Before punk rock and CBGBs, before heroin and cocaine, Richard Hell was Richard Meyers, the son of a university psychologist in Kentucky with an advanced intellect and tendency toward destruction — two traits that would help him define an artistic era in the years to come.
Richard Hell left high school, caught a ride to New York, and never looked back. And despite having retired from music in 1984, he is still remembered as one of punk rock’s founding fathers, best known for founding what would become the group Television and for “Blank Generation” by Richard Hell and the Voidoids.
Hell has spent the last three decades writing fiction and nonfiction in a series of books and magazine articles. His latest is a memoir, I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp, which is out now from Ecco.
