I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp: An Autobiography by Richard Hell

Author:Richard Hell [Hell, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9780062190833
Publisher: Ecco
Published: 2013-03-12T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I more or less lived at the club, and at Max’s Kansas City, for all of that first year, and the next two as well. CBGB was isolated. It had received virtually no national publicity, and even in New York it was a “downtown” phenomenon, known only to a minuscule subculture, though we fully expected to become international hits. The room was usually no more than half full even on weekends, and the larger crowds for even the most popular bands were conscious of their status as enlightened initiates. Most media people and their audiences didn’t take rock and roll seriously. Even the veteran trash journalist Lisa Robinson, who was practically the only national voice to consistently play up the scene, with her magazines Rock Scene and Hit Parader, treated the movement as primarily a source of titillation and gossip, just another instance of decadent fashionable New York nightlife. Only a few of the musicians and their friends knew that what was going on at CBGB was the most interesting thing happening in the world at that time for both high art and popular culture.

The most important aspect of the isolation, though, was the way in which what happened within it was a dream come true, was a comprehensive self-invention, or self-manifestation. In retrospect, it seems like everything we did has been colored by the way the music has come to be perceived now, but that’s not the way things really were—“punk” is too limited a description for what happened there from 1974 through 1977. On one hand the place was more mundane and half-assed than it’s typically pictured as having been. There were plenty of ordinary derivative bands that could have been found anywhere at the time. But on the other hand we had conjured into existence, out of imagination, this reality in which we were the representatives, the sound and appearance and behavior, of the environment we’d located at CBGB. This was the essence of CBGB then and there—that we, with our rejected and extreme sets of beliefs and values and intentions, had managed to materialize an environment in which we were not outside, but at home ourselves. Where we were the positive standards of being, rather than examples of failure, depravity, criminality, and ugliness. It was a world of rock and roll and poetry and anger and revelry and drunkenness and sex, but all specific. It brought real life, as opposed to the conventions of popular songs, back to rock and roll, but starting from the real life of a very specific time and place. The traits and signs of what came to be called punk were the ways that we’d systematically invented or discovered as means for displaying on the outside what was inside us. That’s the origin of the funny, lyrical, angry music styles, the haircuts, the clothes, the names, and everything else that identified us. What defined the club was that it was where we were completely ourselves. And what could be better

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