Richard Hell's I DREAMED I WAS A VERY CLEAN TRAMP: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY out March 12th

The new book from my favorite writer and one of the most influential artists, and people, of my life comes out Tuesday March 12th and I am asking that you all buy it and give it a read. 

Richard Hell's I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp: An Autobiography promises to be one of the best and most important books of the year, and I do hope everyone here will support my favorite fellow Kentuckian and snag a copy of this long awaited work. 

If you aren't already familiar with the life and work of Richard Hell please, for God's sake, stop reading here and go immerse yourself in his official site. 

A big congratulations to Richard on his upcoming book and, needless to say, I can't wait to add it to my special bookshelf already dedicated to all things Richard Hell. 

Dust Off Those Grooves (Chapter Three) Johnny Thunders' So Alone

Johnny Thunders would have turned sixty years old today. In tribute to one of my major musical heroes, I am re-posting this look at his greatest album that I wrote in the early days of Moon in the Gutter.


Memory is a strange thing, specifically what we remember. I have over 3,000 records and cds. I've been collecting, passionately, since I was in my early teens. I have had girlfriends that I can't even remotely remember anything about but I can pretty much pull any of my records, or discs out, and recall not only where where I got them but what was going on in my life at the time. I couldn't tell you what I was doing last week but I could tell you my first 45 was Blondie's "The Tide Is High" and that my first lp was Elvis Gold Records Vol. 5. I mention this because, even though I remember these things clearly, certain albums seem to be almost part of my DNA...while I remember the first time with them, I can't imagine ever really being without them.
I found Johnny Thunders then out of print solo debut, SO ALONE, on vinyl in a tiny Manhattan record store in 1992. I had discovered JT at the perfect age of 16 when I bought the first New York Dolls record and even though his guitar playing had been copied a million times over at that point there was still a freshness and raw energy that made it totally unique and unbelievably compelling to me.
Southern Indiana in the late 80s early 90s was not the most ideal spot for finding Johnny Thunders solo records; so for several years it was just those Doll sides, some scattered live recordings and articles that I found in old music magazines.
I'll never forget getting the news that JT had died my senior year of high school. My friend Ryan coming into the cafeteria and simply saying, 'Johnny died'.
A year or so later my father took me up to Queens to see Johnny's grave, by that point Jerry Nolan was gone also and the groundskeeper was very helpful in helping us locating both markers. Johnny's grave was covered with stuff fans had brought...I added a pack of Lucky Strikes..
It was on that same visit that I found SO ALONE, a near mint original British pressing with the insert sleeve. The original Rolling Stone review was entitled 'The Promise Of Rock and Roll' and all these years later that still seems fitting. It's not only one of the great rock albums but it's an album that's in love with the idea of rock itself. It's because of this record that when I think of Johnny I don't think of drugs, his early death or any of that shit, I just think of the passion and humanity that he injects on SO ALONE'S 10 tracks. Humanity might seem an odd word to use in describing Johnny but like the line goes in "Great Big Kiss", "Bad but not evil". Hell, even the notorious Sex Pistols put down "London Boys" has a certain honor to it...like a kid talking trash on the playground because he's been insulted in front of his friends.
The album open with what sounds like a call to arms with Thunders storming version of the classic instrumental "Pipeline". What other 'punk' album would have worn it's heart on its sleeve so much? Johnny on this album right up to his final work COPYCATS would always, at heart, be that kid who grew up listening to rock in the 50s and 60s. One of the main things that always separated the New York punk scene from the British one was New York's willingness to tip their hat to what had inspired them. A lot of the British bands from the time seemed to take this holier than thou attitude that they were doing something new, when of course they had all been influenced by the same stuff the NY scene had. While Joe Strummer was singing 'No Elvis, Beatles or The Rolling Stones' Patti Smith was covering "Jailhouse Rock" and Richard Hell was doing "Ventilator Blues". It all works out though, and the influences that punk carried are more and more known. I think it might even get to the point where I can say no one was more punk than Elvis in '55 or The Who in '66 and not be looked at like I was crazy.
SO ALONE includes a mixture of covers, originals and a few older redone Dolls tracks and yet it feels completely cohesive. "You Can't Put Your Arm Around A Memory" is the most famous and probably rightly so, but listen to the way he sings David Johansen's incredible lyrics to "Subway Train" or that cover of the Otis Blackwell penned "Daddy Rolling Stone". It sounds like a greatest hits album to me and if the closing late period Dolls track "Downtown" doesn't make you miss what used to be New York City, nothing will.
A lot has been written about Johnny Thunders, highly recommended is Nina Antonia's bio 'In Cold Blood' (plus her work on The Dolls) and books like 'From The Velvets to The Voidoids' and 'Please Kill Me' are essential. For newcomers, I would recommend three things over any of those: The first Dolls album, SO ALONE and an essay Richard Hell wrote after Johnny died called 'Johnny Thunders and The Endless Party'. It's available in Hell's must have 'Hot and Cold' book. There isn't a finer piece of writing on a rocker that's ever been written. The most famous quote comes when Hell describes him as the 'the rock and roll Dean Martin of Heroin' which is of course dead on but it's his description of Thunders as a guy who wanted to be 'as good as Frank Sinatra and Elvis' that really gets me. After reading that I saw that guy staring at me from that isolated corner on the cover of SO ALONE differently. He was no longer that doomed rock and roll loser that everyone is so quick to cast him off as. He was just a kid who grew up wishing he could wear a great suit, play music that he loved so much and be as good as good ever got. Through the ten tracks on SO ALONE Johnny Thunders got his wish.

...

Operation Screenshot (Films of the Eighties) Susan Seidelman's Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)

My Favorite Closing Shots: Ulli Lommel's Blank Generation (1980)

Images From My All Time Favorite Films: Susan Seidelman's Smithereens (1982)

***My article on this film can be found in this book.***

"Time Can Write a Song": Richard Hell's Destiny Street Repaired

I've sometimes wondered why I am so often attracted to the most flawed works from great artists. I typically find myself gravitating towards works in an artist’s canon that show off their imperfections, and vulnerabilities, more than their obvious masterpieces do. So I will always rather watch The Magnificent Ambersons over Citizen Kane, read Forced Entries instead of The Basketball Diaries and listen to Street Legal more than Blood on the Tracks. As long as I can remember I have been drawn to fractured little classics that most overlook, or hold in disdain, and as I get older I find myself gravitating to these artistic fringes more and more.

Richard Hell was already one of my favorite songwriters when I first heard his damaged second album Destiny Street in the early nineties in Richard's hometown of Lexington, Kentucky. I had cut my teeth on Richard's first LP, the masterful Blank Generation, through high school but Destiny Street had been a bit trickier to find. It only took a few listens for me to hear that Destiny Street was indeed that flawed bastard young son of Blank Generation and it really didn't have the savage grace and finesse of that historic first platter.

Despite its flaws, I couldn't get certain songs like the epic title track, 'Staring in her Eyes" and "Ignore that Door" out of my head and within a few months of buying the album I was playing it much more than its more powerful predecessor. Destiny Street haunted me and I could ultimately relate to it more than Blank Generation. It felt like a very powerful glimpse into the soul of an artist clearly in trouble and, as a young artist myself also in the midst of a crisis, I just couldn't shake the effect it had on me.

For the better part of a year I played Destiny Street rather obsessively and I can't think about my time in Lexington, specifically walking downtown staring at the abandoned buildings that housed once promising businesses, without thinking of the album. It didn't matter that there was indeed something wrong with the production, that the songs had been too messed with and that it was finally a very inconsistent album because, it did what all of the greatest art should do in that it spoke directly to me. It understood my splintered state and it helped remind me that even the darkest chapters of a person’s life can have traces of the brilliance and transcendence that the best periods have in spades.

I introduced the album to anyone who would listen for the better part of the nineties. Friends, who would one day become enemies, heard it through me and lovers, who would slip out of my life, had songs from it put on mix-tapes designed to express emotions that I couldn't get across otherwise. I came to love its flaws, its savage intensity and how Hell's audacious and brilliant lyrics succeeded even when the production failed him.

When I first heard last year that Hell was planning on revisiting Destiny Street I was a bit skeptical. Not because I didn't trust Richard, but because I didn't trust myself to hear a different version of this album that had come to mean so much to me. Imagine my surprise and shock when I first heard Destiny Street Repaired, as it is not only the equal of the original but is finally the masterpiece I always felt it could have been.
Destiny Street Repaired isn't a nostalgic trip; it is a full-blown revitalization of one of the most important and often overlooked careers in modern music. A ferocious reminder to the genius of Richard Hell, Destiny Street Repaired is one of the freshest and most vital releases of the past several years. A near complete re-working of the flawed original with all new vocal tracks by Richard and added on guitar work by Marc Ribot, Bill Frisell and the Ivan Julian, all admirably filling in for much missed Robert Quine, Destiny Street Repaired is a jaw-dropping and emotionally wrenching listen that re-solidifies Hell's place as one of the most vital performers of the rock era. Finally, we have performances and production on Destiny Street Repaired to match Hell's lyrics, with the muddy and compressed sound of the original transformed into one of the most vivid and explosive aural experiences I have had in a long time. Listening to Destiny Street Repaired is like seeing Apocalypse Now on the big screen for the first time after years of only seeing it on home video.

Opening with the reworked version of the still thrilling first single off the album, “The Kid With The Replaceable Head”, Destiny Street Repaired immediately establishes its presence as a full-throttle rock powerhouse and never lets up through the nine tracks that follow. Two covers, “I Gotta Move” and Hell’s extraordinary take on Bob Dylan’s “Going Going Gone”, a moving track now made all the more wrenching by some really exquisite new guitar fills by Frisell, follow before the album really arrives at arguably its first masterpiece.
Time has done nothing to lessen the effect of one of the original album’s most bracing moments and “Lowest Common Dominator” is still a bracing experience. Hell’s new vocal is a bit more laid back than the original and the background vocals of Ruby Meyers and Sheelagh Bevan give the already menacing track a seductively sinister new layer.

The legendary “Downtown at Dawn” is up next and it is here that the two real stars of the new album began to come forward, with Hell’s unbelievably emotive vocals and Ribot’s new guitar work taking center stage. Ribot is in simply stunning form, delivering the kind of do-or-die guitar work you just don’t hear on Rock n' Roll records anymore, and Richard delivers some of his most moving lyrics with the added wisdom that only age can bring, and the kind of emotional honesty that only a true poet can be capable of.

A splendid version of one of Hell’s most famous songs, “Time” is up next along with another cover, “I Can Only Give You Everything”, before the album goes into its astonishing trio of concluding songs, three tracks that represent the finest of Richard Hell as a songwriter and performer.
The pounding “Ignore That Door” tops the screaming original with a subtler, but still wonderfully corrosive, vocal by Hell and some astonishing new guitar work from legendary Voidoid Ivan Julian. “Staring In Her Eyes”, one of the most simultaneous sweet and sinister songs Hell ever delivered, is still a highlight to the album and the new version is given a wonderfully off-kilter treatment with Bevan again on background vocals and both Frisell and Ribot contributing excellent additional guitar work.
Destiny Street Repaired closes with a surprisingly extended take of the original’s already epic title track, and Hell’s time defying tale of stepping “off a curb into ten years ago” to run into himself as a younger man is still one of rock music’s most resonate conclusions. Wonderfully poetic, haunting, funny and profound, “Destiny Street” is such a unique and compelling track that it is an absolute tragedy that it isn’t more recognized among rock and punk fans.

The CD version of Destiny Street Repaired (which is free with a purchase of the vinyl version of the album) has an additional two bonus tracks that are both wonderful to hear. A terrific never before heard song “Smitten” is followed by a tremendous studio demo (with Quine) of the amazing “Funhunt”, a song previously only available in muddy live recordings.

Destiny Street Repaired is available to order from Richard Hell’s website and it is an absolute essential purchase that I couldn’t give a higher recommendation to. While Hell has proven himself as one of America’s great literary treasures of the past thirty years, Destiny Street Repaired stands as a bracing and brilliant reminder that Hell is also one of Rock Music’s great figures. Destiny Street Repaired is a triumph and it erases the flawed aspect of what was already one of my all-time favorite albums. Thanks to Richard Hell for having the guts to revisit one of the most discussed and controversial chapters of a career that has simply been like no other.

My Much Missed Literary Life

At some point in the past fifteen years or so I have went from being a voracious reader to someone who maybe reads one or two books a year. I suppose the process has been a slow one but it feels sudden. I must say that I miss the reader in me who has gradually disappeared over the years and I have been trying to wake him back up.



I was lucky enough to have parents who knew the value of reading growing up and some of my best memories involve my mom reading me everything from Where the Wild Things Are to Curious George to, my favorite, The Fire Cat. It was in these slim children’s volumes that my love for books first came into bloom. Reading should have been in blood, after all my father and grandfather were both writers, and luckily my parents recognized and embraced my appetite.

While I was never a Comic book fanatic some of my earliest reading came in any number of issues of Creepy and Eerie that I could get my little hands on. These helped form my fascination with the fantastic that continues to thrive to this day.



I began seriously reading on my own pretty early in my life, which helped a lot as I was moved around constantly so I never had time to really make connections with kids my age. I remember before I began finding the writers I really loved tht my tastes were all over there place in forming…so everything from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the Little House on the Prairie came into my view pretty well before my teen years.



It was around Junior High that my tastes really begin to form and I had a handful of writers that I read constantly. Chief among these were Stephen King, who I still consider one of our great storytellers, and I zipped through his entire canon in those two years of Junior High. I also became entranced by the plays of Sam Shepherd and the work of Poe, who is probably the person I would name these days as still my favorite American writer.



My real love though early on was Tennessee Williams, whose life fascinated me just as much as his Southern Gothic tales of obsession and heartbreak. I immersed myself fully in his works throughout my early high school experience and one of my best memories was visiting Key West, and seeing where he wrote so many of his greatest and most enduring works.

I also discovered the world of fellow Kentuckian Richard Hell in high school, and his work continues to have a monumental effect on me. I will write more on Richard, and how much he has meant to me, in detail at a later date so I will leave that for now.



College brought along poetry and the works of Verlaine, Rimbaud, Dorothy Parker, Patti Smith and Jim Carroll were rarely out of my hands. Lydia Lunch and Exene Cervenka also played a huge role in my development and I of course had my Bukowski period. All of them just burned with me and a highlight of my early college career was meeting Jim Carroll at a reading he gave at the University of Kentucky in Lexington Ky. in the mid nineties.

My time at UK also brought me in contact with the great James Baker Hall, one of the nation’s great poets and his classes, friendship and books were all like wonderful gifts that came to me in my early twenties. I’ll never forget my time with him, and am still grateful for his support.

Sadly, I began to lose my literary drive in my late twenties due to a variety of factors, most of them all just coming back to the effects life can have on a person. My eyesight got worse and worse each year, and I went from having to occasionally wear glasses to the annoying full time script I have now. Reading, which had once been the most joyful escape, became in a very real way just very exhausting and at times painful.

Most of my reading now comes in the form of non-fiction…mostly film and music related books (Derek Hill's great recent work being the one I am currently working on), with Tim Lucas’ majestic and monumental Mario Bava biography being the first book in quite a while that reminded me of how much I loved the printed word in the first place. Mostly though, I find myself re-reading books now with titles ranging from Elmore Leonard’s Out of Sight to any number of works by William Peter Blatty occupying my time again and again.
It takes me awhile to get through a book and my attention span has become such that I usually have a few going at once with always a couple I don’t finish. It’s a sad state of affairs for a guy who once considered himself a truly great reader. Of course, it is my own fault and I hope to one day return to the page and perhaps rediscover some of the dreams of my youth I have lost along the way.

I hope the reader in me wakes up again eventually. I hate that I have become one of those guys who just doesn’t read much. It’s never been what I have wanted to be…I am hoping one of these nights a line from Poe’s William Wilson or snatch from an Patti Smith poem might enter my mind while dreaming and I will set off on my literary journey again…but until then I am more than a little vacant.