Hells, Bells, Ivans & Quines: The Voidoids, or My Favorite Punk Group

Today while driving down I-30 I decided to pop in Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation. I have done so many times in the past year, and will hopefully continue to do so for my entire life. It has become one of my favorite albums ever in that time - but first, a little history.

The 1990 CD reissue

I got this particular copy of Blank Generation (henceforth, BG) at Recycled Books in Denton, Texas. I had a digital copy of it but hadn’t given it much attention, like many other neglected albums in my iTunes (there are a lot). The only reason I had even gotten said digital copy was because of my guitar teacher, Marty Morris, who in a random but not uncharacteristic display of generosity opted to give me his entire iTunes library, some 80 gigabytes(!) of music. I am simply unable to refuse such opportunities, so naturally I took it all. I got Wire’s Pink Flag, The Damned’s Damned Damned Damned, and oh so many others, so I had virtually no reason to listen to BG. I had only just heard of it, anyhow: a few weeks before I had written a part of an angsty song, only to have Marty tell me that it was the exact chords of the song “Blank Generation” and though he didn’t say so, I could tell the Voidoids’ song was about a thousand times better. Yet the final piece in the puzzle came when Marty recommended I read the book Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of PUNK by Legs McNeil, and not long after my dear pal Logan lent me said book.

Don't let your mother catch you reading this one.

(Marty told me I should have stolen it from Barnes & Noble.)

I read about the whole CBGB scene and it intrigued me. When I randomly decided, months later, to seek out BG at Recycled Books, I not only did not expect to find it, I thought I’d not buy it if I did. Yet it was with BG in hand that I left Recycled Books, and I must admit I felt quite a bit of regret having bought it. Impulse buys are rare for me, and I almost always regret them afterwards. In fact, the ones I haven’t regretted in the immediate aftermath are the ones I regret the most later, oddly enough. I mean, I had a digital copy of it, previously noted as unlistened-to. I was out $5 on something I didn’t know if I would even like. I kicked myself knowing I couldn’t go back and return it. Darn!

So it was with this regret that I put the CD in my car stereo for the first time. Bam! The first 3 notes of “Love Comes In Spurts” blasted me out of my sleepiness (it being the early morning and all). The weird, atonal guitar notes that hit me were created by a Mr. Robert Quine, now my favorite guitarist. I couldn’t fathom his bizarre soloing style, simultaneously sloppy and refined, and was struck by how much I loved his similarly contradictory guitar tone. His guitar on the record chimes while still being abrasive and noisy. I was just baffled by it for the longest time, wondering how he even got such sounds or how he played them. Only through Marty (once again proving himself invaluable) did I learn a bit of information about it. Weeks earlier, I had finally managed to master “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry, at Marty’s urging. He told me that it laid the template for New York Punk, which seemed hard to believe at the time. Yet when I finally learned “Love Comes In Spurts” I understood. Marty described the soloing style as “perverted Chuck Berry” and he is exactly right. Quine takes the typically chimy, bright solos of Berry and other contemporaries like Buddy Holly and distorts them, literally and figuratively. The guitars are still chimy, but use their treble infusion to attack the listener rather than to make them happy. Of course, the guitar is distorted, but not to in the same bass-heavy, cock-rock way as many other players of the time.

And the soloing of Quine is nicely complemented by the frontman of the band, Mr. Richard Hell. Allow me to digress into what I understand as the history of the band.
Richard Hell was formerly in a band you might have heard of called TELEVISION. That is all caps because you should listen to them if you haven’t already, damn it. Born Richard Myers, he and Tom Verlaine (born Miller) performed in one of the greatest bands of the CBGB punk scene; in fact, the first band of the club. Hell was fired for being too flamboyant onstage, but not before setting a precedent for punk style - spiked hair, ripped shirts with safety pins, etc. He then joined the Heartbreakers, composed of several protopunkers (including two New York Dolls) briefly, but left to form his own band, the Voidoids, so named after a novel Hell wrote during a period in which he thought he was a vampire.

Pictured: a vampire.

The Voidoids sound incredibly unique even today. Like Television, they eschewed the typical punk formula (which, at the time, was not yet really established) of power chords, shouted vocals, simple lyrics, and fast tempos. Yet they also brought a punk sensibility - attacking other people in song (Liars Beware, Betrayal Takes Two). Furthermore, Hell maintained an air of punk nihilism - he called his generation “The Blank Generation”. This brings me to a question I posed myself today: are the Voidoids a punk rock band? And if not, what the hell are they? I have thought long and hard about this - it’s incredibly strange to me that a band would be so confusing. For me, there’s no question that Television is not a punk band. It may seem odd that they are post-punk in 1977, but they were light-years ahead of their time and no one really sounds like them anyway, so post-punk it is. Yet the Voidoids, and especially Richard Hell, remain associated with Punk Rawk in a way that can never be disassociated. Hell invented the punk look. He built the CBGB stage. He played with some of the foremost punks with the Heartbreakers, and with a future Ramone in the Voidoids. As previously said, Hell’s lyrics sometimes brought a punk sensibility - but he was incredibly different from his contemporaries. He wrote poetry before he played in a rock’n’roll band, and that is clearly reflected in his lyrics.

“I was sayin' let me out of here before I was even born

It's such a gamble when you get a face

It's fascinatin' to observe what the mirror does

But when I dine it's for the wall that I set a place”

While they don’t necessarily make sense, they are certainly more academic than “Hey little girl, I wanna be your boyfriend” or “I don’t need anyone/don’t need no mom and dad/don’t need no pretty face/don’t need no human race”. And while Hell shouts like a punk for most of the record, there are more than a couple moments where he croons, such as on the cover of CCR’s “Walking on the Water”. In addition, despite some of the testaments in Please Kill Me, to my ears Hell is a pretty damn good bass player, which puts him several steps above a certain Mr. Vicious who for some reason is more famous. So he’s definitely not your typical punk singer, and nor is the band your typical punk band.

L-R: Bell, Hell, Julian, Quine

Quine’s guitar prowess has been discussed, but his use of noise and dissonant chords must be taken into account. It is unsurprising that Sonic Youth praise his work, nor that Lou Reed hired him as a guitarist - he’s doing what they did: taking noisy, avant-garde influences and synthesising them into punk rock’n’roll. In addition, Quine eerily predicts the jangle-pop of the Eighties with songs like “The Plan”. He also uses effects - something the hippies used, and therefore something not punk rock. There are phasers on quite a few songs, most prominently on “Walking on the Water” - itself a not-quite-punk cover song. While other bands covered Sixties songs, they were usually by the MC5, The Stooges, or other protopunk or garage rock bands. Creedence Clearwater Revival is hardly any of those. This befits Quine; while Hell was balls-out punk, Quine was in his thirties when he joined the Voidoids, balding and bearded. Definitely not a punk, but mindful of its power and influences. Yet despite Quine being an amazing guitar player and foil to Richard Hell, it may have fallen apart sans Ivan Julian, a worthy adversary to Quine. Similar to Quine, Julian played did not exactly have a punk background - his most noteworthy contribution to pop music pre-Voidoids being guitar on “Build Me Up Buttercup”. Julian’s contribution is rarely mentioned in reviews of the Voidoid’s oeuvre, so much so that I barely know what he wrote in the damn band. I have read interviews with Quine and Hell saying that they find it ridiculous that Julian gets the shaft - according to Quine, Julian wrote the intro to “Blank Generation”. Perhaps a large part of this is that Julian’s guitar is mixed quieter than Quine’s, the lead. Yet if one listens to the other, quieter guitar, it’s often just as complex as the lead, suggesting a technical mastery of guitars by both men. I’d say that “Who Says?” might be the best song to notice this, as both the bass and the rhythm guitar play a similar part that is quite complex. And while not as noticeable as Hell or Quine, Marc Bell drives the songs on the drums. He shines on “Who Says?” as well (in case you hadn’t noticed, that songs is a favorite of mine); note the almost call-and-response intro to the verses. Ding - DUM DUM - ding- DUM DUM - ding ding ding ding! I admittedly need to listen to Bell’s drumming a lot more than I have (which is a lot) because I am constantly finding new moments of greatness. (The same goes for the rest of the record.)

So are they a punk band? I am inclined to say no. They end the record with an 8 minute psychedelic guitar freakout - not standard punk stuff. The only term I could come up with that really even encompasses them at all is “alt-punk” which is an odd term to say the least. Punk is itself an alternative music style, and “alt” is even broader than punk is. Yet if there is an “alt-country” and “alternative hip hop” why not punk? I cannot call it noise punk - while it is there, it’s not as pronounced; nor post-punk, it’s still very much a product of its time. Alt-punk seems to fit it well - as it incorporates elements of psychedelic music, proto-noise, proto-jangly guitars... even a pop standards cover in the bonus tracks! Not unlike a Mr. Declan McManus, who also debuted in 1977 with an impressive synthesis of pop, punk, and R&B, Hell & Co. are musical chameleons from song to song, even from part to part. And not unlike Wire, whose Pink Flag deconstructed punk, they effortlessly reinvent a genre that ostensibly wanted to reinvent genres. They can really only be compared to Television, and Hell didn’t even play guitar in that band. 1977 saw the release of many great records - Television’s Marquee Moon, Dead Boys’ Young Loud & Snotty, Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True, David Bowie’s Low and Heroes, among many others - but to me none capture that spirit of reinvention in ‘77 as well as Blank Generation does.

Except this ad.

And it is for all these reasons that I am constantly frustrated at the critical consensus on Blank Generation. While it is now recognized as a classic, it is usually confined to the lower reaches of “greatest album” lists. While it is on those lists, which is great, I don’t think it gets quite the recognition it deserves. Full disclosure - I am not a huge fan of that elephant-in-the-room 1977 debut, Never Mind the Bollocks. Not because it’s a bad record, no, it’s perfectly adequate, but because of the hype train behind it. Many at the time assumed punk rock began in England, which is utterly false. While some of my favorite punk bands hail from England, they came a whole lot later than, say, Iggy Pop, the MC5, or the countless garage bands. England was merely the perfect springboard for punk to take off - it had numerous disaffected youth who had grown up in post-war London, and the English music media has a knack for hyping up anything remotely new (see: Arctic Monkeys, The Strokes, The Libertines). So imagine the fervor when an extremely angry band were in the right place at the right time, saying the most provocative things imaginable. To call the Sex Pistols the be-all end-all of punk rock , or the ultimate punk band, is extremely reductive. For one thing, let’s take a look at some of the tenets of their legend.

-They broke up after one record because they were so explosive!

The Sex Pistols have reunited more than once post-breakup, always because they need money. Sorry, but this seems rather hypocritical.

Not that this band would ever be hypocritical.
(http://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/feb/18/john-lydon-pink-floyd)

-They never sold out!

Well, their records are on a major label and have been reissued a lot... so... no. And while I have nothing against majors, they clearly did, as they wrote a song about EMI, so... hypocrisy? I must also make mention of the fact that one can easily find a Sex Pistols shirt at the nearest Hot Topic - and that doesn’t include the numerous official Sid Vicious bobblehead dolls I have seen. Really, the only musical artists with as much merchandise as the Sex Pistols are probably the Beatles or Elvis, neither of whom were exactly anti-establishment. When one observes the merchandising empire of Sex Pistoldom, Star Wars, another 1977 release, springs to mind. That certainly loses some indie cred.

Not a joke.

-All of their songs were original!

Malcolm McLaren has said on multiple occasions that he told the Pistols to write a song as good as “Blank Generation,” resulting in my favorite Pistols song, “Pretty Vacant”. When your best song is a ripoff, that’s not a good sign. In addition, McLaren, who basically formed the band to be a new pop sensation, wanted Richard Hell to sing for them before he found John Lydon.

Don’t get me wrong - I can respect what the Pistols did for England. They also brought Anarchy into punk, which is cool I guess. But to call them the ultimate punk band when others did so much more? Hardly true. I’d say a large part of their hype is their sheer explosiveness on the scene, the media circus around them, and Sid Vicious, their insane bass player who died young.  And while you could say lots of people got into punk because of them, lots of people get into rock music by listening to Dark Side of the Moon (I did) which really kind of sucks. The Voidoids had no hype, a ton of other, same-scene bands debuting at the same time, press coverage slavishly  devoted to the Sex Pistols, the beginnings of New Wave, and countless other things working against them. They didn’t sell well - only the Pistols did. Even The Ramones, one of the more mainstream punk bands whose t-shirts you can find in malls, have one solitary gold record. The Voidoids didn’t go out in a blaze of glory - they fizzled. After BG they released a handful of songs every year or two, culminating in the release of their second and final album, 1982(!)’s Destiny Street, which is nigh-impossible to find nowadays (side note: if you ever find a copy for $30 or below, I will take it). Hell retreated to privacy, having never really been in the public eye to begin with; Marc Bell joined the Ramones; Quine played in Lou Reed’s band, as well as with other stars like Tom Waits; and Ivan Julian joined various supergroups and other famous punk bands. Not exactly the stuff of legends.

For me, the influence of Blank Generation, as well as its true innovation in sounds, must be recognized. The Velvet Underground and the Modern Lovers are cited as two of the most influential bands of all time, and while some early punks bought their records, it’s safe to say not all of them did. Certainly many discovered them after hearing they were ahead of their time, and only retroactively realized their incredible influence. I wish to do the same for Blank Generation - it truly is an amazing, timeless record. It says to me everything punk was meant to say - think for yourself, subvert expectations, and rock’n’roll all the way.