Richard Hell, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp—Reading and Booksigning

Wed, Oct 9 at 7 PM

Musician, writer, and provocateur Richard Hell (born Richard Meyers in Lexington, Kentucky) was at the center of the social and cultural upheaval of the 1970s that came to be called “punk.” With his best friend, Tom Verlaine, he started the band Television, which, as the first band to play at a then-obscure downtown New York City bar called CBGBs, ignited an entire movement. Malcolm McLaren admitted that he drew inspiration for the look and music of the Sex Pistols from Hell’s original style. He departed Television before they recorded, and he subsequently made his name as the leader of the group Richard Hell & the Voidoids, whose album Blank Generation was seminal to punk.

Hell joins us to read from his unsurprisingly candid and reflective new autobiography, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp. The book chronicles the coming of age and artistic birth of this iconoclastic icon, indelibly capturing the seminal years when punk rock exploded across New York and London. At the vortex of this seismic shift, Hell helped define its unwritten principles and the sound of its primal battle cry. A book signing will follow the talk; learn more about this event here.