Richard Hell & The Voidoids

Richard Meyers is a teenager out of the ordinary. He sets fire to a field in Alabama together with his buddy Tom Miller, just to watch it burn, as he would later recount after being arrested; he reads and writes poetry. Provincial life is boring: Meyers, flamboyant and passionate, and Miller, more shy and composed, find themselves reunited a few years later in New York to fulfil their dream of poetry and rock'n'roll. One takes the name Hell, in memory of that episode of youthful madness, while the other becomes better known as "Verlaine", reviving the romantic imagery of French Decadent poetry (Verlaine himself, of course, along with Rimbaud and Baudelaire).

New York is the centre of the world, Patti Smith begins turning music into poetry, in verses both erudite and passionate, and a movement is born, a shared sensibility rooted in romantic/existentialist poetry, in the accursed spleen of rock's great shamans, from Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin to Lou Reed. If the Ramones had created a sound, Hell, Smith and Verlaine supplied a meaning, a cultural horizon, a depth that spared the fledgling movement the label of pale, post-pubescent revolutionary excrescence. Punk was born in its complete form, as an ethical/aesthetic synthesis of fast, furious sound and lyrics meant to portray an inner world. Granted, the experience in Neon Boys and then in Television with Tom Verlaine was undeniably influential, granted, the brief spell with Johnny Thunders too, but it's "Blank Generation" that stands as Hell's real testing ground, the moment of revelation: was he a mere agitator, a pseudo-poet with an ego bigger than his talent, or a sincere vessel for the generational humus of '77? Hell undoubtedly embodied the latter, creating with "Blank Generation" the cornerstone of a movement that would soon leave its mark on the social and political consciousness of half the world.

And then English punk, Malcolm McLaren, the Sex Pistols, who would sweep away any claim to intellectualism and inner searching—their explosive "no future" rings out louder than any slogan ever coined in the world of rock and beyond—the Clash and their innovative drive in presenting punk as a vehicle for social protest, and then countless minor outfits picking up a guitar and making a racket to express some vague, confused ideal, often just trying to ride the wave. And Richard Hell? He watches what he had sown come into bloom, gathering only the crumbs from the banquet in the form of recognition and (self-)proclaimed claims to the movement's paternity.

But we're here to talk about the record, so let's talk about it. "Blank Generation" is raw, gutsy rock'n'roll in the way only the Ramones knew how to make it, with prominent interlocking guitar work (courtesy of Robert Quine and Ivan Julian) and a tight, driving rhythm section (Marc Bell). Add to that Hell's vocals—sometimes desperate, sometimes nervy, sometimes simply bored—and his romantic, decadent lyrics; it all condenses into an alternation of dynamite anthems ("Love Comes In Spurts", "Liars Beware", "Down At The Rock'n'Roll Club", "Blank Generation") and more relaxed tracks like "Betrayal Take Two" and "The Plan".

"Blank Generation", as we were saying, is the genuine manifesto-track of a generation: relentless drumming, dissonant guitars and the ghost of Iggy Pop guiding Hell's raucous vocals, a true synthesis of nihilistic passion. "I belong to the blank generation/ And I can take or leave each time/ I belong to the__________blank generation/ But I can take or leave each time" sings Hell. A string of sharp, visionary lines that bear witness to the existential anguish of punks, the visceral hatred of a self made other by the objectifying, crushing weight of bourgeois good-living dictates. He proclaims his belonging to the "blank generation", the generation with no clear path to follow, no goal to pursue. Hell does nothing less than reinvigorate—while also giving a new horizon to—the original meaning of rock'n'roll: that of being a vehicle for social destabilisation, for the promotion of cultural revolutions.

Just as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez had done before him, Hell screams out his malaise, but unlike Dylan and Baez, he doesn't accuse, doesn't outline solutions, because he has no political horizon, no ideal to follow: he simply lets his inner unease (which is, in fact, that of his whole generation) pour out, indifferent as to whether anyone is listening or not. The Sex Pistols would represent the ultimate extreme of this concept. Every song performed by Hell triggers a process of emotional self-surrender and catharsis. From a purely musical standpoint, much of the credit for "Blank Generation"'s sound also goes to the guitars of Robert Quine and Ivan Julian, as on the sprawling "Another World", a mantric web of psychedelic textures, a sort of Grateful Dead for the punk era.

"Blank Generation" is, first and foremost, an intention: the intention to play old rock'n'roll with a new language and with codes that had until then been unknown.

But the Seventies come to an end, the decade has turned a corner, rock reawakens, in thrall to synthetic sounds, mass culture is in the grip of a macho/hedonistic ethic, of upwardly mobile yuppies blinded by the materialistic ideal of climbing to success, of cocaine flowing like a river as a tool of social distinction, as an affectation of young men grown old before their time. There's less room for revolutions, every intellectual pretence is relegated to second place, "real rock" is built underground. The world no longer needs Hell, who withdraws almost entirely from the scene (with a few things still to come in the Eighties and Nineties), privately recalling the scent of that adolescent spirit, preferring a dignified obscurity to a parodic dragging-on. Respect and admiration.

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30/10/2006