As a high school freshman I was accosted by a rockabilly senior, who pulled me aside for wearing a Sex Pistols shirt. "Fuck Sid Vicious," he started. "Now, Johnny Thunders, there's a survivor." I was fourteen, my knowledge of punk history fairly sketchy, but I could've mustered a better rejoinder if at the time I'd been more aware of Richard Hell.
Hell was there from the beginning. In 1974, a year after Hilly Kristal opened CBGB's and before the Bowery biker dive regularly housed punk, then no wave, Hell and Television bandmate Tom Verlaine convinced him to let them play every Sunday. "CBGB's was a private world," Hell says in the liner notes to Spurts: The Richard Hell Story, while discussing "Chinese Rocks," the track he co-wrote with Dee Dee Ramone and subsequently recorded with the Heartbreakers. Known in punk lore for inspiring Malcolm McLaren with spiked hair (perhaps inspired by Rimbaud) and ripped t-shirts, Hell recorded at least two seminal albums with The Voidoids, 1977's Blank Generation and 1982's Destiny Street. Thirty years later, skyrocketing NYC property values and $91,000 in unpaid rent finds CBGB's ready to sink.
"I think it would be good if CBGB's could remain open," Hell replies via email in response to my question regarding the same. "I guess the people who think differently believe that "market forces" should always reign. That if the place can't pull it's own weight, it should be allowed to die a natural death. I don't know what a practical way of subsidizing the place would be, if that's what it takes, but I do think there's value in its preservation, 'preservation' just meaning letting Hilly maintain operation as he has for thirty years. The place is like a little cultural time capsule. I remember how interesting it was to visit Goethe's house in Weimar and Jefferson's Monticello and Gustave Moreau's museum/residence in Paris. 'Punk' may not be Goethe but it's amazing that the location of its breeding and birth still exists exactly as it was then and it would be stupid to destroy it. It's the last vestige of that physical situation, for those who are curious. And obviously many people from all over the world are curious."
He's right, folks are intrigued by punk pioneers. And while CBGB's struggles to stay afloat, Hell's enjoying his highest profile in years. Akashic Books recently published Godlike, his second novel, and he's finally receiving reviews that discuss his prose rather than his biography. Now the ex-Neon Boys, Television, Heartbreaker, Voidoid, and Dim Star player has curated Spurts, which spans his output in chronological order, sans the two unordered, affixed bonus tracks by Dim Stars and Television, respectively.
"Those two bonus tracks are the only two out of order. I had a few reasons for doing it this way," Hell says. "Not least of which was the way it subtly (almost imperceptibly) suggested that the album already existed, and by doing that played into my vague, goofy conception of Spurts as my "only" album." He continues, "I made the album I'd most like to listen to that could be compiled from all the songs I recorded." Accordingly, he's crammed 21 tracks onto a single CD, accompanied by liner notes by Robert Christgau, Carola Dibbell, and Hell himself, along with the full text to Lester Bangs' take on the then enfant terrible.
Oddly, the early Hell doesn't feel at all dated, while his later Dim Stars material with Thurston Moore, Steve Shelley, and Don Fleming emerges as the least timeless. (Robert Quine, Hell's longtime guitarist, plays rhythm on one track. Quine committed suicide last year, and Spurts is dedicated to him.) Otherwise, there are nice opportunities for compare/contrast between The Voidoids' 1977 "Blank Generation" and Television's 1974 live version (recorded, of course, at CBGB's) as well as an early, so-called "preliminary version" of "Love Comes In Spurts" by The Neon Boys and a "completely different" version from the Voidoids.
Check out also a jittery cover of Creedence Clearwater's "Walking On The Water" and the more recent, previously unreleased "She'll Be Coming (For Dennis Cooper)," a sublimely weird homage to the Los Angeles and Paris-based transgressive author. "Well, it was more or less a 'commission,' not something I thought up independently as a song I felt compelled to write," Hell tells me. "I was asked to do it by the people who'd conceived that CD compilation (which I understand is now cancelled), and I agreed out of respect for Dennis."
It isn't the first time Hell overlapped his verbal and musical interests. I ask him, if he had to do another track based on a work of literature, what would he choose?
"There were a couple of times something I was reading gave me ideas for songs, but they took me by surprise," he notes. "They just happened when I was reading books at a time when I needed to be writing songs and the reading set off a song—"Time" was inspired by something Borges said in a poem, and "The Hunter Was Drowned" by a myth Jung was talking about. So it's not like a pattern, or habitual or anything. It happened twice. You never know, it could happen again but I don't have anything in mind."
Despite his literary mind, Hell's suspicious of the rocker-writer tag placed upon him and posits in the liner notes, "What I've done isn't about my lyrics—there's never been a rock 'n' roll song that survived on the strength of its lyrics." (I tried coming up with a list, but returned empty handed.) In conversation, he also chaffed at my terming his most famous and most rocking track, "Blank Generation," an anthem. "I don't like that word anthem, as if everyone was swearing allegiance to something a song says." In the liner notes, he expands this thought, mentioning that the song's too ambivalent to be anthemic and asking, "How can there be an ambivalent anthem?"
This nonchalant ambivalence shows again when Hell discusses the attention punk's salad days are currently receiving. "The punk era had a resurgence about ten years ago too, when Please Kill Me, Go Now [Hell's first novel], and a new album from Patti Smith (after a long period of no recording) happened all at once, and that Sex Pistols reunion tour," he says. "Maybe it's every ten years for a few decades (until we're all dead)."
Per usual, it seems he's onto something.
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