Richard Hell

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“Talk Talk” on the jukebox

December 7, 2010 in Music, Neighborhood Scenes by Bryan

Sometime in 1974 Richard Hell wrote a review of his own band, Television, playing a set at a newish club called CBGB’s, from the perspective of a fictional audience member. “The place had a grapevine reputation on account of a band called Television that played there Sundays at midnight,” he writes. In the first few lines he sets the scene, describing the club’s sights and smells (“smelled like dogshit”), the sounds of the pool table before the band starts playing, and a particular single on the jukebox: “Talk Talk,” by Music Machine, from 1966. It’s the sort of song that makes you want to walk with a swagger.

You can find Hell’s entire piece in his collection Hot and Cold (2001).

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Anxious about LES gentrification, 1977

August 8, 2010 in Music, Neighborhood Scenes by Bryan | 1 comment

Vivien Goldman, from “To Hell & Back,” Sounds, 8 October 1977:

“I WONDER whether the bright spark who thought up the new Sire Records slogan Don’t Call It Punk realised exactly how spot on he/she was. Take a musician like Richard [Hell] – he isn’t a punk. True, he lives in a highly unsalubrious area of New York, way down on the lower east side, ideal turf for young punks to hang out on corners and shoot the shit, but Richard isn’t there because he’s a first generation American whose folks have just pulled in from Puerto Rico. He’s there because he’s one of the new generation of artist types flocking to low-rent areas, a process which will inevitably result in the rents slowly rising, the scabrous tenements being tarted up till the immigrant families can’t afford it any more and have to shift camp to somewhere even less advantageous. Right now, it’s still funky in the fullest sense of the word – mean, dirty and low down, just the kind of area your mother wouldn’t let you play in.”

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