by Richard Hell
I belong to the ______ generation
but I can take it or leave it each time.
Does that sound joyous with the opportunities for self-realization? The vocal is anguished and furious too. Would I really write “I belong to the blank generation” without knowing that it would be understood as describing us as being numb and apathetic? That would be like thinking I could say “I belong to the gay generation” when I meant that I felt happy a lot. The meaning of the song is its ambivalence and ambiguity. Another of its little mechanisms is the way that the first line of the refrain says, “I belong to the blank generation, and I can take it or leave it each time,” while the repetition goes “but I can take it or leave it each time.” So, in other words, the ambivalence is so profound that even the ambivalence itself can be taken or left.
Anya Phillips was at CBGB every spare minute she had. She was a stripper in a midtown club who performed as “Peking Doll,” and she was devoted to me and our band. She founded a Voidoids fan club in 1976. She was Asian—Taiwanese American—and had grown up with her best friend, Sylvia Morales, out in the Asian Pacific, where their fathers were in the military. Sylvia ended up marrying Lou Reed and living with and managing him for a long time. Anya eventually managed and mentored James Chance, poster boy of the no wave.
Anya was known for being smart and tough. She was a professional dominatrix as well as the controller of the quiet, subdued James, who broke out of his shell onstage. But her relationship with me was the opposite of controlling. Like other young girls who hung out at CBGB in those early days, such as Nancy Spungen and Lydia Lunch, she loved the world of the club and entered it completely. And to Anya the club’s primary identity was as my platform, and I represented what mattered about the world of the club. To me, she also was not exactly a person but the embodiment of a function. She was a girl who wanted to be Anya with around me and who, by that equation, I was always some steps beyond. She put herself in this position. But she was not exactly a “groupie”; she was more like an apprentice. She would do as I pleased because she wanted to please me, but also in exchange for hearing what I might have to say about things and for seeing how I behaved. This is not to say that I abused her or disrespected her; the exchange between us was fair and was the only relationship possible, given her presentation of herself to me.
Anya with James Chance.
Her apartment was on the ground floor on East Tenth Street. It was a cool gray cell, lightless, bare, and remote. When I wanted I went over there and she gave me money. I would go acquire a few bags of heroin, bring them back, and we would experience sex. The heroin was a reward for our status as outsider artists. This was innocent and quiet. At that time it was innocent. She followed my instructions and she was always glad about where they led. I remember closing my eyes and gathering my mind as if it were an armful of wood and depositing it on the “stoned” pile. We were members of a particular race, a secret race, quiet and aware. Kind of beat up, but strong. Access to her body was just as complete and uncomplicated as well.
I haven’t mentioned Peter Laughner yet either. Like Anya and Lester, he wasn’t in a New York band but was connected to the scene—in Peter’s case he actually was a musician, but he lived in Cleveland, Ohio, and that’s where his bands played. He visited New York as often as he could from 1975 until his death in 1977, and he cultivated New York friends and contacts at CBGB. He’d already made friends with Lester, by writing to him at Creem, before Lester came to New York. Peter was one of the founders of the interesting cold-ass industrial band Pere Ubu, but he remained with them only long enough to play on their first single. He played in and was largely responsible for creating the earlier group Rocket from the Tombs, which was the basis for not only Pere Ubu but the Dead Boys.
Laughner was self-destructive, smart, a natural-born guitar player, and grew from the same roots—the Velvet Underground especially—as the CBGB bands. Lester and Anya and Peter exemplified something that was new about CBGB in rock and roll—and what set it apart from the British scene it sparked—in that they were intellectual. They were interested in ideas and liked to talk and think. (Malcolm did too—he was an exception in England.) Anya wasn’t a philosopher, but she was observant and analytical and she respected thought and insight, even if she could be a sneering bitch (in the best sense of the words). Lester and his friend Peter were literate and interested in ideas, unlike, say, Sid Vicious, or the moronic, hypocritical British journalo-sheep, such as Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill, who, like party functionaries in Mao’s Cultural Revolution, mocked Americans for reading books. (Mocking books is OK. Books are a hobby, are a taste, like anything else. God knows we mocked the Brits. Their hobby seemed to be potatoes. They might not have liked books, but they loved a spud. Fried potato sandwiches. The countless English storefronts serving spuds and spuds only. Every vile dead block its potato shop.)
With Peter Laughner.
Peter was actually probably less fun and interesting to be with than Sid. Wait, that’s not true . . . There’s not much point in comparing the two. I guess the main difference in them as avatars of a kind of punkness, apart from what I’ve already mentioned, is that Sid stayed infantile and clownish in his fucked-upness, while Peter was more melodramatic and bitter about it. In that way Sid was a newer type and more purely “punk.” Peter had ideas and musical talent but Sid didn’t pretend to either of those things. Both of their stories are sad and demoralizing. And what one has to say about either one of them has to do with one’s mood and whom one is talking to. Because it’s about the sadness of life, about suffering, about hopelessness; sometimes one takes that seriously and sometimes one doesn’t.
There was an inherent contradiction in rock and roll for me. On one hand I wanted to do it because it was physical and unhinged; on the other, I wanted to use my brain to make the songs say as much as possible and to exploit every other aspect of having a band to say as much as possible too, as interestingly as possible. I was not any kind of intellectual snob—I was a high school dropout for a reason—but at the same time I wasn’t ashamed of my interest in books and in thinking, and even wanted to affirm that, just to make a point, America being so idiotically anti-intellectual. I felt secure enough in my credentials as the real thing in rock and roll to be able to refer to Gertrude Stein or Nietzsche or Nerval in interviews. I wanted to reconcile the physical and intellectual, and be seen doing it. But almost always people disregarded or misunderstood (or made fun of ) one side or the other (or both!) of what I was doing along those lines.
Peter Laughner liked to think about things, and analyze them, too, but he was also a natural-born musician (unlike me) as well as being the most self-destructively drug-hungry drunk of all the many I’ve known. He just flatly yielded, no resistance, to his impulses to take drugs and drink, the way anyone else would scratch their nose when it itched. Methedrine seemed to be his preference, but alcohol was always present, and he took downs and codeine too. He wrote songs about Sylvia Plath and Baudelaire, as well as one called “Life Stinks,” and, with the Dead Boys’ Cheetah Chrome, the sarcastic “Ain’t It Fun,” which Guns N’ Roses later performed on their album of punk covers.
He made a solo cassette tape in his room at his parents’ house, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar and harmonica, on what turned out to be suddenly, unexpectedly, the night his years of chemical self-abuse caught up with him and he died there in his bed of acute pancreatitis. It was 1977 and he was twenty-four and still living at home. The tape, labeled by him “Nocturnal Digressions,” is mostly others’ material, and he doesn’t sound well, but he plays and performs heartrendingly. On the tape he calls “Blank Generation” his favorite recent lyric, and he plays it as well as Television’s “See No Evil,” and songs by Richard Thompson (“The Calvary Cross”), The Rolling Stones (“Wild Horses”), Robert Johnson (“Me and the Devil Blues”), the Velvets (“Pale Blue Eyes”), Eddie Cochran (“Summertime Blues”), and seven or eight more.
When I knew
him in New York I didn’t know about his talent but only his drunken fanaticism. In retrospect his story is familiar but still it moves me. In the mideighties, when I’d left music (and drugs) and was first attempting to figure out how to write for a living, I got Spin magazine to send me to Cleveland to investigate Laughner’s life. A few things became clear: the quality of his taste and talent; the depth of his self-doubt and concomitant surrender to drugs and other means of self-escape (including sexual sadomasochism); and his generosity (he encouraged, and improved the lives of, many people in Cleveland). He was so pure and so tainted at once. He gave people joy and tore them up. His songs held nothing back, but that could make them silly too (“Sylvia Plath / was never too good at math / but they tell me that she finished at the head of her clath”).
The week I spent in Cleveland interviewing those who’d known him, I thought about nothing but Laughner, and that was harrowing and complicated. On the last day I was there I went by myself to visit his grave. I knew that his parents, who’d doted on him—he was an only child who was born relatively late in their lives—had had his gravestone engraved “play on, beloved son.” It took me a while to find the plot. The marker was a small panel laid flush to the earth. Snowflakes were falling sparsely. As I stood there, thoughts and feelings about Laughner rushed through my mind in a ghostly torrent, impossible to read, and I was too tired and fed up to try to sort it out anyway. Then, in my extreme mixed feelings, which were largely composed of exhaustion and impatience with all the emotional information, and without quite realizing what I’d done until I had, I spat on his grave.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Voidoids debuted, at CBGB, in the fall of 1976. The year that followed was the peak of my career in music. I still remembered what I was there for and I had the means to express it. One could say I’d been good, as well as happy, for five minutes in the Neon Boys/Television and ten minutes in the Heartbreakers, and I would be happy and good for twenty minutes in the Voidoids.
I’d been approached by Instant in April 1976, just when I was deciding to leave the Heartbreakers. I’d signed with the production company and then spent May gathering, with Quine, the new band. The Voidoids started rehearsing in June, and at the end of that month we recorded the three-song demo that would be our first release. That raw, clunky Ork Records EP of “Blank Generation,” “Another World,” and “You Gotta Lose” was released in late November. We debuted live in November also, at CBGB. We got an offer from Sire Records two months later, in January 1977, and negotiated an agreement with them by mid-February. We started recording the album in March, and after a delay, caused by Sire’s switching its distribution from ABC to Warner, the album came out in October 1977.
The band rehearsed steadily that first year, organizing arrangements and working up new songs. I’d only brought the group a few numbers, because I’d cowritten many of my songs with former bandmates and I didn’t want to use those. I had “Blank Generation” and “Love Comes in Spurts,” and a sketch of “New Pleasure,” but most of the album was written in the nine months before recording it.
I had “You Gotta Lose,” but it was too retro to keep high in the repertoire—too Chuck Berry and rockabilly. I always liked its lyrics though. I wrote them partly about Verlaine—the start of the second verse—right after I left Television, using my dissonant bass line from the Neon Boys’ “High Heeled Wheels.” Verlaine was someone who would never admit to a mistake, as if it was unacceptable to ever be wrong or to fail at anything. I hated that attitude. In fact I thought life was pretty much a losing proposition, and I didn’t mind saying so.
I hope I don’t seem immodest when I tell you that my my
mother was a pinhead and my father was a fly.
That’s why I love you darling with a love that’s so unique—
your glistenin wings they complement your head’s exquisite peak.
They all died by coin toss.
Love’s a form of memory loss.
I can’t forget that triple cross. . .
You gotta lose, you gotta lose. . .
Not too long ago I knew a guy who thought he can’t be beat
but he got rabies on his rubies now he can’t unlace his feet.
And I for twenty minutes yesterday felt great felt insensate
but when you’re twenty minutes late your fate is patient and will wait.
[Chorus]
I know it’s hard for you to face the fact Max Factor failed your face
and that your social life’s misshapen cuz you feel so out of place
and that the most magic man you’d meet and ask your soul to keep
still could only love you from a distance one man deep.
[Chorus]
By the time the Voidoids signed with Sire I was a drug addict, though I didn’t even fully realize it. I’d feel bad if I didn’t have heroin, but the bad feeling was not much worse than a touch of the flu, and I could go without using and still be able to get around for days before it became too maddening. What had begun as an occasional vacation with Ork in the Television days had become a regular routine in the Heartbreakers, and by 1977 I was using a bag or two every day.
Then I discovered methadone. Methadone was the drug the federal government gave addicts who registered at clinics. It satisfied heroin need, and if you had to hunker down and take care of business, controlled doses of methadone let you handle yourself as if you were straight. That’s all I knew, and I assumed that methadone was not habit-forming. It didn’t occur to me that the government would give out a drug to cure heroin addiction that was itself addictive. I thought I had beaten the game when I got my methadone connection. In fact methadone lingers in the system longer and produces worse withdrawal symptoms than heroin. The main difference is that it ostensibly lets the government control how you go about getting a maintenance level of narcotics, while it also blocks the effect of heroin without itself providing a heroin rush. It’s supposed to civilize an addict.
I got my methadone from a guy named Fernando, who was the super in the building next door to mine. He and his wife scored a couple of bottles at a government clinic twice a week and they only needed half of their supply. You had to take it orally. It was a powder suspended in orange drink and came in fifty-to-one-hundred-or-so-milligram portions in squat translucent plastic bottles with Day-Glo orange labels.
Fernando was a second-generation Puerto Rican–American and lived with his Anglo common-law wife, Karen, on the fifth floor of the tenement next door. They really tried to be respectable. I guess the methadone program was effective in that regard in their case. Their linoleum-floored apartment was spick and span, though it reeked thickly of cleaning fluids and stale cooking.
Both our apartments were on the fifth floors of our buildings, and his windows looked right into mine across the air shaft. Once he asked me in a mature, neighborly way to please not do that again to my girlfriend up against the kitchen sink, because his wife shouldn’t see it. But there were advantages to the proximity too. I realized we had a set of windows close enough that I could reach across the corner of the air shaft to his window with a mop handle. So, to save the energy of going downstairs, climbing up to his apartment, and then dragging myself back, I rigged a mop handle with a paper bag rubber-banded to its end so he could switch the $12 inside for a methadone bottle. That little bottle would last me a good four days. I would have needed $60 or $80 worth of dime-bag heroin to last that long.
The routine was like a number in a movie musical, like An American in Paris or Funny Face. I, the male lead, never miss a pretty slide-step as I glide around the living room preparing the pole, slip currency into the crumpled bag rubber-banded to its tip, pirouette to the next room’s window, swoop the mop stick up across the air-shaft pit, and then wait a moment, quizzically, like a baby bird, or Fred Astaire foot-tapping to a tuneless whistle with his arms crossed, while grumpy, smudged, brown-Afro-ed Fernando tightly smiles, removing the cash to pop in the odd little methadone conta
iner. I pull back the pole, retrieve my prize, imbibe a sip, and drop onto the couch to relish a cold can of Coke and the New York Times, in advance of the onset of cure-all internal glow. My future assured, all is serene, as the music fades, camera pulls back, and the shot dissolves . . .
I had two or three girlfriends at this time. There were Lizzy and Sabel, and then later in the year Kate Simon for a while. Kate was unusual among my friends for being professional and mature. She was a rock photographer who’d lived in London and did a lot of work for Sounds. She had slanted Modigliani eyes, high cheekbones—concave cheeks like a model—a padded lower lip, thick stiff shoulder-length dark hair, a slim body with wide hips, and she walked splay-footed. She was pale and she didn’t wear much makeup except lines of dark pencil around her eyes. I could make her laugh. People knew I did heroin, but doing heroin at that point was still kind of mysterious. It didn’t signify crime and deceit and betrayal. When you’re young enough you can get away with anything. Kate was smart and was in on the secret that some animalistic aggressive rock and roll musicians weren’t morons either. We also worked well together in photo sessions.
I remember lying next to her on a mattress on the floor in the back bedroom in her bright, high-ceilinged, uptown photo-studio apartment and feeling guilty, knowing that, as knowledgeable and worldly and self-possessed as she was, she didn’t understand that I wasn’t good for her, that I had other allegiances. When I left her it hurt her and made her angry and she didn’t really forgive me. I didn’t treat her right. She wound up marrying David Johansen of the Dolls a few years later and they were together for decades.
The Voidoids spent three weeks making the record at Electric Lady, the subterranean flying saucer of a recording studio that Jimi Hendrix had built for himself on Eighth Street, a fifteen-minute walk from my apartment.*