(In 1982 I was music editor at East Village Eye, and working on Avenue B and 4th Street back when that meant something. I hung on the scene and knew quite a few people who have subsequently reached legendary status. I knew Richard Hell, though he sure didn’t like me much. Still, I interviewed him for a cover story in the Eye and here in is, pop pickers -IL)
A TRIP TO DESTINY STREET CAN HAPPEN ANY TIME
For me it was in a bar on Avenue A talking with a man who denies and admits his own destiny with every other breath, whose laziness and nihilism can’t eliminate that rare ability to describe a generation of American youth with a shrug of his shoulders, to refuse a rock network copied and conned by dis-connected dis-turbed young Americans growing into dis-affected retrogressive junk aggressors. Here he comes again, ‘Blank Generation’ was and wasn’t an answer to ‘My Generation’, it was a denial of there being any form of generation. Richard Hell’s lanky body dips deeper into his foreign beer and Aneda goes for a round of listening and playing a non-pop stars girlfriend — quiet, indifferent, ignored — the spurt of love: “I just dropped out of the whole scene. It’d have killed me if I’d gone on.” We go to hell; Richard trashes the East Village Eye offices, “Leonard is sloppy, he doesn’t do what he promises he will.” We go to punk: “I said all I wanted to say about my contribution to punk in the ‘Slum Journal’ piece. I have nothing left to add.” We get caught in time: “I have to leave for a rehearsal in an hour, but we can talk again if you like.” We are lost in perceptions: “Ask me a question… That isn’t a question.” This is Richard Hell, caught between an egotistical need to be known and a refusal to capitulate on it, the mechanisms of a biz that’ll spit you out like the bile from yesterday’s drunk and that pure pleasure called rock, disaster and denial, self-destruction and the human urge to live. And an intense dislike for pop journalists that he barely masks with a nervous urge to thoroughly explain his motives, “I haven’t finished answering the question yet…” Take a walkdown Destiny Street.
I remember watching Richard Hell and the Voidoids (God knows what edition — I was on holiday from England and X-Sessive was the bass player) at CBGB’s in 1978 ten times in five days. For me, they were brilliant every single time. Punk was dead but an attitude was alive, a connection between audience me seemed to also. I wanted to deny and be denied. That was the whole CBGB’s present to the world-at-large — further than dropping out; deeper than getting in; worse- than apolitical; just not wanting to know at all. And for five days in 1978, I denied society and in a manner beyond the reaches of “soul brother” Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell personified the need to withdraw, in a tasteless, classless cocktail lounge, Richard denies it all again.
“I wasn’t recommending some way of acting or feeling. I’m not preaching or… it wasn’t meant to be preaching or — what’s the word? — proselytizing. I was just expressing what I felt and whether or not I enjoyed feeling that way and players seldom really felt. That subjectivity. I felt it, and the people around or even that I meant that those were emotions to be emulated in any way, it was just that I felt I must be honest. I was being half optimistic and half satirical. It was more personal than that. The point was at the time that ‘I don’t care’, that ‘I can take it or leave it.’ I wasn’t actively promoting anything, it was far more passive.”
Blank Generation happened on Sire (“I know nothing about Sire”), the friendship formed through Jake Riviera (at one time the manager of Dr.Feelgood; later part of Stiff; later with Radar; far later still with F-Beat) that got Richie onto Sire in the first place. Prior to this, between Hell’s degrading and thoroughly romantic urges (the child who wanted love that was wild), he was enjoying the whole clubland Manhattan style. But with a trip to the U.K. (although Hell claims it wasn’t such an extreme reaction), playing support for a Mr. Costello, the syndrome became overpowering. Hell retreated. His rock wasn’t in-style, there was too much to put up with and’ The Kid With the Replaceable Head’ (an infinitely worse version than the one on his current album) died a deserved death.
Richard went into semi-detachment, says he hasn’t been going down to the rock and roll clubs that were his life for several years. “Punk rock,” he acknowledges, “became just another style. Yet I appreciated the anger of hard-core, the importance of what we did passes.” Richard wrote tor the Eye for a while — his infamous “Slum Journal”. “Rock isn’t dead,” he says (I disagree with him), “it’s like the late ’60s and early ’70s. It’s hiding.”
Richard, by intention or otherwise, finds himself still part and parcel of an aesthetic legitimized, explicated and “knew how to live with myself, but I wasn’t advocating it for other people.” Richard Meyers is thirty-two years old and a Kentucky kid, his mother is a University professor and he reached NYC after dropping out of school. He became friends with Tom “Verlaine” and formed the bare bones of Television called the Neon Boys. It was a fun time, slowly drifting from the Mercer Arts Center and Max’s Kansas City with the — ta dah — New York Dolls — to CBGB’s. For the usual egotistical reasons Television split up, Verlaine getting the name (and a superb album, Marquee Moon to boot). Hell formed his band, the Voidoids. “At the time I moralised; that of courage, self-definition, defiance, acceptance.” This is more closely seen in Hell’s latest long-player Destiny Street (I define my own love for this album in this month’s “Steady” column). It is a oblique, realistic and disturbing a statement as rock can come up with. As inexplicable as (let’s not get too cute, it’s not even in the same league) Highway 61 Revisited, it’s a microscopic view of East Village NY life romanticised and cynicised. In a manner juxtaposing a hard (not as inmetal but as in brakes and guitar dexterity — especially Robert Quine) rock sharp and sweet (try ‘Downtown’ At Dawn’), and put into place by a cover that makes covering worth the exercise of Dylan’s ‘Going, Going, Gone’, it’s a rock as tough as steel, as solid as…
“What do you think of it?” asks Richard. “Punk — it was important… we thought it was important, but it was just an alternative to beatnik and hippies.”
“I’m not ambitious as a musician any more, and I’m more interested in being an actor.” One of the films in which he has appeared, Smithereens, was shown at Cannes and will be distributed internationally. “Rock is dangerous to me as an individual.” So he wants to be an actor, he wants to be a writer — “I haven’t started on a book yet, but I’m about to.” He compromises.
Richard Hell isn’t interested in what he has to tell me. He does it through a need, a need to be known, a need to express a dead-end street of love and lust and junk and survival. He’s a star because he doesn’t have the energy to make the effort but he has the talent, the ideal of rock, that aging boring, bothersome old fuck that doesn’t know what to do with itself but inevitably explodes in one direction or another. Richard Hell could matter — I mean really matter — be a matter of life and death to many people (“I’m not a hero… I don’t want the responsibility”) but all he wants to do is to live and let live. He could write a popular music that’d set your heart flaming but why bother if he doesn’t like touring and can’t be buggered to make an album unless it’s handed to him on a plate. It’s a matter of life and death but Richard does it for the Hell of it. I know I don’t much like him as a person but I think his new album is the best rock album I’ve heard all year. But I’m twenty-five and now I abdicate from his Blank Generation, and though I’ll trip down Destiny Street, I’ve only come to dance.