Richard Hell - Time

I've been meaning to post this for some time and forgot but then I heard a cover of Time today and was reminded what a phenomenal stud Richard Hell is/was and, dammit, gotta toss this bastard up on the FROxx sin delay!

Enjoy!

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Stylus: Fuck Rock and Roll (I’d Rather Read a Book) – Richard Hell

The story goes like this: two boarding school friends run away from home some time around 1966, and start hitchhiking through the South. An Alabama policeman sees them huddled around a fire in an abandoned lot, and asks what they’re doing. One responds that they’re just trying to keep warm; his compatriot looks at the cop and tells him that he likes watching things burn.

The pyrophilic young man is, of course, Richard Hell. Bearing a new name inspired by ‘Une Saison en Enfer’, he would (along with his childhood friend, now known as Tom Verlaine) be one of the prime movers behind the nascent punk scene, defining many of the aesthetics that we now take for granted: the snarling, snotty vocals, the ripped t-shirts and cropped hair, all find their start here. His name pops up in half the bands of the era: the Neon Boys, Television, the Heartbreakers all started with Hell mauling his bass, even if he left (or was kicked out of) each band after a matter of months. It was only with his final band, the Voidoids, that he would manage to get more than a few scratchy demos committed to tape. Yet even there, the total output of the Voidoids amounted to a paltry two albums (1977’s Blank Generation and 1982’s Destiny Street) before Hell turned his back on music and committed himself to writing.

This compilation just about doubles the amount of Hell material available, consisting of one disc of demos, rarities and alternate takes (the long out-of-print R.I.P. material, originally released on ROIR cassette in 1984), and one disc of live performances. The sound quality is the weakest part of the album, ranging from passable to poor, but this seems more a fault of the original tapes than this release. It’s beautifully packaged, with photos aplenty and an essay by Hell (and I do mean an essay: he does a line-by-line analysis of the title track.).

The rarities start off with a quartet of demos recorded by the Heartbreakers, most notably ‘Love Comes In Spurts’, a remarkable song which manages to combine ruminations on frustrated love with jokes about premature ejaculation, and tie them together with a Johnny Thunders guitar solo. There’s also a stellar version of ‘Chinese Rocks’, co-written by Dee Dee Ramone, but (temporarily) rejected by his bandmates for being about heroin. What’s immediately clear from these demos is that, unlike many of their contemporaries, the Heartbreakers knew how to play their instruments. These songs are a constant battle of wills between Hell’s writing and Thunders’ guitar licks, and you can feel the sparks flying.

The remainder of material comes from Hell’s Voidoid days, when he was paired with guitarist Robert Quine. While their relationship was certainly less fractious than that of Hell’s former bands, that doesn’t mean that Quine’s playing is subordinated to his bandmate’s ego. If anything, the tone of the songs becomes even darker, with distinctly angular guitar chords conveying menace around every twist of the songs. Hell’s writing is at its best, as well. Songs like ‘Betrayal Takes Two’, ‘Time’, and ‘Funhunt’ (Don't like to get too aggressive, in it for the fun/Weapon's a reputation--good mouth beats gun) are as sharp and incisive as anything that has come out of the punk canon.

The live performances are absolutely savage, made up of mostly Blank Generation material. Hell has called the 1977 show that makes up the majority of this disc their most “aggressive” ever. Fed up with their opening spot for the Clash, the Voidoids tear through their headlining set in under 30 minutes, with barely a break for air. ‘Blank Generation’ makes its appearance here in all its ragged stop-start glory, with one of the greatest opening lines in history (I was sayin’ let me out of here before I was even born). They cover the Stooges, CCR, and surprisingly, return for an encore of the Stones’ ‘Ventilator Blues’. If you want to know how much influence Richard Hell had on punk, listen to Johnny Rotten screaming “More!!! More!!!” at the end of the set. Slightly more sedate, ‘Time’ closes out with a four song radio broadcast, with Elvis Costello helping out on guitar.

While Blank Generation remains the essential document of Hell and Co., Time is going to be of interest of anyone into early NY punk, and serves as a decent overview of his brief career. Now, the next project I want the folks at Matador to tackle is putting together decent versions of Heartbreakers material, and most elusively, the Neon Boys\Television demos.

That would make me one happy punk.

HEAR Disc 1

HEAR Disc 2