Richard Hell

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Richard Hell (born October 2, 1949) is a professional name of Richard Meyers, an American singer, songwriter, bass guitarist and writer.

He is best-known as frontman for the early punk rock band Richard Hell & The Voidoids. The title song from their 1977 album, Blank Generation is cited as being among the top ten punk songs in the book Rough Guide to Punk.

Hell was cited as an originator of the punk fashion look, in particular the spiked hair and torn, cut shirts, often held together with safety pins. Malcolm McLaren, designer of the Sex Pistols, has said Hell was the inspiration for the Sex Pistols' look and attitude, as well as the safety-pin accessorized clothing McLaren sold in his London shop, Sex.

Hell has also acted in low-budget New York films, written and published independent press manuscripts of poetry and journals, and wrote two novels. He was the film critic for BlackBook magazine from 2004-2006.

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life and career

Hell grew up in Lexington, Kentucky in the 1950s. His father, was a German Jew and his mother descended from Welsh and English farmers. His father was an experimental psychologist who died in a car accident when Hell was seven years old.

In 11th grade Hell became friends with Tom Miller (later to be known as Tom Verlaine) at a private boarding school in Delaware. They ran away from school together and were arrested in Alabama for arson vandalism a short time later.

Hell never finished high school but moved to New York City. 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, supporting himself in part with a trust fund set up by his father. Before he was twenty-one his own poems were published in numerous periodicals, ranging from Rolling Stone to the New Directions Annuals.

[edit] The Neon Boys, Television, and the Heartbreakers

In 1969, Verlaine joined Hell in New York and they eventually formed the Neon Boys. Their 1973 self-titled single is arguably the first punk song. Not long after, they 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 of 1974. She was dating 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," inspired by Allen Ginsburg's well-known phrase "Beat Generation", during his stint in Television. In 1975, Hell split 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 left the New York Dolls and the three of them formed a band called The Heartbreakers (not to be confused with the later Tom Petty band). After a few shows Walter Lure joined as a second guitar player.

[edit] 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, although the second, Destiny Street, was less successful and employed a different lineup and label. Hell in fact had sued to get out of his recording contract, a decision he later claimed to regret. The Voidoids' best known songs were "Blank Generation" (the title track of the group's original album), "Love Comes in Spurts," and "The Kid With the Replaceable Head." A 2002 Hell collection, from Matador, of outtakes, unreleased, and live material is titled "Time," after one of his self-released songs. Hell and the Voidoids reunited to record the song "Oh" for Wayne Kramer's Beyond Cyberpunk compilation (2001)--it was later included in Hell's career retrospective CD, Spurts (2005).

[edit] Dim Stars and Hell's books and further life

Hell's last major musical work to date was in the short-lived band Dim Stars in the early '90s. Dim Stars was a project featuring guitarist Thurston Moore and drummer Steve Shelley from Sonic Youth, Gumball's guitarist Don Fleming as well as some guitar playing by Voidoid Robert Quine. They released one album and one EP, both called Dim Stars.

Hell acted in Nick Zedd's Geek Maggot Bingo and Susan Siedelman's Smithereens.

In 1996 he wrote a novel, "Go Now", that was drawn largely from his own experience, and 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.

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 had a daughter, Ruby, with Patty Smyth of Scandal and in 2002 he married Sheelagh Bevan. He continues to live in the same rent-controlled East Village, New York City apartment as from his early New York days.

He had a well-known heroin and marijuanna habit, off and on, throughout his career.

[edit] Discography

The Voidoids:

Richard Hell:

  • Funhunt (1989)
  • Time (2002) [which is a much-expanded version of R.I.P. (1984)]
  • Spurts, The Richard Hell Story (2005)

Dim Stars:

[edit] Trivia

Hell had a non-speaking cameo role as Madonna's murdered boyfriend in the 1985 film Desperately Seeking Susan.

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  • Steven Grant / Mark Fleischmann / David Sprague / Ira Robbins, "Richard Hell", TrouserPress.com,
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