinking of the Persian necklace purchased by Robert Mapplethorpe before the two even knew one another: “The necklace was passed back and forth throughout the years. Ownership was based on who needed it most” (51). Objects can become symbols, not only in literature, but also in our own lives. It’s important that Robert picks out her favorite necklace when he was still a stranger; the necklace becomes a symbol of their quiet understanding of one another as well as their mutual yearning to keep each other safe.

These treasures that Smith describes are not representations of greed or consumerism, but of memory, love, and art. Maybe the artist can transform the mundane into art because the artist can see the life and importance others cannot. Things that might be deemed worthless can be the most important. Like the “marbleized candy dish with a purple cow lid” Robert becomes fond of when visiting Smith’s parents house: “He was delighted with it, so much so that years later, after he died, it was found displayed among his most valuable Italian vases” (52).

Smith gives every single object weight and importance, and it made me think about the objects in my own life; the things that I brought from California when I came to Bryn Mawr; the things that I continue to move from dorm room to dorm room, from apartment to apartment: a wind-up music box, a red mug with a chipped lid, a tin full of magnets.