special introductory
paragraph!
Blank Generation
Destiny Street
R.I.P.
Time
Mmm?
Anyway, if you're into it for catchy melodies, you're gonna wanna gonna hear "Love Comes In Spurts" ("IT REALLY HURTS!"), as well as the bouncy "Liars Beware," the adorable "Betrayal Takes Two" (later covered by King Missile!), "New Pleasure," and - oh yeah! Or, as Richard puts it, "Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Yeah... Oh! Yeah... Whoo!!," "The Plan" is a KILLER song! It goes on for like ten minutes with this boompy-boompy-boomp little groovy bass line while the singer just goes nuts with his voice thing.
The best description of the music might be to say that the guitarist has a really interesting splankity jazz-trained undistorted style and the band really swings. And then Mr. Hell complements it with a totally unpracticed voice that just quivers and spits at you while you dig the hapnin' vibes of the NON-punk Voidoids (featuring Marky Ramone before he was Marky Ramone!). Buy it - the finest Richard Hell you can find.
Incidentially, speaking of resurrected trends, at 43, I now know I'm old because I have lived through three, count them three, fucking ska revivals. If there's ever a fourth wave of that nauseating Jamaican debasement of the noble polka, with its attendant valorization of stupid little hats, I'll have to shoot myself.
Unlike the diverse jazz/rock/pop debut album , Destiny Street is mostly just plain rock and roll. As such, buy it only if you already have the first one and you're desperately hungry for more Hell.
He also has 3 cds singles/eps:
1. Richard Hell and the Voidoids/ Neon Boys
this includes a different version of "time" and a Fucking Awesome song
called "Don't Die". The Neon Boys stuff is from 73', featuring Tom
Verlaine and Billy Ficca before Television.
2. Another World: this includes the original mix of "Blank Generation"
and a
great song called "You Gotta Lose".
3. 3 New Songs: In this one he's joined by Thurston Moore and Steve
Shelley
from Sonic Youth. It's not too bad. Recorded in 91'
I just thought you might want to know about these too. Your site is very cool anyway. Later.
First off are some poor-quality Heartbreakers demos recorded before Richard quit the band, including a great
energetic reading of "Love Comes In Spurts" and a couple of more NY Dollsy-style '50sy tunes. It then moves on to gorgeous, clear-as-day demo versions of two of his all-time
greatest songs, "Betrayal Takes Two" and "I'm Your Man," both of which sound even better on here than they did on This is some good Richard Hell! It gives a fantastic overview of his entire
career and creative gamut, with the fun stuff, the fast punk stuff, the slow early-'60s influenced pop rock, the literary aspirations, the angst, the drugged-up failure and finally
DEATH. Eventually, I mean. Unless somebody knows something about Hell's medical coverage that I don't.
But have the same exact thought because it was a correct one. This is a repackaging of R.I.P. with a few extra old studio
tracks and an extra disc featuring one of the lowest-quality concert recordings you will ever hear in your life. The reason you want this and need this though is because it has
the original recording of "Chinese Rocks" on it! Do you know the saga of "Chinese Rocks"? Well, it's a delightful song about heroin addiction that was penned by the late Dee
Dee Ramone (who, incidentally, DIED of a heroin overdose just 25 years after he wrote the song! COINCIDENCE??!??!?!??!?). Actually, Dee Dee just wrote the music and
the first verse before the other Ramones told him that no way would they record a song about heroin. Sniffing glue and carbona -- fine. But NO heroin. So he told Richard
Hell that HE could record the song with the Heartbreakers if he could write two more verses. Richard did just this and recorded the demo version you hear here, crediting it to
Hell/Colvin (the actual songwriters). Then when he left to form the Voidoids, the Heartbreakers recorded the song by themselves and gave songwriting credit to Johnny
Thunders!!!! Not to be outdone, the Ramones finally recorded their own version of the song a few years later (when heroin addiction was more mainstream and widely
accepted, apparently) -- complete with Richard's second verse -- and credited to THE RAMONES! Everybody's a fuckin' lair. Everybody is a little den where animals go to
rest and wait for prey to walk by. So to my point, the version on here features the previously unacknowledged THIRD VERSE!!! It goes as follows: "When they
checked me in at dawn (or something)/I heard they thought my pulse was gone/I found that I was happy to die/and Chinese Rocks is the reason why." So now you know.
And now you know why it was dropped by the other people who covered it. Because it SUCKS! The other studio tracks are an alternate version of the excellent Hell
composition "Time" (neat lyrics to that one - very well written to my eyes!) and some ugly messy garbage nonsense called "Funhunt." Then the HELLISH concert CD comes
in and ruins everything -- everything is one big monophonic blur, with all the catchy songs turned into over-speedy nonmusical messes of noise and yelling. "Blank
Generation" is on there and that's key (being a great song), but the rest of the set sounds really awful. "Love Comes In Spurts" is played completely wrong. Hell breaks a
string during an awful rendition of "You Gotta Lose." A perfectly pleasant cover of "Now I Wanna Be Your Dog" drags on for SIX MINUTES. Johnny Rotten comes on to
say some nice words, and it's impossible to make out even ONE of them. Finally, they close with what turns out to be a surprisingly powerful cover of the Rolling Stones'
"Ventilator Blues." Then stupidly enough, there are four more live tracks from a different tape that have GREAT sound quality!!! And Elvis Costello sings one of them
and one is a great cover of the Stones' "Shattered" and oh why the hell couldn't he have just given us THIS whole concert instead of the messy crappy one? I'm vah-klempt!
Tawk amongst yaselves! I'll give you a topic -- Saturday Night Live is neither funny nor controversial. Discuss! I saw a guy reading in Braille on the subway
today. I'd never actually seen that before! It made me realize that what my site really needs is a way to communicate with the blind. You see, with their eyesight gone, their
other senses become much more acute, meaning that they hear nuances of music that you and I can't discern. The implications of being able to understand what these
super-aural human beings perceive when listening to rock music is too exciting a prospect to ignore. So I've been coding for about 72 hours straight now and I think I've finally
developed the technology to make this a reality. It's not perfect yet, but I think it's a decent prototype and I'd love to hear your thoughts. Please scroll down and enjoy the
new "eyesight-impaired Mark Prindle Record Review
Site"! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
its credited on the original pressings of End of the Century to
D.Ramone/Richard Hell although I have seen it credited somewhere recently to
Ramone/Ramone/Ramone/Hell (but thats probably because they split the
proceeds 3 ways no matter who wrote it)
good site though, you may or may not enjoy mine, although it seldom gets
updated
website.lineone.net/~murrayramone/
. . . I'm having trouble suspending my disbelief.
If you thought that Richard Hell would never return to a recording studio, allowing the work that he performed 20 years ago to stand as the lifelong testament to his
songwriting talent, THINK AGAIN!
Oh, Prindle, the fidelity of the second disc isn't
that bad. It's about one and a half steps up from any
live Germs recording. Your ears are clogged with too
much prog rock.
fuck you, blindy. never before had these words been uttered. and soon they were on the lips of every child in every sockhop in the nation. what
started as a joke by one Marcus J. Prindle, became a fad across the United States. Soon it spread to Cameroon, where it stopped dead in it's tracks.
for too many Cameroonians were blinded from kissing AIDS patients.
I have read the previous bits on Richard Hell and I want to add my ha'penny worth. Apart from his esiguous but compelling body of work he left (to which more later) he invented the punk look as we know it. Period. Not everyone might know that a certain Malcom McLaren, while managing, or better supervising the demise of the great but unlucky New York Dolls, met Richard Hell and quickly brought back to London, and more specifically to his shop on the Kings Road (then called Sex) some of the more arresting visual ideas ripped off from the "Blank Generation" author: ragamuffin hair, torn and ripped t-shirts with hand-painted nihilistic slogans, a certain affected pose better described as ennui, and used all these ingredients to package his next creation: the Sex Pistols. As far as Richard Hell music is concerned: very few artists have encapsulated the boredom of daily living, the barely contained anger and and elegant and positive nihilism better than him. All this in spite of his less-than-rudimentary bass playing. His music still touches me and I recognise bits of my worst (best?) self in it. I wish the current crop of modern "new rock revolution" bands had only an inch of his poise, anger and grace. Than we'd have something to talk about!!!!
I almost sold this thing off because of the astonishingly low quality of the second disc. You don't have to turn it up loud to have ringing in your ears, because it's already right there! It's a new development in modern recording...as you might say, Mark, "if you like SHIT". Somehow, though, his oddly charimatic yelp of a voice made me keep it. Guess I'm stupid. Regardless, some really neat stuff on disc one - really nasty version of "Chinese Rocks". I agree with the 6/10.
"Not to be outdone, the Ramones finally recorded their own version of the
song a few years later (when heroin addiction was more mainstream and widely
accepted, apparently) -- complete with Richard's second verse -- and
credited to THE RAMONES!"
Lots of Dick Hell for sale herein.
Let's pretend you already clicked here.