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Rating: That year, three albums were released with a common denominator: Richard "Hell" Meyers.
The strange thing is that in two of the three albums, he is not present. Although "Marquee Moon" by Television and "L.A.M.F." by the Heartbreakers managed without him, this Kentucky hooligan is too involved in the New York scene of 1977 to not be mentioned whenever talking about the bands of Verlaine and Thunders.
Remember? A few years earlier, in the icy wind sweeping through the Big Apple, Patty Smith opened and closed the shutters of The Strand bookstore, while our Killer Kane roamed around, shriveled in his plastic jacket, waiting for his man with those famous twenty-six dollars clenched in his hand. Richard Hell was also taking a ride on the wild side of those cold streets. He formed Television with his friend Verlaine and was kicked out because Tom refused to sing an "empty generation," met the wayward Thunders and Nolan of the New York Dolls and formed the Heartbreakers, bringing seminal pieces like "Love Comes in Spurts" and "You Gotta Lose," but those ungrateful ones flew off to England without him.
It's the old story of too many roosters in a henhouse, so while New York seems like a metropolis where it's easy to sign a contract with a major record label, he is still looking for members to play his songs. But the new group is all his own: they are Richard Hell's Voidoids, just to set the record straight. And in 1977, New York is not only the city of three-chord-speed Ramones and Dead Boys, it becomes an intellectual city: Patti Smith, Television, Talking Heads...and The Voidoids.
The ingredients seem trivial, two guitarists and a drummer, Richard plays the bass and sharpens his screechy voice. However, the result is not simple at all. First of all, Hell provides the sly Malcolm Mac Laren with all he needs to give an aesthetic to the new golden-egg-laying hen called punk. The hair standing straight up, the ripped and graffiti-covered t-shirts with sayings like "kill me," the cocky bully attitude. But more importantly, he puts forth an album that is punk more in spirit than in music. Having two guitarists from art rock, especially the fragmented and irregular guitar style of the too old to punk Richard Quine (who does everything to resemble a Fripp trimmed to the bone), means not embracing the destructive impulse of punk but making it damn poetic. Where poetry does not rhyme with softness. The old "Love comes in Spurts" is a song that hates everything but does so with style, Quine's Fripp-like guitar is already looking towards his future with John Zorn. Listen to how Robert, almost playing with frippertronics, begins "New Pleasure," which is then led towards the stinking streetwise drift à la New York Dolls/Heartbreakers by Richard Hell, or how it integrates perfectly with the other guitarist Ivan Julian to paint the weavings of "Betrayal Takes Two." Elsewhere it’s funk meeting nowave in the essential and long "Another World" or the punk speed of "Liars Beware," where the singer's howls cannot hide the fine guitar work.
The title track, rejected by Tom Verlaine and mistreated by Johnny Thunders will become the manifesto of the empty generation, in contrast with the proactive one of the Who ("My Generation"). On a rockabilly-punk riff, Richard Hell reels off his truth, pay attention to how he leaves just a moment of emptiness between the words "I belong to the ...generation," his is a complacent acceptance of his own marginalization instead of an attack against the established society. The years spent playing have culminated in an album that resembles none of its contemporaries because it matured night after night in New York venues...and this is "Down At the Rock ‘n’ Roll Club." You will find the out-of-tune Strummer of the 101'ers' performances drowned in pubs for old drunks and the insolence of Rotten pissing on them without mercy.
The same lack of mercy that fate had for Richard Hell, progressively abandoned by drummer Marc Bell who would become a Ramone brother, by Ivan Julian whose fate is unknown, and finally by Robert Quine (R.I.P.) who finally heads towards his idol Lou Reed.
Today, Kate Moss walks around with a t-shirt with the gaunt face of Richard Hell printed on it, and I bet my nice nickname that she doesn’t even know to whom that face belongs. However, his album belongs to the greatest expressions of rock of all time. Its beauty has remained unchanged without suffering the ravages of time passing.
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