To promote the paperback release of his autobiography, Richard Hell (born Richard Meyers) read an excerpt from “I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp” in the Rare Book Room of New York’s Strand Book Store.

For those who don’t know who Richard Hell is, he is the lesser-known progenitor of everything now considered punk and indie. True the Ramones cemented the leather jacket and ripped jean archetype into our consciousness, but Hell’s aesthetic was the further reaching because it wasn’t simply a uniform. It was subtle enough to sift down through the ages manifesting itself in the minds and wardrobes of countless rockers, some of whom had no idea that their waif-thin build and practiced lethargy was an inherited persona, not their own creation ex-nihilo. Thick, black-framed sunglasses while on stage and wearing a blazer? Hell. An intentionally torn t-shirt so shorn it makes a wife-beater look like excess fabric? Hell. Atonal caterwauling? Hell. And let’s not forget the cropped, spikey hair.

After dropping out of the scene to get a handle on his heroin addiction, Hell turned his attention to writing. The written word, particularly poetry, had been his first passion and his reason for coming to New York in the first place. I regret that I am not as well-versed with his body of written work – novels, essay and poem collections, magazine contributions – as I am with his musical work. Notwithstanding my one-dimensional appreciation of this multi-faceted artist, I couldn’t resist attending this event and meeting the man, the legend, Richard Hell.

I arrived early to the event. The Rare Book Room is lined floor-to-ceiling with bookshelves. More decorative and involved than any wallpaper, the spines of the rare books engage the wandering eye wherever it lands. The ceilings are high. The floors, long thin wooden planks stained with age but sturdy. The leather reading chairs with brass studs lining the armrests and backs are exactly what any admitted bibliophile would expect in a proper reading room. The tableau would’ve only been complete if everything were covered in decades worth of dust and the room, dimly lit, smelled of moldering paper and the antiquarians working there whom time forgot.

Instead, the Rare Book room is well lit, clean, and staffed by friendly, fresh-faced college grads who wouldn’t have been out of place down the street at a bar during happy hour. I bought my copy of his book and took a seat. Staring at the cover, I felt confirmed a hundred times over that indie rockers with any knowledge of a once even-more-obscure Richard Hell must have grinned to themselves mischievously before walking off with whatever characteristic of his they thought would help their game. Pale, gaunt, heroin-chic. Boyishly masculine, yet effeminate. An unruly swath of hair that looks like it’s never seen a comb. And an expression on his face like he wouldn’t even begin to know how to pose for your picture, but he does. He’s been doing it the whole time, and that was his genius.

The Richard Hell that walked out to the podium was a stark contrast to the one on the cover of his book. In his mid 60’s, it was only natural, but nevertheless surprising to what extent he had avoided the physical ravages that mark so many rockers of excess approaching their golden years. Far from looking emaciated, shriveled, or hunched over, he looked barrel-chested and healthy, like an ex-body builder aging gracefully.

He started by explaining the origin of his autobiography. Vice magazine had contacted him about commissioning a work of fiction, but he felt like using autobiographical material instead and treating it as if it were fiction. It wasn’t to take creative license with the material, he maintained, but to put it at some distance from himself, while focusing on the elements that would most suit a magazine like Vice.

The idea for an autobiography had already been in the works before Vice’s offer, inspired by a night out with his wife. The chapter he read described this anecdote. While at the theatre watching a movie he was captivated by the hair of a girl sitting in front of him. Something about its style reminded him of an adolescent crush he had had on a classmate with an equally distinctive hairdo. The reminiscence quickly turned into a meditation on the nature and appeal of hair as being a part of the person but dead and unfeeling. From this digression came the willingness to retrace a history that courses through first sexual experiences to running away from Kentucky and finally to the streets of New York City.

The Interview

Bryan Waterman is an NYU professor of American Literature. He briefly summed up his relationship with Hell: In doing his research for a book he had written about the band Television and the years leading up to the release of Marquee Moon, he unearthed many archived documents on Richard Hell. The day before the reading, they met for the first time over lunch. Waterman’s conceptual familiarity of Hell’s accomplishments at the expense of actual familiarity with Hell as a person marked most of the interview. Instead of asking informed questions about Hell’s approach to his early work and years in New York City, Waterman was more intent on confirming and elaborating on his own theories on what Hell’s thought processes were.

Hell, for his part, was gracious enough to avoid overtly contradicting him. He instead reworded some of the questions and offered alternate, if not contradictory, but far less intellectual explanations as to what inspired his sensibility. Grinning and rephrasing through much of the interview and through questions from the audience, it became clear that Hell’s work in music and literature and fashion were natural processes, more reactions to the prevailing status quo, albeit reactions informed by a discriminating and cocksure aesthetic cultivated over years of observation and reading. The extensive reading may be why fans insist his every move must have been a calculated statement, instead of the actions of a perspicacious teenager fully aware that the spotlight and all eyes were on him.

I see why Verlaine grew to detest him. And why I do like him. His writing abilities notwithstanding he doesn’t come across as some deep and dark poet. For all his time as a Lower East Side junkie-poet-rocker who could’ve lost it all, any death’s-head humor is delivered with a playful smirk creeping around the corners of his mouth. It’s a gesture that threatens to betray his own amusement and makes you wonder if you aren’t, in fact, what he finds so amusing.