I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp

by Richard Hell

  There was that lowlife journalist with the tour named Julie Burchill, whose writing partner was the equally slimy Tony Parsons. From what I understand she’d snagged Paul Simonon, the bass player for the Clash. I liked Paul, he was a good guy. But Burchill was snidely hostile to me and my band.

  We got a mostly enthusiastic (or better) press reception on the tour, but there was usually some member of the British-punk-chauvinist press who’d twist reports about the Voidoids and me into cheap mockery. One of them depicted the Manchester incident as an example of my essential cowardice and fraudulence; another—or maybe the same person—described me as terrorized, like cravenly throwing myself to the boards for safety, by a firecracker that went off at a gig. There was a firecracker thrown on stage in Newcastle; it was silly and got no reaction from us except annoyance.

  This segment of the pommy press had jumped onto the bandwagon of British punk as a revolutionary proletariat avant-garde from which they pointed fingers at the “posers.” Burchill, prime exemplar, was a self-adoring super-ambitious loudmouth, kind of a Fox News, Murdoch-press type, for that mob. The irony was that those journalists were imitating Patti Smith and me in their outspokenness and criticisms of the world, without even knowing it (having gotten theirs from newcomer Rotten), while doing their best to wither us with their copycat contempt. It was creepy and pathetic, that corps of pettiness grabbing at the chance that ideological “punk” gave them to feel noble while behaving disgustingly—like Communist children reporting their parents to the authorities for criticizing political officials at the dinner table.

  The only place on the trip I liked was Scotland—Dundee and Edinburgh and Glasgow. Edinburgh was magic, with its narrow winding river under ancient bridges, castle on a hill in the middle of town, whiskey and huge steaks in centuries-old dining halls, snow-complected girls unable to hide the sudden emotional patches of red on their cheekbones. The punk kids of all those Scots towns were eager and smart and sweet.

  Later, as the monotony and discomfort of the tour became more and more horrible, the great Roadent introduced me to his antidote for ennui—self-inflicted cigarette burns. It worked and I still have the cherished mementos on my left forearm.

  By the end of the first week of our traveling I’d accepted that I wanted to leave rock and roll. (I was spineless! A fatalistic alienated junkie.) I felt that, once I’d made the album, I’d accomplished what I’d set out to do, and I did not want to grind away in an effort to get the world outside of New York to appreciate us. It was too humiliating and the work was too hard.

  My main aim in starting a band had been to have an impact on the world, to make myself heard, and have my perceptions and values and ideas affect things. That had happened, even if it was partially indirect. I believed that my contributions to everything that was going on in music and visuals and temporarily “underground” culture would become more widely known eventually and would continue to grow in influence—that it would “all come out in the wash,” as Wylie used to say, and it has.

  Back in London, at the end of the tour, we had two concerts that we headlined ourselves, with Siouxsie and the Banshees opening. The venue was a ballroom-style club—an open dance floor under a high stage—with a capacity of four or five hundred, called the Music Machine.

  We were relieved to be playing our own date again but were angry about the British tour and everything else in the life of the band. As a result we played some of the most violent, aggressive, fast sets of our lives. For me it was no relief though because I was too distanced and depressed by everything, including myself. The sets came out of furious, single-minded, cold determination, like the finish-line sprint at a marathon. We were as tight as a rubber suit by that point too.

  The venue was packed and many of the originators of the new British music scene were there, like Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious (with Nancy), and the Clash’s Mick Jones, along with many journalists. When we finished the final set and didn’t come back for an encore, Rotten jumped onstage and exhorted the screaming and applauding crowd to continue cheering until we returned. It was a nice gesture. We eventually encored with a Stones song off Exile on Main Street, since British punks purported to despise that band. Backstage afterwards, the first thing Rotten said to me was, “God, you’ve got a big nose.” He’s a strange mixture.

  Another wayward youth present that night who would eventually become a household name in the UK was Paula Yates. She was seventeen and the greatest-looking thing in the room apart from my shoes. She had short, bleached white-blond hair; fine, narrow features in a broad face, like Demi Moore; and quite large breasts, fully worthy of their braless, near-full visibility through her wispy blouse.

  At the time she was working as a “rent-a-punk.” She hired out to go to parties to make them look modish. Within a few years she had a rock and roll interview show on British TV’s Channel 4. She became big British tabloid fodder and married (Sir) Bob Geldof, pretentious promoter of the Band Aid and Live Aid charities and front man for the cornball Irish “new wave” band Boomtown Rats. In the nineties she had a notorious affair, while still married, with Michael Hutchence, soon-suicided singer for the Australian commercial pop-rock group INXS. In 2000 she died of a drug overdose.

  In her autobiography Yates credits me with teaching her about sex. I’ll accept that, though the most I can remember is that I had the requisite remote detachment. We were together for the two weeks or so that I hung around London following the tour before returning home. Soon afterwards she got a tattoo of my name on her arm. It depicted a pretty swallow in flight trailing a banner from its beak that read “Hell.” But I didn’t stay in touch with her. A few months later when Roberta was in London, Paula explained the tattoo to her and Roberta took a picture of her displaying it. Twenty-four years later I used the arm in that picture on the cover of my Time CD, without identifying whose it was. Eventually she had the tattoo removed to spare someone else’s feelings.

  In those final London days post-tour the other person I spent time with was Nick Kent. He was a rock journalist besotted with Keith Richards. He wore eyeliner in imitation of him. He had black hair and a hook nose and receding chin and was skinny and tall. He never changed his black leather pants, even though they had a tear in the crotch his balls hung through. He was a junkie. He’d been one of the first limeys to notice and write about what was going on at CBGB in 1974–75 and I think that’s part of what got him in trouble with the British punks. The rest of what got him in trouble was most likely his journalist’s certainty that he knew more about what the bands were doing than the bands themselves did. There’d been an incident where Sid Vicious slung a chain at him, causing actual injury. Kent was the closest British equivalent to Lester Bangs in his not-dumb commitment to full-on crude rock and roll, but he was more contrived and self-conscious, with some dubious motives, and he was derivative of Lester. His writing has gotten worse and worse over time, more and more deludedly self-important and blindly, self-aggrandizingly cynical and fake “knowing.” He did know where the drugs were though, back then, and he wanted to be with me and so we climbed a bunch of cold London stairwells together.

  I should add that, on the whole, all the above said, I’ve gotten more attention and respect from the British writers and music public than I have from the American. I admired and envied the activist kids who were doing everything that was going on there in the punk era, making it happen. Maybe they were right about Americans being stodgy and self-centered compared to their version of what broke at CBGB, and maybe they were right too that we corrupted them by introducing junk to the British punk world (the Heartbreakers were accused of this).

  Those British kids were honest and spontaneous and unpretentious and funny. They aggressively subverted old ideas of what bands were and how they should behave. Most of that came from Malcolm and Rotten, but the kids were so ripe for it that it was theirs too, and they developed it further in fanzines and clothes and ways of life and fresh bands.

  Johnn
y Rotten made everything new by saying things like his band wanted to destroy rock and roll, or that the sacred sixties bands were “old farts.” There was a one-for-all, all-for-one feeling among the mass of punk kids there. In America there didn’t exist a mass of punk kids, and the few who were conscious of what was happening at CBGB didn’t, for the most part, have any ideological or moral or other particular ties with one another. The British kids were all cheeky and mocking, but in a street-smart, kind of lovable and generous way. They took care of each other.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  At the end of 1977 I was approached about playing the lead in a 35 mm color feature film to be called Blank Generation, written and directed in New York by a German named Ulli Lommel, about a musician in the CBGB scene. My romantic interest would be the French actress Carole Bouquet.

  I thought it might be an alternative to the dead end that music seemed to have become. I didn’t know anything about the people involved in the movie, but their credits looked good. Lommel was young, only five years older than me, but he’d been part of the badass German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s circle in Munich for a decade, mostly as an actor. He’d only recently started directing movies himself but had made two of them. The one he talked about was his latest, Tenderness of the Wolves, which had come out in 1973.

  His model and mentor Fassbinder was a monster—the apparent successor to Godard in wildly prolific, gorgeous-looking, super-intelligent, politically radical filmmaking. He was also a monster of cocaine-driven tyrannical bitchiness as the boss of his troupe, which otherwise operated like a communal theater company. A given member could act a major role in one movie, production-design another, then assistant-direct, then script-write. But it all had to be at the pleasure of their dictatorial, manipulative leader.

  Fassbinder movies are an exotic brew of moody Douglas Sirkian expressionistic high style in dark and spare mise-en-scène, lushly composed and color coordinated; a commitment to radically leftist politics often expressed in the relations of the sexes; and—also Sirkian—overwrought, soap-operatic situations. Gay, cold, and brilliant. He was not in my personal pantheon—the precedence he gave elaborate style wore me out—but he was impressive.

  I got the chance to see Lommel’s Tenderness of the Wolves, and it was pretty inspired—a funny, chilling riff on the story of the real-life serial killer “the Vampire of Düsseldorf,” on whom Fritz Lang’s 1931 film M, with Peter Lorre, was supposed to have been based. The star of Tenderness, Kurt Raab, even resembled Lorre, with his moon face, dark eyebrows, and bulging eyes. But in this movie the killer was not only an actual classic super-canine-toothed vampire, he was gay, there was full-frontal nudity of young boys, and he literally butchered them, slicing off cuts that he presented as pork to his grateful neighbors.

  Carole Bouquet had been a high-fashion model in France and was only twenty. She spoke English well, but with a strong accent. She’d just begun acting but had played a lead in Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire. I’d seen that movie, because I tried to see all Buñuel movies. Carole was insanely beautiful, in an inert way. She wasn’t dumb, but she wasn’t warm. Her beauty almost seemed like a handicap, because it was so extreme that, as she was not particularly animated, it overshadowed any other interesting qualities she might have possessed and made her hard to relate to. She became her beautiful scowling, or insincerely laughing, otherwise inexpressive face.

  At first sight, the various connections seemed almost too good to be true, as if the project had condensed from my own history: the despairing but jokey vampire theme of my novelina The Voidoid; entanglement with a lovely maddening French soul mate; cinephilia; life in music (I would be performing some numbers live with the Voidoids at CBGB) . . .

  With Carole Bouquet in Blank Generation feature fiction film, 1978.

  The band was limping along, essentially on standby. I was demoralized by the British tour and Sire’s sink-or-swim treatment of us, but it was worse for my bandmates, since my drug addiction and general loss of initiative were part of the problem for them and now so was my detour into the movie. I didn’t feel responsible to them. I thought the movie would benefit us, but I didn’t consult them before I decided to do it. Of course, the choice was theirs whether or not to appear in the live music scenes, but ultimately it was either agree or quit the band.

  We did owe Sire a second album. I had a fantasy that we could do it as a soundtrack album from the movie, but that didn’t make sense, since the movie’s title song came from the first album, and, anyway, I didn’t have enough new songs well enough rehearsed to play them in the movie.

  I felt fucked over and undervalued by Sire and I didn’t want to make another album for them if I could get out of it. I assumed we’d be snapped up by another major label if we were available. I discovered a way in which Sire had violated our contract. They had included on a Sire sampler LP compilation, without informing us, a track, “You Gotta Lose,” that we’d recorded during the Blank sessions but hadn’t used on the album. By contract they were not allowed to do that; they had to have my permission to release anything I hadn’t approved for the album. So I figured we could use that violation of theirs to get out of our obligation. Richard Golub got to work on it.

  Shooting on the film began in early February 1978. It didn’t go as I had hoped. For one thing, I liked hardly anybody who was involved in it.

  Lommel turned out to be insufferable. The only artistic qualities he shared with Fassbinder were his megalomania and his bitchiness. I don’t thrive in that kind of atmosphere. His dissembling and manipulation and posing were transparent, but somehow a fair number of people enjoyed participating. Maybe their families were like that, so it made them feel comfortable. Anyway, it bored me and I wouldn’t play along. But as shooting progressed my disappointment became more and more angry, because Lommel was such a bad artist. It was maddening enough that nothing in the movie made any sense, but it was worse that every moment of it was inappropriate, false, and dead. There wasn’t an honest frame in the whole film, including the credits and the fade-outs. It was just a pastiche of half-cooked pretensions, the scenes serving neither plot development nor spectacle nor realities of behavior, but only derivative ideas, and not only were the ideas secondhand, but Lommel had not understood the originals in the movies of his betters. He only knew that when Godard or Fassbinder or Antonioni or Warhol had done the thing (focused on underground and youth culture, or equated cameras with firearms and/or sex organs, or quoted fifties American directors) it had made them famous and admired.

  The Voidoids performing at CBGB in Blank Generation film, 1978

  Lommel was a hack of the art movie, which is a dizzyingly self-defeating job description. In the coming years, after another movie or two in that mode, he found his level and became a hack of horror/slasher films, which is far more practical. There is an audience for derivative incompetent horror trash, because there’s a huge audience for well-made horror. There is virtually no audience for avant-garde art movies, so what the fuck could he have been thinking, trying to exploit it by cheap imitation? Of course the answer is that he didn’t know that Godard and Fassbinder and Antonioni and Warhol actually were brilliant and talented (witness the contemptuous way he treats Warhol in Blank Generation). He actually thought that everybody was as fake as he himself was.

  There was one uniquely good thing about the film: the scenes of the Voidoids playing live at the peak of our best-sounding, best-playing period (with the possible exception of our first few gigs in 1976). The film was shot right after we returned from the Clash tour, and we were tight, and, as it was shot at CBGB, we were in our environment, too. It’s not documentation of an actual gig—it’s a movie, where the director has contrived the offstage action—but the band is playing exactly as during a gig, and directly into the sound recorder, and the live sound has not been tampered with or added to; it is authentically live playing. Within a few months I’d have abandoned bass and would only grudgingly rehearse and pl
ay at all; there would be a different drummer too.

  During the period of the movie shoot I had dinner one night with Susan Sontag. The meeting had been arranged by Victor Bockris, Andrew Wylie’s old partner, in order to tape the conversation for Interview magazine. Bockris had become a prolific journalist specializing in covering William Burroughs and a few other drug-friendly, important, popular hip artists (Keith Richards, Andy Warhol).

  I’d long admired Sontag, as did most halfway literate people. She was about twenty years older than me and had been a trendsetter among New York intellectuals all that time. She set the standard for aesthetic and moral values, and for subtlety of perception, in her essays on literature and film (and dance and photography, and a few other art mediums). She affirmed an “erotics” of art rather than an interpretation of it. Furthermore she was beautiful physically and a gracious, charming person.

  The dinner was just the three of us, in February, at Bockris’s apartment on Perry Street in the West Village. It took place during the final hours of one of the heaviest snowstorms ever recorded in the city. Drifts were fifteen feet high. The snow made everything feel even more rarified and intimate and beautifully insulated. Victor intrepidly fetched Susan from uptown, and Roberta Bayley kept her appointment to show up after dinner to take photos. The shots she got of Sontag and me as pals are some of my favorites of my career.