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I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp (2013)

by Richard Hell(Favorite Author)

3.45 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0062190857 (ISBN13: 9780062190857)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Ecco

review 1: This is the book people have been waiting for Richard Hell to write. Few people were on the inside of the whole New York CBGB’s punk scene as much as Hell and he has something to say about great legends like Patti Smith, Johnny Thunders, and Dee Dee Ramone. Equally of great import are his memoirs of teenage pal Tom Verlaine and The Neon Boys, later Television.There’s a lot of dope about his band The Voidoids, especially Robert Quine, and even more dope about celebrity girlfriends like Sable Starr, Lizzy Mercier-Descloux and 1,000 more vestal virgins. I also enjoyed his tales of starring in film-trash classics Smithereens and The Blank Generation.For all his vanity and egomania he’s a hard man to hate because the last five pages completely dcemolishes whatever egocent... morericity he’s unleashed for the past 200 pages, but you’re going to have to read it to discover it for yourself. All I can say is this is one of the best of the punk books around, and even Anthony Bourdain agrees.
review 2: Something about this book reminds me of "The Savage Detectives." Perhaps its that as a young man, Richard Hell put poetry at the center of his life, abandoning all things for the magic of the word, reading deeply, writing poem after poem, filling notebooks with lines, verses and stanzas. Music came later in life and he fell into it with the same enthusiasm he devoted to literature. He also fell into many a woman's bed. And then there was the heroin. The book is a breeze to read, well constructed for the most part, only near the end becoming a somewhat tedious list of gigs and sexual encounters. It's best when Hell is a young man, still named Richard Meyers, groping for his art and failing. That's what sets this book apart from many similar autobios, Hell's not afraid to say when he screwed up, when he cheated or lied. Hell never burnishes his legend and instead just dishes out the facts. Recommended. less

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