Just
Kids
Early
days in New York City
by
Patti Smith
For
my 21st birthday, Robert made me a tambourine,
tattooing the goat skin with astrological signs and tying
multi-colored ribbons to its base.
He
put on Tim Buckley’ singing Phantasmagoria in Two,
then he knelt down and handed me a book that he had rebound
in black silk. Inside he had inscribed a few lines of poetry,
portraying us as the gypsy and the fool;, one creating silence,
one listening closely to the silence. In the clanging swirl
of our lives, these roles would reverse many times.
In
the beginning of March, Robert got a temp job as an usher
for the newly-opened Fillmore East. He reported for duty in
an orange jumpsuit. He was looking forward to seeing Tim Buckley.
But when he camer home he was more excited by someone else.
“I saw someone who is going to be really big” he said. It
was Janis Joplin.
© 2010 Patti Smith
Just
Kids,
a new book from poet and singer Patti Smith, is an
accounting of her early years in New York and her
five-year relationship with artist and photographer
Robert Mapplethorpe.
Mapplethorpe
- who shot the cover picture on Smith’s iconic debut
album Horses
- would move on to become one of New York’s most celebrated
photographers.
Before
his 1989 death from an AIDS-related illness, he would
later find notoriety as his work became more provocative
in his depicture of the homosexual lifestyle.
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