From an early age, Richard Hell dreamed of running away. He arrived
penniless in New York City at seventeen; ten years later he was a
pivotal voice of the age of punk, cofounding such seminal bands as
Television, The Heartbreakers, and Richard Hell and the
Voidoids—whose song "Blank Generation" remains the
defining anthem of the era, an era that would forever alter popular
culture in all its forms. How this legendary downtown artist went
from a bucolic childhood in the idyllic Kentucky foothills to
igniting a movement that would take over New York and London's
restless youth culture—cementing CBGB as the ground zero of punk
and spawning the careers of not only Hell himself, but a cohort of
friends such as Tom Verlaine, Patti Smith, the Ramones, and Debby
Harry—is a mesmerizing chronicle of self-invention, and of Hell's
yearning for redemption through poetry, music, and art. An acutely
rendered, unforgettable coming-of-age story, I Dreamed I Was a
Very Clean Tramp evokes with feeling, lyricism, and piercing
intelligence both the world that shaped him and the world he shaped.