Review Summary: He ain't for sale unless you add the kitchen sink..
Punk’s got a short half-life because it has to, and for damn good reason. No one wants to see James Dean grow old and fat and grind blood thinners, and essentially turn into what became of Brando. And the path from romantic to didactic is an awfully short one. If every moment is third-eye opening, then it all becomes a flattened plateau. Bands that came up in the late 70’s out of New York and London had to burn out, and aside from Debbie Harry’s legs, no one involved aged gracefully. So I understand why Richard Hell cut two albums and a short slew of side projects and got the *** out of there. Few things in life are as demoralizing or inept as outstaying your welcome. But for better or worse, to me he stands as the one proper visionary of that movement.
To those listening, Blank Generation and the Pistols’ Pretty Vacant became hymns of the era. Yet for all of their one cohesive album and two brief tour stints, it is Never Mind the Bollocks that you can now pick up at Starbucks from the impulse baskets for a fiver. Anyone who’s read Hell’s writing knows the man is quietly bitter about the whole thing, and it’s easy enough to understand why. The look, the sneer, the vague androgyny, the ideology. He was one of the first. He’s one of the forgotten. But they made a movie about Sid Vicious, a talentless kid who liked having hissy fits in public, the reality TV star in the age when Kardashian wasn’t even the name of OJ Simpson’s lawyer yet.
It makes sense why punk didn’t spend as long gestating in London. New York may had been ravaged by drugs, but in the late 70’s, it was still basking in the waning streaks of hippie bliss, the economy was ambling along, and the country was eager to recuperate its global standings after the fiasco of Vietnam. What was coming to replace the flower generation was perhaps one of the most fruitful and progressive de-censoring of art in the history of the West, one that would have a brief burst of life, only to be re-maimed in the 80’s. Andy Warhol and David Bowie were becoming household names, and not just prophets of the outliers. Meanwhile, civilian life in 70’s England was marred by Edward Heath whose foreign policy would see him pull back local manufacturing in favor of trade improvements with China, and whose plans to set up internment camps in Northern Ireland threw fuel to the fire of the conflict. The decade would see the country go through severe austerity measures and mass joblessness, and finally capped off with Thatcher’s first rise to power. The young generation of that era would grow up with axiomatic creeds that a university education didn’t guarantee or mean anything anymore, and that the 99% were left ***ed on the wayside. Zeppelin and the Who had already quickly gone through the motions, turning from scrappy bar bands to chart monoliths. Roger Daltrey was no longer singing on behalf of the young masses, but rather for them. The air was thick with anarchy in its nascent form already, so when Malcolm McLaren returned home with hairpins and nihil and self-imposed primitivism in chord progressions, the scene didn’t take long to ignite. McLaren needed a pet project and a catalyst, and in the Sex Pistols, he found both. Pretty Vacant became a paean and combat boots flew off the shelves. In New York however, bands like the New York Dolls and the Laughing Dogs, the bands who’d arguably kicked off the movement, still struggled to get a gig going anywhere outside CBGB’s or Max’s Kansas City.
The hermetic aspect of New York’s first wave of punk made sense in some ways. It was a niche that you were supposed to not know about, its draw was its inaccessibility, and bands like Television and the Voidoids thrived on being off-kilter. It was only natural then that the two bands that truly broke from the scene were the Ramones and Blondie. They were the most neutered of the bunch, the Ramones’ proto-rock aging faster than anything else, turning from cretinously revelatory to plain old cretinous in the span of one album. What McLaren did for the Pistols is what drives the most successful artists in any medium. The most famed of the bunch are always experts at marketing much more so than their craft. Pedantry is not becoming of art. In fact, they are two polar sides of a barricade. There’s a reason why they pinched Capone on taxes. He was better at racketeering than he was at paperwork.
Spurts is a retrospective of a musician who never made it until he was in his 40’s, and even then, when he did, it was on a simple modest scale. And it kicks off with two tracks from the Neon Boys, his very first band, a group of kids who would go on to make Marquee Moon. Both of these tracks encapsulate what was best about both the Voidoids and Television. That’s All I Know (Right Now) in particular walks that indelible middle, full of Hell’s chaotic pitchy singing and Verlaine’s spider-web-thin guitar lines. Much has been said by Hell about the relationship between the two and not all of it particularly complimentary. The short of it, as far as I can see it, is what epitomizes That’s All I Know (Right Now)’s duality. Two musicians with different visions trying to coax a song out without making the whole thing implode. Verlaine would go on to make two more Television records fifteen years apart from each other, as well as a string of solo records that fit more in the new romantic post-punk set of the 80’s. But that perfectly coordinated, meticulously controlled guitar that drove Marquee Moon would carry through all of it. The Voidoids were purposefully shamblier. Picks from the two albums he cut with them, including a reworked sharper version of the Kid with the Replaceable Head, make up the bulk of Hell’s anthology. Beyond Hell’s assumptive if slightly abstruse lyricisms, and the songs’ raucous asymmetrical swing, it is Robert Quinne’s lean and rangy and implacable guitar that makes this music so enduring and of its own kid. He was the unsung hero in a scene where ragged junkies like Johnny Thunders and Ron Asheton made their name in music history. His psychotic soloing across tracks like Lowest Common Dominator and Love Come in Spurts elevate the sound from simple punk fare to the kind of sieve the Velvet Underground threaded music through. It made art of what in the hands of most players are mere predetermined algorithms.
Hell’s own project with Thunders, the Heartbreakers is represented here in only one song, and by no means the best one they’d cut. Chinese Rocks was purportedly written by Dee Dee Ramone, and is fast and loud and a bit homogenized. That record’s highlights like Pirate Love and Born to Lose are omitted here, as is All My Witches Come True, the best song Hell wrote with his last band, Dim Stars. Seven songs by this spontaneous side-project Hell put together with a young Thurston Moore, who then was just cracking the Bowery scene, pull up the anthology’s back-end, along with a rather superfluous live version of Blank Generation played by Television in one of their first shows.
This album doesn’t quite pull off condensing what sheer euphoric sinisterness Blank Generation and Destiny Street are. But it does exactly what an anthology is meant to do. Anyone of the un-indoctrinated picking this up stands at the cusp of discovering a cache of music that was the sound of your parents’ insurrection, of kids trying to cut their teeth without smashing their heads to pieces. And really, what grand rebellion can you wield in all your supposed boredom, when your mother probably blew David Bowie in the backroom of CBGB’s once?
