“The most successful thing I’ve done”: The one project Patti Smith considered a blessing
Some of the biggest musical gifts don’t feel that way in the moment. Anyone can spend their time making the most technical piece of work of their entire career, but there might not be a chance that anyone relates to it if it doesn’t have any semblance of heart behind it. What Patti Smith did always featured her passion before anything else, though, and some of her best work is about trying to look at the real person through the pages of lyrics or the roaring guitars behind her.
Then again, it’s not like she didn’t have a healthy respect for rock and roll. Half the reason why she made Horses was to occupy the same walls that Jimi Hendrix helped build and leave her own mark on rock music. And while most people consider her the progenitor of punk because of the way she tore through songs like ‘My Generation’ in her early years, it’s drastically different from what everyone thought.
Much like people like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, or Lou Reed before her, Smith understood the importance of every word that she uttered onstage or in the studio. There are plenty of artists who have made an entire career playing rock and roll but have said very little, but whenever listening to a record like Wave or Radio Ethiopia, anyone can pick up on a different layer of what she’s feeling, whether that’s heartache, anger, or love.
Like all of the legends before her, Smith seemed to actually care about the medium’s future. She wanted to make sure that what she did helped carry on the idealism of what rock and roll stood for at the start of her career, but when looking back on her career, it was always going to come back to those early days of woodshedding when anything felt possible.
Although any by-the-numbers documentary usually likes to gloss over the salad days of any band and get right to the action, Just Kids is one of the most quintessentially human projects that any high-profile musician has taken on. While many people would usually look at any musical autobiography as a fluff piece, this is one of the most genuine depictions of friendship ever made, as Smith talks about the importance of Robert Maplethorpe in her life and how their time together helped inform how she lived her life going forward.
And since the book had become a mainstay for fans and musicians alike, Smith considered it one of the greatest gifts of her career, saying, “Just Kids is the most successful thing I’ve ever done. It has sold over a million copies. It’s in 43 languages. Kids will stop me on the street, take a copy out of their backpack, covered with wine and coffee stains and pencil scribblings, and ask me to sign it. It’s such a blessing.”
The book itself might be far from an easy read when talking about Maplethorpe’s declining health and eventual death, but Smith never saw it as a purely painful endeavour. Make no mistake, losing someone that close is going to do a number on anyone’s psyche, but Just Kids stands as an affirmation that all those years laughing together were not in vain and that she has become a far greater person for having someone that special in her life.
If anything, Just Kids should be mandatory listening not only for artists of any stripe but by anyone that’s looking at the darkness that comes with everyday life. Yes, many pieces of our existence can grind us down and do a number on our souls, but it sometimes takes the right words for everyone to realise that there is still some beauty in the world that is worth protecting.
