The following book review, which I am pretty sure was the second one that I ever wrote, originally appeared on DigBoston.com in March or April 2013.

Since today is Richard Hell’s 70th birthday and his name has popped up more than once in the book that I am currently reading — Girl To City: A Memoir by Amy Rigby — and because all of my pre-2015 online Dig material has long since vanished, I figured this was a good opportunity to revisit my long-neglected blog by posting it here.

In his new book I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp (HarperCollins), Richard Hell—arguably the first New York City punk rocker—writes that “the ground work that we’d laid was paying off big for complete strangers.”

The “we” in this statement was the early 1970s line-up of his first band, Television. The “complete strangers” were, among others, The Sex Pistons.

Granted, The Damned and The Ramones released the first punk recordings in 1976, one year before Richard Hell & The Voidoids released their debut album, Blank Generation. However, “punk” designated a style and attitude before the sound associated with the term was captured on vinyl.

I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp tells the story of how this way of life was realized by a boy born Richard Meyers in the Bluegrass State in 1949.

Meyers was a poor student and a bit of a troublemaker growing up, but he was no dummy. His father, who died in 1957, was an experimental psychologist with a Ph.D. from Columbia University. If the shirtless, poolside pic of him on page 2 is any indication, he was damn handsome, too. (Hell himself was not much of a looker, but lucky for him, “playing rock and roll made a person handsome.”) His mother got a Ph.D. in 1965 and taught American literature at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.

Having such brainy parents must have helped him get the “highest scores in the whole school” on a standardized achievement test in junior high. This, in turn, was his ticket to admission to boarding schools in Kentucky and Delaware. He was frequently suspended from both and eventually expelled from the latter.

After being expelled, Meyers made a deal with his mom to attend a public high school in Norfolk until he saved enough money to transplant himself to New York City. On December 26, 1966, at age 17 and sans a high school diploma, Meyers hopped a bus to the Big Apple.

This happens on page 51 of the book. The remaining 230 pages cover his life in New York City—with one brief excursion to Santa Fe, New Mexico—from 1967 to 1984, when he retired from music. Thus, “A Memoir” would have been a more accurate subtitle than “An Autobiography.”

After he arrives in the Naked City, Hell tells nothing of what became of his mother or younger sister. Nor do we learn when and how he met the woman to whom he is currently married. I found this disappointing.

The story he does tell, however, is fascinating and poignant.

In New York, he worked many jobs. These included a construction job during the course of which he got hit on by Allen Ginsberg. (Not to be, it would turn out, the last time that he would reject something that Ginsberg offered him.)

Although Meyers moved constantly and never made much money, he never wanted for female companionship, even if it meant having to pretend that he liked Sgt. Pepper by The Beatles.

In 1968, he began an affair with the soon-to-be ex-wife of artist Claes Oldenburg. This one-and-a-half-year relationship brought the young tramp, very clean or otherwise, into personal contact with the artists Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Willem de Kooning.

Tom Miller, Meyer’s only friend from school in Delaware, eventually moved to New York as well. Together, they resumed what Hell calls “the most meaningful friendship I’ve had, I think, and the last male friendship of its importance.”

In 1972, Meyers and Miller changed their “hopelessly banal” last names to Hell and Verlaine, respectively, and started a band called The Neon Boys. This band went nowhere, but Television—the band that they formed a year later—was a different story.

In describing videotaped 1974 rehearsals of Television, Hell writes, “modern punk can be seen first emerging …: four pathologically skinny guys in ripped shirts, tight black and blue jeans, and spiky short hair blasting their brains out … in the service of compelling, noisy, contemptuous, angry, but also lyrical, rock and roll.”

Hell further describes the band’s fashion sense: “In early 1974 we were dressed in cheap black leather (before the Ramones) and torn shirts stuck together with safety pins, thrift-store suits, sunglasses and sneers and throwaway grins and short hair …”

To sum up, “Television at CBGB represented the Future [sic] …” and “the beginning of the rejection of hippie values and the rejection of star worship …”

Hell is not giving himself undue credit for his influence on American and English punk rock. After all, the man who saw Television at CBGB in 1974 and 1975 and offered to take Hell under his wing after he had left Television and joined The Heartbreakers (not Tom Petty’s band) was Malcolm McLaren.

Hell recalls a 1976 incident in which Chris Stein—the Blondie guitarist who had unsuccessfully auditioned for The Neon Boys—called Hell over to look at a picture in a European rock magazine of, in Stein’s words, “four guys who look exactly like you!” Those four guys were The Sex Pistols. Their manager was Malcolm McLaren.

Hell’s response was, “Malcolm really did like me … This thing is really breaking out.”

By this time, Hell had left The Heartbreakers in the hope of forming a new band of which he would be the leader. That band was The Voidoids, who recorded the classic punk songs “Love Comes in Spurts” and “Black Generation.”

According to Hell, “One could say I’d been good, as well as happy, for five minutes in the Neon Boys/Television and ten minutes in the Heartbreakers, and I would be happy and good for twenty minutes in the Voidoids.”

He may have been happy, but he was also trapped in the throes of drug addiction.

“What had begun as an occasional vacation …in the Television days,” Hell declares, “had become a regular routine in the Heartbreakers, and by 1977 I was using a bag or two [of heroin] every day.”

Before long, cocaine and speed became a regular part of his diet.

The story of Richard Hell the musician is sex, junk, and punk. I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp tells that story effectively and—as far as I know—honestly.

Hell does not glamorize or demonize anything of which any reader is likely to change his or her opinion. He does not preach “just say no” when “I was sleepless, in full-body pain, and sweating and vomiting and spurting diarrhea” might send the same message.

Hell is a pretty good writer who knows how to turn a phrase, such as “It tasted like cold God.” Although what he has written cannot properly be called an autobiography, he succeeded grandly at writing “about a person through time” and “time through a person.”

Friday Flashback: Something Else by The Kinks

Posted on March 30, 2018 by Blake Maddux

Before I had the honor of writing about music and nonfiction for actual publications, I posted reviews of my favorite albums on Amazon.com. I have reposted some of them on this sadly negelected blog in the categories of Amazon Flashback and Amazon Reviews. Inspired by Pitchfork’s Sunday review feature, I have decided to begin reposting my Amazon reviews on a regular basis. Since Pitchfork’s selection was Something Else by The Kinks this past Sunday, I figured that I would make it mine today. (Save for edits for spelling, grammar, punctuation, and factual accuracy, the pieces will appear exactly as they originally did.)

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Britpop Ground Zero

In late 1960s, rock ‘n roll began to outgrow “Satisfaction,” “Love Me Do,” and “You Really Got Me.” Not only did bands become more socially and politically aware, they became more ambitious and eager to experiment. For their trouble, many of the great bands from this era–such as The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, and The Beach Boys–were rewarded with not only a secure musical legacy, but healthy financial benefits as well. The Kinks, who were banned from the US between the crucial years of 1965 and 1969, received neither. They had a handful of successful singles, but their LPs went almost completely unnoticed by record buyers.

Kinks_by-Dezo-Hoffman

Fortunately, the pendulum has swung, and The Kinks are now recognized as a major influence on subsequent generations of British rockers. To quote Mick Jones of The Clash, “As far as The Beatles, The Stones, and The Who are concerned, we don’t really hear that much about The Kinks. But they’re just as important, you know.”While the influence of The Beatles and The Stones spreads across the entire spectrum of popular music, that of The Kinks and The Who is most obvious in the punk (British and American) of the late 70s and the Britpop of the early 90s. Like Newton and Leibniz’s independent but nearly simultaneous invention of calculus, the fuzzy power chords of these bands’ 1964-5 singles laid the groundwork for punk, while assertions like Pete Townshend’s “hope I die before I get old” and Ray Davies’ “I’m Not Like Everybody Else”–a B-side that appeared 10 years before The Ramones’ debut–were philosophical proto-punk manifestos.

In the late 60s and early 70s, both bands turned toward catchy, melodic pop songs whose influence would be heard in everyone from The Jam and XTC to Blur and Pulp. And the career trajectory similarities don’t stop there: The Kinks and The Who could also be credited–or, if you prefer, blamed–for inventing the rock opera/concept album with their 1969 releases Arthur and Tommy (although The Pretty Things’ S.F. Sorrow was released a year earlier than both). In the late 70s and early 90s, British groups would be inspired to sound like these British bands who had influenced them, rather than like the American artists who had influenced the British bands of the 60s.

Something Else by The Kinks was arguably the first full-length instance of what would be called Britpop a quarter-century later. (Or maybe it was Face To Face. Take your pick.) The proto-punk and American R&B elements of their first records were less salient on this record, having been replaced by a “distinctly British” blend of marching drums, slow to mid-tempo rockers and ballads, and primarily acoustic–but nonetheless rocking– guitars. Furthermore, the themes moved beyond boy loves girl to musical snapshots of schoolyard jealousy, sibling rivalry, disappointed in-laws, bittersweet solitude and, of course, underachieving circus folk.

It is one thing for a record to culminate in a one-two punch or trio of great songs, but quite another for it to start off with a right, left, and uppercut. That is what we get on Something Else. With the Stonesy thump of “David Watts” (later covered in a faithful if perfunctory manner by The Jam), the quirky, melancholy folk of “Death of a Clown,” and the thinly veiled allegory “Two Sisters,” this record wastes no time getting started. And it is hardly on cruise control before closing with “Waterloo Sunset,” a feather in the cap–if not jewel in the crown–of 60s British pop.

After the 1-2-3 punch that opens the record, things slow down a bit with “No Return,” which, like the similarly hazy and dreamlike “Lazy Old Sun,” shows that while the Kinks were not a psychedelic band or a bunch of hippies, they were clearly not impervious to the atmosphere of Swinging London. The same can be said of the hilarious “Harry Rag,” which humorously mocks the idea that anything is bearable if you’ve got the right stuff to take your mind off of it. “End of the Season,” sung by Ray in a mock lounge singer voice, is another highlight, and the music hall ditties “Tin Soldier Man” and “Situation Vacant” contribute significant personality to the record.

Then there are Dave Davies’ songs. I am a great fan of underdogs and unsung heroes, and I think that it can be said that Dave wrote at least one great song for every dozen or so that Ray did (see Dave’s The Album That Never Was for examples). The absurd folk of “Death of a Clown,” which reached #3 in the UK, is proof enough: “The trainer of insects is crouched on his knees/And frantically looking for runaway fleas.”

But Dave also contributes the steady rockers “Love Me Till the Sun Shines” and “Funny Face.” Hence, Something Else was for Dave what Revolver was for George Harrison. (The weakest track on the record is probably Ray’s “Afternoon Tea.” While its subject is quintessentially English, it hardly makes for compelling listening in this case.) And it would be a travesty to not give props to Nicky Hopkins for his superb piano and harpsichord work.

The bonus tracks on the 2000 reissue are far from the throwaways meant to entice completists that such tracks often are. First of all, Dave rears his underrated head with “Lincoln County” and the excellent “Susannah’s Still Alive,” which was a hit single in its own right. And Ray’s songs–especially “Autumn Almanac,” “Wonderboy,” “Polly,” and “There’s No Life Without Love”–are as good as anything to be found on this or any other Kinks record of the era.

It may be a bit unfortunate that this rerelease is in mono, for it is tempting to say that the stereo version packs more punch. But that is ultimately a matter of taste, and the fact is that this is a fascinating collection of songs, sounding very much like a product of its time–perhaps somewhat charmingly dated–and yet still unlike albums by the band’s peers. These elements combine to create a precious gem of the British Invasion, one which would itself spawn the gems of future British Invasions.

Kinks

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Tag Archives: Music

Old Book Review: Richard Hell’s I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp

Friday Flashback: In the City by The Jam

Friday Flashback: Something Else by The Kinks

Asked & Answered: PETER HOOK (DigBoston Archive)