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| In 1980 Richard Hell wrote a regular column for the New York Alternative paper 'East Village Eye'. Hell's column 'Slum Journal' didn't usually concern itself with music. But March 1980's piece turned briefly to the subject close to his heart: the story of punk and the way he believes lazy journalism have put a twist in the tale. ". . . the journalist declared, in three columns, that the Investigator, Erik Lonrott, had dedicated himself to studying the names of God in order to come across the name of the murderer. Lonrott, accustomed to the simplifications of journalism, did not become indignant." -Jorge Luis Borges "Death And The Compass" |
| "I WAS ROBBED!" Or: How I invented Punk Rock By Richard Hell |
| MY MOTIVES for becoming a columnist for the East Village Eye were largely created by my experience as an aspiring public figure, rock and roll variety. After seeing the music writers in action, I wanted (and still want) to be able to talk about them and back to them without having to talk to them. But then I kept putting off writing about them until now for fear it would seem like sour grapes, and because the lies were probably no greater in proportion to the positive and flattering 'news' than in gossip on a neighbourhood level. Still, there is at least one thing about the processes of journalism that I'm sure is worth pointing out: namely that, at least in music writing, half of the material printed is untrue. I've sworn to ignore them, but, at the risk of looking as bad as they do, I've got to get all this off my chest before aspiring to Erik Lonrott's calm. The clearest example of the phenomenon in this case, and most controversial, is my role as an originator of many traits that became identified as 'punk' or 'new wave'. The fact is that London punk was copied from New York punk in 1976. English punk was created in that year when Malcolm McLaren tutored his associate in the clothing business, Bernard Rhodes, and the two bands they immediately formed. The Sex Pistols and The Clash, in the styles which Malcolm brought back to England from me (Television) and The New York Dolls (who were already famous there). The only strong stylistic trait of the two British groups that wasn't taken directly from the Dolls - their sound, primarily - or me was their political emphasis, which was Malcolm's speciality. (When he managed the Dolls for the last six or eight months before they broke up, he dressed them all in red leather and had them play before a giant Communist flag backdrop.) |
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| Now, none of this is difficult to establish,and this is not to give it much weight, but it's the sort of petty subject that fascinates journalists, and I resent the large number of obnoxious and embarrassing (untrue and/or out of context) lines they've written in discussing it. Virtually none of these writers care about writing the truth or making the simplest fact check because they know that their readers will accept any statement they see in a newspaper or magazine as fact if the writer presents it as such.If a passing sentence says Hell started ripping his shirts in imitation of the pictures he found in English fan magazines, as a writer named Cynthia Heimel wrotes in New York magazine a few weeks ago, a reader will believe it without questation. The writers knowing this use the papers to present their opinions and attitudes in the guise of the truth by fabricating entire sets of information to their theses. |
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| All that would have been necessary from Heimel, for instance, was a phone call. (She might have been referred to Punk magazine #3 of April 1976 that contains an interview and photos of me wearing ripped and safety-pinned T-shirts made a year before the first English punk groups were manufactured.) The point is that the writers don't care because they know how intimidating newsprint is to the ordinary reader. One would think that New York (if not American) chauvinism would weight at least local writers toward those particular facts, but they are so astonishingly petty that a different kind of pride interfered: the Heimel type is so intent on seeming to be among the avant chic that she has to pretend to be a real punk-initiate, a real insider, by picking out others to describe as derivative. It's really disgusting and happens every' day. |
| FOR THE RECORD, and in chronological order, the groups that established the characteristics that soon became identified as new wave, and who predated Malcolm's single contribution of an overt political message, were The New York Dolls (the bridge from the previous era and most responsible for the sound that became known as punk), Television (while I was in it), The Ramones, Patti Smith, and then jalso Blondie, Talking Heads, and The Heartbreakers. All these groups existed before any English punk, which was modeled on them. Television was the turning point. I originated virtually all the visuals - haircut, torn (via Patti) and safety-pinned clothes, '50s suits with loosened ties, leather jackets (which The Ramones soon improved on), and shirts with scattered geometrical shapes (initiated by Verlaine) and personal messages drawn on them (the first being "please kill me" which Richard Lloyd was talked into wearing at Max's one night). |
| The first English punks also lifted a lot of ideas from such things as Punk magazine anour songs, such as '(I Belong To The) Blank Generation' (soon to become 'Pretty Vacant'), 'Love Comes in Spurts', 'I Don't Care', and 'You Gotta Lose', which were performed regularly at CBGB by Television in the same pre-British period. All of this is documented in the New York press of 1974-75. (I will insert a little overt advertisement here.) This whole subject arose again in part because I've been working on a four song EP that contains two of those early songs. They were incredibly chaotic, hard-driving rock and roll songs (music by a different Verlaine than later recorded), influenced mainly by The Velvet Underground and the sort of American punk of the late '60's that was made by the groups on Lenny Kaye's 'Nuggets' album, like The Standells, The Shadows of Knight, The Seeds, etc., and The Stooges. The other main line, at least for for me (I got most of my music education from Verlaine), was the mid-'60s English Invasion of The Beatles, Them, The Who, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, and The Yardbirds (and the '50s rock and roll that comprised half of all those groups' repertoire). We've recently finished re-mixing two of the tracks that Verlaine and I recorded in 1973 with Billy Ficca on drums in a four-track basement studio in Brooklyn. They've just been issued on Alan Betrock's new Shake Records as an extended play 45 with two new songs: 'Don't Die' and 'Time' by me and the Voidoids on one side and 'Love Cornes in Spurts' (no resemblance, outside of the title, musically or lyrically, to later recorded versions) and 'That's All I Know (Right Now)' by The Neon Boys on the other. These latter songs were the dying words of the group we called The Neon Boys, which lived maybe six months altogether. It was my first group, my first attempt to play bass, and my first visit to a studio (we never reached the point of playing in public). A few months after we made the tape, Terry Ork brought us Richard Lloyd and we formed Television with The Neon Boys material for a repertoire. But in a real way they were the first modern punk songs recorded; The Dolls are the only other ontenders. |
| As I was saying, I began writing for this paper in order to have some public access without having to speak to journalists. I had decided to start my music career over with the benefit of what I had learned. This applied to my relationship with music papers as well. I had originally planned to stop dealing with em altogether and use this space instead though this is the first time I've written about music). |
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| Since then, in order not to seem to be abusing myself and record companies that invest in me pointless harm, I've modified this essay I'll answer in writing any inquiries from commercial papers at the rate they give their peer journalists. Of course, I don't expect this to happen very often and so I'm going to use this opportunity to get these arguments about the past out of the way and onto the record for good. The order that the events occurred is a matter of record, though there may be some disputing of exactly how and why things happened this way — I give my explanation. NEW WAVE music was carried in its entirety from New York to London by Malcolm McLaren and The Ramones. The Ramones, by touring in 1976, and Malcolm, by bringing the news of Television and our styles and attitudes to the kids he attracted with copies of my clothes to his clothing store in London, SEX. (As well as on the racks, he had the Punk interview mentioned above hanging on the walls there when he was recruiting the members of the Pistols). |
| We had deliberately started a scene in New York (1974-75) by convincing Hilly Kristal, the owner of CBGBs, a Hell's Angel and wino hangout on the Bowery to let Television present live music there every Sunday night. Like the Dolls at the Mercer Arts Centre, we figured that was the best strategy for acquiring a following. It worked, and The Ramones soon formed (we knew Dee Dee) and started playing there. Patti Smith, who was still reading poetry with ten-minute interludes of electric guitar accompaniment from Lenny Kaye, wrote about us in Hit Parader and soon was playing there as her band expanded. We were being written about in the newly founded SoHo News, Interview and the Voice, getting the same kind of coverage in N.Y. as The Velvet Underground or Dolls had. But as the scene grew it looked more influential than that, and as short-haired and unpracticed driven new groups formed. |
| Punk magazine appeared and, just when Malcolm, then the Dolls' manager, turned up and began hanging out at CBGBs, independent records began to be pressed. But it was still confined to New York City, which was the advantage Malcolm had. The great advantages of England for good new rock and roll are: one, that It's taken as seriously by the U.S. press as our own charts, and two, that because the whole place isn't much bigger than New York, news travels fast there and similar events gain the importance for the whole nation as would be given them by the local press in a city the size of New York. In other words, the number one new group in London is not only necessarily the #1 in Britain (even The Beatles moved there quickly), but is considered by Americans to be the equivalent of American national news here. (I'm glad that this was true because it greatly benefited the scene here and good rock and roll everywhere, but it is the phenomenon responsible for the spectacle of American asshole journalists trying to look like they belong with the hipsters on the bandwagon they hopped by means of pontifications on the authenticity of the styles they're trying so desperately to adopt.) It's amazing how much looser the British national press is than ours. The most influential music papers are the London weekly tabloids — New Musical Express, Sounds, and Melody Maker—that operate for the whole country with the flexibility of a neighbourhood newspaper. They got here long before our own national press. I have the clipping from when NME's Nick Kent, who had heard about us from Malcolm, did about three pages with pictures on me just as we were getting The Heartbreakers off the ground in early '76 (issue of March 27), that described the whole scene in minute detail, bemoaning the lack of such fertility in Britain with these words: "The immediate ramifications of this burgeoning N.Y. rock scene were actually felt by yours truly on his immediate return to the Old Country by simply noting the shocking lack of any new bands playing parallel London venues to CBGBs and the like who even seemed aware that rock and roll could be something more than a mindlessly competent regurgitation of old licks. The fact is that just about every band with the marked exception of the unique and very wonderful Roogalator and also, possibly, The Sex Pistols (themselves a rather obvious New York consciousness band who fortunately anchor this pitch firmly within their Shepherd's Bush origins and outlook), seem totally unwilling to even dare commit themselves to commenting on their environment, to develop a decently relevant attitude to current times. In the final analysis, this whole New York thing — this new perspective — by rights should not be confined to the incestuous precincts of downtown Manhattan. It should be usurped absolutely everywhere new rock 'n' roll is being shaped and formed." (This was one of the first mentions of the Pistols in print.) |
| Well, he got his wish, but I wouldn't be surprised if that particular article is what got him chain-whipped by Sid a little later. The first few English groups were very self-conscious about their origins because so much of their notoriety was due to what seemed so astoundingly unique about them (while they knew that there existed a few local travellers who'd seen where they'd copped their act). |
| They vehemently put down all things American ('I'm So Bored With The U.S.A.' by The Clash) and particularly New York ('New York' by The Sex Pistols) in public. (England today is so derivative of the U.S. that it's practically a diluted version, which understandably enrages the kids, but it's pretty ironic that they rallied behind these musical expressions that were made partly to disguise their own U.S. origins). But privately, the first times I met both Glen Matlock and Sid Vicious they each surprised me by insisting on continuously apologising for the theft of specific riffs and ideas I hadn't even noticed they'd used.But it is the media people who are the villains — ideas are public property, they were meant to draw attention anyway, and you can come up with as many more as you need to replace the ones that get worn. The very largest of the American papers, including the ones like Rolling Stone that supposedly specialise in music, are the ones that invariably begin their essays into 'punk' with the blanket statement that it originated in England, often followed by a few overt thrusts at denigrating the supposedly secondhand American counterparts. That is insulting. They do it out of a stronger self-interest than chauvinism: the hope of locking competent as journalists, which prevents them from admitting they were two years behind the news when they read about it in the British press. They move so slowly because, unlike their colleagues there, they are huge and therefore extremely conservative, using other freer journalists as their sources rather than the actual news events. It's also an insult to the large number of American rockers who have been misled by it into thinking that they got their culture secondhand. I think I've just about gotten this out of my system, and I hope it will have an effect on the way you read these papers. Even straight interviews, or maybe especially interviews, since they appear, with their quotation marks and all, to be so certainly legitimate. Finding the truth in a newspaper article is about as easy as guessing the title of an abstract expressionist painting. I know how hard it is to be aware of - I still can't help forming opinions on the basis of newspaper 'information'. And in the long run one can't help being affected by it. But do be sceptical, because the effects of untrue information from trusted establishments can have the nastiest effects on its subjects. For instance, the rumour the FBI has admitted to starting, and which the press promulgated, concerning Jean Seberg (whose stillborn baby was falsely rumoured to have been black) that eventually led to her suicide. A doubly uncountable number of such journalistic crimes, and many many more with effects of lesser atrocity, are never exposed. The writers know denials just emphasise the issue while making the accused look foolish. In fact the papers have such power they should be legally forced to supply on demand the proof of any statement they make that's not preceded by the words, "in my opinion," or an attribution, in the same way politicians have to report the sources of their income. To close out I'll make one more clarification: that I'm an appreciator of lots of modern British groups (particularly the earliest ones' latest music) and could have spent these paragraphs admiring their famous variations on our theme, but obviously that wasn't my purpose, and I'll be glad to return next issue to subjects anoVaims more conducive to good writing than music-industry criticism. © Richard Hall 1980 |
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