Richard HellI Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp

“A rueful, battle-scarred, darkly witty observer of his own life and times.”—New York Times

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 tonight 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.

Richard Hell is also the author of the novels Go Now and Godlike, as well as Hot and Cold, a collection of essays, diaries, and lyrics. He has published essays, reportage, and fiction in such publications as Spin, GQ, Esquire, the Village Voice, Vice, Bookforum, Art in America, the New York Times, and the New York Times Book Review. From 2004 to 2006 he was the film critic for Black Book magazine. Hell lives in New York City.