The most indelible image of 1970s New York City punk rock cool remains Patti Smith staring down the camera from the cover of her seminal 1975 album, Horses. Defiantly androgynous and radiating subterranean charisma, she instantly redefined the notion of a rock star for generations of smart, artsy outsiders to follow.
The iconic portrait—a starkly beautiful provocation in high-contrast black-and-white—was the work of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, an artist who visually established the gritty Gotham demimonde in the public imagination as definitively as Smith did through her music and poetry.
Amazingly, Smith and Mapplethorpe were more than one-time collaborators who happened to capture lightning in a bottle. They were also best friends who had supported and inspired each other while struggling in total obscurity and abject poverty at the storied Hotel Chelsea before emerging as leading lights of bleeding-edge 20th-century cool.
In Just Kids, Smith told their story in her characteristically ecstatic, lyrical prose, evoking an era of rebellion, decadence, and discovery from the perspective of an integral participant who survived to tell the tale. It’s a touching tribute to Mapplethorpe the man and artist (Smith notes, “Our relationship was such that I knew what he would want and the quality of what he deserved”) and an elegy for a cultural moment that has inspired boundary-breaking artists ever since.
Just Kids earned rave reviews (it was praised by Kirkus as “riveting and exquisitely crafted”) and won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2010, kicking off a wave of high-profile, literate rock memoirs from the likes of Keith Richards, Bruce Springsteen, and Questlove.
Arthur Smith is an Indie editor.
