Originally appeared in Maximum Rocknroll #365 (October 2013).
It must have been in 2006 when I saw Richard Hell read in Portland at Powell’s Books on Hawthorne. He was promoting his novel Godlike. The small space reserved for readings was filled with chairs but more than half of them were empty. A glammed out girl in studs and heels asked Hell about his time with the Heartbreakers. Bluntly, like an annoyed high school teacher, Hell made it clear he wasn’t going to answer any questions about bands or Tom Verlaine or Johnny Thunders. In spite of the book’s trashy characters and Hell’s obvious talent as a writer, the crowd looked bored and tired as Hell read from his provocative novel.
Earlier this year Hell finally gave the public what they always wanted. In March Ecco Press released Hell’s tell-all autobiography I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, which covers his life up to the early eighties. The book begins with Hell’s childhood in Kentucky, and works its way through a number of episodes – first crushes, first sexual experiences, first records, running away and so on – before getting to the meat of the book: when he finds his way to New York City with the man who would be known as Tom Verlaine. The two partners do the poet thing, work menial jobs, and even go so far as to found their own literary journal. Eventually they start the band Television, and from there the book takes on a new direction, strictly focusing on anecdotes and gossip about the early punk scene in New York. Band members, ex-girlfriends, and people Hell admires get the most coverage.
At times it seems the primary focus of the book is his relationship with Verlaine, which he paints as one of friends who become collaborators, rivals and even enemies. The love is there, but so is the hate. It seems no matter what he does, his damaged relationship with Verlaine haunts him. It’s quite refreshing to hear someone like Hell speak honestly and self-consciously. He is self-critical and never denies the size of his ego. He never pauses to paint a pretty picture of himself or someone else when it isn’t deserved, and vice versa. For example, when he compares himself to Johnny Rotten he admits, “He was about the whole world; I was about myself.”
Yet, perhaps it is his devotion to directness and truth that hurts the book. When contrasting Hell’s book with Patti Smith’s recent bestseller Just Kids, Smith’s comes off as the better read, but I question her sincerity. She depicts herself as an innocent, with very little of the sex and drugs that usually goes along with rock n’ roll. At one point in his book, Hell even points the finger at Smith, claiming her affair with his buddy Verlaine clinched the conflict between himself and Verlaine. Hell depicts her as a backstabbing opportunist. That’s the thing about Hell’s book: it isn’t afraid to show the bleak, conflict-ridden side of the New York scene. Cocaine, heroin, addiction, betrayal, death, and sex are all regularly discussed. Truth isn’t always pretty. It doesn’t always make for smooth reading. When you tell it like it is, there’s not always a tidy package at the end. Unlike Smith’s book, not all of Hell’s stories have a powerful ending. Like life, they seem to end with a shrug and fade away.
And at times these anecdotes tend to read more like brief sketches that have been stitched together with a transparent and predictable structure. When a new character is introduced there’s a sure bet the next five or six pages will focus on that character before they disappear from the book forever. The book also never decides if it wants to be about Hell’s relationship with Verlaine, or about the New York punk scene in general. Verlaine seems to play an important part at the beginning of the book, but simply vanishes for large stretches. The epilogue, a recent chance encounter with Verlaine at a used bookstore, seems tacked on and unnecessary.
But it’s Hell’s documentation of the scene he participated in that makes the book a convenient companion to other punk books like Please Kill Me or From the Velvets to the Voidoids, which cover much of the same ground. Unfortunately, the book is a missed opportunity for Hell to produce a truly masterful book. As is, Hell’s punk rock tales, his youthful ambitions, and his personal relationships, simply float around. They are informative in a historical sense, but directionless. There is nothing tethering them together. Because of Hell’s skill as a writer, the book is by all accounts an enjoyable collection, but with a much-improved structure, the book could have been a punk classic.