Richard Hell, The Dolls Redux - (And So On)

The trouble with the Dolls: their flirtation with chaos - like all high wire acts carried out without aid of a safety net, at some point someone is going to slip and fall and get hurt.
The trouble with Johnny Thunders: the bad habits he learned with The Dolls - a junk habit, a truculent attitude, a disinclination to practice his art. All of the foregoing amplified within The Heartbreakers.
The New York Dolls - they coulda been, they shoulda been the biggest, the greatest.

Richard Hell: Johnny was really lazy ... I was pretty lazy but Johnny was really lazy.

Thunders, in a career spanning some twenty years helped create only four albums proper (or three and a half if you're nitpicking ... his first solo album was stitched together from a number of disparate sessions); the rest of his oeuvre consists of shoddy collections of shitty live cuts, outtakes and studio floor sweepings. Post Dolls, he wrote perhaps two or three half-good songs.
'You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory', though, if you like that sort of thing, is an absolute classic.
Hell, for his part? From the early-to-mid 1970s (on and off), a professional (more or less) musician (more or less), and three albums to boast of - two with the Voidoids, one with The Dim Stars. Where, he once asked, did those years go? A few sessions with The Neon Boys/Television - forever buried (apart from three or four songs) due to Verlaine's intransigence, some demos with the Heartbreakers (again, only some of which have seen the light of day).

Hell (of course) was a, perhaps the, pivotal figure. A founder member of The Neon Boys/Television, and The Heartbreakers - he would suffer the indignity of being turfed out of both bands by singer/guitarists jealous of sharing the limelight. Certainly, with Television, Hell was responsible for the conceptual/visual side of the group ... which made up a good 50% of what made that group interesting (a rough analogy can be drawn here with Hell's beloved Eno-era Roxy Music, although one would obviously argue percentage points). The banks of televisions onstage. The look, customised, grafitied thrift-store, chopped-up hair, old geezer's clothes, was a million miles from both the glam fag-end and trad rock image prevalent in the rock scene as a whole and, more importantly, in their little corner of New York.

Not musical enough for Verlaine? Hmm ... I always found Hell a good solid bass-player, a lyricist of rare distinction and, on a good night, a fascinating, febrile performer. Is it true that Verlaine gradually sidelined Hell, progressively cutting down the number of Hell-penned songs from the set and forbidding him to jump around on stage? What Hell possessed, mostly absent from Verlaine, was a fine, sly sense of humour. What Verlaine didn't want was a rival.
Insecurity can be so ugly ... Television may have garnered more critical kudos but for me The Voidoids always had the edge ... far more visceral while at the same time more oblique ... Hell's lyrics and preoccupations, the wonderful twin guitar attack courtesy of Ivan Julian and Robert Quine (gone but not forgotten, Quine).

The Blank Generation - blank as in tabula rasa, a space where one could write one's own persona, one's own demands (not as in vacant ... the productive misreading by The Sex Pistols, 'Pretty Vacant' an attempt to come up with their very own little 'Blank Generation').

A tale repeated so (so) many times, one is sick of hearing it ... but Hell really did invent the punk template; the spiky hair, the ripped-up and customised clothing, the provocatively nihilistic demeanour.
His music, though, was always far more interesting than three chord punk thrash - lyrically, too complex, too romantic and poetic, musically too grown-up. (This is all so obvious, it barely needs stating. Which is why I'm stating it). The Voidoids? They coulda been, shoulda been, if not the biggest (too stubborn, too individual for that), at least not reduced to supporting The Clash.

The genius of Hell: that nom de guerre ... alienated, smart, Romantic, bitter.

The genius of Hell: his comment that he formed the Voidoids because he was lonely.

The genius of Hell: the Voidoids gig when he went onstage with a dog on a lead.

The genius of Hell: the vocal style - an impassioned yelp, untutored but capable of expressing contempt, yearning and ennui ... all within the same song.

The genius of Hell: the lyrics ... take 'Love Comes In Spurts'- "And it murders your heart/They didn't tell you that part". Has anyone ever better articulated the danger and desire of love and sex and death and all that crazed Bataille-type stuff in a pop song?

The Hell visage - the two thousand yard stare (brilliantly reduced to, erm, blankness in the image on the back cover of the Sire 'Blank Generation' 12", the eyes cut out), the provocation, the ugly/beautiful dichotomy, the bitterness, the hurt, the vunerablilty, the toughness.
Enigmatic, a mirror looking back at you. Fragile and bruised, Poe and Rimbaud.

As Gilbert and George were asking at around the same time - are you angry or are you boring?