Richard Hell
Richard Hell was born Richard Meyers in Lexington, Kentucky three months before 1950.
Lexington turns out to be a hotbed of narcotics and samesex love. Lesbian magnet. Do recall "Sweet Evenin' Breeze," to Richard Hell's ''personal page''a very eye-catching black male nurse happily alluded to by Cormac McCarthy in Suttree. Hell never really knew of the notorious "Lexington" narcotics treatment center (a countryside brick block locally tagged "Narco"). Maybe Burroughs was stopping there when Richard was sporting his black and silver Hopalong Cassidy snowsuit, practicing quick-draw, and chewing on a plastic pipe in fresh Shawneetown scant miles across the fields.
What Hell likes to do now is look at the sky, he practically lives there. Lots of people are mad at Richard.
October, 1966
Escapes from school and starts hitchhiking south with best friend of the moment Tom Miller (Verlaine). Within weeks they're apprehended by Alabama lawmen and returned to their families in separate states.
November, 1966
Meyers convinces his ma (no dad: long dead) nothing will keep him home. She agrees to let him leave without calling police on conditions he'll stay in school and put together $100 before departing. He finds job in pornographic bookstore after school, saves money, and takes a bus to New York before Xmas (no one sees him off).
# 1967-71 Feels distressed, confused, and pissed off. This is ennui, this is fury. Gunjle. Keeps dead turtle in jar.
# 1969-74 Tabletop offset publishing at Mott and Elizabeth Streets. More desperation. Mot Rellim comes to New York. Ins and outs with Patty Oldenburg. Theresa Stern conceived and grows to phenomenal maturity. Hell haunts bookstores. Works at Strand and Cinemabilia. Cultivates Steven Schomberg.
1973-73-73-72
R. & Tom too itchy for life. Tom picks out bass for R. (Dan Electro). Songs writ; hair cut; names changed: to Richard Hell / Verlaine writing collab., ''The Drunken Boat''the Neon Boys, with drummer Billy Ficca imported up from Delaware, glean insect lifespan, recording first-last words (six songs: three by Hell/Verlaine sung by Hell, three all Verlaine) before languishing for lack of second guitar player. "Drunken Boat" reeled off, and Richard rites The Voidoid (which title born over burgers or mushroom barley soup at the 2nd Ave. Deli when the boys slip into calling each other this- and thatoid).
1974
Terry Ork, Godardiste, intellectual guerilla, pudgy freak tub 'o laffs, and manager of Cinemabilia, where Richard and Tom are both now working, offers his loft for rehearsal space and Lloyd for guitarist, and the Neon Boys are reborn as Television, the only short-haired and best band in the world for quite a few months. The Townhouse Theater, a 200 capacity screening room in midtown, is site of March initial gig where group is backed by a row of television sets tuned to different channels, except for one that displays feed from roving camera in the theater. By April they've persuaded kind-hearted Hilly Kristal to let them appear every Sunday at his Bowery wino/Hell's Angels dive CBGB, and the crowds start building. Patti Smith writes one of the first reviews of the group. By June the band is also appearing regularly at Max's Kansas City and Club 82 (ordinarily a gay/transvestite bar, which the New York Dolls had recently introduced to live rock 'n' roll). That fall there's a long stand with Patti, who now has a band, at Max's. Hell's starting to feel short ended and fed up. Verlaine starts refusing to play Hell songs and tells him to stop jumping around on stage during his (Verlaine's) songs. It's getting ugly. Patti supports new boyfriend Tom, while Malcolm McLaren (who's discovered CBGB's as he's managing the New York Dolls) sees the future in Hell.
1975
Decision becomes easy when Verlaine refuses to play any but one ("Blank Generation") of Hell's songs on Brian Eno produced six-song demo for Island Records. (Hell's songs--lyrics and lead vocals--for Television included "Excitement," "Eat the Light," "Love in Spurts," "That's All I Know ((Right Now))," "Fuck Rock 'n' Roll," "High Heeled Wheels," and "Change Your Channel.") Hell leaves Television. That week Johnny Thunders calls Hell to say he and Jerry Nolan have left the Dolls and asks if Richard'd like to start a new band with them. "Yeah," and the Heartbreakers are born. Concept is same as with Tom in the original Television / Neon Boys: Hell and J.T.'ll have roughly equal number of songs, each singing the songs he writes. Doubt it if you will, but for about eight months this was the best band in the world. It might also have been Hell's happiest time in a group, and Sable was doing all she could to help. Drugs. Dee Dee Ramone, a running buddy of the time, brings Richard 3/4's of a song the Ramones won't play because it's about "Chinese Rocks," favored heroin type of the day. It lacks two verses, which Hell writes, and song becomes Heartbreakers' favorite.
1976
But as well as things are going, Richard's restless. He can't help feeling cramped to be playing songs about things like "Going Steady" and "Pirate Love," as good as they might sound. Johnny and Jerry aren't sympathetic to this point of view. Hell realizes he'll have to leave the group to find out what's possible. No hard feelings towards the Heartbreakers. The new group will be Richard's own. He asks Robert Quine, a bald 33 year old law-school graduate who hasn't played in a band since college, to be his guitarist, then recruits Marc Bell from Wayne County's group to play drums. They agree on Ivan Julian for the second guitar after to Nick Detroit sampleholding open auditions and the band, named Richard Hell and the Voidoids, immediately begins heavily rehearsing the three songs--"Blank Generation," "You Gotta Lose," and the new "(I Could Live With You) (In) Another World"--that Hell intends to record for the e.p. single Terry Ork wants to release. Hell insists the group wear identical black $50 corduroy workingman's suits (from Hudson's on 3rd Ave. and 13th St.) for their debut at CBGB's in November.
Official Press Bio
Richard Hell was born Richard Meyers on October 2, 1949, and raised in Lexington, KY. He dropped out of high school in 1966 to come to New York and make his way as a poet. In New York he bought a used table-top offset printing press and began publishing books and magazines under the imprints Genesis : Grasp and then Dot Books. Before he was twenty-one his own poems were published in numerous periodicals, ranging from Rolling Stone to the New Directions Annuals. Richard, though, realizing by this point that he wanted more direct, physical relief, started a rock and roll band with his best high school friend, Tom (Miller) Verlaine. This band, The Neon Boys (1973), two four-track studio recordings by whom are on the 2005 Hell compilation SPURTS [catalog entry], evolved into the group Television, which band Richard left in 1975 before the group recorded their first album. He then immediately joined with Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan, who had just departed the New York Dolls, to form the Heartbreakers, which Richard also quit after one year and before recording a studio album (a live performance by the Heartbreakers in 1975, when they were largely performing Hell material with Richard singing, has been available on CDs from Bomp--inferior--in America and New Rose--superior--in France). In 1976 he founded the group the Voidoids.
Hell became known in the mid-Seventies as an originator of the punk movement [as documented, for instance, in the books From the Velvets to the Voidoids by Clinton Heylin (Penguin, 1993), and Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain (Grove Press, 1996)]. His album Blank Generation (Sire/Warners, 1977, currently in print as a CD) by "Richard Hell and the Voidoids" was chosen by the New York Times as one of the ten best albums of the decade. Lester Bangs had this to say about Hell and that album in 1977:
"Richard Hell identifies with no movement, with few people in fact. If you listen between the sonic blasts, his music is about a sense of aloneness beyond the old alienated antihero syndrome, but before that Richard Hell is a rocker. The music on this album is some of the strongest, truest rock & roll I have heard in ages. Like most great rock & roll, it stands alone; there are influences, not all of them musical and many of them literary, but he is no arty poseur, in fact this is also some of the most honest music I have heard in some time. As we trail out of the age of artifice (I don't think I have to mention any names), artifice itself rides on the coattails of most of those who proclaim themselves an alternative. Richard Hell is different. I hear echoes in this record of rock & roll from time immemorial, and they are not contrived, they are rather the modus of a plain-speaking kid with an awesome intelligence and a great pain to speak plainly of... The toughness of the music is just defensive armor, courtesy the searchlight-destructive tag-team of Robert Quine and Ivan Julian on guitars. In this album they have slashed out some of the most fitfully dangerous rock & roll I've heard this decade. If you think I say that lightly you don't know me. But at the center is Hell himself, his own ninth circle, pretending to be blank when his every move and word reveals a naked, impassioned intelligence in the throes of the only truly rock & roll artistic convulsion, which is to be driven so far into and paradoxically, simultaneously outside of yourself that you create as a matter of frenzy, instead of lowering your eyelids before the world in shame and loneliness."
Hell's second album, Destiny Street (Red Star/Jem, 1982, now kept out of print by Hell until such time as he has an expanded re-release prepared), with such classic songs as "The Kid with the Replaceable Head," "Time," and "Lowest Common Dominator," [MP3 / RealAudio sound file] was declared by the Times to be among the ten best of its year of release. His third release was R.I.P. (ROIR, 1984), a collection of outtakes and unreleased material from the length of his musical career as well as several new songs recorded in New Orleans. Hell retired from music after the release of R.I.P., but made an exception in 1992 to record a one-off set with Thurston Moore and Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth and Don Fleming of Gumball. The self-titled CD by this new group, Dim Stars, was released worldwide that year. To quote from Robert Palmer in Rolling Stone's four-star review of the CD:
"...Richard Hell--yes, the guy who, beginning in the mid-Seventies, forged jacked-up garage rock, spiked hair, ripped T-shirts and a bad attitude into what we now know as punk rock. Too often, the result of this kind of casual studio play is casual music. Not this time. Dim Stars carries on the raving sonic mayhem of Hell's original Voidoids. His visionary songwriting and off-center soulfullness are dominant enough to make Dim Stars Hell's very long-awaited follow-up to Destiny Street (1982), which was only his second album. Rarely has a rocker been so influential with such a small body of recorded work. On this album he makes a spectacular return to peak form..."
As a poet, Hell is the author of Wanna Go Out? by Theresa Stern (collaborative poems with Tom Verlaine, Dot Books, 1973), I Was A Spiral On The Floor (poems, Soyo Publications, Amsterdam, 1988), and Across the Years [catalog entry] (a selected poems cased in a wooden box with a CD of Hell reading the entire book aloud, Soyo, Amsterdam, 1992). A short novel, The Voidoid, that he wrote in 1973, was published by CodeX in Britain in 1996. The collection of his notebooks from the seventies, Artifact, was published by Hanuman Books in 1990. In the late '80s he edited the NY literary magazine CUZ for the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. He has been widely anthologized and, for instance, is represented in such anthologies as: Out of This World (fiction, Crown Publishers, 1992), Am Lit (fiction, Editions Druckhaus Galrev, Berlin, 1992), The Penguin Book of Rock Criticism (essays, Penguin, 1992), Jungles D'Ameriques (fiction, AAC Editions, Paris, 1993), Low Rent (fiction, Grove Press, 1994), The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats (essay, Hyperion, 1999), Beat Punks (essay, Da Capo, 2000), Aroused (introductory essay, poems, and fiction, Thunder's Mouth Press, 2001), and Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues (essay, Amistad, 2003).
Hell's first full length novel, Go Now, an account, set in 1980, of a burned-out junkie punk driving across America with a former girlfriend, was published in 1996 by Scribner in the U.S.A. and Fourth Estate in Britain. Novelist William Gibson, the influential originator of "cyberpunk" fiction, said this about the book: "Go Now is vile, scabrous, unforgiveable, and deserving of the widest possible audience." (A spoken word recording by Hell, with guitar backing from Robert Quine, of the first two chapters of this novel was released on CD and vinyl by T/K records in America and CodeX in Britain in 1995.) The paperback of Go Now (Scribner) came out in the U.S., June, 1997.
In 1998 Richard embarked on a project of co-publishing--with Will Patton, actor, and Mette Madsen, painter--and editing a series of poetry pamphlets under the imprint CUZ Editions [catalog]. The first of these was a small book by Hell entitled Weather. Seven more titles were published in 1998-2001, completing the series [excerpts from each CUZ book] (Autobiography in Words by Susan Noel with drawings by Mette Madsen, WillieWorld by Maggie Dubris, Sitting Pretty by Michael DeCapite, Lassitudes of Fire by Will Patton, Chaldea/I Dig Girls by Nick Tosches, Love Poems by Rene Ricard with drawings by Robert Hawkins, and Ron Padgett's Poems I Guess I Wrote with drawings by George Schneeman) .
The French translation of Hell's novel Go Now, retitled by the publisher--Éditions de l'Olivier (Paris)--L'oeil du Lézard, was published in April, 1999. There have also been Japanese and Russian translations of the novel published, and a British edition. In September, 1999, the French art book publisher Éditions Anna Polèrica returned to print in a facing-page French/English bilingual format the Tom Verlaine/R. Hell collaborative book of poems Wanna Go Out? (which purports to be the work of "Theresa Stern"). There was an Italian translation of Hell's second novel Godlike published as Come Dio by Coniglio Editore (Rome).
Richard has publicly read from his writings at numerous clubs, universities, bookstores, and other venues in the U.S. and Europe, including, since 1995: Duke University in Durham, N.C.; University of Kansas at Lawrence; Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY; Beyond Baroque, The Viper Room, and Book Soup in Los Angeles; the Make-Out Room and City Lights Books in San Francisco; Richard Hugo House in Seattle; Powell's Books in Portland; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; Central Park's Summerstage series, the St. Mark's Poetry Project, The New School, KGB Bar, the Knitting Factory, the NightLight series at the Drawing Center, and The National Arts Club in New York City; as well as at the Cinémathèque française and La Maroquinerie in Paris, the Second Coming festival in Stockholm, The 13th Note in Glasgow, the Horse Hospital and the Vox 'n' Roll series Upstairs at the Garage in London, and the Festival Internacional La Música y la Palabra in Seville.
In video, Untitled, Big Show, and Prehistory are three poeokes (poem-karaokes) made by Hell in 1993-4 using software created by Perry Hoberman. Each one lasts 3-5 minutes. For a period in the late '90s, Richard sometimes projected these videos on a large screen to provide a little spectacle at his readings.
In October-November 1998 Hell had a first gallery show of his drawings at Rupert Goldsworthy Gallery in New York. Accompanying the show was the publication of a new short collection of a miscellany of his writings (poems, essays, notebooks, etc.) and drawings entitled Hot and Cold (Vehicle Editions). The book was an advance preview of a full-length collection of such work that was published by powerHouse Books in 2001. This full-scale, 256 page Hot and Cold, a compendium juxtaposing the best of Richard's writings and graphics which had not appeared previously in his books, including the lyrics to all the songs he'd written to date, organized this disparate media into a coherent whole. Hell not only wrote the book and designed its pages he compiled its vivid index.
As an actor Richard established his reputation as a star of Susan Seidelman's (Desperately Seeking Susan, etc.) initial feature Smithereens, which made history by being the first American independent film to be invited to compete at Cannes.
Hell has played leading roles in a number of New York underground films, from Rachid Kerdouche's punk film noir, Final Reward (1978), and Nick Zedd's mad-scientist/horror parody Geek Maggot Bingo (1982), to Rachel Amodeo's examination of the plight of the homeless What About Me? (1992).
The feature length color 35mm film, Blank Generation, in which Hell played opposite French star Carole Bouquet in 1978, and which features live performances by Hell and the Voidoids at CBGB, was rereleased in widescreen format on VHS and DVD in the U.S. in March 2000.
Also in 2000, Richard accepted a commission from the major Internet music label MusicBlitz to record a new song and ended up gathering his original band of Voidoids--Robert Quine, Ivan Julian, and Marc Bell--to do it. It was the first time they'd been in the studio together since 1977. The result is called "Oh" and was available for a year exclusively as an MP3 for free download at MusicBlitz.com, but was withdrawn as a free download upon release of the MusicBlitz CD compiled by Wayne Kramer entitled Beyond Cyberpunk which included the song. (It's now been included in the 2005 retrospective CD from Sire/Rhino called SPURTS.)
In March 2002 Matador Records released a 2 CD compilation by Hell called Time [catalog entry], comprising an expanded version of his 1984 collection of demos, outtakes, and unreleased versions R.I.P., plus a CD of two live sets, one at the Music Machine in London, 1977, and a short one from C.B.G.B. in 1978.
During 2004-2006 Richard was the film columnist for BlackBook ["Hell On the Movies" online here], the "progressive urban" youth culture bi-monthly out of New York. In his tenure he contributed fourteen substantial film essays.
Richard's most important recent accomplishment is his new novel, Godlike . It's published by Dennis Cooper's imprint, Little House on the Bowery, at Akashic Books, and arrived in stores July, 2005. Set largely in the early '70s, but structured as a middle-aged poet's 1997 notebooks and drafts for a memoir-novel, the book recounts the story of a young man's affair with a remarkable teenage poet.
Besides Godlike, two other major releases occured in 2005: the retrospective CD, containing Hell's 21 most compelling recordings 1973-2004, called SPURTS: The Richard Hell Story, out on Sire/Rhino; and the marvelous, finely-printed, collection of Richard's 13 poem collaborations with David Shapiro, called Rabbit Duck .
Richard spent early 2006 delivering the last in the series of readings booked to promote Godlike (a more comphensive -- retrospective -- reading and Q & A, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, was video recorded by the museum [offsite streaming video]); writing the odd piece of journalism (for instance an Op Ed for The New York Times on CBGB's closing) or art catalogue text (for Christopher Wool at Gagosian [Gagosian site catalog listing], and one for a group show called Sad Songs); but he's been mostly focused on writing his "quasi-memoir," the first chapter of which was published in February, 2007 in Vanitas #2 as "from The Autobiography of Richard Hell by Richard Meyers."
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