The Stool Pigeon

For many, Richard Hell remains an image first and foremost. He’s the shock-haired, sunken-eyed Peter Pan of proto-punk, the guy behind the Voidoids’ vainglorious 1977 debut Blank Generation and the one that got away from Television. The latter outfit is routinely celebrated as one of the most influential to emerge from the pre-punk era, but when you got tired of Marquee Moon’s bravura eloquence, there was always Hell.

By comparison, Television - the band Hell founded with college pal Tom Verlaine and promptly departed in acrimonious circumstances - seemed like history men, sights set firmly on the happy ever after. Blank Generation was a record for the here and now; of ideas in the raw, and by the bucketful. Here was music possessed of a heroic self-involvement, as if the whole world revolved around its extended middle finger. For Clinton Heylin, a critic Hell has chided for his would-be academic style, he was the artist that best epitomised the ‘fuck art/let’s art’ ambivalence of the scene that developed around New York’s recently departed CBGB’s club in the early seventies.

But for those who stuck around long enough to see it, Hell did grow up. Five years after his incendiary debut, Destiny Street emerged as its troubled successor, an album hamstrung if not exactly sunk by the desperate circumstances that surrounded its making. Recorded during a period of chronic narcotics dependency with the stellar original Voidoids line-up largely departed, the album nonetheless betrays a certain maturity in its odd suggestion of a man talking himself down off the ledge. Check the just-say-no intonations of ‘Ignore That Door’, or the pleasingly direct cover of Dylan’s burnt-out ‘Going, Going, Gone’ for evidence.

“I was in the depths of my narcotics addiction,” says Hell. “Plus my girlfriend at the time was a coke dealer. There were huge quantities of coke around. I was at the point where I couldn’t really deceive myself that I was doing this on purpose. It was really self-destructive in a kind of explicit way. Like most serious drug users I injected everything, it wasn’t really using a drug for me to snort it. If it was a pill I’d crush it and try to dissolve it. And by then I’d literally stab the needle into my arm in a violent way that was almost like a miming of self-destruction. Strange. That was the beginning of the end of my drug addiction, though. I was finally able to kick it in the next couple of years, as I’d realised it was either that or die.”

Recording sessions were interrupted by the paranoiac bouts which left Hell unable to set foot outside his apartment, and yet, for all the setbacks encountered, it would only be telling half the story to call Destiny Street a failure. The New York Times called it one of the 10 best records of the year. And another eminent champion of the band enjoyed a private airing of the record at late Voidoids guitarist Robert Quine’s prompting. Says Hell: “Quine played Lester Bangs a copy a couple of weeks before he died. Lester was gratified, he thought we’d really pulled it off.”

In spite of the largely positive press, Destiny Street has remained something of an unknown quantity ever since. Hell got clean, and turned his hand to other things (novels, poetry, essays - but that’s another story) before finally acquiring the rights to the record in 2004. He let it go out of print, anticipating an opportunity to release the album that should have been some 20-odd years ago. In the event, he didn’t have long to wait - two years later he discovered a two-track mix of the original rhythm tracks for bass, drums and two rhythm guitars. Now all he needed was to lay down fresh vocal takes, and find adequate replacement for the prodigiously gifted Quine, who took his own life in 2004 following the death of his wife.

Quine’s importance to the Voidoids cannot be overstated. He’s the vacillating muse figure to Hell’s existential drama queen, laying down wildly imaginative solos that are at once cerebral and painfully alive, and seem to shape rather than embellish the songs. Along with Ivan Julian, Quine’s partner-in-crime on Blank Generation, Hell chose Tom Waits collaborator Marc Ribot and jazz supremo Bill Frisell to step into the gap. The end result is Destiny Street Repaired, released through Insound.

“I organised a memorial for Quine after he died,” says Hell. “We invited people we knew were important to Quine to come say a few words or whatever they wanted to do. And they [Marc Ribot and Bill Frisell] were part of that. They actually played together on a piece, it was really affecting and impressive. So they immediately seemed the appropriate people for me to get for the record.

“It really worked out beyond my fantasies of how it would work. Bill and Marc and Ivan already knew the record well, we worked really quickly. They came up with stuff which was not only great but also really suited the songs. And Ribot and Frisell aren’t thought of as being rock’n’roll guitar players. There’s this extreme depth and range with these guys, there aren’t any clichés. I love the new outro [to the title track], it’s these duelling guitars between Ivan and Marc. What I told them was to be as stupid as you can possibly be, I kept telling them to ‘play stupider’. When you ask a great guitarist to play stupid you’ll usually end up with something worthwhile.”

Hell’s own vocal contributions are shockingly sprightly for a man approaching 60. Indeed, Hell himself suspects they would have been mistaken for the original takes had the press not first been alerted to their presence. At a pinch, you might say that a little more of Hell’s native Kentuckian brogue has crept back into those previously tortured vowel sounds. But then, the whole thing sounds remarkably fresh. One centrepiece track widely acknowledge as being one of his best, ‘Time’, fairly bursts out the speakers with a fragrant majesty that’s reminiscent of Big Star.

“This release of Destiny Street Repaired is like redemption,” says Hell. “The thought of the original record always produced this sinking feeling in me, and the opportunity I had to make the record what it could have been was too good to pass up. I felt the songs had always been good, and I think they were done justice this time around. It’s like a real classic definition of magic, it doesn’t seem possible. It seems supernatural to me that now I have the deathly album replaced that happened all those years ago. It’s like science fiction. In a sense I didn’t really regret Destiny Street, in that it would be a waste of psychological energy to have regrets like that, but at the same time now I feel like I have this fantastic new health, or that I’m forgiven somehow.”

That’s one mortal soul no longer imperilled. Now the rest of you are advised to go straight to Hell.

Popularity: 1% [?]