About book I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp (2013)
The title comes from a piece of creative writing by an 8 year old Hell (ok, Richard Meyers at that point) after a curious attempt to sneak away from home that his father worked out and even "helped" him with, just a few weeks before dying suddenly. This tragedy gets given very little importance by Hell, as does the rest of his family after he drops out of college and leaves them in the South while heading off to New York City.The typical rock bio arc includes the rebellious youth, the kindred spirits (or not), the gathering of momentum, the breakthrough, the pressures/drugs/creative differences, the difficult years (kids moving on to others) maybe even penury and then the acceptance that really it has been a privileged life and there are still enough people willing to pay to keep the subject in wine and clover... Here, apart from Hell's undoubted skill as a writer, there are a few twists to that boilerplate tale. Rebellious youth? Check. Kindred spirit? Tom Verlaine, but they never really made it while working together - they're sort of Banquo's ghost to each other. And the momentum? It kept getting pushed sideways, although by accounts other than his own, Richard Hell was actually the crown prince of the CBGB scene, the one who was going to make it, who gave a look and hauteur and drive to the whole punk schtick. Without Hell, the whole UK explosion would not have happened the way it did, given that it galvanised around some touchstones that came from him (and others from Iggy Pop, of course, but that was on the other side of the 'family').Now that's where this book starts to become more interesting than the usual rock bio. Hell is old enough now to question whether he really could have been as direct as the Sex Pistols were (he doubts it very much), and his breaking down of the literary/intellectual underpinnings of the whole Village/Bowery/Lower East Side gang shows that it was more what we might understand now as performance art added to the snarling guitars and rhythmic whomp of post-glam rock. So Hell is there as a blend of poet/dreamer, ladies man, live piledriver and hopeless case junkie. He never gets to win. He gets points decisions, critical acclaim, groupies by the whatever-load, but he basically ends up being "the bass player" in punk's pantheon.We end in 1984, when 35 year old Hell gives up music and turns to writing: journalism and the odd novel. Not much poetry, in fact. We end, in fact, on a real low. It's unlikely Hollywood's going to pick up on this story... Hell, whether as a junkie or as a rival, ends up destroying most of his closest relationships. He has an admirable ability to critique himself, as well as a great re-reading of Dylan Thomas, of whom he was and then wasn't a fan. And now is again.It's great to get the feel of a long NYC build-up to fame. He was there from the age of 18 and it was a good 6-7 years before he got anywhere. This feels much more tangible than some of those "I got in to town on Friday and made it by Sunday" tales. His dead end jobs and sidesteps and poetic dreams are all affecting.The only odd feeling I get, and one which seems to anticipate the rather monochromatic palette of punk, is that Hell seemed to use very limited reference points. He talks about only listening to 3 albums as an adolescent (building his musical viewpoint from them), he seems to read with very strict self-imposed guidelines (although to be fair he does describe himself as a a cinephile and kind of prove it) and his main filter is himself. Solipsism and word games, indeed. And punk took up that navel-gazing weltschauung and simply gave it a class-war-fuelled rhetoric. Indeed, it had not very places to go by 1978, which is why postpunk's widescreen raiding of reggae, African music, funk, electronic music etc. was such an antidote.That said, it's clear that he was a seeker, however select his 'sacred texts', and that he gave this non-conformist energy, swirling amorphously since the Stooges and the MC5, a real focus and swagger. This book is not a score-settling (although when Hell gets fired up, he gets a little snakey), but is a different view of the 'cool' (nice debunking of himself as cool, too) heart of the CBGB crowd and how his grand vision went all the way and hit its target, but did it without him. I understand that this is an autobiography, but the first 50 pages of childhood cowboy fantasies and accounts of the pubescent mindset were a little slow and disappointing. The rest, not unlike Legs McNeil's Please Kill Me, was a pleasure, though.The book is speckled with aphorisms about what is and what is not rock and roll, the pleasures of an opiate nod, damaged people and their little (or big) intricacies, sex, and various other ego confessions. Towards the end, the author even admits that the writing gets a little repetitive during the details of acute drug withdrawal, kicking, relapsing, binging, grasping out for lost loves/flings, and jumping in and out of this cycle for some time before realizing he had to quit music and narcotics at the same time and focus his life on writing. Although repetitive, this section is not unpleasant in that he writes without embracing some new dogma, nauseating positive thinking, exaggerated but vague "thankfulness", and therefore probably avoided a good lot of the Oprah/NPR crowd (even though Anthony Bourdain wrote a jocky little blurb on the back of the book).
Do You like book I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp (2013)?
Marginally talented, pretentious, egomaniacal junkie in the right place at the right time. The end.
—V1C2S3
who knew the birth of punk rock could be such a bore?.i guess the terrible writer and Richard hell
—lisieux
Comes off as an arrogant misogynistic toerag, tbh.
—Ginger
the writing is really, really poor. disappointing.
—Dream
Great memoir. Best epilogue ever written.
—EvanNPatriceRMent2B
