Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe arrived in New York together in 1967 — two young people from New Jersey with no money, no connections, and no clear plan beyond the shared conviction that wherever they needed to be was New York and that what they needed to do was make things. They were 20 years old. They moved into the Chelsea Hotel. They were each other’s primary audience, primary critic, and primary sustaining belief for the years before either of them became famous enough to have an audience that was not each other.
Mapplethorpe was a photographer who had not yet fully discovered photography — he was making collage art, assemblage pieces, objects. Smith was a poet who had not yet discovered that poetry could be performed in the way she was about to discover it could be performed — as something physical, dangerous, and directly connected to rock and roll rather than to the academic tradition that poetry inhabited. Both of them were in the process of becoming what they would become, and the becoming was something they witnessed in each other at close range for years.
The specific night that Mapplethorpe has described most often in interviews about Smith — and that appears in his account of their relationship in Smith’s memoir Just Kids — was an early performance at St. Mark’s Church in New York, sometime in the early 1970s, before Smith’s band had formed and before Horses had made her one of the most significant figures in the history of American punk. She was performing poems, with guitar accompaniment from Lenny Kaye, in a church that was hosting a series of poetry events and that was filled with the specific audience of people who attend poetry events in Lower Manhattan in the early 1970s — young, politically engaged, artistically serious, and not expecting what they were about to receive.
What they received, by every account from people who were present at those early St. Mark’s readings, was something that had not previously existed in that form — the collision of poetry’s precision and rock and roll’s physical energy, delivered by a woman who did not perform the collision but was the collision, who moved through the language with her body and her voice in a way that the separate traditions of poetry and rock had not previously accommodated. She was inventing something. The audience knew it. Mapplethorpe, watching from wherever in the room he had placed himself to watch, understood it immediately in the way that people with genuine aesthetic intelligence understand when something new is in front of them.
He told her afterward that she had changed what rock and roll could be. He said this not as a compliment in the conventional sense — not as encouragement or praise — but as a statement of observed fact, the way you might tell someone that the weather has changed. Something had happened and he was reporting it. Smith has said she did not believe him at the time — that her own sense of what she was doing was too interior and too uncertain for such a large claim to land cleanly. She believed him later.
Horses was released in 1975 and was produced by John Cale, who had left the Velvet Underground and brought with him the specific understanding of the avant-garde’s relationship with rock that made him the right person to capture what Smith was doing. The album opened with Gloria — a reworking of Van Morrison’s song, beginning with the line “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine” — and established immediately that this was something outside the categories that existed.
Mapplethorpe died of AIDS-related complications in March 1989. He was 42. Smith has spoken about his death as the loss from which her life is permanently divided — before and after, with everything after carrying the weight of everything before. She continues to perform. She continues to recite his name in concerts, as she has since his death, at moments in the music that require the presence of someone who is no longer present.