Richard Hell

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As the full-scale illustrated bio (" Bio Core ") is advancing kind of slowly, we've stuck on this publicity/press thing to supplement it, and've added links to some of the material it mentions that's on the site. Hell Bio/Resumé Richard Hell was born Richard Meyers on October 2, 1949, and raised in Lexington, KY. He dropped out of high school in 1966 to come to New York and make his way as a poet. 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. Before he was twenty-one his own poems were published in numerous periodicals, ranging from Rolling Stone to the New Directions Annuals. Richard, though, realizing by this point that he wanted more direct, physical relief, started a rock and roll band with his best high school friend, Tom (Miller) Verlaine. This band, The Neon Boys (1973), two four-track studio recordings by whom are on the 2005 Hell compilation SPURTS [catalog entry], evolved into the group Television, which band Richard left in 1975 before the group recorded their first album. He then immediately joined with Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan, who had just departed the New York Dolls, to form the Heartbreakers, which Richard also quit after one year and before recording a studio album (a live performance by the Heartbreakers in 1975, when they were largely performing Hell material with Richard singing, has been available on CDs from Bomp--inferior--in America and New Rose--superior--in France). In 1976 he founded the group the Voidoids. Hell became known in the mid-Seventies as an originator of the punk movement [as documented, for instance, in the books From the Velvets to the Voidoids by Clinton Heylin (Penguin, 1993), and Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain (Grove Press, 1996)]. His album Blank Generation [catalog entry] (Sire/Warners, 1977, currently in print as a CD) by "Richard Hell and the Voidoids" was chosen by the New York Times as one of the ten best albums of the decade. Lester Bangs had this to say about Hell and that album in 1977: "Richard Hell identifies with no movement, with few people in fact. If you listen between the sonic blasts, his music is about a sense of aloneness beyond the old alienated antihero syndrome, but before that Richard Hell is a rocker. The music on this album is some of the strongest, truest rock & roll I have heard in ages. Like most great rock & roll, it stands alone; there are influences, not all of them musical and many of them literary, but he is no arty poseur, in fact this is also some of the most honest music I have heard in some time. As we trail out of the age of artifice (I don't think I have to mention any names), artifice itself rides on the coattails of most of those who proclaim themselves an alternative. Richard Hell is different. I hear echoes in this record of rock & roll from time immemorial, and they are not contrived, they are rather the modus of a plain-speaking kid with an awesome intelligence and a great pain to speak plainly of...

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