12/1/2009

in

NY's original punk poet, Richard Hell visits his junkie younger self in "Destiny Street Repaired."

Robyn Chelsea-Seifert

[![richard hell Pictures, Images and Photos](http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y214/mtotallywired/DestOusm.jpg)](http://photobucket.com/images/richard%20hell)  
  
In 1982 Richard Hell and the Voidoids released "Destiny Street." At best, the album was a smattering of both original poetry anxiously sung to the twang and buzz of Robert Quine and Naux's guitar assault coupled with little known covers by Them, The Kinks and Bob Dylan. It was challenging and produced a better than average sound over all but hated all these year by Hell.  
  
One obstacle the band faced when entering the studio was how to follow up the mighty "Blank Generation" recorded five years earlier. That, coupled with Hell's stint in Television, anointed him into the stratosphere where punk gods dwell, rip clothes and apparently shoot smack.  
  
"I was strung out on dope," Hell recalls to The Guardian. "My girlfriend was a coke dealer. I'd end up shooting coke around the clock and get so freaked and paranoid that I couldn't tolerate the idea of stepping out into the street. I knew I was fucking myself up; I just didn't know how to stop. I'd been living like that for four or five years by then pretty much, and it would have phases and cycles. \[But\] that period when that record was being made was a particularly bad phase. I was a rodent at the time, dying to be human," he says. "I was insane and desperate and riddled with drugs and didn't know how to make a record sound good."  
  
Finding the original rhythm track of "Destiny Street" amongst a box of old tapes, Hell decided to revisit the "high-pitched sludge of guitar noise" 27 years later. Perhaps knock some sense into his junkie younger self by making the record "I'd have done back then if I'd been capable, bring it out in a form which I could stomach."  
  
The new version is called "Destiny Street Repaired," and Hell speaks of it with the enthusiasm of man released from his shackles. Songs are "fully alive  they could have been recorded yesterday." Guitarists Marc Ribot, jazz legend Bill Frisell and original Voidoid Ivan Julian perform a tight, clean arrangement around the 10 tracks which include standouts "The Kid With the Replaceable Head," and "Time."  
  
There's no comparing the two albums for Hell. "Destiny Street Repaired" was "really a kick, like a thousand light bulbs going off: 'Pow, wow! This is gonna be fun.' It was transcendent to be able to take that thing that was nothing but a thorn and pull on it and out comes a rose."