The autobiography of Richard Hell, icon of an indelible era of rock and roll and “rueful, battle-scarred, darkly witty observer of his own life and times” (The New York Times).
From an early age, Richard Hell dreamed of running away. He arrived penniless in New York City at seventeen; ten years later he was a pivotal voice of the age of punk, cofounding such seminal bands as Television, The Heartbreakers, and Richard Hell and the Voidoids—whose song “Blank Generation” remains the defining anthem of the era, an era that would forever alter popular culture in all its forms.
How this legendary downtown artist went from a bucolic childhood in the idyllic Kentucky foothills to igniting a movement that would take over New York and London’s restless youth culture—cementing CBGB as the ground zero of punk and spawning the careers of not only Hell himself, but a cohort of friends such as Tom Verlaine, Patti Smith, the Ramones, and Debbie Harry—is a mesmerizing chronicle of self-invention, and of Hell’s yearning for redemption through poetry, music, and art. An acutely rendered, unforgettable coming-of-age story, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp evokes with feeling, lyricism, and piercing intelligence both the world that shaped him and the world he shaped.
“In his poetic memoir, Hell takes us on a tour of a lost world and stakes out his place in cultural history.” —Los Angeles Times
“There are very few books that make me want to start writing my own; this is one of them.” —Kathleen Hanna
“Not only an absorbing cultural history but also a clear-eyed story that superbly channels the attitude expressed in the first blurt to his best-known song ‘Blank Generation’: ‘I was saying let me out of here before I was even born.’” —The Boston Globe
