I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp
An Autobiography
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“In his poetic memoir, Hell takes us on a tour of a lost world and stakes out his place in cultural history.”—Los Angeles Times
“A rueful, battle-scarred, darkly witty observer of his own life and times.”—New York Times
The sharp, lyrical, and no-holds- barred autobiography of the iconoclastic writer and musician Richard Hell, charting the childhood, coming of age, and misadventures of an artist in an indelible era of rock and roll.
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, cofounding 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 mesmerizing 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hell's fashion style torn clothing and the ubiquitous safety pins, spiked hair and the protopunk music of his bands Television and the Heartbreakers, influenced numerous early punk rockers, such as Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols. Hell brings his searingly honest songwriting style to this candid and page-turning memoir of his life, from childhood until the end of the 1970s. Hell takes us on a journey through his youth in Lexington, Ky., his boredom with school, his attempts at running away, his to move to New York in the 1970s, and his struggles with drug addiction. Hell recalls that when he started having a band in the late 1960s, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and the Kinks provided what excited him most in music: "It was fast, aggressive, and scornful, but complicated and full of feelings." He recounts seeing Patti Smith for the first time and being blown away by performances that were seductive and funny; she was like a "bebop artist off to a whole other plane beyond the beyond." Hell's memoir spills over with recollections of his times with Andrew Wylie, Sid Vicious's girlfriend Nancy Spungen, and rock critic Lester Bangs. In 1976, the Voidoids debuted at CBGB; the following year, Hell descended into drug addiction. 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.
