“They’re Just Kids”: What Patti Smith Taught Me About Love, Music and Adolescence

New York City’s punk rock atmosphere would not have excelled the way it did in history without the influential component of 1970s poet, songwriter, and musician Patti Smith. As a 20-something inspiring artist with little-to-no money in her pockets, Smith made her way to New York City in 1967. Just Kids (2010), a memoir written by Patti Smith, begins as a love story between two young, hopelessly romantic artists and ends as a eulogy of the artistic wonders and experiences of young Smith. Mapplethrope, losing his life, slowly tells Smith to promise him that she will write about them someday. Published as a death-bed promise to the young artist, Just Kids animates the relationship the two shared as they became each others muses, as they lived by creating artwork with vignettes of one another. 

The critical love story of Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith assisted Smith in finding her poetic hand as she embraced the popular music scene surrounding the famous Hotel Chelsea, along with the historical identities that lived between the famous walls. Patti Smith’s 1975 debut album, Horses, is a crucial document in the musical history of the birth of New York’s punk rock scene. She unfolds her 20-something rebellious nature in lyrics as it poses as a declaration of her existence as a young woman in punk rock. Patti Smith, as a self-identifying woman in rock n’ roll music, reflects on being a female artist in a male-dominated industry. Horses 1975 stays as a historically significant artwork as it prevails her understanding of living in a world where art, poetry, rock n’ roll and sexual politics collide.

Horses (1975) debuted as Patti Smith’s first project in New York City as a 20-something artist alongside her boyfriend/photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Smith’s only artistic input into the album artwork was that it would be photographed by Mapplethorpe. Horses explores Patti Smith’s poetic nature as she is often described as a poet first before as a musician. Her words escape the pages with ease as my individual copy of Just Kids is drenched with annotations and underlines. Nothing on her debut album takes a single shape. All rhythms, tempos, instruments and lyrical arrangements are inclined to be built with their individual personalities. The album is one of the greatest of the 1970s featuring Smith questioning adolescence, gender, religion and life all as one. Smith experienced a life in the 1970s that was full of artistic ideas and creative ambitions. Growing through her 20s where she resided in Hotel Chelsea with Mapplethorpe, Smith knew that she would fall in love with an artist. 

Smith is among the elite class of the punk rockers of the 1970s. Especially as a young woman in rock n’ roll, she faced challenges that pressured and accelerated her writing abilities. Not having a place to reside, or a job to take, she makes her way to New York City and hops into a nearby book shop. Seeing a tall, scrawny boy with black wavy hair standing behind the counter, they exchange thoughts on a necklace for sale at the front counter. As she ventures out on a date night with a man in New York City, she finds herself in a disciplinary situation where her instincts crawl out onto the pavement as she flees from the man in Central Park. She seeks out help as she approaches a young man taking a walk in the park. Young Robert Mapplethorpe finds himself meeting again with Patti Smith, as she glares at him hoping that he'll pretend to be her boyfriend until the strange man passes. The two of them continue to walk under the starlit sky of New York City – until they both admit they have nowhere to call home.

The city is an amazing place where souls can collide. It is even more magical when they do so by a chance of luck. The two young lovers hop from couch to couch, using art as a medium to numb their lack of materialistic conditions, but rather find other material properties that become much more important to their artistic journey as artists in the city. 

Growing up as a gender-confused child, she found freedom in her artwork. Her masculine-esque features defied images of femininity. The romantic involvement she expresses in Just Kids with Robert Mapplethorpe, lead to his independent discovery of his homosexuality. As she grew up watching her mother perform “female tasks” seemed to be all against her nature. Horses (1975) challenges gender narration as she finds herself writing as a woman, narrating as a man, who then preys on women – exemplified in the opening track of “Gloria.” As a result, the album focuses on a heavily untouched theme in rock n’ roll in the mid-1970s. 

 As one of the most influential punk rockers in the 1970s New York City, Patti Smith pursued a quest to understand and experiment with gender relations and roles at a moment in history where gender roles were idealized in mainstream popular music. Without the guidance from the creative minds of Robert Mapplethorpe, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix to name a few – Smith’s repertoire may not have exceeded the surrealist entity of existence the way it did in history. It was her driving force of colliding sexual politics with art forms that made her debut album, Horses, to be known as one of the best punk rock albums to come out of the 1970s. She transformed the way women are viewed in a misogynistic industry as she performed and grew in settings that gave her the acceptance she needed in an industry that needed her the most.

Just Kids explores Smith’s and Mapplethorpe’s relationship as they live out of a room in the Chelsea Hotel. While housing an array of artists like Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Sid Vicious and Bob Dylan – those walls became a reflection of not only the artists that grew as people but developed their artistic skills day-by-day, paycheck to paycheck. Soulmates is an understatement when looking at the relationship between Mapplethorpe and Smith. Friends, colleagues, roomaties, dreamers, acquaintances, lovers; the list can go on. Just Kids makes the reader want to move to New York City like it’s 1975 again to watch Smith perform a version of “Gloria” on the CBGB stage.

Just Kids fills a void with romantic uncertainties of adolescence. Music, love, poetry, and the 1970s – what could be more satisfying? Watching the relationship of Mapplethorpe and Smith unravel, meeting completely by chance, it gives hope to readers that bliss exists whether it's through a person, a piece of art, or at the doorstep of an old 12-story hotel in the middle of Manhattan.