Richard Hell & Robert Quine

Richard Hell can be considered the prophet of the New Wave. He was among the first rock musicians to escape the stereotypes of decadent New York rockers and transform that ideology into something new and viscerally philosophical. The Ramones may have provided the sound, but Richard Hell gave it the ethos: punk. At the same time, his decadent/existential approach to rock music, transforming songs into abstract art, decreed the birth of a new period: new wave. In 1971, Richard ‘Hell’ Myers, then working at the Greenwich Village bookstore Strand with Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine, decided to form the Neon Boys with drummer Billy Fica. The group performed turbulent and provocative rock and roll, contending with the New York Dolls for the best precursors of punk-rock. The group added Robert Lloyd and replaced Hell with Verlaine on vocals, changing their name to Television. In 1975, Hell left the group in the hands of guitarist Tom Verlaine, and, after a brief collaboration with Johnny Thunders as the Heartbreakers (for whom he wrote the anthem Chinese Rocks), he dedicated himself to a career in journalism. Hell, with his attitude and clothing, conceived the punk lifestyle. For example, Malcolm McLaren, in London, based his own style on capturing the British punk look.

The following year, Hell was back on the saddle with a new group, the Voidoids. At his side, titanic and atonal guitarist Robert Quine. The track Blank Generation – which served as a manifesto, sarcastic and desperate, for the fledgling punk generation and new wave movement – appeared on the EP Richard Hell (Ork, 1976). Hell sparked the punk-rock explosion with lyrics ‘I was saying/let me out of here/before I was even born’.

Blank Generation (Sire, 1977) – marked by its tangled abrasive, dissonant guitar styles, scarred by Hell’s neurotic growl, and signed by his disjointed lyrics, influenced by Beefheart’s free association style and Dylan’s visionary – is testimony to the ferocious nihilism and existential angst of punk, from the outrageous pulsing plea of Love Comes in Spurts (recorded for the first time by the Neon Boys in 1973 as an auditory homage to the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan) to the hysterical rock’n’roll of Liars Beware to the long, tormented ballad Another World.

Quine is the real hero of Destiny Street (Red Star, 1982), with Massacre’s Fred Maher on drums; highlights including the Mersey Beat nursery rhyme The Kid With The Replaceable Head with the disco-music parody of Downtown at Dawn and the virulent hard rock of Ignore That Door. After branding the Voidoids music with his abrasive Stratocaster, Robert Quine, who was a veteran of San Francisco’s hippie summer and had already joined the New York new wave scene at thirty crazy years old, committed to two high profile collaborations. The first with Jody Harris of Raybeats, and the other with Fred Maher of Massacre. The second collaboration, Basic (1984), influenced by Eno’s ambient style, is an instrumental tour de force starting with dissonant funk (Pick Up) and gliding through Hendrix influences (Bluffer), equatorial tribalism (Summer Storm), disco-surf (Bondage Bait) and dreamy new age (Village). The man who invented cynical punk poetry on suicide and overdose (thanks to his ‘strangled’ vocals but also to Robert Quine’s atonal guitar) is certainly not prolific. The third true album in fifteen years, Dim Stars (Caroline) was released in 1992, by a super-group that had held Manhattan clubs in anticipation for months. Hell’s approach had not changed at all: many songs were born of more or less improvised jam sessions followed by conjuring up apocalyptic verses. As with the Voidoids, the musical result depended almost entirely on the accompaniment. This time, the lineup included Thurston Moore, and the best song of the album is, in fact, a Sonic Youth imitation: The Night is Coming Down. The sardonic genius of Hells’ lyricism has a way of surfacing here and there (All My Witches Come True), but the album overall confirms his limits: as all revolutionaries learn: it is one thing to revolt, it is another to then govern the nation.

But maybe Richard "Hell" was just the last of the romantics, poet of bleak alleys with no way out of the slums, prophet of the long sleep.

(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)

Go Now (Tim Kerr, 1995) is a spoken-word album (excerpts from Hell's novel) with musical accompaniment by Robert Quine.

Time (Matador, 2002) is a double disc of rarities (including the entire 1984 cassette RIP).

Quine penned with Marc Ribot Ikue Mori's Painted Desert (Avant, 1995). Robert Quine, one of the greatest and most underrated guitarists in the history of rock music, died in june 2004 of a heroin overdose.

Spurts (Rhino, 2005) is a retrospective of Richard Hell, mostly drawn from Blank Generation and Destiny Street.