"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"A rueful, battle-scarred, darkly witty observer of his own life and times."-New York Times The sharp, lyrical, and no-holds- barred autobiography of the iconoclastic writer and musician Richard Hell, charting the childhood, coming of age, and misadventures of an artist in an indelible era of rock and roll. 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 Debby 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.

I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp - An Autobiography

CBGB, the music club that helped define New York City punk scene by introducing the world to such bands as the Talking Heads and Ramones, is little more than a bar, a stage and two bathrooms. Since opening in 1973, very little has changed about the physical space, with one exception: the graffiti. The club has never stopped its patrons from adding to the mosaics of ink and pencil that literally cover every square inch of the walls. As grimy and layered as they are, the walls contain the history of the club, irom the musicians to the fans. The verve of the lettering and the passionate, drunken silliness of the words and messager echo the power and innovation of the countless hours of music that have Screamed off the stage. While CBGB's reputation is rooted in the music, the music spawned a scene that people now associate with the club as a physical space. Without this book, there would be no record of these graphic treatments of the punk aesthetic.

CBGB - Decades of graffiti

Chargés par un riche éditeur de convoyer une voiture de San Francisco à New York et de rapporter leurs impressions de voyage, Billy Mud et sa petite amie, Chrissa, s'embarquent dans une odyssée dérisoire. Billy est un rocker, un junkie. Chrissa est française, elle est photographe et elle n'a pas froid aux yeux. Comparé aux reportages lyriques de Hunter S. Thompson ou aux romans autobiographiques de Kerouac, L'Oeil du lézard est une pure fiction, dont le modèle serait plutôt à chercher du côté du Voyage sentimental de Sterne. Mais le véritable intérêt de ce livre, c'est son héros, Billy Mud, un loser qui nous raconte avec un ton sardonique son trip sous héroïne à travers l'Amérique.

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