From an early age, Richard Hell dreamed of running away. He arrived penniless in New York City at seventeen; ten years later he was a pivotal voice of the age of punk, co-founding such seminal bands as Television, The Heartbreakers, and Richard Hell and the Voidoids – whose song ‘Blank Generation’ remains the defining anthem of the era, an era that would forever alter popular culture in all its forms.
How this legendary downtown artist went from a bucolic childhood in the idyllic Kentucky foothills to igniting a movement that would take over New York and London’s restless youth culture – cementing CBGB as the ground zero of punk and spawning the careers of not only Hell himself, but a cohort of friends such as Tom Verlaine, Patti Smith, the Ramones, and Debby Harry – is a mesmerising chronicle of self-invention, and of Hell’s yearning for redemption through poetry, music, and art. An acutely rendered, unforgettable coming-of-age story, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp evokes with feeling, lyricism, and piercing intelligence both the world that shaped him and the world he shaped.
How this legendary downtown artist went from a bucolic childhood in the idyllic Kentucky foothills to igniting a movement that would take over New York and London’s restless youth culture – cementing CBGB as the ground zero of punk and spawning the careers of not only Hell himself, but a cohort of friends such as Tom Verlaine, Patti Smith, the Ramones, and Debby Harry – is a mesmerising chronicle of self-invention, and of Hell’s yearning for redemption through poetry, music, and art. An acutely rendered, unforgettable coming-of-age story, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp evokes with feeling, lyricism, and piercing intelligence both the world that shaped him and the world he shaped.
Reviews
[A] mesmerising rumination on his life, its effects on others and on himself, and on the maxims - true, in his case -that beautiful people have special powers, and that charisma is a form of intelligence. . . . He's committed to the unvarnished truth, about himself and others, and yet he's fair and, when it's called for, also restrained . . . An earnest but never maudlin look at a potent and magical and rather brief era, now gone
In his poetic memoir . . . Hell takes us on a tour of a lost world and stakes out his place in cultural history
Hell's memoir is an achievement on its own terms: a portrait of the artist as a young renegade that, like the music he helped pioneer, evokes the drive to escape through self-reinvention
Clear-eyed, surprisingly moving
A lovely memoir - modest, arrogant, and aware of what it means to dream
Epic badassness
Not only an absorbing cultural history but also a clear-eyed story that superbly channels the attitude expressed in the first blurt to his best-known song 'Blank Generation': 'I was saying let me out ofhere before I was even born'
The last decade has birthed many a punk rock autobiography . . . Richard Hell's might be the best of them all
Hell has the remarkable ability to impart the cultural and personal significance of those years without sounding sanctimonious or bloated with nostalgia. Whether fondly recalling his derelict peers and the songs they wrote together, or describing the adult feeling heroin gave him, Hell makes the grit gleam
A candid, sometimes brutal tour of punk's gritty early days: [Hell] dissects band dynamics, counts notches on his bedpost, relates his disturbing descent into addiction and debunks myths about his famously choppy hair. It's like a testosterone-fuelled Just Kids
In Hell's arrestingly well-written autobiography . . . the performer, songwriter, coiner of the phrase 'blank generation' and consummate New York arts-world habitué describes a nascent punk scene that was more sophisticated
than the legend . . . Unlike so many autobiographies written to burnish the author's place in history, Hell's commitment to the truth, however ugly, frees him up to imbue I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp with a real generosity of spirit
He narrates in the voice of a survivor: wizened, reflective, witty . . . his unfussy, precise, yet still writerly prose, makes this book so enjoyable andinsightful . . . [Hell] feels like a Romantic but writes like a hard-edged realist
There are many shivery, illicit pleasures in this louche memoir of bygone bands and lost downtown haunts . . . Hell was a virtuoso of taste, a critic with a sensibility so fi ne and unconventional it bordered on its own form of art . . . Mostly, though, you read I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp for Hell's mind, which is weird and singular and superbly self-aware
There's no soft focus here: the good, bad and ugly are all held up to the light where everything is revealed in sharp relief. For those still enamored of pre-sanitised New York, CBGB, the bands, the fashion and the freedom, this is a must-read
Hell brings his searingly honest songwriting style to this candid and pageturning memoir of his life. . . . Hell's refreshingly candid portrait of the artist searching for himself offers a glimpse into his own genius as well as recreating the hellishness and the excitement of a now long-gone music scene in New York City
Besides being a rock legend, Hell has long been a journalist and novelist, and this memoir reveals a skilled writer . . . In recalling those days when love came in spurts, Hell is precise, telling a lot without ever seeming to tell too much. He nails the essence of both scenes and people, from rock peers to exploitative record producers . . . A deft, lyrical chronicle by a punk with perspective
Hell is a fine writer and full of self-knowledge, and part of the pleasure of this randy, drug-addled memoir are his descriptions of New York during the bad old days when crime was rampant and the streets filthy. A compelling and entertaining memoir by a punk-rock pioneer
It's childish, bratty, and fantastic. . . . [Hell] defines rock stars as a kind of monster. To reinvent oneself, perhaps one always has to become a monster, larger than life and at least a bit ruthless. But the fiction of himself, and of the scene around himself, in I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, goes one step further and makes an argument for persona-creation as a useful art form. Hell offers his invented self to a next generation of longing kids
Before Richard Hell, all was darkness. He can rightly claim to have started . . . everything. Other than almost single-handedly creating 'punk' as we know it, he founded two of the best and most influential bands in the history of modern music, redefined what rock and roll lyrics could be, introduced the world to the terrifyingly brilliant guitarist Robert Quine - and then pretty much walked away from it all. I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp is an unromantic, clear-eyed and unsparing look at an important and volatile period in New York history, in the history of our culture. It's an argument-ending account of what really happened, a coming-of-age story, a personal history of a unique, important and hugely influential artist. Few people have been as important - yet as underappreciated as Richard Hell. Poet, musician, fashion icon and terrific, terrific writer. Chances are, you have been deeply influenced by Richard Hell your whole life. You just didn't know it
Richard Hell, once a penniless young poet from Kentucky, designed and executed a sustained performance of rock stardom as if he had invented the concept himself - a bravura spectacle that was half modern art and half picking up chicks. Radically self-aware, he tells the story by thrusting the reader face-first into the good and the bad, wielding prose keen as a diamond knife, sharpened by the light of the moon
An exquisite snapshot of early punk possibility - that so beautifully captures the exuberance of starting a band
Charming and impossible, bemused and alien, Richard Hell is the first (and best!) name in the punk rock mythos. His introspective insights into the bands he founded, some of NYC's most significant rock 'n' roll groups, as well as CBGB, the magic Bowery clubhouse, are informed by poetry, love, sex and the romance of taking off, running away to the mystery of distance heard in the rowdy grooves of a dirty LP or as gleaned in the thumbed pages of a dingy book of verse. And . . . he can take it or leave it each time
I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp gave me the same feeling I had as a kid when I read Little House on the Prairie. I just cozied up and fell in love with a world that wasn't mine. Richard Hell can make a wooden desk sound sexy. There are very few books that make me want to grab a pen and start writing my own; this is one of them
Hell is an enthusiastic reporter of the critical artistic crossover of the avant-garde art scene and the world of punk rock . . . His account rings true and it entertains . . . A treasure both to those present during gritty, heady '70s NYC and to those not
