An Apology To Richard Hell
(With additional apologies to Adrienne Grunwald for appropriation of her photo)
About a month ago, we wrote about the 40th anniversary release of Richard Hell & the Voidoids’ great Blank Generation. In an overly long appreciation, we took a swing at Hell’s 2009 Destiny Street Repaired, the altered re-release of his 1982 album Destiny Street. We now regret what we wrote.
Destiny Street Repaired took the rhythm tracks of the original, scraped off Robert Quine’s lead guitar and Hell’s vocals, replacing them with Marc Ribot’s guitar playing and Hell’s re-recording of his vocals. When it came out, we really didn’t like it because the original Destiny Street was one of our favorite recs of all time. Besides, Bob Quine was on few enough records, and he’d died in 2004, and we found the whole concept off base.
But Hell was a mess when he recorded the original, it had stuck in his craw, and he wanted to go back and perfect it. This is an artist who recorded Blank Generation twice, just to get on vinyl what he knew his band was capable of. And Lord knows, I can understand the impulse to go back and correct something produced prior to achieving sobriety.
Objectively, the original is better, even though I can appreciate how much stronger Hell’s vocals are on much, or at least parts, of Repaired. But we took, and not for the first time, some real shots at Repaired, including in particular a sentence I’d like to be able to call back: “We understand why he’d want a mulligan on the output from his drug-addled days, but it is possible to be sobriety addled too, and some things are best left as they were.”
One should never make light of any fellow traveler in the difficult world of sobriety. Shame on us.
When our piece came out last month, Hell nicely replied to the email we sent him with a link. “You’re pretty hard on Destiny Street Repaired, but I know the record is hard to like, all things considered. Still, I would bet that eventually you’ll at least feel you’re glad it exists.”
Since then, we’ve revisited Repaired, and Hell is right. We’re glad it exists. And while we’ll always go first to the original, we have a much better appreciation of what he was trying to do when he went back into the studio — yes, without Bob Quine and original second guitarist Naux — to repair what he knew was broken.
Tulip Frenzy 
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