Time March 19, 2002

“[Hell’s] every move and word reveal a naked, impassioned intelligence in the throes of the only true rock & roll artistic convulsion.”
—Lester Bangs

Matador Records is proud to present Time, a double CD of mostly-unreleased studio and live recordings by Richard Hell. This coincides with the publication of Hot & Cold, a huge collection of Richard Hell’s essays, poetry, song lyrics, notebooks, fiction and graphics published worldwide by powerHouse books late last year.

Richard Hell co-founded, wrote songs for, sang in, and played bass with a number of influential New York bands in the early ’70s before recording his landmark first album Blank Generation (Sire/Warners, 1977) with the Voidoids. He originated many of the stylistic signatures of “punk.” Songs such as “Blank Generation,” “Love Comes In Spurts,” “The Kid With The Replaceable Head,” and “Time” are among the finest of that or any other era. He was to record only one other “official” album after 1977 until 1992’s Dim Stars (with Thurston Moore and Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth and Don Fleming of Gumball). As Robert Palmer said in Rolling Stone of him at that time, “Rarely has a rocker been so influential with such a small body of recorded work.”

This double CD contains rare and previously unreleased material ranging from the Heartbreakers in 1975 (when Hell co-founded the band with former New York Dolls Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan) through the Voidoids in various configurations from 1977 to 1983, featuring many performances by original band members Ivan Julian and Robert Quine and some by Marc Bell (which band members variously went on to play with Matthew Sweet, Lloyd Cole, Lou Reed, and the Ramones), as well as recordings with local musicians in New Orleans in 1984.

Disc One consists of material previously only available on the ROIR cassette R.I.P. (1984) plus three newly added tracks, while Disc Two contains a live show at London’s The Music Machine from 1977 (with a certain vacant young pretty taking the stage to demand an encore) and a short set from CBGBs a few months later that includes Elvis Costello joining the band to sing Hell’s “You Gotta Lose.” The Music Machine date is a crude recording - via cassette tape of a mediocre sound system - but the frenzied performance more than compensates. The CBGB’s date comes directly from the board for live radio broadcast so the audio is brilliant. This is no mere historical artifact - on the brink of 2002 it’s still completely up to date.

Since the Dim Stars project, Hell’s only visited a recording studio once - bringing in the original “Blank” Voidoids to record a song for the online music company MusicBlitz.com in 2000. It’s called “Oh” and is available only on the Music Blitz compilation CD Beyond Cyberpunk. Hell’s novel Go Now was published by Scribner in the U.S. and Fourth Estate in Britain in 1996. It was widely praised, as his new book, Hot & Cold, is currently.