I re-read this ebook again and finished it on Tu 2/13/18. I started his novel, GO NOW, which I found my hardback copy downstairs on the shelves. This is a novel although it's very much based on fact. In TRAMP there's even a picture of his French girlfriend in GO NOW.
And the second time through, my only complaint is that the book ends in 1984. He's only in his mid thirties and I would really like to know how he made it through to middle age. He's now in his late sixties and I wonder how he handled his forties and fifties. We are the same age and I know that my forties and fifties turned out very different from anything that I could possibly have imagined. Hell's must have been too- but in a much different way.
Three cheers for the library's ebooks!!!!
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This is the first book that I've read from the library's ebook selection. I took my tablet to the April, 2017 meeting of the Contemporary Book Club and one of the librarians downloaded the Axis 360 app. I had it on the device, but she said that it probably needed to be redownloaded for possible updates. Now it works just fine.
I finished the book early on the morning of Su 4/30/17. This was after over four inches of rain and the newly remodeled downstairs area flooded. God Save The Shop Vac!!
Although the book only covers Richard Meyers life up to the early 80's he seems to be an insightful and thoughtful individual. Just as he grew out of the poetry scene of the early 70's, it seems that he also has left the music scene behind, and is now (for a couple of decades) part of the literary establishment.
Born in 1949 (so was I and Arthur 'Killer' Kane) and he spent his early years in the white suburbs of Lexington, Ky. His father was a Jewish behavioral psychologist who died when he was seven. He has a sister a year and a half younger, and after his father died his mother went back to school and received a PHD.
A grandmother lived in NYC and they visited her frequently, so this might have been where he picked up his love of New York.
I loved that he mentioned caps and cap guns. I remember them well; and Captain Kangaroo.
Interesting recollection- Just before his father died, Richard and some friends were going to run away and live in the caves of Kentucky. His father discovered his plan, but instead of getting mad, he drove Richard to the meeting place to show him that his friends wouldn't go through with it. He was right.
The title is from the story that he wrote as a kid about this adventure with his father.
He believes that Punk Rock, and rock in general, are the province of the young. Passion and reckless indifference to 'what's supposed to be' trumps musicianship. I don't know why it can't be both; striking and different, yet musically competent and sublime.
Loved Romilar and BETWEEN THE BUTTONS.
The NY Punk Rock Scene of the seventies was really small and interconnected. Many of the girlfriends became wives and girlfriends of other prominent musicians.
He's a big fan of Dee Dee Ramone, but I don't think that he ever mentioned Joey.
He and Tom met at Sanford. A college preparatory boarding school in Delaware. They ran away to Florida. Started a fire in Alabama while camping, police were called and they were sent back. He decided that school was not for him and he wanted to go to NYC. His mother agreed to let him go only if he saved up a couple of hundred dollars. He did.
He was involved with various poetry magazines before and during his career in music.
He learned bass when he met Verlaine. He decided on bass because it had less strings than a guitar.
Bob Quine sounds like someone who was radically different. He was a bald lawyer who dressed like a yuppie on the skids and was very insecure.
I'm listening to DESTINY STREET and BLANK GENERATION on Youtube and I love it; "The Kid With the Disposable Head"and "Love Comes In Spurts", also an excellent cover of Them's, "I Can Only Give You Everything".
Although he never really admits it, drugs and alcohol seem to really have prevented him from reaching his full potential. Many drug addled artistic characters seem to be able to skate through to something great, but, in his case, I'm left with the feeling that he could have accomplished so much more. Maybe he's done it in his writing. I'm going to check it out.
He portrays Tom Verlaine (Tom Miller) as an egotistical control freak. The book ends when they both meet accidentally more than thirty years later in a used book store; "Did you know that Plato was from Pluto"?
Ripped from his bio at Goodreads-
"Born in 1949, Richard Meyers was shipped off to a private school for troublesome kids in Delaware, which is where he met Tom (Verlaine) Miller. Together they ran away, trying to hitchhike to Florida, but only made it as far as Alabama before being picked up by the authorities. Meyers persuaded his mother to allow him to go to New York, where he worked in a secondhand bookshop (the Strand; later he was employed at Cinemabilia along with Patti Smith) and tried to become a writer.
He arrived in the Big Apple at the tail end of the hippie scene. He took acid (and later heroin), but sought to develop a different sensibility in the manner of what he later referred to as 'twisted French aestheticism', i.e. more Arthur Rimbaud than Rolling Stones. He printed a poetry magazine (Genesis: Grasp) and when Miller dropped out of college and joined him in New York, they developed a joint alter ego whom they named Teresa Stern. Under this name they published a book of poems entitled Wanna Go Out?. This slim volume went almost unnoticed. It was at this point that Meyers and Miller decided to form a band. They changed their names to Hell and Verlaine, and called the band The Neon Boys.
During this hiatus, Hell wrote The Voidoid (1973), a rambling confessional. He wrote it in a 16 dollar-a-week room, fuelled by cheap wine and cough syrup that contained codeine. He then played in various successful bands: Television, Richard Hell and The Voidoids.
Hell recently returned to fiction with his 1996 novel Go Now."
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