I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp

<p><strong>In his poetic memoir Hell takes us on a tour of a lost world and stakes out his place in cultural history.--<em>Los Angeles Times</em></strong></p><p><strong>A rueful battle-scarred darkly witty observer of his own life and times.--New York Times </strong></p><p><strong>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.</strong></p><p>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.</p><p>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 <em>I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp</em> evokes with feeling lyricism and piercing intelligence both the world that shaped him and the world he shaped.</p>