I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp

Ultimately, not only are we all the same, but what happens is out of our control. (...) All there is is the entertainments, pastimes, of love and work, the hope of keeping interested.

Sex and drugs and rock and roll. In roughly that order (and a bit of poetry). Richard Hell's autobiography of his early life and brief punk stardom before deciding to quit the whole circus before the inevitable overdose has all the usual trappings of a rocker memoir, with two exceptions: One, that Hell never really seems into the music as such as much as what it offers in terms of expression and lifestyle (well, he IS a bass player), and two, that Hell actually knows how to sling a pen even if his writing, much like his musical output, tends to come in brief outbursts of genius surrounded by stretches of rather workmanlike time-passing.

It was like having magic powers. The ability to create action at a distance. The sounds that came from the amplifiers were absurdly moving and strange, the variety of them so wide in view of the fact that they came from flicks of our fingers and from our vocal noises, and the way that it was a single thing, an entity, that was produced by the simultaneous reactive interplay of the four band members combining various of their faculties. We were turned into a sound a flow of sound. I remember having a weird moment of weird revelation once, that each moment of a phonograph record being played, each millimeter of information conveyed via the needle to the amplifier to the speaker to the ear, is one sound. A whole orchestra is one sound, altering moment by moment, no matter how many instruments go into producing it. And, as our band rehearsed, on each moment we made the sound spray out in arrays we could instantly alter, emanating from inside us and out interplay and our inner beings combined, playing. And the sound included words.

While the book largely overlaps Patti Smith's Just Kids it's also quite different, largely of course because Hell himself is a very different person; with more distance to in his own myth for good and bad, capable of describing his younger self and the people he knew back then with an honesty that borders on cruelty, but also as befits the writer of "Blank Generation", that distance seems to have been there already; rather than submerge himself in the music and lifestyle he comes across as the kid (not that he was that young) who stands over in the corner making sarcastic comments, always with a girl of five nearby (he is literally unable to mention a woman without reviewing her breasts) and some good dope, but never really liking it much except in small doses. There's an intellectual detachment to I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp that is understandable and often quite entertaining, but a little too often fails to take it above the level of a good life story into something greater. But I should probably take a look at his novels.

Rock and roll is the only art form at which teenagers are not only capable of excelling but that actually requires that one be a teenager, more or less, to practice it at all. This is the way that “punk” uniquely embodies rock and roll. It explicitly asserts and demonstrates that the music is not about virtuosity. Rock and roll is about natural grace, about style and instinct. Also the inherent physical beauty of youth. You don't have to play guitar well or, by any conventional standard, sing well to make great rock and roll; you just have to have it, have be able to recognize it, have to get it. And half of that is about simply being young, meaning full of crazed sex drive and sensitivity to the object of romantic and sexual desire, and full of anger about being condescended to by adults, and disgust and anger about all the lies you're being fed, and all the control you've been subjected to, by those complacent adults. And a deep desire for some fun. And though rock and roll is about being cool, you don’t have to be cool to make real rock and roll—sometimes the most innocuous and pathetic fumblers only become graced by the way they shine in songs. And this is half of what makes the music the art of adolescence—that it doesn’t require any verifiable skill. It’s all essence, and it’s available to those who, to all appearances, have nothing.