TCCDM Dig and Flip: "Just Kids" - Patti Smith (2010)

"Just Kids"...Patti Smith (2010)
304 pages

If you are already a Patti Smith fan, like I am, you're gonna fall in love with her all over again.  If you're just driving by the house to check out her curtains, you're gonna want to pull in the driveway and sit a spell on the porch.  Because “Just Kids” is time well spent.

“Just Kids” is an amazing and extremely personal snapshot about two young people unexpectedly crossing paths and forming what would become an almost unbelievable friendship.  That would be Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe.

But it's much more than that.  The strong connection between these two reads like one of those “stars in alignment” kind of things.  Fate takes the wheel.  Two kids, both compelled by the love of “The Arts” and the need to create...find themselves pulling resources, living month-to-month and week-to-week in the edgiest and unlikeliest parts of New York City where the underground arts and music breathe.

Patti's descriptive share of time spent at the infamous Chelsea Hotel is like being a fly.  And it‘s spooky amazing how Robert and Patti cement themselves into this somewhat private world.  It was also interesting how the famous and the not so famous just regularly bump into each other.  The underground cool.  If you're there...you just fit in.  It was a different time.

In the end, this beautiful memoir is Patti Smith sweetly honoring a ‘last request' from her best friend, Robert Mapplethorpe who died in March of 1989.  To tell everyone about their extraordinary bond that helped see them through it all because no one else would believe it.  Just kids, after all.
"Gloria" - Patti Smith / CBGB (1975)

Good stuff.

 Casey Chambers
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