I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp

by Richard Hell

  The women at CBGB were interesting too. There were intellectual high school girls and band-happy go-go dancers, pretty photographers, girl journalists, and slumming rich nightclubbing types, not to mention women band members. The topless dancers probably predominated, at least in my consciousness, but the categories overlapped. Some of the topless dancers were also intellectual teenagers who wrote about bands and came from uptown (which pretty well describes Kathy Acker, come to think of it). Most just liked to get high and spend their nights with young musicians. I liked almost all of them.

  Being a rock and roll musician was like being a pimp. It was about making young girls want to pay money to be near you. That was the relationship with the anonymous audience, and the audience you actually met as well. I was always ready to fall in love, but I had noticed that love comes in spurts, and that was appreciated by the women. Many of them expected or even required that their boyfriends neglect them a little—it proved how important the boyfriends were. (Of course, most of the dancers came from unhappy family backgrounds; relationships were expected to include abuse.)

  The go-go dancers made a lot more money than the band members did, and they shared it freely. One of the most powerful mental images I retain from those days involves a girlfriend from a few months later, in 1975, after I’d left Television and had started in with the Heartbreakers. Her name was Carol and she was a nineteen-year-old topless dancer from rural Pennsylvania. She had long straight natural blond hair and the face of a confused cheerleader. Her body was like a compilation of American male fantasies: so youthfully ripe that, while having no excess, it seemed to be straining to burst from itself, with breasts that lifted as if they were scenting the air, an athlete’s high butt that sheltered under it that little concave-sided triangle of light between the tops of her thighs, behind the soft lush see-through-blond pubic hair; and she was uncomplicated and good-natured and desirous to please.

  I was doing junk pretty often by then, but it still felt deluxe. I was sure that the drug was outlawed because the arrogant rich wanted it to themselves. Sticking a needle in my arm felt adult, like I was really in charge of myself finally, running my own destiny, out from under. It was more independent than any other choice I’d ever made.

  Carol often had to work at night dancing in midtown, so she wasn’t always able to catch second sets at the club. She gave me the keys to her apartment, and, after I was paid for a gig—maybe $50 on a good night—I’d likely go cop a couple of bags of dope and then let myself into her place to wait until she got off work at two or three AM.

  One of those late nights, I was lying alone in semidarkness in her big bed in that continuous soft slo-mo rippling of dope bliss, dreaming and drifting, when she let herself in. The trebly crunch of the key in the door distracted me out of my nod. She saw me and broke into smiles and jumped up, in her miniskirt and tight blouse, onto the bed, bright-eyed, straddling my torso, standing, center panel of creased 3-D panties directly above my eyes, and reached into her pockets and purses to lift out fistfuls and fistfuls of soft crinkled money she released to float down all over me.

  By the winter of 1974–75, Tom was shutting me out beyond a doubt. He had not only stopped allowing most of my songs onto set lists, but he’d told me not to move around onstage while he sang. He didn’t want any attention distracted from himself. The last straw came when Virgin records asked for a demo recording of the band, to be produced by Brian Eno. Out of six songs to be recorded, Tom would play only one of mine, “Blank Generation,” and he performed it like a novelty song.

  In early 1975, Malcolm invited us to open for the Commie red-leather Dolls at the Little Hippodrome ballroom in midtown, in what would turn out to be the full Dolls’ last New York show, on February 28, 1975. It was also one of my last appearances with Television. In late March, a week after I quit the band, I got a call at Cinemabilia from Johnny Thunders. He said that he and the Dolls’ drummer, Jerry Nolan, had just left the band, and wanted to know if I would join them to sing, write songs, and play bass in a new group to be called the Heartbreakers.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I didn’t know Johnny that well. I’d had a few drinks with him, and he’d seen me in Television a few times, but I didn’t know he was so into me that he’d ask me to make a band with him. I didn’t hesitate. It increased my respect for him! I wanted to make tough, frantic music, and that’s what Johnny did, and he was the most exciting guitar-playing stage presence of the time.

  Jerry had named the Heartbreakers. It wasn’t awful, and I didn’t want to start the band with an argument. We did a photo session before we even had a rehearsal. We went over to the grungy, broke-down Hudson River waterfront and posed for some pimply, frayed, windblown pictures for mellow, goodhearted Bob Gruen, the Dolls’ camp follower and house photographer. Johnny still had the ratty black stacked-up super-long hair that’s imitated by every glam heavy-metal mug to this day. Nolan wore his natty Irish/Italian doo-wopper Queens street-style getup, which often included white or two-tone shoes and sharply creased form-fitting shirts and pants in bright colors. Somewhat Soupy Sales. I was a bit shaggier on top than usual—I wasn’t careful about keeping my haircut in prime shape—and wore tight black jeans with some burn holes in them (left them too long to dry in the oven one night), scuffed jazz dance shoes, and a ragged suit jacket over my torn T-shirt.

  pimply, frayed, windblown

  Our rehearsals were casual. Gruen took more pictures at our first one, at the loft the Dolls kept on Twenty-Third Street. He shot us outside on the fire escape. Malcolm was there that afternoon too. He was a little worried about me. He was afraid that I might be wasting time with Johnny and Jerry, or, worse, that it could be dangerous to my health, that I’d end up as a junkie. I didn’t really realize it at the time, but Johnny’s and Jerry’s drug use played a big part in their departure from the Dolls. They had chippies—rudimentary drug habits—closer to full-blown addiction than me. I thought they’d just gotten frustrated with the way things had slowed down for the Dolls and didn’t like the disapproval of their drug proclivities from others in the group, but it was a little past that. Malcolm was not judgmental but he was down on narcotics. He took me aside and reminded me that I might be better off coming to London, where he would help me get a new start. I was happy about the Heartbreakers though, and I didn’t want a controlling manager.

  Johnny and Jerry had gotten used to a higher standard of living than me, but our careers were still pretty scroungy. We’d be lending each other a few bucks here and there. Everybody was free with what money there was, as poor people will be. It was another couple of months before I was able to quit Cinemabilia.

  Through connections of Johnny’s we got the use of a beat-up rehearsal loft in SoHo, where we practiced three or four days a week, and would usually cop a bag of dope each afterwards. There was speed around that year too and we’d use that sometimes. A friend of the band was Frenchy, another Dolls-entourage survivor, sometimes referred to as the Dolls’ “valet.” He was a dedicated speed freak. That whole Dolls gang was a ball of nonstop hedonism, though David and Syl were a bit more sober.

  Life during most of the year I spent with the Heartbreakers was the best I would have in a band, in terms of good times. Dope was still nothing but fun, Johnny and Jerry were easygoing, and the group had a great sound and style. We were popular. I was the principal singer of the band, though Johnny sang four or five of his own songs. His songs, unambitious in ways, were often more powerful than mine. He and Jerry had already been playing them for a while, and not only had they jelled, but they were made to existing patterns, usually fifties and early sixties rock and roll, like Eddie Cochran or girl groups. I was still trying to teach myself how to write songs that would do what I wanted them to. But our sets were driving and rocking, and at their best they combined the different things that Johnny and I brought—my intellectual ambitions and lost-boy affect with Johnny’s defiant junkie prowling. I got to live the ideal I’d had in mind when I
came to New York to be a poet—to have a well-placed platform for saying things to the world, and an audience that thrived on it and wanted to have sex with me because of it, and I ran my own life, had no boss. And there were drugs and money.

  One late afternoon hanging out with Roberta, sitting in a bar in midtown, I didn’t feel like going to rehearsal so I got her to call the loft and say I couldn’t make it because I’d been arrested. It worked perfectly; plausible, but partly for being too crazy to be made up, and anyway, Johnny and Jerry were usually fine with calling off a rehearsal.

  I moved at this time, in early 1975, from Elizabeth Street to an apartment on Twelfth Street between First Avenue and Avenue A. I didn’t move after that. The building was right on the border between the seedy youth area of the East Village, which still housed a lot of poor East European immigrants too, and the full-blown ghetto of deep Alphabet City, with its drugs and unromantic poverty. On Tenth Street and Avenue A, two blocks from me, in front of the abandoned corner storefront that had formerly housed the Psychedelicatessen, New York’s first hippie head shop, milled a mob of twelve-to-fifteen-year-old heroin runners. I could walk around the corner and give a young teenager $3 and he’d be back in two minutes with a bag of dope. The story was that, as juveniles, they couldn’t be sent to jail.

  The junk trade was booming. Whole local blocks, in the course of a year or two, morphed from dwellings into darkness into drug hives. Hordes of junkies slipped money under hallway doors in abandoned buildings, and tiny taped-shut glassine envelopes were slid back. The dope’s brand name would be rubber-stamped on the package, sometimes with a graphic logo, like “Toilet” or “Tombstone.” The best brands would draw crowds of shoppers in lines that wound down tenement stairs and halfway up the burned-out block, in a single file kept orderly by the dealers’ crew. Sometimes a scout would yell “Bajando!” and it would echo in relays around a few blocks and everyone would reluctantly disperse for a few minutes until the cops passed by.

  Dee Dee would often come over to my apartment to visit and we would go around the corner and get ourselves each a bag of dope from the baby runners. Dee Dee was practically a baby himself, in his boy bob and his eagerness. It never occurred to me at the time, but I’ve read that Roberta says that Dee Dee secretly would have liked to be a Heartbreaker. This might have been true a couple or five years later, when he’d become a hard-core junkie. I can imagine him chafing at the regimented comic book style of the Ramones and wishing he could be in a real happy-go-lucky bad-boy band that attracted the more fun girls and wouldn’t try to hamper his drug use. But back in 1975 he seemed happy in the Ramones; he was excited about them. At that time he didn’t know any of the Heartbreakers but me.

  Dee Dee, like Johnny and Jerry, and Richard Lloyd, and Gruen, never much cared about the quantity of factual content in the stories he told. He was probably the most uninhibited fabricator of punk anecdotes of them all, especially since he eventually published a lot of “autobiography” and gave a lot of interviews and was such a comic riot. He was like a boy Marilyn Monroe or Jessica Simpson with his cute dizzy-dumb persona. In rock and roll, in show business, there’s not much value placed on integrity. People say and do what serves their interests and what seems entertaining. That’s just as well, if for no other reason than that it’s inevitable. Ultimately what difference does it make what actually happened? Things look different from different perspectives, and the conquerors write history; and what reality do the stories of the past have except as entertainment and mythology? Obviously, “reality” is slippery anyway. “Print the legend,” as advised in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

  Still, to me, it’s interesting to try to figure out what’s actually going on, what really happened. I want to get the most accurate idea I can of the way things are. To me, that’s a lot of what “art” is about. Of course I have my vested interests too: even disregarding any pride involved, my earning power depends partly on my reputation and my role in past events, so I might try to straighten the record where I regard it as misrepresenting me. But I try to be as faithful to what happened as I can, however what happened might reflect on me. I want that to be part of my reputation too. Whereas Dee Dee’s purposes were served more by keeping it funny, and maybe “funny” is more real than “true.”

  I always liked seeing Dee Dee, and to my mind he was the best example of a certain rock and roll essence that punk sought to embody. He was a street kid who was purely talented—he wrote most of the great Ramones songs—and who radiated lovable innocence, even though he’d worked, for lack of any better way to earn a living, as a gay hustler on the street. Or maybe that’s where he’d learned the innocence. Like Jerry Nolan, he’d been a hairdresser for a while, too. He had a strongly defined personality—that funny dizzy dumb style—that he had to have developed as a defense. He was like a toddler, stumbling and misunderstanding what just happened, but who recovers instantly to plow ahead grinning proudly, endearingly, hilariously. With him the comedy was deliberate, if so deeply habitual that it became who he was. The other side of his childlike goofiness was his tantrums. But he was so funny, usually about himself. My favorite example is something he said for a piece I did about the Ramones for Hit Parader in 1976. (It was the first time I’d done any journalism and the first article about the Ramones in a national publication.)

  I always liked seeing Dee Dee

  The band had gathered at Arturo Vega’s loft for the interview. Arturo was the Ramones’ art director and best friend and main booster. I turned on the tape recorder and started asking questions. In a minute, Dee Dee was explaining the group’s songs and he said the first one they’d written was “I Don’t Wanna Walk Around with You,” and the next one was “I Don’t Wanna Get Involved with You,” and then “I Don’t Wanna Go Down to the Basement.” I don’t wanna this and I don’t wanna that. Finally he offered, “We didn’t write a positive song until ‘Now I Want to Sniff Some Glue.’” Someone who was actually dumb would never be able to think of that, which of course makes it even funnier.

  Dee Dee is the best punk example of a rock and roll star in part because of that combination of his talent and his personal style, but especially because it’s hard to imagine that he could have succeeded at anything else. The Sex Pistols famously screamed, “No future!” at the end of “God Save the Queen.” People made a big deal about how progressive it was that a hit band could sarcastically rage about social conditions. But the noteworthy thing to me about the “no future” subject isn’t the Sex Pistols’ anger about their boring prospects as citizens, but rather that the lack of a future is an unacknowledged foundation of rock and roll. There is no future in being an adolescent, and rock and roll is the music of adolescence.

  Rock and roll is the only art form at which teenagers are not only capable of excelling but that actually requires that one be a teenager, more or less, to practice it at all. This is the way that “punk” uniquely embodies rock and roll. It explicitly asserts and demonstrates that the music is not about virtuosity. Rock and roll is about natural grace, about style and instinct. Also the inherent physical beauty of youth. You don’t have to play guitar well or, by any conventional standard, sing well to make great rock and roll; you just have to have it, have to be able to recognize it, have to get it. And half of that is about simply being young, meaning full of crazed sex drive and sensitivity to the object of romantic and sexual desire, and full of anger about being condescended to by adults, and disgust and anger about all the lies you’re being fed, and all the control you’ve been subjected to, by those complacent adults. And a deep desire for some fun. And, though rock and roll is about being cool, you don’t have to be cool to make real rock and roll—sometimes the most innocuous and pathetic fumblers only become graced by the way they shine in songs. And this is half of what makes the music the art of adolescence—that it doesn’t require any verifiable skill. It’s all essence, and it’s available to those who, to all appearances, have nothing.

  I’d seen
a picture or two of Sabel Starr in magazines like Creem that covered the Dolls. She and Thunders were the sensational love duo of that ghetto of rock and roll fandom for a few months in 1972–73, and there was a lot of gossip and backstage/nightclub snapshots of them. Sabel was fifteen ( Johnny was nineteen) when they met and she was already notorious as an L.A. groupie. Word was she’d slept with Iggy Pop when she was thirteen. In between Iggy and Johnny she’d been with Robert Plant, and in between Johnny and me she spent some time with Keith Richards. She and I got together in 1975.

  Like the other avant-garde underage groupies of L.A., she dressed in an elaborate thrift-store old-school-movie-star/hooker style, with plenty of satin and silk, and fishnet stockings and Hollywood hats, sometimes with veils, and fake fur and spike heels and hot pants and feather boas. She looked like a pubescent trailer-camp drug whore, except that because we had no concept of a drug whore at that point, it might be more appropriate to say she looked like a flamboyant dress-up Lolita, especially since she always had the cheeriest healthy smile. The smile was real—happy and friendly. Everything about her was real. She was heroic. At least from the point of view of a musician whom she liked. She truly lived for fun and joy, and the thing that was the most joyous of all to her was to make a meaningful rock musician happy. That was her mission, the way someone else might join the Peace Corps. Instead of digging wells and planting crops and offering medical care, she provided pretty and entertaining companionship, astute and sincere encouragement, favorite drugs, and magnificent blow jobs.