The book Johnny Depp called a “poetic masterpiece”
Long before the days of Captain Jack Sparrow and even before his formative roles as Edward Scissorhands and Cry Baby’s Wade Walker, Johnny Depp aspired to be a rock musician. After dropping out of school a year early, Depp began to perform profusely with his band, The Kids, eventually growing weary of their limited success.
In 1983, Depp married a make-up artist named Lori Anne Allison, the sister of his band’s bass player. Through his then-wife, Depp met the aspiring actor Nicolas Cage, who turned his eyes towards an acting career.
“I ended up acting by accident,” Depp said during his defamation trial in 2022. “I was a musician, and I moved out to LA with my band when I was 20 years old…. There were a couple of things that happened where the band split up. I remember I was filling out a couple of job applications with a friend of mine.”
“He happens to be an actor less known than he is now, Nicolas Cage,” Depp continued. “I was filling out applications at video stores, clothing stores just to be able to pay the rent… Nic Cage said why don’t you meet my agent… cause I think you’re an actor… You could be an actor… I said I’ll meet anybody. I’ll do anything at this point.”
“I didn’t have any desire to be an actor,” Depp confessed. “I was a musician, but the fact that these people were going to pay me what I found to be a ludicrous sum of money. It was kinda the SAG minimum, it was $1,284 a week… I’d never seen that kind of dough in my life.”
In recent years, Depp has returned to his original passion for music, touring with his band Hollywood Vampires. He also worked on a musical project with Jeff Beck before the guitar virtuoso’s death in January 2023.
Over the years, Depp has never been far from the world of rock ‘n’ roll, whether it’s his 1990s friendship with Oasis or his more recent brother-sister bond with The Godmother of Punk, Patti Smith.
“I met Johnny [Depp] about five years ago,” Patti Smith told The Sun in 2012. “He and Vanessa [Paradis, his wife] and their daughter came to my concert in Los Angeles and said hello backstage. We just really hit it off. I lost my brother and really mourned him, and it felt like he sent Johnny Depp to be my new brother.”
Music was naturally a prominent feature of the pair’s conversation, but intriguingly, their bond formed over a shared interest in literature. “We love the same books,” she continued. “We talk endlessly about French literature and Jack Kerouac and Dylan Thomas. We just have fun and a laugh and he’s such a great musician.”
After establishing a friendship, Smith penned ‘Nine’, a song to thank Depp for helping to fill the hole left by her brother’s passing. The song features on Smith’s 2012 album Banga, which focused on “unique dreams and observations” and a “wide range of human experience,” according to Smith.
In 2010, Smith published her bestselling memoir, Just Kids. The book mainly focussed on the singer-songwriter’s past relationship with the late artist Robert Mapplethorpe, who famously took the cover photograph for Smith’s masterpiece album of 1975, Horses.
“I didn’t write it to be cathartic,” Smith said of the book in a 2014 interview with Classic Rock. “I wrote it because Robert asked me to… Our relationship was such that I knew what he would want and the quality of what he deserved. So that was my agenda for writing that book. I wrote it to fulfil my vow to him, which was on his deathbed. In finishing, I did feel that I’d fulfilled my promise.”
The book was published with the tagline: “It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation.”
On the back of the hardback edition of Just Kids, Depp appraises the memoir: “Patti Smith has graced us with a poetic masterpiece, a rare and privileged invitation to unlatch a treasure chest never before breached.”
Listen to ‘Nine’ by Patti Smith below.
