Richard Hell - "I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp"

I was more than excited to finally read Richard Hell's autobiography. If you're not familiar with Hell, hit play on this video first before reading.

Blank Generation has been one of my favorite albums since I first listened to it sophomore year of high school. I thought it was better than anything else his contemporaries were doing at CBGBs, and even better than the Velvets and Stooges before him. It combined a feral physical nature with intellectual wit and humor, in the lyrics and in the compositions. It's the perfect album for a hormone-addled teenager: music about sex and art made by drug addicts.

Somehow, the Glenview Public Library had a copy of Go Now, a novel Hell wrote in 1996, briefly mentioned in his autobiography. I remember being underwhelmed, and feeling like it was an On the Road ripoff (though I also devoured it). Unfortunately, I feel the same way here. Looking at reviews on Goodreads, a lot of people feel the same. He spends too much time on describing apartments he lived in only briefly, that it was a 3.5 star book, that moments of brilliance are overshadowed by half-baked prose, unnessecary tangents, and not expanding on stuff that he could have shed more insight on.

In high school, I read Please Kill Me three times. It remains one of my favorite books, and is an amazing oral history of the punk scene. So it was sorta disappointing to read a lot of the same stuff again and even some things that are almost line-for-line the same. I had hoped for more of Hell's post punk rock life when he was writing more, but he addresses his reasons for not doing this as the life of a writer isn't that interesting, difficutly in describing present day situations frankly blah blah blah. We want to read you, Hell, because we know you are fearless! Give that to us again.

And yet, I can't hate this book entirely. There are in fact some great anecdotes from the CBGBs days, and he has great descriptions of people like Lester Bangs, Dee Dee Ramone, Anya Phillips, and more, and when his poetry sticks out, it sticks out ("Everything that happened to her was weather," describing a girlfriend), but too often it feels like Hell is cashing in; the book is double spaced with blank pages between chapters, like he was just trying to get to a specified length and then call it a day.

It's not all bad. If nothing else, it's got me excited about that scene again, and what's come out of it. I'm rediscovering some LPs, like Robert Quine (Hell's guitarist) and Fred Maher's album Basic. Quine was a great and underrated guitarist, as angry as they come and with a unique style all his own. Check out 'Summer Storm' from that album:

For those interested in CBGBs scene, I'd recommend going with Please Kill Me. For those that want more of a personal account, read Patti Smith's Just Kids. For those that can't get enough (like me), go for I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp.