by Richard Hell
I used that photo, along with ones of Rimbaud and Artaud, for the cover of that final issue of Genesis : Grasp (number 5/6). Once I had Theresa’s manuscript together I decided to pose as her literary agent and submit the book to big publishers. They all turned it down. A couple of years later, in 1973, I published it myself in a new series of poetry pamphlets called Dot Books.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Andrew Wylie had rented a tiny storefront on Jones Street between Bleecker and West Fourth in the West Village and had set up shop as Telegraph Books. At the front of the room were a few shelves with books of poetry for sale, and at the back was a mattress where he slept. In 1971, shortly after it opened, I came across the place and stepped inside and we started talking. His real mission was the series of poetry pamphlets he was publishing. He was a poet who had a lot of ideas about how poems should be promoted.
He had two partners in Telegraph Books—Victor Bockris, an unsmiling, brisk, talkative little British guy, and Aram Saroyan, whom I never met but knew of from his writing. Saroyan was an inspired, advanced, and relatively widely published poet in his late twenties. He was the oldest of the three and the only one of them with a reputation. Wylie had just recently come down to New York from college at Harvard and was two or three years older than me. Bockris was about my age. I didn’t cross paths with him more than once or twice back then. He lived in Philadelphia.*
Andrew always dressed in a black leather motorcycle jacket and a beret—he was balding—and was an aggressive, wired street person, who was also charming, a joker. He was a born salesman. Pretty soon I realized that he came from a wealthy family, but his gutter style still seemed genuine. I remember he said he’d spent time in a mental hospital. He was short and skinny and pale, with a face like a shaved pug dog starved to the point of transparency. In canine spirit he was more like a pit bull though, with the energy level of a Chihuahua. He liked amphetamines. His voice sounded just like John Malkovich’s and he gave that same impression of being smart and a jump ahead that Malkovich does. Always a little snort smirk laugh.
He was an “alpha” personality. He was always “on” and always had to be on top, one-upping everyone in the vicinity. He never showed self-doubt and he crackled with tactics for domination. This didn’t mean he was unlikable. He was ahead of you even in anticipating your fatigue with him, and would then get humble. He was funny and generous and encouraging, even if it was calculated. He and Bockris in their later incarnation as Bockris-Wylie, a poetry-writing, interview-conducting literary/journalistic team, consciously strove to gain sympathy and cooperation from their subjects by making them “feel good about themselves” via strategic flattery.
Andrew’s main model was Andy Warhol, because of Warhol’s combination of artistic talent with overriding worldly ambition and the marketing savvy to fulfill that ambition. Andrew was discriminating—he may have been tightly wound to succeed, but it was in the service of the most interesting art, or at least the most interesting art that he could imagine being profitable. His ceaseless competitive drive could be maddening, but I almost felt sorry for him. It was lonely work and hard work keeping everyone conscious that he was ahead of them.
As a poet he was into sex and violence. He was aware that these subjects sold, but it’s true as well that they sell because they fascinate and excite people, and Andrew was a person, so it was only natural that they excited him too. I liked his poems. They were highly influenced by Aram Saroyan’s minimalist style as well as by Giuseppe Ungaretti (Wylie had edited a special issue of the British literary magazine Agenda in 1970 that was entirely devoted to Ungaretti, and Andrew had translated a majority of the many poems in it). Here are a few of my favorites of his:
I’m a
tramp
—
a trap
—
I’m a trap
and
lie down
in yellow
flowers
it’s the whole
world
and
I fuck
your
ass
you suck
my cock
He had a flair. With Telegraph he wanted to make poetry as popular as rock and roll and movies, and make poets stars. The style of the books owed a lot to the City Lights Pocket Poets series. They were small and simply designed in a uniform format. One difference from the Pocket Poets books though was that Andrew’s books had a black-and-white film-studio-style glamour shot of each book’s author on its front cover, like a rock album. The books were brief and so were most of the individual poems—they had a “telegraphic” style that way.
His belief in the potential of poetry to excite mass appeal, and his intention to nakedly work to make that happen, was just what I needed to hear about at that moment.
I made a book by Andrew the first in my new publishing venture, Dot Books. It was Andrew’s idea to model the book’s appearance on mass-market paperbacks. We printed the book at that standard size and with a glossy cover and other signifiers indicating it belonged on a rack in a drugstore or an airport, rather than in a literary bookstore where it’d be hidden in the back with the other small-press consignments. In 1972 and 1973 I planned and gathered the material for four more in this series: Theresa’s Wanna Go Out?, Tom’s 21st Century (which I’d renamed from my original title for it, Merde), Patti Smith’s Merde (I thought the title was too good to go to waste, so to speak), and The Voidoid by me.
I can’t remember how I first heard about Patti Smith. Between 1971 and ’73 I saw her acting in a play (Island by Tony Ingrassia), and I saw her read at the gay nightclub Le Jardin, and at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, which was one of the first times she ever sang, and was definitely the first time she had musical accompaniment to her singing—she ended the poetry reading by having Lenny Kaye play guitar for her on one or two pieces of writing. I also saw her read as an opening act for the New York Dolls at the Mercer Arts Center. The St. Mark’s musical interlude was as elaborate as her singing got until after she came to see Television play at CBGB in early 1974, when she started forming a full band.
Tom was with me for at least one of those Patti appearances, possibly all four. Her first book, Seventh Heaven, was published by Wylie on Telegraph in 1972. It was frighteningly new and good, and so were her performances. She fulfilled Andrew’s demand for an electrifying, rock-and-roll-level poetry. Patti was triply stunning at that time, not only because her stuff was hair-raising on the page, but because her performances were so seductive and funny and charismatic that the writing was lifted way beyond the page, and then, third, she was self-possessed and plugged in to the point that she would improvise and riff extensions as she read, like a bebop soloist or an action painter, off to a whole other plane beyond the beyond. She was a natural-born sex waif and a pretty-assed comedian. She’d step out with her hand on her tight-cocked hip, all casual, if in-your-face, and jack out mind and body gush, giggling at herself like a five-year-old, under her deep-set eyes and her coal-black shag, begging to be fucked, skinny as a rod, massive tits deceptively draped in her threadbare overlarge Triumph motorcycles T-shirt, and then twirl away, denying you in favor of Anita Pallenberg.
At the same time as I was working up the Dot Books series, the New York Dolls were taking off. Tom and I went to a couple of their shows at the Mercer Arts Center. We saw them headlining above the Modern Lovers, and also with Patti Smith opening, still only speaking, though she fooled with a little toy piano onstage at that gig. The Dolls were as riveting as Patti, and their music, though simple and sloppy, was physically thrilling. Their gigs were unlike any I’d ever experienced. They were parties, they were physical orgies, without much distinction between the crowd and the band: the band felt like an expression of the dressed-up avant-garde teenagers, and all the downtown hipster cognoscenti who’d materialized from the gutter glitter of the whole sexy area and history itself. It was like some kind of funny dirty religious revel. The band was theatrical
and mocking, self-mocking—semicamp, like a bright crumpled-tissue gift presentation of the weird thing inside. As it turned out, you kind of “had to be there”—the effect didn’t really translate either to record or to concert hall. Its habitat was downtown New York clubs and it didn’t survive transplanting.
In 1972 Tom and I were following what was going on in New York and England in music and I started getting the idea we should form a band. I knew I could do it and I saw how I could use my chops as a writer, and my perception of what was interesting to do in rock and roll, as a songwriter, onstage, and in the whole arena (singing, clothes, haircuts, names, posters, interviews, etc.). I was a little nervous about not knowing how to play any instrument, but Tom said it was easy to play bass for the kind of music we wanted to do.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Even though Tom imagined his future as a professional singer-songwriter, he never did anything about it except to continuously mess around on his acoustic guitar, sketch out a few folkie songs, and once or twice a year go to an open-mike night at a folk club. I can kind of understand that, or think I understand it. It was a form of egotism, like my refusal to try to get accepted by the groups of poets in New York I admired. It would have been humiliating to present myself for approval. We knew we were good and we didn’t have anything to prove. On the other hand I’ve always been interested in making things happen. My inclination is to put it out there and see where it leads. But Tom was too proud, at least at first, until I suggested we team up and go electric.
He found me a copper-colored, little lightweight $50 used Danelectro bass and we started rehearsing quietly in his apartment, practicing the three or four keeper songs he’d written. At the same time I started working on lyrics and melodies to some guitar compositions he’d got going that he hadn’t worked up words for. The idea was that he’d sing his lyrics and I’d sing mine, and eventually I’d write music too. I had the name for the group: the Neon Boys.
We were going to supersede the new “glamour” bands whose music we liked, such as the Dolls and Iggy and Slade and T. Rex. We were into that driving, crazed, riff-strong music, like what was made in the midsixties by the early Stones, electric Dylan, the Standells, the Seeds, the Kingsmen, etc. The hard-pumping 1972 platform-shoe, eye-makeup, and wack hair groups were a welcome replacement for the horrible symphonic-rock and bloated arena muck ruining American radio at the time, but Tom and I were different, and we wanted to strip everything down further, away from the showbiz theatricality of the glitter bands, and away from bluesiness and boogie. We wanted to be stark and hard and torn up, the way the world was.
Preliminary Neon Boys.
Already there was a split between us though. Tom didn’t like the Dolls. He liked Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers more. Richman was an idiot savant of a Velvet Underground–besotted nerdy rock and roller. Like Tom, he had a vision that was personal and that he stubbornly, insistently purveyed as a magic territory in the world, musical and otherwise. He cultivated, and sheltered himself in, a wide-eyed, if intelligent, American-reality-embracing childishness. “I’m in love with the modern world,” he sang. “Roadrunner, a thousand miles an hour,” driving past the malls, into the nightways. I liked Richman too but found the Dolls more exciting and interesting. Tom was a reserved, wound-up person, and the Dolls were too loose for him. It was the same as in poetry—he had problems with Frank O’Hara because too much was allowed in Frank O’Hara. That flamboyance made Tom uncomfortable and made him feel threatened; at least that’s my interpretation.
Tom was highly protected, well defended. There are good things and bad things about that. It gave him a certain kind of integrity—he wasn’t going to be blown around by fashion, he was discreet and reliable, but it made him really difficult to work with or be friends with. He was afraid of infection and robbery, so he lived in this high, remote, walled-in place, which enabled him to look down on everybody else. To me, extremes like that always suggest the presence of their opposites—in other words that somehow, somewhere, he must have been very insecure to need to be so heavily defended. But he never showed the insecurity. On the contrary, he showed nothing but contempt for any activity at which he didn’t believe himself to be adept. Things were only interesting to him that were either completely innocent (cartoons)—and by that token nonthreatening—or that existed in a realm where he felt supremely capable (like highly constructed, technically proficient, emotionally strong guitar playing). Over and over again I experienced his scorn for, or conspicuous indifference to, my interest in things that weren’t his forte. I respected his abilities and valued his friendship, but his coldness and egotism came more and more to the fore as he began to get more public attention. He was a lot easier to get along with before strangers started admiring him.
At the beginning, though, our collaboration was complete and balanced. Naturally I deferred to Tom in musical matters at the start, but we had the same aims and values, musical and otherwise, for the band anyway, so there was no issue. And my lyrics and vocal delivery were just as strong as his. I was writing a lot of songs: “Love Comes in Spurts,” “Change Your Channel,” “Eat the Light,” “I’m Nice,” “That’s All I Know (Right Now),” “High Heel Wheels”—which was the first and only one of these to which I wrote the music (its attitude was influenced by Marc Bolan—Tom and I both appreciated Bolan, digging the Slider LP for instance)—and “Blank Generation,” etc.
After a few months, once we’d gotten six or seven songs well rehearsed, Tom contacted a drummer friend of his from Delaware, Billy Ficca, with whom he’d had a short-lived band in high school. Ficca, who had an unusual, spiky, stop-and-start free-jazz playing style, agreed to come to New York to rehearse with us in anticipation of finding the second guitar player we’d need to start playing shows.
We put an ad in the Village Voice classifieds that read, “Narcissistic rhythm guitarist wanted—minimal talent okay.”
We wanted someone who would be interesting to look at, not be completely stupid, have a reasonable command of guitar basics, and be willing to play the parts Tom would teach him. We did also want him to be at least a little simpatico with us in character and taste. We had no luck with it though.
Among the guitarists who came over to Tom’s apartment and auditioned for us were Doug Colvin, who’d soon be Dee Dee Ramone, and Chris Stein, who would be the guitarist, songwriter, and musical director of Blondie (and longtime boyfriend of Debbie Harry).
Dee Dee was a riot. He could only play barre chords—that’s the single frozen, clawlike fingering that is simply clamped up and down the guitar neck to produce a common chord at any fret. To get started we told Dee Dee that the song we’d try out would be in the key of C. So he put barre chord fingering at a position on the neck, and we had to shake our heads, “No—C.” He slid the fingering to another fret. We shook our heads. He looked up quizzically, puppyish, eager to please, with that shining hair of his and friendly grin. Again, wrong. I always liked Dee Dee. We would become extra-good friends for a while a couple of years later.
Probably the problem with Chris was that he was too mellow and had hippie hair and wore glasses. I always liked him, too, though.
The three-fourths Neon Boys continued for months, rehearsing while searching for a second guitarist, Tom and I both working full-time. Ficca made a lot of sacrifices, staying in Tom’s tiny apartment with him, unable to earn any money. As I recall, he got a job as a messenger for a little while. Finally we had to give up and let him return to Delaware. Before he left though, we salvaged something from all our efforts by recording a few of the songs we’d worked up. From out of the Voice classifieds we found a four-track room in a guy’s basement in Queens and laid down three of Tom’s songs, “Hot Dog,” “Poor Circulation,” and either “Bluebird” or “$16.50,” I believe, and three of mine, “Love Comes in Spurts,” “That’s All I Know (Right Now)” (both of which were Tom’s guitar compositions with my lyrics and singing), and “High Heel Wheels.” Tom has never let
his material from those days be heard. The songs of mine are typical of what we sounded like at the time though, and what Television sounded like at the beginning: driving, angry, ecstatic übermodern rock and roll.
In person, we were also at the state that we’d bring public with Television a year or so later. We’d cut our hair short and ragged. I did mine in a style that poked up in shreds and thatches all over my skull. Our clothes were torn and frayed and sometimes held together by safety pins. I often wore a wrinkled baggy suit and an old tie that was pulled loose down my shirtfront. At other times I wore a leather jacket—not a motorcycle jacket, which I considered trite, but a policeman’s jacket, bought at a policeman’s supply shop near the police academy. (I tried to get Tom to get some police clothes too, which is where those lines in one of his songs comes from, “Richard said, hey let’s dress up like cops, but something in me said I’d better not,” or something like that.) I wore sunglasses a lot too, but never Ray-Bans, which I also thought were clichéd. I liked round, horn-rimmed dark glasses, like Ivy League gone depraved or early Andy Warhol.
My style was deliberately calculated. I wore pegged black jeans. Before I did that, no one on the street wore anything but blue denim jeans. Black ones were hard to find. I was able to find only one store in the entire city that carried them. (Further sartorial anecdote: Once Television got popular and our social circle started expanding, I became friends with Barbara Troiani, a great girl who made a lot of clothes for the Dolls. I showed her a Wilson Pickett album cover and asked her for a suit in purple sharkskin that was cut like that. I loved that suit. It’s the remnants of its jacket I’m holding open on the cover of Blank Generation.)