"I felt just overwhelmed by input: the Vietnam war and the collapse of the '60s and the proliferation of media' it just felt like everything was too much to handle and you just tuned out." -- Richard Hell
Richard Hell (born Richard Meyers; October 2, 1949) is a singer, songwriter, bass guitarist, and writer.
Hell is probably best known as frontman for the early punk rock band Richard Hell & The Voidoids. Their 1977 album, Blank Generation, influenced many other punk bands. Its title song was named "One of the 500 Songs That Shaped Rock" by music writers in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame listing, and, for instance, is ranked as one of the all-time top-ten punk songs by a 2006 poll of original British punk figures, as reported in the Rough Guide to Punk.
Hell was an originator of the punk fashion look, the first to spike his hair and wear torn, cut and drawn-on shirts, often held together with safety pins. Malcolm McLaren, manager of the Sex Pistols, has said Hell was an important inspiration for the Sex Pistols' look and attitude, as well as the safety-pin accessorized clothing McLaren sold in his London shop, Sex. (Some members of the Sex Pistols dispute this.)
Since the late 1980s Hell has devoted himself primarily to writing, publishing two novels, as well as several other books. He was the film critic for BlackBook magazine from 2004—2006.
"Well, I thought the Sex Pistols were the cream of the crop. They came in and topped everybody, for sure. They took all the existing strands and made a perfect package out of them."
Hell grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, in the 1950s. His father was an experimental psychologist, researching animal behavior. He died when Hell was seven years old. Hell was raised by his mother, who, after her husband's death, returned to school and eventually became a professor.
Hell attended Sanford Preparatory in Delaware for one year (the 11th grade) where he became friends with Tom Miller (later Tom Verlaine). They ran away from school together and were arrested in Alabama for arson and vandalism a short time later.
Hell never finished high school but moved to New York City to make his way as a poet. In New York he bought a used table-top offset printing press and began publishing books and magazines under the imprints Genesis: Grasp and then Dot Books. Before he was twenty-one his own poems were published in numerous periodicals, ranging from Rolling Stone to the New Directions Annuals. Along with Tom Verlaine, in 1971 Hell also published under the pseudonym Theresa Stern, a female poet whose photo was actually a combination of both his and Verlaine's faces, in makeup and a female wig, superimposed over one another to create a new identity.
The Neon Boys, Television, and the Heartbreakers
In 1969, Verlaine joined Hell in New York and they eventually formed the Neon Boys. Their 1973 demo tracks of "Love Comes in Spurts" and "That's All I Know (Right Now)", later released by Shake Records, were arguably the first punk recordings. In 1974 the band added a second guitar player and changed their name to Television.
Television's performances at CBGB helped kick-start the first wave of punk bands, inspiring a number of different artists including Patti Smith, who wrote the first press review of Television for the Soho Weekly News in June 1974. She had an affair with Tom Verlaine, and formed a highly successful band of her own (the Patti Smith Group). Television was the band that convinced CBGB owner Hilly Kristal to book rock bands at his club, and they built its first stage.
Hell started playing his song "Blank Generation" during his stint in Television. In 1975, Hell quit (or was fired from) Television after a dispute over creative control. Hell claimed that he and Verlaine had originally divided the songwriting evenly but later Verlaine favored his own songs. Verlaine remains characteristically silent on the subject.
Hell left Television the same week that Jerry Nolan and Johnny Thunders quit the New York Dolls and the three of them formed a band called The Heartbreakers in May 1975 (not to be confused with Tom Petty's band, which adopted the same name the following year). After a few shows Walter Lure joined The Heartbreakers as a second guitar player.
The Voidoids
A year later, in early 1976, Hell quit The Heartbreakers and started Richard Hell & the Voidoids with Robert Quine, Ivan Julian and Marc Bell. The band released two albums, though the second, Destiny Street, was a less successful lineup that retained only Quine from the original group and suffered from Hell's distractions, narcotics especially, during recording, as he himself has described. (Besides Hell and Quine, the lineup on the Destiny Street album was Naux (Juan Maciel) on guitar and Fred Maher on drums.) Hell's best known songs with the Voidoids were "Blank Generation" (the title track of the group's original album), "Love Comes in Spurts", "The Kid With the Replaceable Head" and "Time". In 2009, Destiny Street was recast and released as Destiny Street Repaired, with new guitarists Marc Ribot, Bill Frisell, and Ivan Julian playing along to the original rhythm tracks.
Dim Stars and Hell's books, further life
Hell's only other album set to date was in the band Dim Stars, for which he came out of retirement for a month in the early 1990s. Dim Stars was considered something of an indie rock supergroup, featuring guitarist Thurston Moore and drummer Steve Shelley from Sonic Youth and Gumball's guitarist Don Fleming, as well as some guitar playing by Voidoid Robert Quine. They formed only to record the one album, written and recorded in three weeks, and one EP, both called Dim Stars, and they never played in public. Hell played bass and sang lead vocals and wrote the lyrics for the album.
In 1996 Hell wrote a novel, Go Now, that was drawn largely from his own experience, and he released a collection of short pieces (poems, essays and drawings) called Hot and Cold in 2001. His second novel, Godlike, was published in 2005 on Dennis Cooper's Little House on the Bowery Series on Akashic Books. All three books have been highly praised. Also published in 2005 was a book of thirteen poems written in collaboration with David Shapiro , Rabbit Duck. Hell's non-fiction has been widely anthologized as well, including a number of appearances in "best music writing" collections.
Hell's archive of his manuscripts, tapes, correspondence (written and email), journals, and other documents of his life was purchased for $50,000 by New York University's Fales library in 2003.
Hell has appeared in several low budget films, most notably Susan Seidelman's Smithereens. (Other acting appearances include Uli Lommell's Blank Generation, Nick Zedd's Geek Maggot Bingo, Rachel Amadeo's What About Me?, and Rachid Kerdouche's Final Reward. Hell film trivia: he had a non-speaking cameo role as Madonna's murdered boyfriend in Susan Seidelman's 1985 Desperately Seeking Susan.) In 2007 he started making a movie which he wrote and acts in as well as directs. It appears to deal with the experience of aging.
Hell was married to Scandal's Patty Smyth for two years, 1985—86, and they have a daughter, Ruby. Hell married Sheelagh Bevan in 2002 and lives with her in the East Village, New York City.
