Down at the sex and drugs and rock and roll club with Richard Hell

A few weeks ago I was saying (shock, horror) I didn't much like Marquee Moon and how - via Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's Please Kill Me - I'd been revisiting the early New York punk scene, including the rather epic creative tussle between Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell. For what it's worth, I plumped for Hell in this big ego-driven battle of the NYC punk poets. Yeah man, I'm down with the charismatic, open-jacketed, marker-pen-on-chest'd leader of the blank generation. But wait a minute! How could I say this? I hardly knew a thing about Mr Hell beyond M&M's book, a Wikipedia entry and a few snippets picked up along the way after hearing (and liking) the Voidoids' first album many years ago. Hmm, an intolerable situation. Well, that's now been rectified because I've sped through Hell's 2013 autobiography I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp on the look-out for much-needed information. And here, dear reader, is what I've learnt:

*Hell takes art and creativity seriously, seeing it as a sort of life mission, but he also apparently wants to distance himself from earnestness and pomposity: "all the most serious art is not only sad but hilarious". 

*The love-hate rivalry between Hell and Verlaine is indeed significant. In the early (pre-music) days of their vagabond-poet existence together in New York (scuffling for money working in bookshops, writing and printing their own experimental poetry) they apparently had a super-intense friendship ("inseparability") which presumably owed a lot to the bond they'd developed in their early years as middle class-ish teenage tearaways in Kentucky. Looking back across the 40-year gap (the void?) between the early 70s and the book's publication, Hell unequivocally says the Verlaine friendship was the "most meaningful" of his life. But - and it's a big but - "in many ways we didn't even like each other". 

*Music for Hell seems to have been a means to do several things he'd longed to do: to be a type of public poet after years of fairly fruitless involvement in New York's underground poetry world; to be a scene- and style-setter along the lines of certain striking types who'd previously impressed him (a self-assured hippie guy wearing an Easy Rider-style tasselled suede jacket seen in a bookshop; teen memories of the "thriving redneck hardasses" from his Lexington school with their "pegged jeans nonchalantly clinging" and "short hair waxed in precise furrows"); and to be a sex symbol who could effortlessly attract women. Music as music seems to have been secondary, though, for sure, he has certain preferences on this score too.

*Image-awareness is a big thing. He says, "Part of what excited me about rock and roll was all the languages of it, clothes and hair most definitely included". And he talks about arriving at "the haircut" (meaning his ragged-y proto-punk hairstyle) "by analysis". Yes, analysis. He reckoned it was to differentiate himself from what he called (rather dubiously) the two basic "innovative" hairstyles of rock and roll: the Elvis ducktail and the Beatles mop top.

*Hell seems to have been pretty keenly aware of the value of publicity and the world of PR and journalism. He saw Malcolm McLaren in action with the late-phase New York Dolls and was acquainted with some of New York's fast-talking arts world hustlers (Andrew Wylie, Victor Bockris, Terry Ork etc). Already something of a self-promoting would-be NYC writer himself, at one point he even wrote an early Lester Bangs-style review (unpublished) of Television.

*Hell seems to have been in numerous intense sexual relationships throughout the 70s and early-80s which, rather wearyingly, we're told about over and over again. I dunno man, I'm not sure I want to hear about this stuff for page after page. Then again, though I don't necessarily find it that thrilling to read (for about the fourth time) some version of how "under coke my brain and cock were one", it is, of course, his sex and drugs and rock and roll life he's recounting so I guess he's entitled to er, spurt it out. And, to be fair, it was interesting to hear from him that he found the early London punk scene almost asexual, something I'm pretty sure Jon Savage has also remarked on. Also, STOP PRESS: in late 1975 he had a six-week thing with Nancy Spungen! Gulp.

*The influence of the Max's Kansas City/Warhol arts scene is acknowledged, and he and Verlaine evidently went to Max's because of the interesting/connected people to be found there. He also mentions how he and Verlaine would frequent other downtown "artists' bars", again simply because that's where they felt at home and hoped to meet people. He and Verlaine seem to have consciously immersed themselves in the city's alt-arts scene. 

*Music-wise, Hell has a big thing for the New York Dolls (a good description of one of their early shows is below), while also name-checking the Stooges, the Velvet Underground and certain records from the Rolling Stones - in other words, all pretty standard proto-punk stuff. Additionally, though, he mentions how he couldn't get the music-obsessed Voidoids guitarist Robert Quine into reggae, though - slightly curiously - Hell doesn't actually discuss his own interest in reggae. 

*Hell treads an interesting line between out and out revisionism (this is how it was) and a shrugged gesture of "there is no objective truth anyway". He's clearly aware of the sticky network of stories that have accreted to the whole topic of the downtown scene and punk's origins and he (mostly) disdains to get involved with score-settling and truth-claiming. Wise move, if you ask me - imagine 250 pages of that.

*Hell reckons he never liked authority figures (along with disliking crowds, eg the New York hippie gatherings) and he says he swerved one or two semi-offers of help from McClaren because he didn't want to be controlled by an older manager figure. 

*Among the many interesting cross currents between Hell and the Sex Pistols is the fact that Hell says he started singing Blank Generation in a "more aggressive style" after hearing how the Sex Pistols sounded, while he was also impressed by Rotten's active contempt for the whole showbiz process of wanting to be liked/admired in interviews.

Book and sunglasses: blogger's own

So yeah, these are a few of my main impressions from reading Hell's very absorbing book. There's arguably a sex overload and the drug-taking also, in my view, takes its toll (and not just on Hell's bodily and psychological health), but he's a genuinely interesting person with a lot to say about life, art, friendship, ambition and much else. But back to music. here's how he describes a New York Dolls gig at the Mercer Arts Center from 1972:

" ... their music, though simple and sloppy, was physically thrilling. Their gigs were unlike any I'd experienced. They were parties, they were physical orgies, without much distinction between the crowd and the band: the band felt like an expression of the dressed-up avant-garde teenagers, and all the downtown hipster cognoscenti who'd materialised from the gutter glitter of the whole sexy area and history itself. It was like some funny dirty religious revel. The band was theatrical and mocking, self-mocking - semicamp, like a bright crumpled-tissue gift presentation of the weird things inside."

Later, when discussing Quine's music connoisseurship (his huge record collection and 100-plus Fender guitars), Hell draws a line between himself and the older, thornier Quine, saying, "I myself didn't actually listen to punk music, like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, for pleasure, but I liked and respected their albums" (which Quine didn't). He reckons that the Neon Boys (first incarnation of Television) and early Television were effectively his "punk period" and that when - a good two years later - punk broke in the UK he'd already musically veered away towards something "more eccentric and complex". And - like a million idealistic young artist-musicians before and after him - Hell was apparently thoroughly chewed up by the record company sharks who saw a good thing in Richard Hell And The Voidoids (a dirty slice of the scuzzy CBGBs action). Hell says that Instant Records, the production company which brokered the Voidoids' punitive deal with Sire records (he apparently received no royalties from the LP for an incredible 17 years), was run by the music biz "gangsters" Richard Gottehrer and Marty Thau, two people who - it's fair to say - probably weren't on Hell's Christmas card list for many years afterwards. 

So what else is in Hell's book? Plenty, but don't worry I'm not going to bore you going through it all. A few things deserve a mention though. His remarks on the UK (from the Heartbreakers and Voidoids tours) are funny and off-key/wrong all at the same time. "Since the sixties", he says, "rock and roll bands had been all that England had to be proud of". He castigates Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons for their "moronic" anti-intellectualism and has this memorable put-down of British cuisine and street life: "The countless English storefronts selling spuds and spuds only. Every vile dead block its potato shop". Fair cop Rich, but at another point he blots his anti-British copybook very badly by saying that cricket (supposed epitome of "Englishness") isn't played ruthlessly (unlike the quintessentially American baseball) but is some kind of genteel pastime "to get exercise". Owzat for a culural misunderstanding? 

But no, for me Hell is generally on the money. He's undoubtedly narcissistic (there's a touch of preening in his self-descriptions) and even close to sexist when recounting his affairs (did we need his praise of various women's breasts?) but he's thoughtful, generally sympathetic and - perhaps most of all - open-minded and has a genuine belief in creativity and self-expression. This is the major takeaway for me. At one point the book has a whole passage on how Hell tussled with Lester Bangs over the meaning of Blank Generation, with Hell countering Bangs' accusation of over-negativity with an assertion that the song was a way of saying you could invent your own reality, that you were part of a new, undefined "-------" generation. True, Hell says he was actually "playing this up" to rebut Bangs and that the song did have plenty of negativity in it, but still, he clearly believed in the power of self-invention and even this somewhat theatrical negativity was, I tend do think, a form of creativity, a scorched-earth levelling of the ground (and barriers) in front of you. 

To Hell, CBGBs was more than just a vile-smelling, sticky-floored Bowery dive bar. In a sort of manifesto for the venue and the entire early punk scene (which he also takes more than a little credit for personally conjuring into being), he says: 

"This was the essence of CBGBs then and there - that we, with our rejected and extreme set of beliefs and values and intentions, had managed to materialise an environment in which we were not outside, but at home ourselves. We were the positive standards of being, rather than examples of failure, depravity, criminality, and ugliness. It was a world of rock and roll and poetry and anger and revelry and drunkenness and sex, but all specific."

Yes indeed, Richy the runaway, home at last. Anyway, the final word in this brief descent into the subterranean punk world of the Lower East Side has to go to the famous Hell-Verlaine psychodrama. In the early, impoverished and super-marginal days of their New York life together Hell says that their shared ennui was virtually a creative force ("we were so bored and isolated we might try anything"), but when music (always more Verlaine's thing than Hell's) became their vehicle for something artistically important and things actually began to happen, then, says Hell, Verlaine's personality became an increasing problem for him, the "walled-in" persona, the "coldness and egotism", the "self-obsessed paranoia". In one memorable passage, Hell describes how Verlaine the guitar virtuoso would coldly judge Hell's still amateur bass playing in the early Television days: "Tom is treating me as if I were a moron, barely supressing his disgust, clenching his jaw, tightening his lips, rolling his eyes, sighing and flittering with a saintly patience ...". Oh no, the jaw-clenching saintly patience of a God-like guitar genius looking down on lesser mortals: truly an excruciating predicament. So Hell probably did the only thing he could in the circumstances. He accepted that his time in Television was over and teamed up with Johnny Thunders to enjoy the loose retro-tinged rock and roll pleasures of the Heartbreakers. The punk-poet of the Bowery and the bedroom was hooked on heroin but he was also free (free at last). That's right! Turn over the record, it's a new pleasure, a new pleasure ...