I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp

by Richard Hell

  None of this clothing cost anything much, which was part of the point. It was an alternative to the international stadium jet-set superstar queens who’d stolen rock and roll and spoiled it. Part of what excited me about rock and roll was all the languages of it, clothes and hair most definitely included. You could subvert certain aspects of its signifying potential while indulging in others.

  I arrived at the haircut by analysis. Rock and roll had had two main innovative hairstyles so far: the Elvis ducktail, and the Beatles bowl cut. I tried to figure out what they signified and what they had in common and what made them work. Elvis’s more or less had already existed—its power was in its southern underclass hoodlum origin (along with the reverse-machismo of the way it required so much attention to maintain, and in that way screamed vanity), and the shock of that suddenly being splashed as glamorous and successful onto the front pages of national music magazines and then newspapers, when before it’d been limited to mug shots—truck drivers and bootleggers and petty thieves.

  The Beatles’ haircut, on the other hand, had been created by the band. It said two interesting, conflicting things: one was innocence and youthful charm, since it was a hairstyle typical of five-year-olds of the Beatles’ generation, and two was perversion, transgression, and defiance, since among adults only girls or bohemian freaks and artists wore their hair that long.

  I thought of what the haircut of my childhood had been, and it was a super-short, stiff, almost military “butch” or “crew” cut that had gone ragged because kids don’t like going to barbers. When that patchy raggedness was exaggerated to the degree that I exaggerated it, it expressed defiance and criminality too. For one thing, a guy with a haircut like that couldn’t have an office job. In addition, it didn’t require a barber. In fact no barber could even conceive of it. It was something you had to do yourself, and something that flaunted its freedom from propriety, even from stylishness.

  I also came at the clothes a few ways, which were related to the haircut. I liked cowboys, I liked private detectives, I liked the ghetto rags the Bowery Boys wore in Dead End (as I’d first seen in all the great comedy shorts with Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall that were replayed constantly on TV in New York in the sixties and seventies). I liked the dandyism of the early Rolling Stones, too.

  But it was also important that it all be easy to do for nothing, from thrift shops and work-clothes purveyors. One strategy I used was to wear articles of clothing that had evolved for the use of people whose profession relied on the high functionality of the given piece of clothing—in the way that blue jeans were originally frontier work clothes. I got my shoes from tap-shoe makers (not Capezio) and that leather jacket from a police store. For the Voidoids’ first gig, I dressed us in baggy, boxy black corduroy workingman’s suits from Hudson’s huge work-clothes emporium on Thirteenth Street and Third Avenue. They cost $50 each and they looked great and were fantastically comfortable.

  It was also important that the band’s stage clothes and their street clothes be the same. We were ourselves as performers, not just a show business act, even though our stage appearances were violent and drunken and crazed. Probably the major, overriding thrust of everything I wanted to do in rock and roll was to bring real life back into it. I played this up by favoring torn clothes, and by sometimes reconstructing them with safety pins to make sure the point couldn’t be missed.

  There are some misconceptions about the origins of the hairstyle and torn clothes that have gotten a lot of play in punk journalism. It’s often said that I based my haircut on Rimbaud. Probably that comes from an interview I did once in which I mentioned that a year or two after I started the hairstyle I noticed that the cover of the final issue of my literary magazine (1971) features pictures of two guys with similar hair: Rimbaud and Artaud. And that that had reminded me of another example: the Jean-Pierre Léaud of The 400 Blows (who’s actually an example of the 1950s kid’s-hair look that my reasoning had arrived at). But noticing those was after the fact, though who knows whether there might have been some influence. The other is a weird false anecdote that all my clothes were torn because an angry girlfriend had done that to my wardrobe and I couldn’t afford new clothes. That didn’t happen. It’s the kind of thing punk interviewees like to say to sound “insider” savvy. It’s obvious from all the publicity pictures I oversaw from 1974 on that I was deliberately proposing torn togs.

  The Neon Boys ready to rumble.

  And then there were our names. While everything else about how we conceived the band had meaning and purpose, our names sounded hopelessly banal: Tom Miller and Richard Meyers. I decided on Hell pretty quickly. I liked it as soon as I thought of it. It was assertive but negative without being too specific, and it captured my condition. Coming up with something for Tom was harder. Then I thought of copping the name of a nineteenth-century French poet. Right away that seemed correct. I suggested Gautier, thinking it should not be a poet who was too well known because that would come off as pretentious and literary. Then immediately I realized Gautier wouldn’t work because there’d be problems with its pronunciation. Tom came back with “Verlaine” and that sounded perfect. It was musical, and though the poet wasn’t known to most Americans, his writing was exquisitely lyrical—all full of autumn and violins and wistful, if sensual, love—while also simple and straightforward (including some pornography), and he was an archetypal bohemian mess. Of course I was conscious of the Rimbaldian tinge “Hell” might carry, especially juxtaposed with “Verlaine,” but what the hell. It was settled: Verlaine and Hell.

  The whole process of reconceiving ourselves as a band was interesting and satisfying. It hadn’t occurred to me before how all-encompassing a self-invention or self-realization making a band could be, but the moment I began picturing myself in music, I understood. (Doubtless David Bowie was a signpost too, though I wasn’t a fan of his. He seemed too artificial to me.) There was much more to having a band than writing and performing songs, and instantly I felt like I was in my element—that I could do this in a way that had hardly ever been done before, because it felt natural to me.

  Eventually, this would be part of what separated Tom and me and what made it impossible for us to work together, but at the beginning, it was different—he appreciated and accepted my conception of the band as a subculture.

  Sadly, all these ideas had to be left half-realized though, when the band project had to be set aside because our search for a guitarist had failed.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  At this time, towards the middle of 1973, I met Andrew’s sister, Jennifer Wylie, and we started going out. She was nineteen, with blond hair, a creamy complexion, and a ruled profile like a Greek statue. She was ample without being overweight, also like Aphrodite. She had a surface toughness that she copped from her older brother’s hardass ways, but underneath she was sweet and kind and a little uncertain. As a Wylie, she had enough money to live decently without having to work. She got an apartment in a renovated building that overlooked the old graveyard in the west yard of St. Mark’s Church and I spent most nights at her place for a while.

  While the band was on hold I started writing a piece of fiction. A couple of the old buildings on Jennifer’s pretty, tree-lined street—probably the most genteel block in the East Village—were anomalous for having been converted to cheap SRO fleabags. You wouldn’t know it from the street except that the buildings’ windows were filthy and some of them had milk cartons and cold cuts on their ledges in winter, meaning no refrigerators there. I rented a room in one to use for writing. At $16 a week it came with a cot, a dresser, a night table, and a kitchen chair; the bathroom was in the hall. The little bed took up over half the floor space. The window looked out onto Tenth Street from the third floor. I brought in a typewriter and a portable record player, and every day I’d go spend a few hours there working on the book. The rooms were so shabby you could slip the lock on a door with a piece of cardboard, so I took a hammer to the case of my little blue Olivetti to discoura
ge theft.

  I kept two record albums there, which I’d rotate nonstop while I was writing—the Who’s My Generation and James Brown’s Live at the Apollo. The other part of my routine was that I’d bring a cheap bottle of red wine to drink as I wrote. I wouldn’t stop typing until I’d covered one single-spaced page per visit, and I’d quit there, usually in the middle of a sentence. That made it easy to pick up where I’d left off. I think I got this trick from an Ernest Hemingway interview.

  The book in progress was called The Voidoid. That word was born over payday fat burgers and steak-cut fries with Tom at the Second Avenue Deli. I said he could be described by attaching “-oid” to any noun and we started calling each other this-and-that-oid. Eventually he called me voidoid. I ran with it.

  The book riffs on life as I knew it at the time. In it, I’m “Arthur Black” and Tom is “Caspar Skull” and we’re known as “Lips” and “Skull.” Lips, the title character, is a somewhat sympathetic vampire. Lips and Skull have a band called the Liberteens. Jennifer shows up in it. (“My thoughts and me are like ships that pass in the night,” as she’d actually said.) All the locations are real (Tom’s apartment, my apartment, the Lower East Side, Hoboken). Andrew is president Booko Wooko (the double o’s pronounced as in “boo!”). Theresa gets a whole chapter.

  It was influenced by Maldoror. When I decided I was done with it, I typed a clean copy, using a fresh ribbon, on deluxe rag paper, in single-spaced lines but with extra-wide margins all around, so that each page was a rectangular black slab of glyphs inside wide white borders, the way the New Directions edition of Maldoror looked. I sealed the typescript with a title page on which I carefully centered my thumbprint in blood.

  At around this time I started working at Cinemabilia, my final and best day job. The shop, at Thirteenth Street just west of Fifth Avenue, was easy walking distance from wherever I would sleep (my apartment, Tom’s apartment, Jennifer’s apartment). The work was a breeze while being interesting and educational, and I was appreciated by the management. The pay was almost nothing, but it cost almost nothing to live in New York at that time, if your needs were few, as mine were.

  The management comprised two people—the owner of the store, Ernest Burns, who was there all day most days, and his lieutenant, Terry Ork, the nominal manager, who knew the stock almost as well as Mr. Burns, and who wrangled the register. Both of them knew their film, but Mr. Burns specialized in Hollywood, while Terry had mastered the rest of world cinema, especially European—the French New Wave and Godard in particular.

  I can’t say exactly how much I knew and thought about movies before I started working there, but I knew a lot more by the time I left. Before I worked there I liked to read Andrew Sarris’s influential film column in the Village Voice; by the time I quit, I was making extra cash writing papers for his Columbia University film students ($75 for a guaranteed B+ or better).

  I grew up on movies, but in the sixties and seventies film influence was at its height in the world, and movies from all film history and half the globe routinely played in New York. (I also gradually realized that one could argue that cinema had crested fifty years earlier, before sound had distracted attention from its essence. This at the same time that I was finding out that rock and roll had peaked in the fifties, before the Beatles homogenized and corrupted everything.)

  Mr. Burns was a big bearlike guy in his early thirties, with a full mustache, a greasy pageboy, and an erect posture, who often pursed his lips and gestured by flipping a hand from the wrist. His default mode was glum impatience, but that was deceptive—he gave gruff, apologetic respect to the knowledgeable. I started off wrapping mail orders, as I’d done at the Strand. Eventually, having learned enough to figure out what photographs from what movies might meet the shyest customer’s personal needs, I worked the stills desk.

  Tom and I were vaguely aware of Terry Ork from Max’s Kansas City. He was five or six years older than us and the most gregarious guy I’d ever known. He was always grinning psychedelically through the beard scruff on his chipmunk cheeks. Everything he said was something he gave you the option of taking as a joke. He was short and chubby, with a weird walk that pressed together his sausage thighs, as he rolled from side to side, while below the knees he was pigeon-toed. It was the walk of a guy actually much fatter than he was. He wore thick plastic teardrop-shaped glasses or tinted round ones, and a big Afro-style haze of frizzy curls. He called everybody “Dog.”

  His legal name was William Terry, and he had a shady history. There’d been a small scandal when it was discovered that he’d conspired with Gerard Malanga to print and sell some Warhol silk screens without Warhol’s knowledge. Malanga was Warhol’s assistant. Terry was also privy to local narcotics supplies. He used to cop from this huge black ex-con with abscess-swollen whale-sized forearms, who loved to sit in his dark cold dump on First Avenue and growl his jabber on and on to the genuinely appreciative Ork. An interesting thing, too, which I only found out quite a bit later, was that Bill Knott had dedicated his first book, the amazing Naomi Poems, to Terry. They’d been friends and roommates when Knott lived for a short period in New York in the midsixties.

  Terry Ork.

  Ork was a connoisseur of boys and movies and modern French art and thought, especially the situationists and Godard. He would end up sponsoring my first bands and me, ostensibly as our manager and/or record label owner. It seems unlikely that the two management figures associated with the first bands of modern “punk”—Malcolm McLaren with the Sex Pistols et cetera, and Terry with Television and the Voidoids et cetera—one British and the other American, should both, independently, consider themselves to be in the lineage of Guy Debord, but it’s true.

  The difference between them was that McLaren was driven, skilled, and full of brilliant ideas. Terry was a nice guy and a generous guy with advanced taste, but he was all front as a band manager. He had no executive or negotiating abilities and no real vision or drive. He just liked having good-looking boys around and liked getting high and chatting in fake French-intellectual. The band—Television, once it formed out of the dormant Neon Boys in late 1973—granted him the honorary term “manager” in exchange for equipment he bought us and for providing us rehearsal space and acting as our mouthpiece.

  I lost patience with him pretty often. When I caught him making no sense, he might act like it was really Dada he was doing, not philosophy. And ultimately he didn’t take offense when a listener didn’t buy his line. It was all in the service of getting high and finding boys who’d let him enjoy them. This is how we got a second guitar player, Richard Lloyd, enabling the formation of Television: it was a favor Ork could do for that pouty, bleach-blond boy he wanted to keep grateful and indebted to him, and to allow him to keep doing things with his body.

  In a common New York syndrome, Terry conceived of himself as an artist even though he didn’t produce any work to speak of. But Terry was different because his goodwill and taste were as important as other artists’ actual work.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  At our first band meeting, at the end of 1973, I brought in a list of potential band names. (“The Neon Boys,” with its history, seemed outdated now.) One of them was Television. Tom, with rare volition, preferred that one, and everyone else was OK with it. Much later I noticed that “TV” was his initials.

  We rehearsed where Ork lived, in a large loft down in Chinatown, on East Broadway. At one end of it Terry had partitioned off a sort of living room, with a mattress or two in it and some rickety chairs and a little black and white TV. The other end of the loft was all open space, decorated by lobby cards for Bertolucci’s The Conformist, a pair of white jockey shorts hanging from a nail, and a photo-poster of a full-frontal-nude Iggy Pop. The floor was polished wood but otherwise the loft was industrial, with grubby whitewashed brick walls, heavy security hardware at the windows and door, and a stamped tin ceiling. We set up three mikes and a drum kit and brought in little amps.

  The truth of our in
vention of our songs and our band preceded and transcended all the contentious opinions and stress and competitive junk that kept arising in the band, and that truth was the hilarious, incomparable intoxication of materializing into being these previously nonexistent patterns of sound and meaning and physical motion. It was as fraught and sublime as great Renaissance religious painting; Bellini’s St. Francis . . .

  The power and beauty of it was unimaginable until then. It can’t be overstated, that initial rush of realizing, of experiencing, what’s possible as you’re standing there in the rehearsal room with your guitars and the mikes turned on and when you make a move this physical information comes pouring out and you can do or say anything with it.

  It was like having magic powers. The ability to create action at a distance. The sounds that came from the amplifiers were absurdly moving and strange, the variety of them so wide in view of the fact that they came from flicks of our fingers and from our vocal noises, and the way that it was a single thing, an entity, that was produced by the simultaneous reactive interplay of the four band members combining various of their faculties. We were turned into a sound, a flow of sound. I remember having a moment of weird revelation once, that each moment of a phonograph record being played, each millimeter of information conveyed via the needle to the amplifier to the speaker to the ear, is one sound. A whole orchestra is one sound, altering moment by moment, no matter how many instruments go into producing it. And, as our band rehearsed, in each moment we made the sound spray out in arrays we could instantly alter, emanating from inside us and our interplay and our inner beings combined, playing. And the sound included words.