Lucking Out - James Wolcott [62]
Or, rather, a side pocket.
Flanked on Verlaine’s right was Television’s bassist, Richard Hell. Hell was not only the band’s bass thumper but also a singer and songwriter and a longtime friend of Verlaine’s, the Paul McCartney to his John Lennon, ideally. (Verlaine once told me that one of the best things about the Beatles was the way they could shout out harmonies and make them seem intimate.) They had met at boarding school in Delaware, a couple of matching misfits named Tom Miller and Richard Meyers who hopped the fence to hitchhike to Florida together, only to be stopped in Alabama, not the most welcoming place for strangers, and sent packing home. But the two of them had gotten a gulp of the fugitive kick of busting out of the regiment and didn’t intend to take their boring slot in the employment line. New York was where they had to be, the cockroaches welcoming them with waving antennae. They eventually adopted alter egos together, shedding their everyday humdrum names for legendary French poète maudit personas—Verlaine deriving from Paul Verlaine and Hell from Arthur Rimbaud’s Season in Hell—dissolving their former identities by dropping acid together to invite visions and synesthesia, knocking down the partition walls of selfhood. They also gender-bender-blended, adopting a mutual drag persona in print, that of the floozy poet Theresa Stern, a Puerto Rican prostitute working the streets of Hoboken and the author of Wanna Go Out? (“Wanna go out?” was what hookers asked in the seventies of any man who caught their eye, the predecessor to the later invitation “Wanna party?”) The author’s photo for Theresa Stern was a composite shot of Verlaine and Hell wearing wigs—a blurred sister persona. (Though it would be Hell who kept up the Stern impersonation solo in print, giving interviews under her name.) It was seeing the drag-happy New York Dolls at the Mercer Arts Center that clicked Hell into realizing there was much more sexy fun to be had playing rock than pecking at the typewriter keys like a trained chicken.
Photographs of the test-run incarnation of Television called the Neon Boys reveal the pouty preening of so many rockers dabbling then in David Bowie’s and the New York Dolls’ makeup kits, going for that androgynous, washed-ashore, fuck-me-I’m-pretty look. But by the time Television was double billing with Patti, Verlaine had adopted the nondescript tee or the thrift-shop bargain shirt that actually buttoned for those special non-festive occasions, dissolving the barrier between street clothes and stage wear and spurning the theatricality of glitter and glam droogies like the Dolls and their imitators. It was a taste choice, Verlaine being a master of high-visibility low profitability, but it also reflected a recoil from the train-wreck legacy of the Dolls, whose members buckled from too many drugs and reeled off the road, regrouping and forging ahead but never again with the runaway splendor of their legendary performances at Mercer Arts Center, where the lead singer, David Johansen, and the guitarist Johnny Thunders augured to be the Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the East Village cockroach kingdom. (As was remarked at the time, David had the lips and Thunders the licks.) The commercial flop of the Dolls and their inability to break out beyond their cult following (though their influence in England was incalculable, the Smiths’ Morrissey being their number one pining fan), coupled with their casualty toll and reliable undependability, made it that much harder for newer New York bands to get signed. I mentioned this once to Bob Christgau, saying that some of the younger rockers felt the Dolls had blown it for those coming up after them, to which Bob shot back, “Well, if that’s how they feel, fuck ’em.” He wasn’t going to coddle a bunch of ingrates.
Hell’s look was his own—like Edie Beale, he inventively made do with whatever was near at hand and served his