To Hell and back

Richard Hell performing with Robert Quine (left)

Growing up in Lexington, Kentucky as the son of a secular Jew seemed to be an unlikely start for a punk rock icon, but for Richard Lester Meyers, normalcy and conformity were not in his genetic makeup.  After Richard’s father died suddenly, he was raised by his mother and was sent to private school in Delaware. While at the Sanford School, he met and became friends with Tom Miller, who later would change his name to Tom Verlaine. During their stint together at school, the two ran away but were soon picked up in Alabama where they were arrested for arson and vandalism. Richard never finished high school, but instead he moved to New York City to pursue his goal of becoming a poet.  While in New York, he met David Gainnini, a fellow poet, and the two relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico for a short spell to publish books and magazines. Richard was starting to make his name as a poet at this time, even having pieces published nationally in Rolling Stone. Music was not his first love, it was the written word. Soon however that would change as Meyers would form a band with his old friend Tom Verlaine in 1969.

 Along with this new band, The Neon Boys, Richard Meyers changed his name to Richard Hell.  In 1974, the band added a second guitar player, Richard Loyd and the name of the band changed once again to Television.  It was around this time that Hell created his own look for himself which included spiky hair and ripped clothes held together with safety pins. This look was something totally new. “It was about putting your insides on the outside” Hell would say much later in an interview.  Famed Sex Pistols manager, Malcolm McLaren cites Hell as the inspiration behind the safety-pin style clothing that he sold in his London shop, “Sex” that would later become the stereotypical English punk look.  Although Hell insists that Television was not a punk band due to the fact that punk did not exist yet, the raw angry sound quickly became the proto-punk signature that would influence just about every punk group waiting to be born.

Television soon became a regular act at Hilly Kristal’s club, “CBGB’s” in the Bowery section of New York City. The band also physically built the club’s first stage, much to the delight of Kristal. Hell’s twitchy bass guitar playing style along with his ripped safety-pinned clothes served as a role model for future punk musicians who would emulate this look over and over again. However, Hell’s position in the band was becoming strained due to a dispute over creative control between himself and Tom Verlaine. Originally, they two decided to divide songwriting evening between them, but after a fashion Verlaine refused to play any of Hell’s compositions. This ultimately resulted in Hell leaving Television in the spring of 1975. At the same time as Hell was making his exit, Jerry Nolan and Johnny Thunders quit the New York Dolls and the three of them formed their own band in May of 1975, The Heartbreakers, which added Walter Lure as the second guitarist.

The Heartbreakers would last about a year before Hell left to start his own band called “Richard Hell and the Voidoids with Robert Quine, Ivan Julian and Marc Bell. It was during this time in 1976 that the band recorded their best known songs, “Blank Generation”, “Love Comes in Spurts”, “The Kid With the Replaceable Head” and “Time”.  The band recorded two albums, 1977’s “Blank Generation” and “Destiny Street” in 1982. It was during this time that Hell’s heroin addiction was taking a toll on the band and on his personal life as well. Luckily, before he went the way of so many who chased the dragon before him, he entered Narcotics Anonymous and was able to beat his addiction. “I’ve been disturbed and fascinated by having outlived my youth” Hell said recently.

Richard Hell in 2008 (photo by David Shankbone)

In 1992, Hell came out of retirement for exactly one month in order to form a band called Dim Stars. The band featured Thurston Moore on guitar, Steve Shelly on drums, Don Fleming on guitar, Robert Quine and Hell on bass. Dim Stars only made one live appearance and recorded one album, the self-titled “Dim Stars”. During the early 90’s Hell became a regularly published author and to date has published eleven books, several of which have received widespread critical praise. Hell married his second wife, Sheelagh Bevan in 2002 and still lives today in the same East Village apartment that he has occupied for over 40 years.