Lineage: 1st generation Maxell XLII-S 90 recorded through Sony TCS-310>recording studio mixing board
This was a short-lived combo fronted by Richard Hell. It never even had a "band name." Hell played bass and sang, Anton Fier was on drums, Jody Harris played guitar and Ned Harvey was on saxophone. Despite the excessive time spent tuning between songs--Hell even introduces "Jody Harris on tuning pegs"--it's a cool rarity by a punk legend.
From the Hartford Courant prior to the show:
The Pop of American Punk Looks to Fresh Start
By Frank Rizzo
Richard Hell is just trying to be himself.
That means the forefather of American punk music, the man who created an anti-fashion with his torn, sloganed T-shirt and spied hairdo, the musician who sang about "The Blank Generation," is leaving his musical baggage behind and offering no forwarding address.
When he appears Saturday night at the Grotto in New Haven, he will, in a sense, be starting over.
Hell has made only two albums in the past eight years-"Destiny Street" in 1982 and "Blank Generation" in 1977, both out of print. And though he played the lead in the 1983 art-circuit movie "Smithereens," he hasn't been visible lately.
Hell has recently come out with a compilation tape of earlier material, called "R.I.P." and made up of sngs such as "Love Comes In Spurts" and "Hurt Me," but even that was offered more as a grand goodbye than a revival of a career.
The man who founded the groups Television (with Tom Verlaine), the Heartbreakers (with Johnny Thunders) and the Voidoids (with Bob Quine) is now focusing on new material and his yet-untitled band.
"I'm trying to shed any kind of preconceived identity," he said in an interview last week at his Lower east Side apartment in New York City. "There's the temptation to live up to an image you created for yourself because it's easier and safer that way. Now I'm trying to get rid of the idea that it is necessary to have any identity. I'm more interested in surprising myself now."
Hell, born Lester Myers in Kentucky 35 years ago, first came to New York in 1973 with school chum Tom Verlaine (born Tom Miller) and together they led the punk rock/new wave movement with their band Television. They were based at the nightclub CBGB's and were soon joined by artists such as Patti Smith, the New York Dolls, the Ramones, Blondie and the Talking Heads, all of whom achieved a wider popularity.
"It was a thrill just to be in your living room and turn on the cassette player and put two chords together and yowl something over it," says Hell of the early days of American punk.
"It was so fresh and it made me feel so potent," he says. "The trick is to keep that spirit. It's too easy to take it all for granted, and just do what you know and stay that way. You have to keep changing. You just get bored with yourself after a while."