I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp

The autobiography of Richard Hell, icon of an indelible era of rock and roll and "e;rueful, battle-scarred, darkly witty observer of his own life and times"e; (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 "e;Blank Generation"e; 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. "e;In his poetic memoir, Hell takes us on a tour of a lost world and stakes out his place in cultural history."e; Los Angeles Times"e;There are very few books that make me want to start writing my own; this is one of them."e; Kathleen Hanna"e;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.'"e; The Boston Globe