Go Rimbaud

In the NY Observer, Nate Freeman interviews the author of I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, the new memoir by Richard Hell. (Yes, as in Richard Hell and the Voidoids.) From the quoted passages Hell sounds like a smell-aware writer.

In the mid-Sixties he hitchhiked his way to Florida with Tom Verlaine:

“We didn’t know anybody there,” he writes, “or know anything about the place except that it was warm and airy, and there was plenty of citrus fruit and seafood, and girls who smelled like suntan and had little particles of sand on them here and there, including inside the waistbands of their panties.”

Then there’s this bit about CBGB:

The birthplace of punk was a garbage dump. In an unpublished column he wrote during the club’s formative years that is included in Tramp, Mr. Hell says, “the first thing I noticed is that it smelled like dogshit. Then I saw the damned dog.”

Good times.