Richard Hell

The sharp, lyrical, and no-holds-barred autobiography of the iconoclastic writer and musician Richard Hell, charting the childhood, coming of age, and misadventures of an artist in an indelible era of rock and roll... From an early age, Richard Hell dreamed of running away. His father died when he was seven, and at seventeen he left his mother and sister behind and headed for New York City, place of limitless possibilities. He arrived penniless with the idea of becoming a poet; ten years later he was a pivotal voice of the age of punk, starting such seminal bands as Television, the Heartbreakers, and Richard Hell and the Voidoids—whose song "Blank Generation" remains the defining anthem of the era. Hell was significantly responsible for creating CBGB as punk ground zero; his Voidoids toured notoriously with the Clash, and Malcolm McLaren would credit Hell as inspiration for the Sex Pistols. There were kinetic nights in New York's club demi-monde, descent into drug addiction, and an ever-present yearning for redemption through poetry, music, and art. "We lived in the suburbs in America in the fifties," Hell writes. "My roots are shallow. I'm a little jealous of people with strong ethnic and cultural roots. Lucky Martin Scorsese or Art Spiegelman or Dave Chappelle. I came from Hopalong Cassidy and Bugs Bunny and first grade at ordinary Maxwell Elementary." How this legendary downtown artist went from a prosaic childhood in the idyllic Kentucky foothills to igniting a movement that would take over New York's and London's restless youth cultures—and spawn the careers of not only Hell himself, but a cohort of friends such as Tom Verlaine, Patti Smith, the Ramones, and Debbie Harry—is just part of the fascinating story Hell tells. With stunning powers of observation, he delves into the details of both the world that shaped him and the world he shaped. An acutely rendered, unforgettable coming-of-age story, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp evokes with feeling, clarity, and piercing intelligence that classic journey: the life of one who comes from the hinterlands into the city in search of art and passion.

An Autobiography

I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp

Godlike, Richard Hell's second novel, combines the grit, wit, and invention of Go Now with the charged lyricism and emotional implosiveness of his music. Godlike is a heartwrenching tale of one whose values in life are the values of poetry. 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.

Godlike

"The Voidoid was written in 1973 in a little furnished room on East 10th Street. I was staying down the block overlooking the graveyard at St Mark's Church. Every day I'd take a cheap bottle of wine with me across the street to the $16-a-week room I'd rented for writing. Sometimes afterwards if l had some extra money I'd go the pharmacy on Second Avenue and buy a bottle of codeine cough syrup and come back and lie on the cot again...

The Voidoid

On the road with the Blank Generation, "Go Now" takes readers on a wild trip across the country and into the head of a down-on-his-luck punk musician. ""Go Now" is a vile, scabrous, unforgivable, and deserving of the widest possible audience".--William Gibson.

Go Now

An outrageous spectacle of love between two untamed poets, a 27-year old man and a teenage boy, written by one of America’s original punks and finest writers. Based on Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine’s notorious affair, but set in the epochal downtown poetry scene of filthy 1970s New York, Godlike is a tribute to poetry and the beauty and mess of art, desire, and New York City. New York poet Paul Vaughn has a trick for enjoying poetry readings: He simply imagines the reader died a long time ago. Paul is twenty-seven, married, and an admired poet himself. R. T. Wode’s mission is to give offense. He’s also a poet, freshly landed in the city, and, at age sixteen, unknown. Paul worships T. They embark on a tempestuous affair, dropping acid and crashing parties and perambulating the grit and grime of New York City circa 1972. Paul is in love with T., but T. is in love with experience. Their relationship disintegrates. A novel of compelling originality and transcendent beauty by legendary musician and poet Richard Hell, Godlike transposes the notorious romance of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud to the East Village in its squalid, glorious ’70s heyday. The book comprises a version of Paul’s 1997 hospital notebooks: diaries amidst poems and essays, along with, most pertinently, the poet’s third-person memoir-novelette of his youthful time with the now-famous T. Godlike is infused as well with evocations—and sometimes actual poems—of many New York poets of the era, from Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett to Edwin Denby and James Schuyler. It achieves a lyricism both profane and profound as it conjures the frenetic vitality as well as the existential malaise of an era. It’s a searching meditation on art, life, love, and the impossibility of everything.

Wayne Kramer

Ed Chalfa

Erica Easley

The Golden Years of Rock T-Shirts (Vintage Tees, Rock Tees)

Rock Tease

Richard Hell may best be known as a punk icon, a founding member of seminal bands Television, the Heartbreakers, and The Voidoids, but for decades he’s been a prominent voice in American letters. Through his novels Go Now and Godlike, and his critically acclaimed autobiography, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, Hell has proven himself as a talented and insightful writer across many genres, in many forms. But one might argue that Richard’s true genius lies in shorter form as a writer on culture. "Love comes in spurts," Hell once sang, and that could well describe the intensity of his penetrating and wickedly droll criticism. Massive Pissed Love is a collection of Hell’s ruminations on art, literature, and music, among other things, that’s like a candy box of reading treats, a bag of shiny marbles, a cabinet of mementos and uncanny fetishes. However one thinks of it, it’s a joy to read from start to finish and a deeply necessary addition to the oeuvre of one of the sharpest minds and sensibilities at work today.

Nonfiction 2001-2014

Massive Pissed Love

Mike Kelley

Dan Graham

Dominic Molon

Diedrich Diederichsen

Matthew Higgs

Anthony Elms

Jutta Koether

Bob Nickas

Jan Tumlir

Catalogus bij een tentoonstelling over de relatie tussen rockmuziek en avantgardistische kunst sinds de zestiger jaren.

Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967

Sympathy for the Devil

Jon Savage

John Lydon

Andrew Bolton

Examines the impact of punk on fashion, focusing on its do-it-yourself, rip-it-to-shreds ethos, the antithesis of couture.

Richard Hell

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