richard hell - pioneer or silly old fool

Cocklodging is often the answer, can't speak for R. Hell in that regard mind

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xp songwriting is work that takes time and effort! So is demoing, rehearsing, and recording music.

Cocklodging is often the answer, can't speak for R. Hell in that regard mind

Slightly different point, but what I always think about bands and artists that are full time bands and artists is what do they do all day?

― Renaissance of the Celtic Trumpet (Tom D.)

Bake brownies, read Elizabeth Bowen.

the little reading i've done by his girlfriend, all linked from her site, indicates her family is dirt poor.

_(Sorry that sounds so snarky. It’s a funny line of inquiry is all, & I imagined someone getting really into the question.

― The land of dreams and endless remorse (hardcore dilettante), _

I didn't take your point as snark, but I still don't get why asking how an artist lives day to day is strange.

Cocklodging is often the answer, can't speak for R. Hell in that regard mind

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― I question your commitment to the revolution (Matt #2), Saturday, June 10, 2023 8:31 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

upthread someone said he bought his apartment years ago when it was still cheap

i think i was wrong about that; thought i'd read it somewhere. here he says it is rent-stabilized.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323936404578581993025822864

this has most of the content of the wsj article without the firewall:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2013/07/at-home-with-richard-hell-

here's an article by his downstairs neighbor:

https://bedfordandbowery.com/2013/07/looks-like-its-time-to-give-up-allen-ginsbergs-old-apartment/

hmm that poetry foundation link only works if you cut and paste it into a browser.

I've mentioned on ILX previously that I worked for Razor & Tie from 93-95 and worked with Msieu Myers on the reissue of Destiny Street, which was licensed from Marty thau… it was marty's to license, lock stock & barrel, but there were some issues that needed Hell's consent…he HATED marty, Marty hated him, but both were of one mind about a number of issues, albeit grudgingly…

I mentioned before that the first time I met him for a formal meeting (I had seen him on the street scores of times prior), he wanted to put this hentai he had made with some artist into the reissue, and I had to say, "uh I don't think we're gonna go for that"(I spose he could have made a case as to what this creation had to do with the context of this record, made in 1982, but he did no such thing) "but we'd really like for you to write some notes for each song." He did so, and was unfailingly cooperative and gracious throughout production. Super super nice guy!

One day, he came to the office for a courtesy meeting with the owners of R&T, who barely had any idea who he was (big springsteen guys, y'see): it was July, probly in the 90s, and he was wearing the kind of t shirt you would get a surf shop, board shorts and a par of chucks… he was not dressed like that for the previous meeting, and for that matter neither you nor I can EVER imagine Tom V or Bob Q EVER consenting to wear anything of the sort. He was very proud of this Mustang he owned, showed me and one of the owners a picture of it, and said "yeah, I drove this across the country when I was dope sick and needed to kick, and that did the trick…" the owner was discomfited, as I don't think he had much experience with the dope demimonde.

I visited his apartment once, to drop off something he needed to sign…by 12th st between 1st ave and Ave A standards, it was (or is) pretty big, he had two floors…this is the same building in which Allen ginsberg's apt was… and before and after my dealings with him (he never recognized me again and I didn't feel like bothering him as such), every single solitary time out of the 20-30 times I saw him on the street, he was with an incredibly hot woman, each fitting the type to which Ms Faw belongs, never the same person but all many decades his junior… for, despite his status as the ne plus ultra of EV hipsters, with an unimpeachable rep, never sold out etc etc, he was extremely well preserved.

Yea, I remembered some of this from the last time you posted it. Glad I didn’t imagine it.

here's part of a granta interview with Ms. Faw from 2014, presumably before she met RH?

What else has influenced your work besides other writers?

I went to film school before I went to writing school. Nikki’s Kool-Aid hair is a nod to Christiane F., this German movie from the eighties about a teenage junkie prostitute in the Bahnhof Zoo train station. Young God is from a Swans song. I remember first hearing this Lou Reed song in high school, ‘Some Kinda Love’, the part about putting Vaseline on your lover’s shoulder, and just being blown away by what was possible in a pop song. I started making my own T-shirts. Like a little boys’ Fruit of the Loom with the sleeves cut off, written all over in black Sharpie. One of them was just the lyrics to Richard Hell’s daughter-fucking song, ‘The Plan’. I was really into the whole seventies New York punk scene. It’s basically why I came to New York, which is nothing like that at all now.

TV: Well, yeah.

(Looks up and down W12th Street, bends over, hides copy of Theresa Stern poems in hard-to-find position on book cart)

Richard Hell has a speaking agency and the gigs those places book can actually come with real money, certainly better than chapbook money.

https://www.allamericanspeakers.com/booking-request/Richard-Hell/434268

rent stabilization is often as good as buying a place. I know a family with a soho loft on broome street where the elevator opens up into their living room, they pay 700 dollars a month.

Right. And feel like even if he has his own place he may be partaking of the spirit if not the letter of the practice Matt #2 mentioned.

MAY 2023: EXCLUSIVE ANNOUNCEMENT--There will be a reading/book launch by Richard in early July... Hell will be joined by Emily Simon for readings from their new Winter Editions titles at White Columns gallery in New York's Meatpacking District (right by the Whitney Museum) on Thursday, July 6. The books will be available for sale and the authors will sign them for those who so wish. The doors open at 6:30 PM and the reading starts at 7:00. It's free.

an enterprising new yorker can just go and ask him.

Ha, I nominate you.

I missed him reading at Book Court a few years ago and never looked back.

ha i've seen him do several readings. he is always thoughtful and amusing. seems like a swell guy. but i am covid-shy these days and don't go to indoor things if i can help it.

I saw him read at cake shop for a small series. Colson Whitehead was also on the bill. Hell was nervous and said he hadn’t done many readings like that and his book was about to come out. He read the bit about running into Verlaine at the strand and cried.

there was that memorial for robert quine at the cb's gallery where, at the very end, he sang his song "time" with ivan jullian's accompaniment and he was flooded with tears. very moving.

I saw him at a tribute to Lester Bangs at the church on the not-so-lower East Side- St. Mark’s, maybe? He read a page from the index of Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung.

He's great on the BBC Rock Family Trees about NYC punk from the 90s, very funny and smart and unassuming. I've not read Tramp yet - I really should, but I read Go Now as a teen and it was brilliant but a lot darker than I was ready for.

Go Now, I think is a pretty exceptional novel, I remember kind of hating it at the time but I think mostly I was just sick of "junkie novels" which at the time were numerous. I re-read it a few yrs ago and thought it was great.

Godlike is one of my favorite novels ever, I've read it several times and every time I am more & more impressed by it. If it had another name other than Richard Hell on it I am sure fewer people would know of it but its rep would be greater.

I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp is much better then your average music memoir.

I am eagerly looking forward to the new poetry collection, hoping Rain Taxi hooks Mpls up with another Hell reading in town (he's done a few over the yrs)

Not quite sure why, but I saw Richard Hell introduce a screening of John Huston's Wise Blood at the Glasgow Film Theatre a few years ago. He made some good points about the soundtrack not being very appropriate/good. As Stevie says, he seemed smart and unassuming.

I also remember reading Thurston Moore saying that the Dim Stars project floundered when Hell insisted on individual songwriting credits rather than a collective Dim Stars credit. Maybe one of the ways you stay afloat as a countercultural icon is by making it your business to pay attention to things like writing and producing credits and the copyright on your recordings.

I doubt any of Richard's literary endeavors generate significant "coin" as the saying goes. Those speaking-bureau gigs can pay well from what I've heard but you need sizable and consistent audience demand. Back in the day there was a weird subculture of people, not necessarily involved in creative activities, who lived on the margins in Manhattan, without visible or ahem Traditional means of employment, in rent-controlled or stabilized apartments. I met a couple of these characters in the early Eighties. Reading Hell's excellent memoir you get some sense of this lost world. Today the city is so high-priced that it's hard to imagine anybody surviving this way. But there are a few holdouts. Richard Hell is still savvy and no doubt gets by on some combination of all the different suggestions here. I wouldn't want to ask him.

would love to find a copy of Godlike. the only one i see available is $400.

Hell is selling it. Mystery solved.

haha! it says "sold out" on his own site.

Friend of mine who worked in publishing used to throw Hell regular editing gigs throughout the 2000s, working under his fairly anonymous govt name. My friend knew it was him but never let on, getting the distinct sense that RH was happy to keep that kind of work separate from his more public identity. My friend had no interesting stories about his work relationship with RH except to say that RH was always polite, professional, and grateful for the work.

In 2005, he answered the question, Sort of.

Are you able to support yourself just on your artwork, your books, your poetry?

It's funny how often I get asked that. Since like 1975, there was only one period of about six months in the late '80s - that was where I made the shift from music to writing and wasn't getting a lot of music royalties - that I had to work a real job.

Now where does the money keep coming from? From the book tours? From sales?

No, I get record royalties. Everything that I want to be in print is in print. Now I write a movie column six times a year. I do two or three high-paying readings a year. There’s a steady trickle from merchandise at the site. Every couple of years I make a good score in advances, either for music or writing...

New book arrived yesterday, it is great

Couldn't make the reading/signing at White Columns tonight, but here's a couple of photos on IG:

White linen suit was very appropriate - hot and muggy as hell today.

Another with his Nan Goldin photograph behind him.

(seriously, pun not intended - it didn't occur to me until after I posted)

was a nice reading. he closed with a poem in progress on Verlaine, then read the note from the author of the CBGB's graffiti book about Verlaine saying he had to get Hell to write the introduction. broke up recounting a dream he had recently about TV, so they skipped the q&a. the gallery owner said they will post video at some point.

would love it if they post the video - i was wondering if TV or Verlaine would come up

(to clarify - the dream was about Verlaine too, not Television. very affecting to see his emotion)

Hell gave another reading tonight at the Powerhouse Arena, which had been postponed a few weeks due to COVID. A good crowd, every seat was pretty much taken, but it felt like a pretty low-key event - except for a poster in the store and a notice on Hell's website, I don't recall seeing any mention or advertising elsewhere.

And man was it great - at the start, Hell acknowledged what was happening in Gaza. He didn't mention any one or group by name - he just wanted to say it was very much on his mind that there was a lot of awfulness going on the world, but he decided to "stick with my original setlist." So he read some poems - at one point, he discussed how he recently found out about time’s relationship to gravity, and how for example time is actually different from the ground compared to the highest peak of a mountain, or how it passes differently within the absence of matter in the vast emptiness of space - he mentions that time was already a subject that held endless fascination to him (see his greatest song, IMHO, "Time") so naturally this concept is something that he has been thinking over extensively. (A quick google search comes up with quite a few articles on this subject, FWIW.)

And he did indeed finish his reading with the poem on Verlaine. He apologizes ahead of time that he couldn't get through it the one other time he's read it, but he says he can probably do it now. He asks if we know Johnnie Ray, and after discussing him a bit (how he's seen as a transitional point from pop to rock music, how he tried to emulate black, female R&B singers, and how his crying was indeed sincere, he wasn't faking it), he mentions that he feels like Johnnie Ray where people are showing up just to see him cry. He talks a bit about Verlaine, assuming most of us knew their history, and mentions they grew up together and were close, but then he says he discovered he really didn't like him, totally not like a joke, but we all laughed. He added the feeling was mutual, and he added he never reconciled with Verlaine. (By this point he told a few hilarious remarks throughout the reading that I wish I could remember.) He goes ahead and immediately you can tell he's trembling and his eyes are tearing up. It really was powerful to witness - I had my phone but I didn't record it, even though it was a public event, I would've felt awful doing it. In hindsight, I should've recorded the audio, but it'll be a moot point if his publishes this soon. I think he mentioned something about an artist's need for an audience to exist, and remarked about his own existence or how he viewed it once Verlaine was no longer with us. He then talks about the dream - him, Verlaine and "Patti" (Smith I presume, though Hell was married to Patty Smyth) in a shop in SoHo. I want to say a bake shop or something like that, but I feel like I'm misremembering and filling the gaps with my own familiar activities around SoHo. Anyway, for some reason, he isn't wearing a shirt in this dream, but Patti/Patty touches his back and it deeply moves him. Then he mentions there's a lot of prose, unfinished verses presumably, and he then talks about the tweets by that author of the CBGB's book and how Verlaine recommended Hell, something that deeply moved him. It's possible he said or repeated this part before reading the poem, but I can't remember.

The reason why my memory on a lot of this has already faded is because of the following Q&A. The first few questions were quick - most notably, he was asked to reflect on Terry Ork and Quine who are also gone. (Quine was devastated by his wife's passing. He'd have dinner with him and he'd tell Hell "I've got it down to three hours of crying a day." He also never did drugs, but he got into it, possibly because of his wife's passing, and he killed himself that way. He hadn't had contact with Ork for a long time until close to his passing. In fact, he even got an email from Ork the day he died.) The question that kind of overwhelmed my memory was someone asking what Hell was listening to these days, and to my great surprise...he's a really, REALLY big fan of the Stones' Hackney Diamonds and talked more about that than anything else! It actually smeared what had been a crisp, sharp memory of everything before because I was just trying to process his response.

Basically, he's a huge Stones fan. They hadn't done anything of note in decades, but this one "blew me away." He did say he's grown to appreciate a bit the later albums he's dismissed before like Bridges to Babylon and Steel Wheels, but not like the new one. Loves all the songs on Hackney Diamonds, especially Keith, who he says has arthritis now so he can barely play but he found a way around that. (As discussed in another thread, ProTools likely.) He's always connected with Keith, but "Mick's growing on me," he really loves Mick on the new one. He also mentions the solos - he doesn't think the Stones were really about the solos before and argues their presence on the new one is a new and welcome development. He compares it to Dylan, whom he holds in the highest regard as a songwriter, but he says Dylan is after another direction, making his old songs sound new. In terms of the rock n' roll element, his records don't touch the Stones. (Again, it sounds like he's only comparing the latter day records.) He says he's very much child of the '60s in that he still believes Dylan and the Stones are in a league of their own. Later when asked what he's doing next, he says - not really jokingly - he may write about the new Stones album, so if any of you editors out there want a Richard Hell review of the new Stones album, it sounds like he's totally down for it.

man that sounds like such a great experience

thanks for such a detailed recap!

You're welcome! I figured I should share as much as possible - it was just great and I didn't want it to disappear in memory.

Yeah, thanks. Very good detail

Also I relate to memory smearing factors

It’s like there is a buffer size that can easily be overrun

That's great - thanks so much. Hackney Diamonds!

Thanks for all that, bird - lovely to read.

he then talks about the tweets by that author of the CBGB's book and how Verlaine recommended Hell, something that deeply moved him. It's possible he said or repeated this part before reading the poem, but I can't remember

There was a book about CBGB's graffiti photos and the publisher reached out to Verlaine to write an introduction, Verlaine demurred but in his email response said "look I can't stand the guy but you should get Hell to write the intro, he would be the best person for it" when he passed the story made the rounds on twitter and Hell has mentioned how charmed he was by the story becuz it neatly summed up how he felt about Verlaine.

Hell's essays (esp on music) are great, I would be eager to read his review of the new Stones record, haha I tried to listen to it last night and couldn't get into it, but if Hell likes I might need to re-assess

ha, this!