Richard Hell & Robert Quine
Go Now (Tim/Kerr)
by Chris Adams
Richard Hell has always been a bridesmaid, so to speak, but never a bride. In the mid-’70s, he formed the Neon Boys with Tom Verlaine, a band which became the hugely influential Television a couple of years after Hell left. Later on, when he co-founded the Heartbreakers with ex-New York Doll Johnny Thunders, Hell was pretty much ignored while Thunders got the star treatment. Malcolm McClaren ripped off his unique style of dress and plastered it on a young John Lydon, who subsequently became Johnny Rotten, the world’s premiere punk rock icon. Poor Richard can’t even be New York’s most notorious literary punk rock junkie – Jim Carroll’s already scored that gig. However, that doesn’t mean that Jim’s necessarily a better writer. Go Now, a spoken word reading of the first two chapters of Hell’s forthcoming book of the same title, is every bit as smack-soaked as Carroll’s Basketball … and Downtown Diaries, but its nihilism and despair is laced with a poetic, metaphysical sensibility more Baudelaire than Bowery.
The storyline itself is pretty simple: Hell wakes up, shoots up, jerks off, scores some cash, scores some junk, shoots up, nods out, wakes up again. But comments like “people are just wallpaper to me – and this existence needs some re-decoration” and “I’ve gotten so skinny that there’s no distance between my brain and nerve ends” make Go Now an insightful, eloquent trip through Hell’s nightmare world. There’s even a little humor here, as evidenced by Hell’s take on Greek philosophy: “…their gods were like people, while we’ve degenerated into treating people like gods… all we have (for gods) are movie stars… can you imagine if Liza Minelli or Clint Eastwood could turn into a duck? Now that’d make you philosophical.” Behind Hell’s deep voice, Robert Quine’s muted, eerie guitar work provides effective background atmosphere, similar to some of the stuff he did on Lou Reed’s The Blue Mask. Although this album is pretty short – it clocks in at just over 21 minutes – it’s a must-have for anyone into the ’70s CBGB’s scene and all the depravity that that entails.
