We were just kids, too

A couple of weeks ago I finally read Patti Smith's remarkable book, "Just Kids." I captured my immediate reaction to the book in this brief review on my Tumblr:

READ THIS BOOK! 

Patti Smith has delivered a love song, a prose poem, a elegy to her life with Robert Mapplethorpe, and to a time and place when the word of possibilities was cracking open for those of us who came of age in the 60s and 70s. If you are of that age, this book will make your heart tremble with memory. If you are a young hipster, this book will tell you who the people are that you may see only as aging baby boomers, or your parents.

Read this review of the book, which includes a recent video of Patti Smith performing “Because the Night.” I love watching her perform this classic at her age now, being as authentic to her soul as she was 30 or 40 years ago. She looks fabulous — an older version of her younger self, not attempting in any way to be anyone other that who she is.

A friend, who is a young, queer hipster in her late twenties, responded with this:

[Just Kids] just totally made me lustful for living in the Chelsea Hotel while catching glimpses of boroughs and digging through used book bins and traveling to Paris with zero money.

Me too, my friend. But more than creating a longing for Patti Smith's time and place gone by, Just Kids cracked open for me with vivid clarity another time, not long after hers, when I was a young artist who was part of the art scene on the West Bank in Minneapolis during the mid- to late-seventies. So indulge me as I remember my own time and place gone by.


We were just kids, too. Many of us met as BFA (Bachelor of Fine Arts) students in the studio arts program at the University of Minnesota. Most of us, but not all, were recent arrivals from our white, suburban, middle class childhoods (one exception was a neo-Croatian, Iron Range refugee), which made it possible to romanticize our roach infested run-down apartments, our student loan-financed poverty, and the self imposed austerity of thrift store clothes and broken down furniture as artist's chic (I once dragged a mattress from a dumpster for my bed). We imagined ourselves bohemians, visionaries, artists, and activists. 


We were a decade too young to be hippies, born in the mid-fifties (Smith, born in 1946 is ten years older than me). So as we created and lived our own wannabe version of her New York art scene, we were copying the recent past.


We drank coffee by day and pondered the meaning of life and art, liberally quoting from Anaïs Nin, Allen Ginsberg, Nietzsche, and all the beat poets. We roamed the West Bank by night, frequenting the Viking, Palmers, and the 400 Bar where we listened to Koerner, Ray, and Glover and other local greats. We danced to Willie Murphy and the Bumblebees at the Mixed Blood Theater and in the old Dania Hall. Our Chelsea Hotel was the Holtzermann Building on Cedar Avenue, a block long string of storefronts with oddly shaped converted warehouse one-room apartments above them.


Many of the music influences Smith references were also ours, such as Jim Morrison and the Doors, but she was our influence, too. Horses was released in 1975. When I first heard Gloria on that album, which begins with Smith seductively, defiantly declaring "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine," before cranking into a punk rock cover of that old classic, she became my female artist/musician hero. When I later learned that line was from "Oath," a poem she had already written, I loved her even more and knew that in her art l could find inspiration for the art I longed to create. 


Like Smith, I knew I always wanted to be an artist and starting writing poetry and painting when I was twelve or so. I would walk from our suburban rambler to Southdale, where there was a bookstore with a large art section. I'd stand there with all the adults paging through arts books of Modigliani, Monet, Van Gogh, Matisse, and Rothko, astounded and inspired. I'd then walk home and paint feverishly or write poetry.


When I got to college my goal was to become a great artist. My urge was to mix mediums, genres, and to make experimental, performance art. In the seventies, the studio arts program at the University of Minnesota was housed in a run-down former warehouse and the professors were hugely influenced by abstract expressionism and the New York art scene of the forties and fifties. de Kooning was to be our model by which our own art should be judged.


There wasn't a lot of room for experimentation, but I gravitated to the teachers who encouraged it. I scribbled lines of my poetry into drawings and painting, blurred lines between paint, pencil, and oil pastel. But I wanted more. I wanted performance art. So when a visiting artist offered a course in just that, I leaped to enroll. I vividly remember my first attempt at a "performance piece." On an early spring day, I walked the teacher and class single file into the woods outside the studio arts building and near the Mississippi River to the discovery of a small pond I had fashioned with goldfish swimming (and dying) in it. Traffic's "The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys" was playing on a cassette deck and then as I turned down the sound, I read a poem I had penned about the environment, how "man" was destroying it, and how all the pollution would one day kill all living things. 


Really, really bad stuff. Forgive me for I was just a kid. But know this - without Patti Smith, I would have never imagined I could stretch the boundaries of what I could claim as art.


After finishing Just Kids and having this flood of memories open, I was wild for Patti Smith all over again. I downloaded Horses, played it on repeat in my car for a week, and watched a recent live performance of "Because the Night" on You Tube over and over. Most of all, I yearned to know more of who Patti Smith is now, in her mid-sixties. I imagined sitting down the two of us - me, a regular person, and her, the godmother of punk, famous poet and writer, and a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of fame - and chilling and chatting about music, art, poetry, kids, motherhood. About our aging selves and that time really not so very long ago when we were both... just kids.

Patti Smith, then and now.