by Richard Hell
The jukebox got turned off and four guys filed out, one stepping back up behind the drums on the little stage and the other three kneeling down in front of their amps to tune up. They were all skinny and had hair as short and dirty and ragged as their shirts. Their pants didn’t fit very well but were pretty tight with the exception of one guy who was actually wearing a very baggy 20-year-old suit over his torn shirt. While the lights were still down they continued to tune for five minutes looking intense and sharing a cigarette. The pool table had got abandoned and some fancy looking numbers at the door were trying to talk their way past the $2.00 admission. A little guy with big shoulders in a Hawaiian shirt went over and told them to go back to New Jersey.
Finally one of the boys in the band stepped off behind the bar for a second and switched on the stage lights. When he got back he slipped on his guitar, eyed the audience and told us the name of the first song. The bass player banged off a figure and they broke into “Hard On Love.”
I’ll take them from right to left. The singer, Tom Verlaine, tall, blonde, and with a face like the Mr. America of skulls, stood at a slight angle from the mike with his eyes half closed and his black guitar strapped up high. He looked totally concentrated, his mouth moving with the slightest exaggeration as if it were the mechanical means, like a plane for seeding clouds, that enabled some terrific natural force to be released. But then when there was a solo or a few moments between words his whole body would slide backwards or droop to the side synchronized with a chord and then jerk in another direction, eyes shut like someone barely able to maintain consciousness. Rising back to the microphone just in time.
In the middle the other guitar player, Richard Lloyd, swiveled his head, holding his guitar low below his hips, bending over, his neck bulging, guitar nearly touching the floor as his feet went to cover every inch of the square yard allotted to them. A perfect male whore pretty boy face alive with such fear and determination as he wracked the guitar you could almost hear his mother scolding him. He looked like he was going to cry.
On the other side of him stood Richard Hell, the bass player, in black boots, the baggy suit, and sunglasses. Dark hair short on the sides but sticking out three inches from the top like anticipating the electric chair. He’d stand there head lolling off on his shoulder while he fingered the bass until a little drool rolled out of the side of his mouth and then suddenly make some sort of connection and his feet would start James Browning and he’d jump up in the air half splits and land hopping around utterly nuts with his lips pointed straight at you.
Billy Ficca on drums, meanwhile, up above and behind, was slamming and kicking in surprise beats, serious face listening and listening with eyes glazed. He was completely on top. His head held like you tilt your head to tune in on a sound, then moving it again a little, catching a cue, while his arms worked like mad always throwing in something to keep it moving while his eyes gazed off.
The sound of the music was just as raw, perverse and real as the band members looked. Bass like a dinosaur plucked with a claw while one guitar made shiny loops for the other to use at raygun practice. Then it would start raining on the ocean. You’d see a cymbal crash. A verse sung like the genuine sneer at stupid girls of an eight year old who then goes home and cries in his pillow. The three boys in front would step to their mikes and sing Hard on love Hard on love, then the singer solo: Why you gotta be so hard on love?? Four beat silence, drums kick it off and another verse starts up. All over in three and a half minutes. They looked so vulnerable and so cold at the same time I wondered how they’d lived long enough to get here.
Their lyrics were also a lot of things at once. Full of little designs. Sometimes funny or dirty or romantic, often psychotic. Some lines: “We’ll steer by the stars in our high heeled cars” (High Heel Wheels), “My horse run away, my hennypennies don’t lay and my cock just don’t git up no more” (Bluebird), “Love comes in spurts for sure. Though sometimes it hurts far more, you just get love in spurts” (“Love In Spurts”), “Enfant Terrible. So many personae. You’re so death-loose. That’s not talking. Talking?” (“Enfant Terrible”).
After a number people would clap and whistle, a few would yell Yay Television, the singer would thank them, and whoever was to sing the next number introduced it with a few words and they’d do something different. They played two forty-five minute sets, thanked everybody, and announced they’d be back the following Sunday. Me and some other people think they’re the best band in the world. Anyway, I went home, started to write a book, and then asked my sister for a blow job.
Maybe that article says as much about my mind-set at the time as it does about the group, but those things were inseparable then. (If it had been published I, as writer, of course, would have used another assumed name; I wanted to enjoy setting a precedent for how the group should be viewed.)
“Hard on Love” was a lyric Verlaine had written to try to match “Love Comes in Spurts.” “Foxhole” was another attempt at catch-up double entendre. It’s ironic, because he always believed that other people were getting rich off his ideas. He had that closed-off self-obsessed paranoia and misconception of ownership. As a lyricist though, Tom was the king of his specialty—the mental “one hand clapping” line like “I fell into the arms of Venus de Milo” or “the lightning struck itself” or “a boat made out of ocean.”
We immediately got attention and every week there’d be new notable people in the crowd at CBGB, but what we were doing only made sense to the sophisticated nightclubbers, the savvy New York music-business ones like Danny Fields—who’d managed the Stooges and was connected to the Max’s Warhol crew—and his flitty journalist friends such as Lisa Robinson, or else alert musicians, like David Bowie and Bryan Ferry and Iggy Pop, or the young artists from the artists’ bars and bookstores, and smart band-loving topless-dancing girls. At the time, to that pop artistic demimonde of connoisseurs, Television at CBGB represented the Future, the new turn the world was taking.
I’d been working with Patti Smith on preparing her book for publication with my Dot Books, so she and Lenny Kaye came to see Television early that spring and that was a turning point for both her and our band. Patti was the underground girl of the year in 1974, as Edie Sedgwick had once been, and Bette Midler after that, and Madonna later. When Patti saw us she realized she had company. She saw that we were as fresh and good in our area as she was in hers and it was time for her to connect to us and move more fully into music. She found a piano player to add to Kaye’s guitar. She wrote an ecstatic account of Television for the new local weekly, the SoHo News, and she set her sights on Verlaine. For a few months they were a couple. She was also living with her boyfriend Allen Lanier of the Blue Öyster Cult at the time.
Patti’s affair with Verlaine clinched the conflict between Tom and me. Inevitably, as his new girlfriend, she supported Tom in his differences with me, and at least tacitly accepted his denigration of me. She’d still wink and grin at me and act friendly and admiring and want to do this and that, but that didn’t touch what she’d do with and for Tom, and any social or public reference to me by her became an empty formality in the context of her promotion of Verlaine. He became truly insufferable.
I had my partisans—the most significant, in retrospect anyway, being Malcolm McLaren. But at that time Malcolm’s name didn’t carry a lot of weight—and even if it had, it wouldn’t have changed the widening split between Tom and me. It just meant I felt a little less betrayed and undervalued.
Malcolm was a young British clothing designer and boutique owner who was interested in the possibilities of rock and roll for affecting the culture. He was an artist and an intellectual. I probably wouldn’t have described him exactly that way at the time, but most of it was apparent on some level. He was in and out of New York in 1974 and early 1975 in his role as last-ditch manager of the Dolls. They’d lost ground since the first wave of excitement about them. Their second album hadn’t done as well as their first and their first hadn’t been a h
it either. It seemed like they might be too radical and sloppy and crude to move beyond New York. And, even among their own crowd, they’d lost ground to the CBGB’s bands. Malcolm’s main contribution to the Dolls was to dress them all in tight red leather and use a gigantic hammer-and-sickle Russian Communist flag as a backdrop for their shows. So they were not only fags but Commies. I was deeply impressed, but not many other people were. I mean it was obvious the guy’d misread American psychology, but it was a fantastic gesture anyway, like a perfect suicide note or famous last words. The Dolls went down defiant, and leaving a good-looking corpse.
Malcolm saw that Television represented an authentic shift in purpose and style, and the part that interested him was what I brought. The Dolls had been a culmination of hippie communal values, of classic blues-based rock and roll, of quasi-effeminate glam, while Television was the beginning of the rejection of hippie values and the rejection of star worship (even ironically), replaced by a furious, if icy at times—and somewhat poetic—alienation and disgust and anger, expressed in the way we looked and behaved, and in songs like “(I Belong to the) Blank Generation” and “Love Comes in Spurts” (as opposed to “All You Need Is Love”). He understood the conflict between Verlaine and me and he had no interest in Verlaine’s position. He told me that if I left the band he’d do anything he could to help me. I appreciated that, but I knew I didn’t want anyone looking over my shoulder. Malcolm was obviously a strong personality and I wanted to be on my own.
I performed publicly with Television at CBGB for a year, from the spring of 1974 through the spring of 1975. Five months after our debut, the Ramones, as we had, played at CBGB for the first club gig of their existence after financing their own earlier ones (in their case, at a rehearsal studio) and immediately became regulars. They were great. Tom sneered at them. The Stilettos, which was the early “girl group” incarnation of Blondie, also showed up for steady gigs. They were a harmonizing street-girl relative of the glittery, campy Dolls style, with Chris Stein writing music and playing guitar, and Debbie Harry one of the trio of girls who provided the vocals. Before that first year was out, Blondie and also the Patti Smith Group formed and debuted at CBGB, becoming regular headliners. The Talking Heads showed up just a shade after a year had passed, and the Dead Boys a year or so after that. Patti drew the biggest crowds. She was the most accomplished, talented sheer performer, though her band was generic and undistinguished, and her songs became more and more ordinary too. Television was also quite popular and was the most interesting band both musically and historically, if a bit inconsistent and esoteric. We were for the connoisseurs. The Ramones were popular but were regarded by the core movers as intrinsically minor, a kind of novelty act. They were a cool idea and one that was on the mark for the time, injecting subversive, funny real-life subject matter into roaring bubble gum, like the Stooges on surfboards, but, basically, a joke (“Beat On the Brat”) and a formula. Hardly anyone took Blondie seriously. They had a bland, occasionally quirky, urban girl-group style but were primarily an excuse to look at their stunningly pretty singer. She had a flair for campy stylish thrift-store clothes and a street-smart, real-life, low-key, deep likability, but there wasn’t anything new about the group. Of course, it was Blondie and the Ramones who ended up being the biggest popular successes.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I more or less lived at the club, and at Max’s Kansas City, for all of that first year, and the next two as well. CBGB was isolated. It had received virtually no national publicity, and even in New York it was a “downtown” phenomenon, known only to a minuscule subculture, though we fully expected to become international hits. The room was usually no more than half full even on weekends, and the larger crowds for even the most popular bands were conscious of their status as enlightened initiates. Most media people and their audiences didn’t take rock and roll seriously. Even the veteran trash journalist Lisa Robinson, who was practically the only national voice to consistently play up the scene, with her magazines Rock Scene and Hit Parader, treated the movement as primarily a source of titillation and gossip, just another instance of decadent fashionable New York nightlife. Only a few of the musicians and their friends knew that what was going on at CBGB was the most interesting thing happening in the world at that time for both high art and popular culture.
The most important aspect of the isolation, though, was the way in which what happened within it was a dream come true, was a comprehensive self-invention, or self-manifestation. In retrospect, it seems like everything we did has been colored by the way the music has come to be perceived now, but that’s not the way things really were—“punk” is too limited a description for what happened there from 1974 through 1977. On one hand the place was more mundane and half-assed than it’s typically pictured as having been. There were plenty of ordinary derivative bands that could have been found anywhere at the time. But on the other hand we had conjured into existence, out of imagination, this reality in which we were the representatives, the sound and appearance and behavior, of the environment we’d located at CBGB. This was the essence of CBGB then and there—that we, with our rejected and extreme sets of beliefs and values and intentions, had managed to materialize an environment in which we were not outside, but at home ourselves. Where we were the positive standards of being, rather than examples of failure, depravity, criminality, and ugliness. It was a world of rock and roll and poetry and anger and revelry and drunkenness and sex, but all specific. It brought real life, as opposed to the conventions of popular songs, back to rock and roll, but starting from the real life of a very specific time and place. The traits and signs of what came to be called punk were the ways that we’d systematically invented or discovered as means for displaying on the outside what was inside us. That’s the origin of the funny, lyrical, angry music styles, the haircuts, the clothes, the names, and everything else that identified us. What defined the club was that it was where we were completely ourselves. And what could be better than that?
I had two girlfriends for more than a night or two that year. One was Roberta Bayley. I met her two weeks after Television’s first date at CBGB, at a New York Dolls gig at Club 82, a dark sub-street-level room that was the perfect environment for the Dolls, having been a tight-knit little mob-owned drag club for decades. It was downstairs on East Fourth Street between Second and Third Avenues. That show was the only time in the Dolls’ career that they actually played in full drag (all except macho Italian Johnny, who refused to come out in a skirt, though he wore plenty of makeup and quite high heels). David Johansen wore a glittering strapless cocktail dress. The group was in top form and the place was packed, the crowd a roiling flood below the stage, faces like the flower cargo of a wrecked ship strewn across the waves. You couldn’t help but get slap-happy in it as you were washed around and the band joked and busted out in muscular girliness and blaring drums and guitars in the glare.
Roberta was very pretty and I was sure I’d see her again. You could tell she appreciated an up-to-date young musician, but she was self-possessed and smart. She’d just arrived in town from London, to which she’d escaped after dropping out of college in San Francisco.
I was at the club all night that night without quite realizing it. When I finally climbed the stairs and pushed open the door to the sidewalk, alone, I was surprised by the dawn. Everything was quiet, the gray-blue air still, and just there, a few yards ahead, was Johnny Thunders ducking into a taxi by himself. It was thrilling and inspiring. He was Johnny Thunders of the Dolls offstage, alone. Taking a taxi. I could never take taxis because they cost too much.
Roberta would end up playing a big role in our new world as a photographer, even though she’d never taken a picture before. (In fact the very first band pictures she took were of the Heartbreakers a year and a half later, when I was in the group with Thunders. Those were the black and white shots, one of which was eventually used on the cover of Legs McNeil’s and Gillian McCain’s punk oral history Please Kill Me, for
which I’d spattered our shirtfronts with chocolate syrup as blood—à la black and white Hollywood movies—to illustrate my slogan for a gig poster, “Catch them while they’re still alive.”) Roberta handled the door at CBGB at the beginning, originally for Television, selling tickets ($2) and deciding who got in free. She became the main staff photographer for John Holmstrom’s groundbreaking Punk magazine once it started up in 1976. When we met, though, she had no credentials except for being a rock and roll lover of refined sensibilities. She was a party girl without being promiscuous. Celebrity didn’t impress her. Everybody liked her. We ended up going together for two or three months, and she stayed my friend. She had the prettiest breasts I’d ever seen. But most importantly, she was kind and had heart. She stuck by me through everything.
Roberta Bayley at her post, CBGB.
The other girl from that year I saw steadily for a while was Elda Gentile, one of the singers in the Stilettos. She was a slut (like me) and that was great too. Elda came out of the hardass but sweet, adventurous, fringe-Warhol Max’s scene. She had a baby kid, Branch, whose father was Eric Emerson, the classically pretty blond Factory regular who’d been in a few Warhol movies and had started a glam band called the Magic Tramps. Elda was funny. She used to give me advice, recognizing me as the next wave.
It was interesting how playing rock and roll made a person handsome. I hadn’t been handsome before. My looks improved partly because I kind of knew what I was doing, that I was using the shift into music life to re-create myself. But it was also rock and roll itself. It made a person handsome.