Research Notes: I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp

Tom Verlaine and Richard HellRichard

There's an old Simpsons episode where George HW Bush is writing his memoirs. "And, having achieved all of my goals in my first term," he writes, "there was no need to pursue a second."

Or something like that. Then there are locusts, as I recall.

That sort of labeling failure as triumph is all over Richard Hell's memoir, I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp. Something along the lines of "And, having invented punk with the Neon Boys, I was happy to be sort of kicked out of Television and then kind of fuck around on heroin for a number of years before retiring from music."

Going into this book not a massive fan of Richard Hell (when Hell describes the split in Television, between his idea for the band, which ends up sounding roughly like the Voidoids, and the band as they ended up, I can't hide my preference for Verlaine's version), I was not inspired to become one by the text. I know it's maybe silly to say that a memoirist is self-aggrandizing, but holy shit is Richard a fan of Richard. And a huge shit-talker regarding everyone else, particularly Tom Verlaine and Patti Smith. He's got some choice words for other folks who either tried to help him out or tried to screw him over, but rest assured that every choice Richard Hell made was the correct one.

That said, there's a lot to pull out here, although some of it comes from reading across Hell. The first and biggest thing, and something I'm likely to return to a lot, is the idea of running away and inventing yourself. "My favorite thing to do was run away," Hell writes. "The words 'let's run away' still sound magic to me." And, later, "We lived in the suburbs of America in the fifties. My roots are shallow." Note the present tense in the last sentence. I like the idea of Americans as being essentially unrooted and drifting, and I particularly like the idea that, growing up in the suburbs, you hit a point where you either have to invent yourself or replicate the lives of your parents. Maybe that's changing and maybe it isn't. I wonder a little to what extent the internet replaces the role of the city when it comes to self-invention.

I think it's important to situate Hell and his cohort right alongside the hippie generation. We (or at least I) tend to think of the hippie sixties and the punk seventies as separated by ten years, but there's a lot of bleed there. Hell talks about what it felt like to hate Sgt. Pepper when it came out, to feel like it was just a bloated piece of crap. The sixties become so monolithic in our thinking, to the point we imagine two forces: the hippies and the establishment, in perfect opposition. But of course the hippie movement is fractured and factional and not really a movement at all, and there are other fringes, other cracks to fall into. Or worse (better?), there is a space that is both outside the culture and outside the counter-culture.

Hell is exacting in cataloguing the women he slept with during this time. He describes many of them as muses, which is to say they paid his rent or provided him drugs. It's a particularly awful form of misogyny that labels the female as a kind of creative force/erotic charge which is itself unable to create; it can only be channeled by the male. It allows him to both praise women and negate them. It's ugly stuff.

We should talk about negation, because it's at the heart of things here. If there are two bits of language often attached to Hell, it's Please Kill Me and the word Blank. As in Blank Generation and as in ______. But, as Hell points out, negation as an end point can be difficult as an artistic project. 

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 understand this contradiction consciously, I intuited it. And its ruinous consequences were becoming more and more obvious.

It's a bit of a central dilemma of punk. If punk is best summed up as a very loud NO, why say it? Why produce art, even if that art is intended, in a dadaist/lettrist sense, as non-art or no-art. Why is a no wave still a wave?

I wish there was more about New York and "the scene," but to be honest, much of what Hell writes about the burgeoning punk scene at the time is self-serving, suspect, and contradicted by other sources. A lot of it is Hell's attempt to "set the record straight", and anecdotes often begin with phrases like "Verlaine and Ficca will tell you..." before recounting a version of events in which Hell is the conquering hero and his bandmates are obstacles he's narrowly able to overcome.

I also wish there was more here about his relationship with Verlaine, but Hell is so sure he was in the right that he's unable to really look at the dissolution of their musical partnership and friendship. Maybe the most poignant moment in the book is the ending where he runs into Verlaine at a used book shop in the West Village. "We were like two monsters confiding," Hell writes. I'm interested in the way art can destroy a friendship, and the ways in which personal conflict can fuel art, but Hell is so caught up in affirming himself as the creator of capital P Punk that he manages to miss many of the moments that create it. The book comes off as one man's attempt at an origin myth, but for something that seems to come from everywhere at once.

One thing the book makes clear, despite itself, is that "the punk moment" is one that never happens, it has always already happened, and attempts to imagine a single Big Bang moment are both misguided and misguiding.