We Were Children - Patti Smith - Book

It was the summer Coltrane died. The hippies raised their empty arms, and China detonated the hydrogen bomb. Jimi Hendrix set his guitar on fire in Monterey. It was the Summer of Love. And in that changing, inhospitable climate, a chance encounter changed the course of my life: it was the summer I met Robert Mapplethorpe. It was July 1967, and they were children, but from then on Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe forged a friendship that would end only with the great photographer’s death in 1989. That is what this splendid memoir is about: the life these two artists shared, both enthusiastic and passionate, as they strode across the outskirts of New York to reach the heart of the new art world. They ended up settling in the Chelsea Hotel and became leading figures in a world now lost, where Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, and his crowd held sway, and the great bands that defined the final years of the twentieth century were born, while AIDS ravaged the city. Far from being a sad, nostalgic book, Just Kids is a tribute to unqualified friendship, and its pages, brimming with vitality and humor, bring back the flavor of that great city where, for a time, almost anything was possible. “Just Kids is an ode to Mapplethorpe, but it’s also a love letter to the art of 1970s New York.” Time Out New York