I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp

by Richard Hell

  The ultimate advantage the music-racket honchos have over a guy like me is that they can afford to stall while my legal fees mount. Gottehrer, for instance, lives in a gigantic luxury apartment by the Natural History Museum, some of the toniest real estate in Manhattan, half a block from Central Park. The amounts of money I would be seeking to legally claim, from any given biz operator, rarely added up to more than an average of say $3,000–$5,000 a year, but could cost five or ten times that amount in lawyers’ fees for me to recover. I am very lucky to have attorneys, Richard Golub and Nehemiah Glanc, who are not only fearsomely able, but who have often donated their services to me over the years out of friendship, and a sense of justice, and the goodness of their hearts.

  As these business talks were beginning, there in the spring of 1976, the band was only Quine and me. I’d had my eye on drummer Marc Bell. He immediately agreed to quit Wayne County’s sideshow group and join us. We rented a rehearsal studio to hold auditions for a second guitar player. I pretty much left it to Bob to assess the candidates for his guitar partner. We settled on Ivan Julian (original name: Ivan Parker) pretty quickly. Ivan was only twenty years old but had already been a professional guitar player for a while. He’d just returned from a tour of Europe playing with a journeyman late lineup of the Foundations (“Build Me Up Buttercup”). Ivan was a pro, was young and sharp, and he liked the same kind of slashing, swinging rhythm guitar that we did. He ended up playing some of the most popular and frenzied solos on our records as well.

  So we started rehearsing, especially on the three songs we’d be recording as a demo for use in seeking an LP deal, which tracks were also going to be released as a limited-edition EP on Ork. The three songs were “Blank Generation,” “You Gotta Lose,” and a new one called “Another World.” Ork Records was the independent outlet for 45s that Terry had started in order to get more circulation for the bands he cared about. The first release had been Television’s “Little Johnny Jewel” in late 1975. My EP would be the second Ork record.

  Richard Hell and the Voidoids, 1976.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I visited Chris Stein and Debbie Harry one day up at Plaza Sound in Rockefeller Center, where they were recording the earliest Blondie tunes with Gottehrer. It was the summer of 1976. Chris was looking at a current European rock magazine, German or French. “Hey, Richard, you’ve got to see this. There are four guys who look exactly like you!” He showed me a color picture of a new band. I saw the band’s name was the Sex Pistols. Good name too. I looked closer at the text and saw the words “Malcolm McLaren.” His London clothing boutique was called Sex; hence Sex Pistols. I thought, “Malcolm really did like me.” I had to laugh. Everybody in the band had short, hacked-up hair and torn clothes and there were safety pins and shredded suit jackets and wacked-out T-shirts and contorted defiant facial expressions. The lead singer had changed his name to something ugly. It gave me kind of a giddy feeling. It was flattering. It was funny. They looked great. I thought, “This thing is really breaking out.”

  Patti Smith’s first LP, Horses, had been released at the end of 1975, just when I was about to leave the Heartbreakers, and her second album would come out a year later, in fall ’76, when the Instant-backed Voidoids were debuting. The Ramones’ first album had come out in the spring of ’76. Neither their record nor Patti’s was selling a lot but Patti was getting a good amount of publicity. Television and the Talking Heads and Blondie would all be making label deals towards the end of 1976 and so would my new band. It was a high time, but the advent of the Sex Pistols upped the ante and made people reassess. News started coming through heavily in the second half of the year.

  Since the sixties, rock and roll bands had been all that England had to be proud of (even though those sixties bands had started as imitations of American rock and roll too), so music was a major focus there. The country had three popular national weekly music papers—Melody Maker, New Musical Express, and Sounds. Though the U.S. had well over three times the population of the UK, and American bands were just as successful worldwide and just as interesting, we had only Rolling Stone for broad national rock and roll news coverage, and it came out half as often as those English papers and was comparatively conservative. It did not routinely cover what was going on in clubs in New York or L.A., while the British papers always wrote about new unsigned UK bands. Furthermore, because England was small, whatever happened in London was instantly national news, while, though the CBGB bands had become the talk of haute New York, that didn’t make them newsworthy in Kansas.

  As things picked up speed, it was hard to accept that the groundwork we’d laid was paying off big for complete strangers, and strangers who seemed hostile to us. But the most frustrating thing was that they were so good. Rotten’s interviews were breathtaking. He mocked and hated everything. He was the opposite of the usual eager-to-impress, humble aspiring celebrity. Rock and roll is about subverting respectability, but there’d never been a musician who so blatantly and fully didn’t give a shit, who just wanted to mix things up and undermine expectations. He actually said his band’s mission was to destroy rock and roll. That was fucking incomparable.

  I’d written and performed a song in Television in 1974 called “Fuck Rock and Roll” but the song wasn’t rock and roll, it was distorted, defaced rock and roll, and free jazz—a challenge. The Sex Pistols said “fuck rock and roll” but in the most blistering, rampaging rock and roll songs. I’d written and sung blistering rock and roll too, though another one of my songs, “Blank Generation,” one that would inspire the Sex Pistols to write their song “Pretty Vacant,” was performed in a more laid-back and dreamy, if sarcastic and sneering, style, until the Pistols upped the ante in undiluted rock and roll the way they did, and I started playing “Blank Generation” in a more aggressive style too.

  I’d also given deeply nihilistic interviews before the Sex Pistols had been heard of, but mine was a lot more self-conscious than Rotten’s negativity. My very first individual interview was with Legs McNeil for Punk magazine, and was conducted when I was in the Heartbreakers, in late 1975, before the Sex Pistols had appeared. I’d said, in a booth with Legs at Max’s Kansas City:

  “Basically I have one feeling, and that’s this little voice in my head. Well I mean the one main feeling I have is the desire to get out of here. And any other feelings I have come from trying to analyse why I want to go away. . . . It’s not going to any other place or any other sensation or anything like that. It’s just to get out of ‘here.’”

  “Where do you feel comfortable?”

  “When I’m asleep.”

  “How many pairs of underwear do you have?”

  “One.”

  “One? How long have you had them?”

  “I bought a pair of underwear because I had so many holes in my pants it became necessary. But now I have so much holes in my underwear it hardly makes any difference.”

  “Why do you wear ripped up clothes? Did you rip them up?”

  “I did rip one shirt once but I sewed it back together because I felt guilty . . . I knew a guy like you once. He tried to fuck a transvestite and almost got his balls cut off and ended up in an insane asylum.”

  “Have you ever fallen in love?”

  “I think love is sort of a con you play on yourself. I think the whole conception of love is something the previous generation invents to justify having created you. You know I think the real reason children are born is because parents are so bored they have children to amuse themselves. They’re so bored they don’t have anything else to do so they have a child because that will keep them busy for a while. Then to justify to the kid the reason he exists they tell him there’s such a thing as love and that’s where you come from because me and your daddy or me and your mommy were in love and that’s why you exist. When actually it was because they were bored out of their minds.”

  “Are you glad you were born?”

  “I have my doubts.”

  “Were you a gigo
lo?”

  “I think that rock and roll is being a gigolo. It’s trying to convince girls to pay money to be near you.”

  There’s not too much precedent, in its antisociability and funny negativity and twisted honesty, for an interview like that with a rock and roll musician, but Rotten was more compelling. I was an off-putting navel-gazer by comparison. Rotten was all energy and extroversion. He galvanized the kids. I was the opposite, a sullen forlorn junkie outcast who just wanted to be left alone, except by admiring girls. He was about the whole world; I was about myself. I did imagine myself as a visionary whose sensibility and ideas would change everything, or at least represent this new generation, but I also knew that this was implausible. How many kids were going to get excited about calling themselves “blank”? The concept of “anarchy” was just as disgusted and contrary but a lot more fun.

  Furthermore I hadn’t really figured out how to make the music sound the way I wanted it to. My music could be halting and intellectual and difficult, and sometimes half-baked. The style and sound I eventually arrived at for my first album was rich but idiosyncratic. Furthermore, I didn’t want a signature sound; I wanted every song to be different from every other song. In a sense I’d passed through my punk period with the Neon Boys and early Television, with relentless driving expressions of attitude like “That’s All I Know (Right Now),” “I’m Nice,” “Change Your Channel,” the original version of “Love Comes in Spurts,” and the twisted seminovelty of “Fuck Rock and Roll” and “Blank Generation.” Then there was the more power-punk New Yorkabilly hardass sneering of the Heartbreakers. Now, with the new band, the music had become more eccentric and complex, often misshapen.

  When the Voidoids first started rehearsing, my top priorities were to whip the band into a team by talking about what set us apart and thinking about how we’d present ourselves physically. I wasn’t sure of what to call the band yet. A list of possible names I made then:

  The Scream

  The Statues

  The Savage Statues

  The Sleep

  The Junkyard

  The Drool

  The Droolers

  The Morons

  The Homicides

  The Hyenas

  The Haloes

  The Hinges

  The Hazard

  The Dogbites

  The Facial Expressions

  The Ineffables

  The Beauticians

  The Teeth

  I like those, especially “The Beauticians.” Typically, I ended up choosing the most difficult name I thought of.

  From the beginning the Voidoids were a locus, a center and source of New York music. It was what I’d been waiting for, what I’d been working towards since I’d first picked up a bass and started writing and singing songs.

  At CBGB my accomplishments were known and I was a leader of the new sensibility. Patti was the only other writer/performer/conceptualist/bandleader who rivaled me in that way. She was more charismatic than me and a better performer and drew bigger crowds, but she was also full of shit in many ways, and a hypocritical, pandering diva, and her band was generic and mediocre.

  I was full of shit in many ways too, and self-important, and uneven musically, but I had endless ideas and vision that had been central to shaping everything that went into making up the culture and style, musical and otherwise, of CBGB, and naturally that music and culture and style excited me, since I had been responsible for originally expressing a lot of it, and just as naturally that culture liked me back. I sometimes felt like the king of the Lower East Side, and I was, in meaningful respects, though I was also aware that the crown was mine largely by virtue of my appreciation of the realm and because I hated royalty.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  We all read Lester Bangs when he wrote for Creem in the early seventies. You had to love him even though, in person, his musical fanaticism was a little embarrassing. He was not cool; he babbled and raved, and treated music as if it were the center of the universe. On the other hand, he was the definition of cool in that his taste and judgment were so advanced as to practically qualify him as a great musician himself, especially in view of how his writing was so searching and honest and full of imagination. He was the rare music writer who actually seemed more interested in the music than in himself. That moment, when Lester came to New York from Detroit in 1976, was the last time that rock criticism really came from the heart (I guess that makes the heart Detroit). Lester was the last critic to stake his life on music. (Though Robert Palmer is up there too . . .)

  I didn’t have much patience for him at the time, though. He was a shameless drunk and pill head. He always wanted to talk and ask me questions. He wanted to leap right into metaphysics and sociology. That’s the difference between a musician and a critic—the musician makes semiabstract little material expressions and resolutions of the noise in his brain and body, while the critic wants to theorize and argue about those results. Furthermore, though I was a guy who liked to think and analyze to a certain extent, I didn’t want to do it with a journalist, who was in the position of taking what I said and framing it in his own terms, distorting it, and making that public. Which is what happened when I agreed to talk to Lester.

  Lester was fascinated by, and devoted to, the Voidoids for two main reasons. One was Quine’s talent and taste—Quine and Lester were a perfect match, though Bob would also lose patience with Lester’s dipsomaniacal sincerity. But they loved each other, and Lester was one of the very few who fully appreciated what Quine could do on guitar. The other reason Bangs was impressed by us was because of my commitment to emotional and technically/aesthetically extreme music, but, even more, he was attracted by the meanings in songs that said things like “Love comes in spurts” and “Who says it’s good to be alive?” and “I belong to the ______ generation.”

  It’s ironic how Bangs’s belief in us, and his compulsion to understand what was going on in the music that interested him, would contribute to the single most significant misbegotten interpretation of my intentions. It occurred when he provoked me to say something that has ever since been waved around by anybody who’s referred to the song “Blank Generation” in print.

  The problem stems from an interview piece Lester published in late 1977 called “Richard Hell: Death Means Never Having to Say You’re Incomplete.” It flatters me as a prophet (“Richard Hell is one of the poets. . . . And because he’s one of the few thinkers I respect . . .”), and praises me as a musician too (“one of the greatest rock ’n’ rollers I have ever heard”), but Lester had come into the meeting arguing with himself and he ended up projecting one side of that argument on me.

  He asked me, “Isn’t so much of the punk movement involved with self-hatred?” and I went, “There’s a lot of basis for self-hatred. To transcend something you’ve got to fully accept the fact that it exists. I would much rather listen to the music of somebody who hates himself and says it than listen to the music of Barry Manilow.”

  When he asked me whether the idea in “Love Comes in Spurts” that “love” is a lie leads to nasty narcissism, I told him, “One thing I wanted to bring back to rock and roll was the knowledge that you invent yourself. That’s why I changed my name, why I did all the clothing style things, the haircut, everything. So naturally, if you invent yourself, you love yourself. The idea of inventing yourself is creating the most ideal image that you could imagine. So that’s totally positive.”

  Despite those kinds of explanations, Lester ended up writing, “Look, I started out saying how much I respected this guy’s mind and perceptions. I still do in a curious way—it’s just that he paints half the picture of reality with consummate brilliance, and the other half is Crayola slashes across a field of Silly Putty and Green Slime. [ . . . ] His whole picture is a self-fulfilling prophecy—he has designed his world in such a way that things ought to work out every bit as miserably as he expects.” Nearly everything I’d said specifically contradicts all that. (Another irony i
s that his line about brilliance with slashes of Crayola, Silly Putty, and Slime is maybe my favorite way I’ve ever seen my work described—it’s my aesthetic ideal!)

  The ultimate problem, though, came from how I saw from the beginning of the interview that he wanted to portray me as childishly negative, and so I told him, “People misread what I meant by [the song] ‘Blank Generation.’ To me, ‘blank’ is a line where you can fill in anything. It’s positive. It’s the idea that you have the option of making yourself anything you want, filling in the blank.” That’s legitimate, but I was playing it up to head off Lester’s making me out as all antilife. When people insist on narrowing down or overinterpreting what you’re doing, the reflex is to point out other perspectives. Artists do that all the time. Dylan refers to himself as a song-and-dance man. Andy Warhol says there’s nothing beneath his surface.

  But the result has been that, ever since, no one has been able to write about “Blank Generation” without saying that I insist it’s not about being numb or empty but about having infinite possibilities.

  I was saying “Let me out of here” before I was

  even born. It’s such a gamble when you get a face.

  It’s fascinating to observe what the mirror does,

  but when I dine it’s for the wall that I set a place.

  I belong to the blank generation

  and I can take it or leave it each time.