by Richard Hell
As I said, the songs were in progress. There were missing lyrics and half-baked arrangements. I was writing lyrics in the studio and we experimented with tempos and backup vocals and solos.
I knew nothing about singing except that it was about emotion, and I had some instincts about the way to convey emotion rhythmically and in tones. For me, singing was like throwing something as hard as I could to stop a threat in its tracks, or stating something beyond a doubt to reassure someone whose confidence I needed, as if everything depended on it. I was aware that position and timing mattered, but I relied on instinct and subconsciously absorbed experience to achieve them. And the power came not from volume, in decibels, but from emotion, in revelation. I had to be accurate not in pitch, but in emotional import, of which pitch was a subcategory. There was something mystical or at least irrational about the process. I had to trust that I could do it even though it required so much release. It was like being in an extended firefight, a fierce exchange in which life was threatened but that slowed time so it was still possible to take care. I depended on the band both to keep me on my feet and to compensate for my weaknesses.
My other major project was Quine. At this time he was pretty insecure, while remaining angry, as ever, under the surface. He tended to play more safely than I wanted. My songs were unusual and it wasn’t clear what I expected from him exactly, so he tended to stay inside the bounds he could see in the patterns of the songs. Quine is now so highly respected a musician that it’s probably hard to imagine how we worked together, considering how much less musically educated I was. Bob had even gone to Berklee for a while, but in our band he was subordinate to me, and that was natural, and accepted by him without resentment or reservation. As musically sophisticated as he was, he knew that rock and roll was not about sophistication, but about instincts and attitude and style. He knew that I was the leader of the band not just because I had built a local reputation, but because I was the engine and identity of the group, and had to be.
Having said that, he also knew how much I appreciated him. When I hear some of those recordings, they come to life during his solos and subside a bit afterwards.
Often, he didn’t want to risk interfering with any possibility of a song. Also, as extreme as his tastes could be, he was a restrained person, and playing really well requires a level of abandon. I would push him and push him, basically infuriate him, and he sometimes hated me for it, but eventually he was glad. He told me so many times in later years. It also helped that he was not well respected by all the authorities—by the record company and by Gottehrer. It wasn’t that they insulted him, they just didn’t treat him with any specific respect. Because of that, he secreted venom that pooled inside and fueled his playing.
People still always ask me what the song “Blank Generation” means. If I trust them, I might tell them it was partly a joke, a joke that was meant to be understood by people compatible enough with me to get the joke, being that it was also a personal ad addressed to those “people compatible enough.” But it was also a description of a state of consciousness that came from having lived through what people my age had lived through: the Vietnam War, the inevitable failure of the flower children, the exposed corruption and venality of the politicians, the sleaziness of patriotism, the flood of drugs, and the overwhelming media data flow of the late sixties and early seventies. That had been numbing and alienating, but, yes, in wearing away all your illusions, it did leave you in a place where the option of remaking yourself from scratch did come to mind. But really the song was an evasion of explanation, as most all attempts to write something decent are. Inevitably it was a self-portrait, still. “I was saying let me out of here before I was even born,” it began.
The cover of the album showed another use of the “blank” concept. I’d arranged for a photo session with Roberta to get a shot for it. (Kate did some with the full band, but we ended up using that version on the back.) We took the pictures at Chris and Debbie’s loft on the Bowery where there was some space. As usual at photo sessions, I tried to multiply the possibilities by shifting my clothing and props from shot to shot—with and without shirt or jacket, with and without sunglasses, etc. I also had the idea of writing something across my naked chest in black marker. I had to have Roberta print the words—“YOU MAKE ME”—across my chest, which I showed by holding open my raggedy suit coat. That’s what I used on the cover. I liked the way the message of the sentence was underscored by the blank. And the way the statement both blamed the world (“you”) for making “me” “blank” (or simply making me) and simultaneously offered “you” (the person looking at the album) the chance to turn that person on the cover from ______ into whatever else you might be inclined to make him by filling in the blank. Plus there’s the challenge, like drawing a line in the sand (“Oh yeah? You make me”).
Blank Generation album original cover shot.
Though they slipped a few things past me, the word at Sire was that I was to be accommodated. I made the final decisions about the playing and recording in the studio, and the record company also deferred to me regarding press releases and album art and, to a certain degree, advertising. They figured I was best positioned to know what might be consistent with the weirdness of the “new wave” we represented.
When I decided on the “YOU MAKE ME” photo for the album cover, I asked the Sire art department to transform the brick wall in the background of the shot into a flat blank flesh color, and I scrawled and scratched the album title and band name, RICHARD HELL & THE VOIDOIDS BLANK GENERATION, to stretch across the upper inch of the cover.
Lester Bangs later contributed an entry to The Rolling Stone Book of Rock Lists that named the top ten worst album covers in history “by major bands.” Mine was number one. Lester always tried to give me my due.
Things were becoming strange. I’d arrived as a rock and roll singer, songwriter, and front man by desire and taste and analysis. I had evolved a conception of what the underlying reality of my time and location was and I was excited to transmit it in rock and roll. On the other hand I didn’t really care; in fact that feeling was part of the foundation of my point of view and my message. (“I Don’t Care” was actually one of the first songs I conceived for Television. Tom and Lloyd and I would each sing one verse. Tom dropped it from the repertoire pretty quickly. Later the Ramones did a different song with that title.) I’d just as soon have been alone. This created a kind of paradox. If your message is that you don’t care about things, how can it be delivered? Where’s the initiative? Even though I didn’t fully understand this contradiction consciously, I intuited it. And its ruinous consequences were becoming more and more obvious.
When I look back at my behavior, my self-regard and self-centeredness, at that time, as evidenced in interviews, I’m embarrassed. I took myself pretty seriously. I thought I was smart. In my defense, I did try to be honest, and I questioned everything. But I was full of myself.
The problem with 1977 was that things stopped being about anticipation and potential and started becoming fixed reality, becoming history. I had to try to make my album equal the range of my phantom perceptions and projections. I felt lonely or at least solitary and I was impatient.
For nearly the entire time I was a professional musician, I chose ignorance. I depended on instinct and attitude rather than technical knowledge. I regarded myself as a force of nature and an entity worthy of sustained attention. I wrote and sang the songs and projected them via my physical self, and played bass, and it was the band’s purpose to follow my lead in providing an appropriate setting and accompaniment. They were there to help construct the space consistent with me, a musical atmosphere I could breathe, in which I could act and carry out my intentions. That action took place in the medium of music but it was actually something else, a kind of aliveness. I could hear its incarnation in music, but it was the aliveness that was the purpose of the rock and roll. I know more than this now and I know how the record suffered for that approach of mine, b
ut at the same time, it couldn’t have been otherwise, so fuck it. It made for some great moments.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Sire’s idea to promote the LP was to send us on a tour of England opening for the Clash. We would play twenty-one dates in twenty-three days in twenty cities. It was the first time I’d ever left the United States and the first time the band had ever played outside of New York.
England made a bad impression. It seemed defeated and ashamed. Its more privileged youth manifested this in continuous cynical, self-deprecating irony. Older people were still fixated, amazingly, on World War II, which was apparently the most recent moment in which they could take any pride. Everyone still seemed psychologically crushed by the collapse of the empire fifty years before.
Physically, it was more of the same. The streets of the East Village were burnt out and lawless, but they were Joyland compared to the death row oppressiveness of urban Britain. A lot of its streets were ugly for having been cheaply and tastelessly rebuilt after the World War II blitz bombings, but even the nineteenth-century blocks were endlessly monotonous, like misshapen penitentiaries.
For food there was fried potatoes, and potatoes and beans, and potatoes and eggs, and meat-potato pies and boiled potatoes.
The country was in even worse economic shape than New York City, without New York’s cultural compensations. The lives of the working-class kids were especially miserable. There were no jobs for them and nothing to look forward to and nothing to do but beat each other up at soccer games.
This was the scene into which the Sex Pistols had exploded in the previous months. They’d overturned things not just with their maniacal rock and roll, but by the way their rage and sarcastic snottiness expressed British kids’ frustration. There had never been rock and roll songs that literally advocated anarchy or screamed about how there was no future. Johnny Rotten said and did things the kids hadn’t even known they’d felt, much less that it was possible to say, and they really loved him for it.
For the band’s entire existence—two and a half years or so—it was perfect, and everything it did was unpredictable and new. All bands of any ambition had to reassess themselves in light of them. I can’t deny that they demoralized me some, and I also resented the way they failed to acknowledge how much they’d gotten from New York and me. But in fact what difference would that have made anyway? It doesn’t really serve a person to be recognized as an influence on another more popular and successful person. I didn’t want that role. I couldn’t help being a little jealous of them though. I felt almost as if they were my dream, my mental production—that, as Chris had said, they were four of me.
The Clash were also big. By late 1977, punk had existed to some extent in England for a year and a half or so—since the Pistols’ obscure early gigs—and the Clash were the next-best-known of the new bands. Their first album, The Clash, had been out for a few months and it had peaked at No. 12 on the British charts.
They were managed by a fashion merchant friend and protégé of Malcolm’s named Bernie Rhodes. He made the band’s deals and helped keep them in effective outfits.
Their music at this time was highly influenced by the Ramones. Each song was a few simple chords bashed out fast in catchy sequence, gone in two minutes, then another. The vocals were a street-limey nonstop shouted harangue. That singing style, originated by Rotten (though he did it much more sneeringly than Joe Strummer), was the hugely influential signature contribution of the British bands to the punk sound (though there had been unmelodic, sarcastically yelled lyrics at CBGB preceding them, sans the exotic accent).
The trip to England quickly exposed—both to the Voidoids and to me—the extent to which I’d become addicted to drugs. I was horribly junk-sick for nearly all of the tour except the days in London. I hadn’t experienced serious withdrawal before and I didn’t know how to handle it. I was sleepless, in full-body pain, and sweating and vomiting and spurting diarrhea.
In my continuous illness I’d shop desperately, as we traveled, for a certain vile British cough syrup that had a trace of codeine. It was thick and coarse and brown, and I’d have to drink multiple bottles to get any relief. Sometimes I’d throw up from the taste and consistency before it could kick in.
Our record company was another source of disgust and disappointment. For one thing, they hadn’t even managed to get the album released in England in time for the tour. Furthermore, we were on the road for three weeks, a new venue every night, and our transport was a minicar. Not a minibus, but a minicar. There was the driver and a band member, chin on knees, in front, and three more band members shoulder to shoulder in back, with the one in the middle swaying for lack of grip.
I also hated the record company’s surprise promotional poster that featured a gigantic photo of my head and torso with the skin colored a flat evil green and the pupils missing from the eyes, like an Alice Cooper shock-rock zombie monster.
At the start of the tour I hung out with Johnny Thunders in London (the Heartbreakers had relocated to England a few months after I left the band). He was living with another Heartbreaker or two in a roomy apartment where the pastimes were doing heroin and watching TV. Sitting around one night, Johnny detailed the most perceptive take on professional rock and roll I’d ever heard. He compared it to prizefighting—young nowhere kids busting their skulls in service to a fantasy of the big-time while businesspeople dole out to them promises and little tokens, raking it in on the youths’ showings until the kids fall out, sooner than later, broke and brain-dead, everything burned.
At night in London we’d go out to concerts and clubs. Just before we headed out on the road, Cindy Sin, a nice American girl who was a friend of Johnny’s, took me out clubbing. I got drunk instantly, and therefore more reckless. She recommended this Mandrax she had. I’d never heard of it. Later I learned Mandrax is methaqualone, which is the same thing as quaaludes. I hadn’t done quaaludes before and I didn’t know much about them. I’ve never much liked tranquilizers. But, as I say, my judgment was not good at the time. As a New York junkie, I also disdained any other way of using than shooting up. To a confirmed junkie the high itself is assumed—it’s the rush that counts. Mandrax was a heavy pill that had to be crushed and dissolved if you were dumb and desperate enough to insist on trying to inject it. Cindy had works with her and we went into the women’s toilets to get off. She was drunk too, but I let her jockey the needle and she missed my vein, pumping the disgusting sludge into the inert flesh of my left forearm. This created a submerged puddle of painful yellow and blue bruising in the muscle that controlled the hand I used for bass fingering, and it lasted for nearly the whole three weeks of the tour.
We weren’t used to deferring to other bands. It didn’t help that a big Clash tune then, performed by them nightly, was “I’m So Bored with the USA.” On top of that, their touring lives were soft. They rolled in a full-sized tour bus, along with a crew who were also mostly old friends. Ari Up from the Slits was along for most of the ride, as was the British guy with whom I spent the most time and whom I liked most of everyone that I met on the trip—Roadent, a speed-freak roadie pal of the Clash.
With Robert Quine and Mick Jones backstage, 1977 Voidoids UK tour with the Clash.
I’m not saying they weren’t good to us or didn’t act friendly and even cultivate our goodwill. They were, and they did. Ivan ended up playing on a record of theirs. They praised our performances, and we all stayed in the same hotels and they came around to our rooms and invited us to theirs. The Clash were good people. But that wasn’t my main concern.
In fact, the spirit of the Clash and their whole circle was one of teenage high jinks. It was mysterious and a little intimidating to me. I couldn’t relate. My world was heavier and darker. But they behaved, as if it were natural, in a spirit of common cause and almost hippie-like communal goodwill.
The British punk culture also seemed strangely asexual. There were some classic teenage sexpectations among stray members of bands, but for
the most part the relations between the boys and the girls seemed infantile, like prepubescent. People kidded and cuddled and might even share beds, but it seemed to be bad form to regard each other as sexual prospects. Johnny Rotten himself was the perfect example of this. As charismatic as he was, as a public figure and an artist (which is really all I knew about him), he never seemed to show any interest in sex, or even to acknowledge it existed. In fact he was married already, to Ari Up’s mother, a wealthy heiress fourteen years older than him. Even though I myself had had a sustained relationship with a great person who was much older than me, I could only picture Rotten’s counterpart as ancient and motherly, because they were married and because of the asexual vibe of the British punk scene.
Gobbing was at its most extreme then. English punk crowds gave tribute and expressed their excitement at concerts by blowing gobs of snotty saliva as violently as they could at the performers. I always suspected that Patti Smith had something to do with inspiring that, because she used to spit onstage sometimes, and she’d toured England (as had the Ramones). The act of spitting did express something about the attitude of the new bands, and theoretically I kind of liked the idea. It was definitely something that put off grown-ups, and after all it really wasn’t any more unsanitary than kissing. However, once you experienced that continuous barrage of saliva onstage, any appreciation of it was lost.
The larger venues of the tour felt from onstage like the familiar cold smelly clubs, but expanded. They were dark and grim, but the band played across a gulf, guarded by security personnel, from the crowd. In the Manchester venue of maybe three thousand capacity, just as we began our set we discovered the microphones were dead. I sang and no sound came out, like that nightmare of trying to scream and being unable. We stopped playing and I yelled an explanation, but the crowd couldn’t hear. They began jeering and I got more and more frustrated and angry. I freaked, and as I left the stage, I hurled my guitar. It hit a big security guy in the back. He turned and started towards me. I beat it backstage with the band and locked us in the dressing room, laughing, amazed and nervous, until he would accept my apology without demolishing me.