Richard Hell & Tom Verlaine: How punk made its way to New York from Kentucky
New York City hasn’t always been that appealing. When hard times hit at the cusp of counterculture, it was a rugged and repellent beast to most. The times were a-changing, and in the Big Apple, they were rotting to the core. The city was taking a turn for the worse faster than the racetrack rabbit amid the pop culture boom. Between 1969 to 1974, the city lost 500,000 manufacturing jobs. Subsequently, a million homes depended on welfare, rapes and burglaries tripled, drugs ran rampant, and murders hit a high of 1690 a year.
However, art thrived like a flowering weed in this fertile rubble. As Factory Records founder Alan Erasmus told us, trouble creates “different visions”, and “if you want to create something different, you have to go somewhere you haven’t been before”. Two young boys from Kentucky named Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine took that literally. “Things always change,” Hell opined, “and New York teaches you that.” With prog-rock proving a stilted artistic avenue, this vagabond duo was set to kickstart the next trend.
It would arrive in 1974 as Television helped to solidify the punk revolution with a show for the ages. In attendance that night was a young journalist named Patti Smith. The piece she peened for The Soho Weekly fatefully announced: “Somewhere in the fifties Billy Lee Riley was slicking brill creme and boys all over the USA were resting Les Pauls on their hip and scrubbing them like sex. It eats thru the Chez Vous Ballroom, 13 Floor Elevator, Love, Velvet Underground and the Yardbirds Live in Persia. It permeates backseats, waterfronts, the local poolhall, traintracks, just anywhere that rains adolescents. And for the past six weeks it peaked after midnight every Sunday on the bowerie in a dark little soho bar called C.B.G.B. Lousy P.A., long nervous dogs running, random women smoking French cigarettes and mostly boys on the prowl hanging by a thread waiting for Television to tune up.”
This might have been the moment that Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine made their mark on New York City, but it had been in their sights for nearly a decade. The pair grew up in Lexington, Kentucky. They lived a few miles from the shrouded brick block narcotics treatment facility known on the streets as Narco. In the shadow of this reprobate fortress for artists like William S. Burroughs, who had stepped one toke over the line, the spectral fortress of a wayward lifestyle was already on their doorstep. In October 1966, they fled to try and find permanent housing.
The pair thumbed their way across the South in a serpentine path of wavering circumstance soon to be cut short when they were apprehended by the police. But from these first speculative steps into the no-mans-land of wayfaring adolescence, an attitude of independence was instilled in the 16-year-old hellraising duo, and like chickens with ambitions of batter-free longevity, they were convinced that there was a better life for him outside of Kentucky.
The pair were thick as thieves with a cultural kinship, unlike the other kids. “He had great sensibilities,” Hell writes in his memoir. “He liked free jazz like Albert Ayler and Eric Dolphy and poetry that resembled it, like Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues, in its disregard for boundaries and spontaneity and desperation and spiritual desire and humour.” Their own initial attempt at a life on the road might have been dashed by the authorities and worried parents, but it hinted at a rogue artistic drive.
In the weeks preceding their escape, Hell had been suspended for taking some Heavenly Blues hallucinogens before a school dance. When he returned, he decided it was time for him to check out for good. “It came like an inspiration,” he recalls, “that had been rising below the surface, the way it might dawn on a trained animal that it could actually just leave the yard. ‘Let’s take off’, I said. Tom agreed.” With that, they were on their merry way. They might have been forced to return, but spiritually they would also be on a journey to New York.
Hell took up a job in a shop selling the sort of Gentleman’s Literature that is often read one-handed. He saved up $100 and boarded a Greyhound Bus to the Big Apple a few days before Christmas with nobody to wave to from the window as he trundled onto his next bumbling chapter. Verlaine was already there, waiting for his buddy. His Dean Moriarty to his Kerouac—instead of the beats, they would become punks.
Everything about this origin story now seems entirely ‘on-brand’: the darkened netherworld beginnings, the need to forage out a space to call your own, the camaraderie, and the fierce daring intent—a lot of the tenets of punk were already in place from the off, they just didn’t find what they were looking for yet. Also, they didn’t really care about whether they were qualified to pursue this dream, but that didn’t matter and at the same time it really did. As Hell writes, they loved “obsessive outsiders”, they idolised those who “were driven to create, even if unskilled by orthodox standards.” And there lies the punk revolution that we are still reeling from to this day.
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