‘Just Kids’ is a fascinating and poetic account of an era when beat culture evolved into punk rock. It is also an honest and touching diary of a love affair and friendship between two unique artists.
Patti Smith met Robert Mapplethorpe in the Summer of 1967 and, although their ways parted in 1979, their paths crossed again in 1986 when he was diagnosed with AIDs and she was pregnant with her second child to Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith.
The book begins with her hearing the news of Mapplethorpe’s death on March 9th 1989, aged 42.
Both were born in 1946 and although they came from different backgrounds they each had a rebellious bohemian spirit and Patti Smith jokes that she was “a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad”
Mapplethorpe’s dual nature is part of what fueled his creativity and made him such a fascinating figure . He is constantly represented as a walking contradiction driven by forces of light and dark so that he could appear as “handsome and lost”, “triumphant and troubled” and an artist-hustler who loved to court controversy yet also “the good son and altar boy”
Patti’s own artist nature was primed by the discovery of “the mystical language” of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud at the age of 16 . (She stole a copy of Illuminations from a bookstall at a bus depot in Philadelphia).
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