I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp

by Richard Hell

  All through this book I’ve had to search for different ways to say “thrill,” “exhilaration,” “ecstatic” to communicate particular experiences. Maybe the most extreme example of this class of moment is what I’m trying to describe here. What it felt like to first be creating electrically amplified songs. It was like being born. It was everything one wants from so-called God. The joy of it, the instant inherent awareness that you could go anywhere you wanted with it and everywhere was fascinatingly new and ridiculously effective. It was like making emotion and thought physical, to be undergone apart from oneself.

  That’s what makes the very beginning then in 1973 and 1974 different, and, in a way, more valuable than anything that came later in my music career, despite its shortcomings and problems and difficulties. It’s that it was fresh and every moment had that surging astonishment and pleasure—even if in the service of anger and disgust, as it often was—of anything being possible to make happen. It was like creating the world, and the feeling could never quite happen again, or be sustained, anyway, because familiarity and habit take the edge off.

  Narcotics. I’d consumed that codeine cough syrup in high school now and then for a few weeks, and then I’d gone through a phase in the early seventies, when I was living with Jennifer, of occasionally buying it at the drugstore. In those days Romilar off the shelf had a little codeine in it. I’d drink a bottle alone in my Voidoid office as a kind of treat for myself sometimes, but the experience was mixed—grimacing down that thick red syrup by the bottleful; the stunned high, half like you’d got slapped upside the head; the hangover—too much to repeat too often. It was like a McDonald’s hamburger—tempting enough that you had to try it again now and then to remind yourself why you didn’t do it more often. I didn’t have the money to throw away either.

  Tom and I, partly out of interest in William Burroughs and Lou Reed, were curious about heroin, but we didn’t know anything about finding it. We got lucky once and copped a couple of bags, but it made us both so sick, vomiting, that it destroyed most of our interest. (Also discouraging Tom was the fact that his fraternal twin brother, John, had died from an overdose.)

  Ork liked to do heroin like he was having a tea party. He’d make arrangements in advance every couple of weeks, invite three or four friends, and everybody would ritually, fraternally, shoot each other up in his back room. Pretty soon I was included. Once I’d found my level, I was all in. I marveled at the way a nod was like the dream of a dream, a dream you could manipulate—in other words, paradise on earth.

  I also usually drank while rehearsing—beer often, sometimes wine, every once in a while a half pint of cheap Wilson’s whiskey. Lloyd drank all the time and did dope too. Verlaine and Ficca were straight.

  Rock and roll was a way of life. The songs were like the souvenirs or the by-product of that way of life. To choose rock and roll was to reject growing up and reject straight society, and to affirm other ways of being and of looking at the world. I had thought it through and wanted to make our band up from scratch in accordance with what was interesting. Sure, to play in a band was to love music: music in the service of what rock and roll enables.

  Rehearsals were parties and cell meetings and cathartic releases. They were about expressing a spirit, an attitude, as much as about detailing musical parts—the attitude and the music were inseparable. I wasn’t a bass player, even in strictly musical terms. I was a singer and songwriter who, for convenience, played the songs’ bass lines. In the Neon Boys, this worked. But once another guitar player was added, the power shifted to Verlaine and he liked that. Lloyd was a stray dog, following Verlaine for his chance. He was a smart enough guitar player to recognize his dependence on Tom. Tom created all the guitar parts. Lloyd was a sycophant who’d throw a tantrum and whine and pout up to the point where there might really be a crisis and then revert to his default submission to Tom.

  There are videotapes of Television rehearsals in 1974 that confirm all this. One excruciating example shows Tom teaching me the bass part to his “Venus de Milo.” I’m proud of the command of the bass I exhibit in that clip. I’d been playing bass for six months, whereas Tom had been playing guitar for nine years. I’m managing well. I sound good. But Tom is treating me as if I were a moron, barely suppressing his disgust, clenching his jaw, tightening his lips, rolling his eyes, sighing and flittering with a saintly patience that would be rampaging rage in a lesser soul.

  Meanwhile a hungover Richard Lloyd sulks and whines, all petulant, offscreen, refusing to do any work.

  On the same tape, modern punk can be seen first emerging, fresh from the conditions, in a couple of full-blown performances: four pathologically skinny guys in ripped shirts, tight black and blue jeans, and spiky short hair blasting their brains out as they slink and drop and quiver around, kicking and bouncing off each other and wrenching their guitars in the service of compelling, noisy, contemptuous, angry, but also lyrical, rock and roll.

  These unreleased rehearsal videos, which have circulated among collectors for years, and the three released recordings of Neon Boys songs, and then four or five songs on a couple of early bootleg tapes of live Television shows, are the only evidence of what the group was like when it first got attention at CBGB in the spring of 1974. It was not like the Television on the album that was released in late 1977. In early 1974 we were dressed in cheap black leather (before the Ramones) and torn shirts stuck together with safety pins, thrift-store suits, sunglasses, and sneers and throwaway grins and short hair, and when we played it was like a rolling, tumbling clatter of renegade scrap that was also pretty and heartrending, as if you were seeing it from a distance. It moved you and shook you and woke you up.

  But that fresh clatter and bruised flash died as soon as it came to be, like Elvis’s twin, as our first gig illustrates.

  For weeks I’d been swallowing my pride, enduring Tom’s grandstanding jaw-clenches of inhuman patience, in the confidence that it would all come out in the wash of real gigging, of public response.

  Ork had already had a few people down to the loft to see us play and so we were able to use some quotes on the poster I made for our debut:

  “Killers. Sharp as tacks . . . They made me cry.”

  —Scott Cohen, Interview

  “They’re finally here—in full pathological innocence . . . Color, skin, guitars: ‘Love in Spurts,’ ‘Eat the Light,’ ‘Enfant Terrible.’”

  —Danny Fields, Sixteen

  “Four cats with a passion.”

  —Nicholas Ray, director, Rebel Without a Cause

  Danny had visited the loft and had liked us and just told us to write his. Scott Cohen’s was perfect. Nick Ray, the great film director, leftist, and amphetamine head, had watched us rehearse a couple of times.

  Beneath our sullen photo on the poster were two lines from the version of “Love Comes in Spurts” we were doing:

  Love’ll come pump in your soul two feet deep

  Two minutes later alligators’ll chew you in your sleep

  The original conception of the band still held well enough for it to be possible to use my lyrics on the poster. Tom would soon be acting so globally sour that I knew I had to placate him with other emphases in the promo. The poster was like a combination mug shot and cheap boxing-match poster. My ideal of the way to present us live was boxing-ring style—a stage like a platform, a boxing ring, on which we performed in white light against the crowd-walls. No pomp or special effects, just the high-lit band, swinging and bleeding and crying and sneering.

  In full pathological innocence . . . Poster photo for first Television show, Townhouse Theater, New York City, 1974.

  Terry had rented a screening room in midtown, the Townhouse Theater, for our first date. It held about two hundred people. My idea for ramping up our presentation was to place four or five televisions onstage. During our performance each was tuned to a different channel, while one of them was hooked up to the Portapak of the video guy who’d been taping our rehearsals. He roam
ed the theater shooting our act as we played, as well as the audience, and that stream was fed to one of the monitors onstage too.

  March 2, 1974. The room was well filled, though a lot of the crowd was invited. We were all nervous. There was a tiny room off to the side of the stage where we waited to go on. I had a couple of drinks. In those days especially, my performances took place in a puppet realm, where everything I did originated in electrical nerves from which I dangled and projected. My behavior was a combination of extreme deliberation and complete loss of control. I liked to obliterate myself with the volume and relinquish myself, devote myself into the stage lights, as if they gave me privacy. My relationship was with the physics of the situation—the spotlight into which I aimed myself and my feelings, and the billowing skitters of sound pouring forward from behind me. I constantly felt this mix of consciousness that I was doing things wrong but that I also knew and employed a magic that transformed the mistakes as they happened into glory and stick-figure beauty and power, and that is what happened.

  I was glad about the set we played. It worked; we were stunning, if rackety. I knew that everyone in the audience had gotten way more than their money’s worth. Then I saw Tom’s face when we were back offstage, and for a minute I really didn’t understand. Then he said something, and I hated him. He was going to treat the show as an embarrassment, as humiliation. As nothing but an indication of how far short we were of what we should be. To him we were all just more-or-less-workable pieces of equipment in his shop, or livestock to manipulate.

  My stomach fell away. But the anger couldn’t be expressed, I knew from experience, because that would be self-defeating. I had to retain belief that as the band gained experience, and audience reaction, we could return to the track that we’d shared at the beginning. I had to believe that this present tension was a detour. I could see our pure existence, and that all it would take would be a little bit of mutual respect and a sense of revelry in our being this band. I still held on to the hope that he could reawaken to the larger possibilities. I didn’t really have any choice—I’d invested too much of myself in our prospects. So I gritted my teeth and continued.

  It’s true that the band sounded ragged. But this was something that had also been said of the early gigs (and often the later ones) of the New York Dolls and the Stooges and the Velvet Underground. It was something that I positively liked in a band. It’s true of the Stones’ Exile on Main Street sessions too, or on some of their early singles, like “Who’s Driving Your Plane?” or “19th Nervous Breakdown.” Another band whose sound I’d always loved was Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, especially on a track like “Going to a Go-Go,” which sounds like it was recorded in an alley, the band banging on cardboard boxes and garbage cans. I love a racket. I love it when it seems like a group is slipping in and out of phase, when something lags and then slides into a pocket, like hitting the number on a roulette wheel, a clatter, like the sound of the Johnny Burnette trio, like galloping horses’ hooves. It’s like a baby learning how to walk, or a little bird just barely avoiding a crash to the dirt, or two kids losing their virginity. It’s awkward but it’s riveting, and uplifting and funny. In a way it’s the aural representation of that feeling that makes the first time people feel the possibilities of rock and roll music in themselves the benchmark of hope and freedom and euphoria.

  But that’s not what Tom was interested in anymore. He heard these crystal-clear crisp sweet-guitar suites of highly arranged series of time and dynamics sections in his head, and they were about specific parts constructed for effects where everything was subordinate to what his guitar would be doing. It was all about his composing and playing, rather than any other value of the material or band.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  People talk about how bad-off the U.S. was economically in those years of the seventies and how filthy and crime-ridden New York was. It’s true, but my friends and I in the East Village didn’t know any better, and terms like “recession” and “stock market” were meaningless to us. The streets of the city were smelly with both garbage—sanitation workers were striking—and dog shit (the scoop law wasn’t passed until 1978). On the Lower East Side, people assumed their apartments would be burglarized every two or three years. Many buildings and sometimes whole blocks in the area were burned out and abandoned, others staked by squatters. Drug-dealing gangs ruled districts. Sidewalks for blocks would be matted with blankets of housewares and junk peddled by the jobless. It was a slum, but it was where we wanted to live because it was cheaper than anywhere else while also hosting the best bookstores and movies and drugs and people and music.

  Our band had to figure out where to play next. I’d noticed how the Dolls had associated themselves with a particular venue. If a band always played the same nights at the same place, it was easier for them to build a following, since anyone interested would always know where to find them. There were plenty of nasty, hungry little joints around.

  We looked for a likely room. The bar owner would have nothing to lose, we figured to explain to him. If he let us play there every weekend for what we charged at the door, he’d get his bar take boosted by our crowd, and we’d be fine with letting in any of his regulars for free.

  The way I remember it is that Verlaine and Lloyd were walking back from a rehearsal when they spotted CBGB on the Bowery, and then I went over there to look at it with them, and then we came back with Ork to make our proposition to the owner. Hilly Kristal had bought the bar only two months before. He always said it all began when Tom and I caught him outside painting the awning and told him we wanted to talk to him. Lloyd says it was him and Verlaine. There’s also the tale that we built the stage. I don’t remember that either, and it sounds like something Lloyd might make up.

  The place already had that stubby white awning and the ugly stucco-style whipped white surface on its narrow street-front. The Bowery was, of course, literally synonymous with drunkenness and dereliction, and, only four months before we debuted there, CBGB had been the Palace Bar, adjunct drink dump to the Palace Hotel flophouse next door. The dark booze cave, renamed, retained its resigned, rejected Bowery clientele for quite a while after we arrived. It was also a favorite hangout for the Third Street Hells Angels club.

  The venue had opened under Hilly’s management in December ’73. He’d always intended to have live music, and two or three odd acts had appeared in the months before we played there on March 31, 1974, the first of our initial venue-establishing series of consecutive Sundays at CBGB.

  The poster I made for that first club date had two vertical columns side by side, the one on the left a set of four photos like a film strip: the top one showing us playing pool in CBGB’s back room, and the three others frames of shivering vagrants—the group—huddled outside of it at night. I typed some words I wrote for the purpose in the column on the right:

  Horses gallop in from all

  sides rising in the air

  as they converge. The guy

  in the torn blue suit is

  whispering Please kill me.

  Verlaine rolls out of bed

  rubbing his eyes for the

  third time in two hours.

  The bleach-blond takes

  another pill and smiles

  sweetly. Billy flicks on

  the TV. The galloping

  horses meet in the air.

  Tears are streaming down . . .

  Television appears through

  the horses. No injuries

  except the screen has

  developed leaks where the

  boys put their cigarets out.

  A distant sound of

  almost human laughter can

  be heard as the characters

  grow new lungs after

  dozing off during their

  successful attempt to

  swim the channels.

  Tom and I collaborated on the official band biographies we ran off as a press handout:

  TOM VERLAINE—guitar,
vocals, music, lyrics: Facts unknown.

  RICHARD HELL—bass, vocals, lyrics: Chip on shoulder. Mama’s boy. No personality. Highschool dropout. Mean.

  RICHARD LLOYD—guitar, vocals: bleach-blond—mental institutions—male prostitute suicide attempts.

  BILLY FICCA—drums: Blues bands in Philadelphia. Doesn’t talk much. Friendly.

  TELEVISION’S music fulfills the adolescent desire to fuck the girl you never met because you’ve just been run over by a car. Three minute songs of passion performed by four boys who make James Dean look like Little Nemo. Their sound is made distinctive by Hell’s rare Dan Electro bass, one that pops and grunts like no model presently available, and his unique spare patterns. Add to this Richard Lloyd’s blitzcrieg chop on his vintage Telecaster and Verlaine’s leads alternately psychotic Duane Eddy and Segovia on a ukelele with two strings gone. Verlaine, who uses an old Fender Jazzmaster, when asked about the music said, “I don’t know. It tells the story. Like ‘The Hunch’ by the Robert Charles Quintet or ‘Tornado’ by Dale Hawkins. Those cats could track it down. I’ll tell you the secret.”

  I can’t remember why I wrote, at the time it took place, the following account of one of the Sundays in those first three months. Presumably it was intended for one of the rock magazines whose editors I was then meeting, but it wasn’t published at the time.

  The pathology prevails.

  My First Television Set

  “Jest the facts”—(Sgt. Friday) T. Verlaine (“Prove It”)

  I walked into this Bowery dive called C.B.G.B. on a Sunday night in April. The first thing I noticed was that it smelled liked dogshit. Then I saw the damned dog. Three or four girls were dancing and being totally ignored by the handsome young gents at the bar. “Talk Talk” by the Music Machine was playing loudly enough on the jukebox to preserve your privacy. A few people stood around the coin slot pool table in back and another thirty or forty sat at tables drinking. The place had a grapevine reputation on account of a band called Television that played there Sundays at midnight. It was a quarter after twelve.