Richard Hell and Amanda Uprichard
Half-time of the 7th game of the NBA playoffs. The radio goes on to the Saturday afternoon blues show on WKCR. They're in the middle of a fund drive. Richard has noticed the pledge form on my kitchen table and mentioned that he and Amanda had also pledged some bucks. He's checking out the articles on Andy Warhol in past months' art magazines. "Amazing that this is what NY looked like when he first came here after college," he says, pointing to Andy on a curb in 1949. Richard's been up since the early morning helping Amanda get her line of Living Doll fashions to a store uptown. Amanda's gotten very little sleep the last few months, Richard says, filling orders.Richard Hell and the Voidoids never achieved the mainstream success that they might have because Richard refused to go along with the marketing machinations of the music and entertainment industry. He wouldn't allow himself to be exploited. So though he was a seminal force in creating the punk movement, his statement was genuine to the extent that he just couldn't play along with the business side; the side that held the potential for stoking the fires he created. He stayed true to his poetic instincts and did what he wanted, a new Romantic. While others have capitalized on the genre he invented, he's settled into his fifth floor walk-up, i.e., he has no idea where Japan is getting the shipments from a supposedly long out-of-print copies of his first LP, Blank Generation, that are selling for $100, while a bootleg there sells for $400.
Listen to the lyrics of his songs. They are some of the most wrenching and accessible blows to the soul, combining surreal sensuality with gritty, scotch and soda bleak, night club depravities. They bring the urgency of our electric guitar backbeat times to the introspective personal geography that poets have been dealing with since it all began.
When he came to NYC 20 years ago, Richard spent those first few years working in bookstores and putting out small poetry magazines and books that poets produce for each other. Now, after a music career that produced two albums and a cassette, appearances in several films, a short marriage that resulted in a great kid, Ruby, and a stint as a journalist, he's back concentrating on his poetry again. What should prove to be a big kick for the poetry and performance scene in Manhattan: he's just been selected to run the Monday Night Poetry/Performance Series at The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church starting next fall.
Amanda Uprichard's line of clothes, Living Doll, has softened many people's fear of fashion. With a cocktail kick of fun and an accessible intrigue, they range past shyness and this side of flamboyance. Simple and basic, they perform their magic with an opulence of taste not materials, for they conjure out the fiesta charms of the wearer's personality. Most often form fitting, they do for the body what the Greeks did, show off the elegance of the human form. Her designs liven up any sidewalk, roadhouse, jukejoint, ballroom or cafe scene.
Even the catalogs she designs and draws up are so cool that the stores that carry her line want to sell them as art books. And they just might be able to start doing that once the clothes are seen on Cyndi Lauper, who grabbed practically the whole line for a film she's making. Or on Cameo, who'll be beautified in Amanda's flame clothes in one of their new videos.
Founder of the St. Pete High School Wiener Club ("We just didn't fit in all the other clubs"), things are now going very well for the Living Doll founder Amanda Uprichard, a sort of downtown Daisy Mae, whose clothes reflect her voracious sense of good times.
Interview With Richard Hell and Amanda Uprichard, May, 30–31, 1987
Greg Masters: When did you first start making clothes?
Amanda: A long time ago, probably when I was eight. I took a Singer sewing class and it just came to me naturally. Then when I was in home ec in the eighth grade, it was the only thing I excelled at. I was the genius of the whole class. I entered this sewing contest at the local department store.
GM: How long have you been in NY?
AU: Seven years. I came a year after I graduated high school.
GM: What were you doing before you became a serious clothes designer?
AU: I was a junk expert. I bought all these things at flea markets and brought them back to NY and sold them for higher money. Nice things, furniture. I got these Osterizer blenders. Whatever you put in them comes out oysters [cracks up]. I know every flea market in NJ. I know every thrift store in a fifty mile radius. It was fun. I went to Ohio, Florida. I bought 900 pairs of gloves once. I was always making clothes and had a lot of private clients. Now my clothes are in a lot of stores. [In NYC: Patricia Field, Menza Menza, Ono, Screaming Mimi's, The Variety Stop, and also in stores in LA, SF, Boston, Atlanta, DC, etc.] I just sold a big order to this store in Tokyo. The Variety Stop on Avenue A is this store I started with my partner Jim Spinks five years ago. When we started it I thought we'd just have this little thrift store and I'd sit in the back and sew. It was real funky. We'd have a lot of parties, it was a real casual scene. We lived in the back for a year and slowly it developed into being the most unusual store in NYC.
GM: Has your stuff been featured in any magazines?
AU: Yeh, Details, Spin, The Daily News, Attitude, Cover. . .
GM: Where do you get the ideas for your clothes?
AU: They're very different. It all comes from Florida. Florida and old ladies at the bank. They're the best dressed people. I guess I get my ideas from things I find in thrift stores. And cars, trucks, palm trees, people on the street in small towns, trash, fish, tree trunks, Detroit, TV, the South, I love the South, Spanish moss and comfort.
Richard: What about the flame dress.
AU: One day I was driving in my truck and I just thought: flames! No one has ever done flames before. Same thing with the penny dress. I was on 10th Street and Avenue B and I was looking out the windshield and I just thought: pennies! I spend half my week in my truck driving around and I just think and look at all these people. Like the woman I saw in the liquor store, she had on a long blue polyester skirt with white flowers and a blue plaid shirt. It was really trashy looking. I like that kind of trashy look but my clothes don't look trashy, unfortunately, cause no one would buy them. I really like polyester but nobody will buy polyester.
RH: How does Florida fit in?
AU: Well, it's there in spirit. It's just there. It's all the trash I loved when I was growing up.
RH: The trailer camp, barefoot, roller-haired life?
AU: Yeh, the trailer parks. None of my clothes are really like that East Village sex stuff, as you've noticed.
GM: What are you talking about, they're very sexy.
RH: They're tight and very short. You're always saying that you want them to make people look curvy.
AU: I know, but it's not like those other people who make those s&m strapless things, vinyl bustier and all black and night and glamor and chains and silver.
RH: They're more funny. A lot of people's stuff is weird but they're conventionally weird. Amanda's unconventionally weird.
GM: That's why you guys fit together. They do have a subtle outrage to them. Do you customize for people?
AU: No. I like to do custom clothes so that I can get really outrageous but I don't have time right now.
GM: What's going on with your music?
AU: The Shams, that's our group now. Me, Sue Garner and Amy McMahon. It started from our Christmas carol thing but now it's going on. We're like a female barbershop quartet so we decided we'd do a beauty parlor rag. We do one of Richard's songs, but sort of a country version. "Time" off his Destiny Street album. It's very simple, a lot of harmonies. We just sang at a kid's birthday party. We're sort of like The Shags. Do you remember The Shags? It's like these three backwards sisters and their dad wanted to help them out so he gave them all these instruments and produced a record for them. Late 60s. We're like a cross between The Shags and The Roches, maybe.
RH: And the Carter Family.
AU: We're going to try for the Apollo Theater Amateur Night.
RH: Amanda has a whole plan sketched out for the rest of her life.
AU: Right. After I do this clothes thing and feel good about it, get more successful, I'll have some kids and still do the clothes. And then, when I'm about fifty, I'm going to be a flea market vendor and sing country songs at night. A restaurant's gonna be worked in their somewhere, a home cooking place, where I cook everything. I don't want to just create this clothing business and live in NY forever. I want to change things around when I get a little older...You know how I really want to run my business? I want to get to the point where I could set it up and I'll have enough people working for me that I could be the salesman on the road. Like Cadillac Jack but with my new line of clothes. Course then, I want to be a spy sometime.
GM: Mr. Hell.Richard: Call me Lester.
GM: What do you see as the difference between your song lyrics and your poetry?
RH: Some people write really unstructured songs. They don't make that distinction. Me, I like to write songs that are pretty regular in their rhythm and rhyming. But I am always putting in too many syllables. It makes them harder to remember. I've never remembered my song lyrics. The poetry is just totally free. It's put together according to the terms of the moment. Some of them will be two lines long, some of them will be six or eight pages long. For me, poems are written to be seen on the page so you play with how they look. Where the line breaks are is important. You can throw a surprise by having a line seem like it ends and then you get to the next line and it picks up. For me a poem is very much a read thing. You're alone with it and you look at the page. A song is more like talking. It's more hearing somebody deliver a message rather than seeing an object that carries meaning.
GM: I remember seeing somewhere that you said you're more interested in the poem's performance than the poet's.
RH: That was in this discussion of what's the point of a poetry reading. Is it a performance? To me a poetry reading is really more of a chance to be in the same room with a poet and get a feel for how their personality meshes with your reading of the poem. It's a way for the poet to make a little money and to have that kind of contact with the audience and have some kind of influence. I don't go to a poetry reading looking to be entertained or expect a poet to be a performer. I'd much rather be exposed to poems on the page. The poetry reading is just a salute to the poet and a way to find out what new things they're working on that might not have been published. It's not an entertainment event or even, for the most part, an art event. Hearing a poet read, to me, is as unlike the original poem as a translation of it is. For me a poem is on the page. There are poets who write hearing the things being spoken in their ear, like Allen Ginsberg or Jack Kerouac.
GM: I know you haven't been active in music in the last few years but have you been writing songs?
RH: I wrote a few songs at one time when I was thinking of picking things up because I got an interesting offer. But no, I've been putting my energies into writing for writing, not writing for songs. I'm really retired from rock and roll.
GM: Are there a few songs you haven't recorded yet?
RH: There's a few songs in there. The band gets offers now and then to do something or other. We just got an offer to go to Japan. When I say we I don't know who I'm talking about.
GM: Ivan [Julian] and [Robert] Quine are still around.
RH: Yeh, but I've played with a lot of other people too. I intend to make another record sometime. But I think I'll wait until I'm in my forties cause for in order for me to put together another record I'd want a year to give to only that. So I've got to have some independent income and I don't really see making enough money so I could take off a year. But I'm not finished. I still have a record I want to make. I'm not going to pick up where I left off and go tour nightclubs, living in motels and doing interviews. [cracks up]
GM: That's an interesting point. At the height of the band's popularity you seemed to be someone who wouldn't exploit themselves. Whose attitude in the music and the lyrics extended into the way you lead your life, too, to the point of avoiding the business side.
RH: Well, I sure don't have the knack for it. Everything about the way that I operated in rock and roll was just an extension of my way of liking to live every day which is basically avoiding any situation that I find the least bit uncomfortable or artificial. So that meant I avoided a lot in rock and roll and the rock and roll life. That's part of the problem with rock and roll. You do become a celebrity. Kids and journalists want to know your views about things as a leader and I never felt like anything I...I wouldn't recommend anybody act the way I act. It put me in a real funny situation. People were asking you things because they took you for some kind of example. I don't want to be an example.
GM: But your art, your poetry created a genre.
RH: The only movement I wanted to create is a movement of the individually dispossessed. A movement of people who didn't have any other movement. A club for people who didn't belong in the clubs. It's like Amanda's Wiener Club.
GM: What's your idea of what a poet is?
RH: Something for me in poetry has to do with a longing for the...absolute. A real deep humanity and tremendous compassion. And a kind of delight in all the beautiful details. Poetry is about having a third eye, about keeping this awareness of the underlying qualities in everything that's going on. Ultimately, it's a kind of consciousness. It's what your values are. It's this kind of spiritual longing that's specifically met and expressed in language. There's poetry in painting and music and movies and a little old lady walking her dog. The poet is the person who uses the means of language to try and fulfill that longing.
GM: How do you see the poet in society?
RH: I don't think a poet has much to do with society except in the sense that a poet, by definition for me, is full of compassion. I mean, he or she identifies with everybody in the world. I don't believe in any strictures or obligations that way, about a role in society. Governments by definition are so evil. All you can do is try and do your own best. There are people inclined to be politically and socially active and that's great. When a poet is, chances are that it's in a real positive form and I support and recommend action whenever anyone's inclined to. But I also wouldn't blame anybody for just saying: my role in society is to try and make beautiful poems.
GM: This isn't to the point of affecting legislation but now you're going to be running the Monday Night Series at the Poetry Project. So now as a poet you become more involved, more visible. What do you plan to do with that series?
RH: Starting in the fall, every Monday night there's going to be a reading at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church of two young poets who I've booked. So I'm going to be a poetry scout this summer, going out looking for good writers to throw a little money their way. They have the Wednesday night series for pretty well established poets already. The Monday nights are for hot prospects. The Poetry Project is sort of Max's Kansas City or the CBGB's of poetry on the lower east side. It's been around for twenty years now and there's all sorts of activities and workshops going on there every week. It's really a fertile place. The people who spend time there and get involved there are people for whom writing is the most important thing in their lives. It's really stimulating to be around, to be part of it. And it's cheap. It's a lot of fun.
GM: How are you going to find these younger writers and where are they going to come from?
RH: I do see it being mostly NYC kids. When I first came to NY when I was seventeen I came here to make a life for myself as a poet. This was the very end of the sixties. The Poetry Project was really inspiring to me and also a little intimidating cause I was this...you know how you have this mixture of shyness and arrogance when you're a teenager. You want people to come to you. You don't want to join up with something that's already established unless they beg. So I sort of stayed on the periphery. I went to some readings but they had great magazines, too. And that's part of the thing I want to do. The magazines were really terrific with all these poets who were just hitting onto new ways of looking at things and writing. Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Tom Veitch, Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, Clark Coolidge. I remember seeing Patti Smith read at the Poetry Project before she did rock and roll. The World magazines that came out every month with everyone's new writings were so great. It's so non-academic. It's not some nutsy, heavy rag journal where you can see everyone's so extremely self-conscious and getting published in the magazine is just a means they have for getting a higher salary the following year at the university where they teach. It's people just out to have a good time and inspire each other. In a genuine way, the highest purpose of any piece of art is to inspire somebody, to enhance somebody else's moment. Nick Ray had a great quote about that I came across looking at my journals the other day. Let me find it..."I never think of a film as doing anything except providing a heightened sense of being." That's what those magazines were doing for me. Inspiring me to do things myself. And that's what I hope to try to help create on the Monday nights and the magazine that's going to go along with it. And we plan to throw parties after readings and just kick up our heels...Going to poetry readings is never going to be like going to a concert with a light show and guitars where it's just handed to you on a platter, it takes you by the throat and shakes you. There are some poets who do that. I'm word addicted. I'm a compulsive reader. I like to read labels. I like to read dictionaries. I really love to read encyclopedias and I'm always reading two or three books. And poetry is a specialized thing, it's definitely an acquired taste. If you're going to be able to receive what poetry has to offer, you have to have developed some muscles in your brain.
GM: What have you been working on lately?
RH: My main project for the last year and a half has been a film script that I've just completed. There was a book called Wanna Go Out? by Theresa Stern that appeared in 1973. Though it's not indicated anywhere in the book it was actually a collaboration between me and Tom Verlaine, but it purports to be a work by this Theresa Stern who has a biographical note in the book that intimates that she's a hooker. An intellectual, alienated, angry but real sensitive slum woman. So I started writing a script about her in the present which puts her in her thirties. The book falls into the hands of this guy who was ripe to have his being heightened by it. And he likes having his being heightened. It goes up a good eight or ten inches every time he picks up that book. So he becomes determined to track her down. The movie opens with him walking into her apartment saying: "You know Theresa, I know who you are." She says, "That's a pretty good stunt." And it takes off from there with him trying to make an impression on her and get into her life and her pants, and her being contemptuous of him and her own feisty self. I've just finished it and I want to get it produced as a play while I'm putting together a film production. I could have written the thing in two months if I'd been able to work steadily but it's taken a year and a half cause I've had to pay the bills and stuff.
GM: I've seen some of your journalism pieces.
RH: I wrote a few articles for Spin magazine. The first one was about riding down the Mississippi on a raft. It was the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Huck Finn. That was great. And then I did an article for them on Sid and Nancy. It's really nice to dream up an experience you'd like to have or a subject you'd like to investigate or dispose of and propose it to a magazine then get paid to do it. Then they sent me to London to do an article on this big proliferation of heroin that's been going on there the last few years. I spent a whole lot of time on that article. I read a good ten books. I'm really an expert on the subject of heroin and its social status and its history, why certain people are more susceptible to becoming addicts than others. I ended up writing the article three separate times because what they wanted was not what I originally intended. I wanted to do this definitive article on what is heroin and why is everybody so wrong about it. But they wanted more local color to put you there in the gutters of London. Anyway, it was a frustrating five or six months battling about it and working on it. I really don't intend to do much more of this journalism, if any, because it's just too time consuming. I doubt the heroin article will appear.
GM: What about the trip you were talking about?
RH: One experience I'd like to have and have somebody underwrite it and then I'd overwrite it . . . I really like traveling a whole lot. I was down in Florida with Amanda. We went down there and explored the trailer camps and barbecue shacks of St. Petersburg. We went to the Sewanee River which is this beautiful stream all hung with trees dripping Spanish moss and bougainvillea and tropical, lush greenery. Little tiny country roads. And I got really turned on by the gulf coast. That's the one piece of journalism I could think of right now that I'd really like to undertake—a trip all along the gulf from Mexico down to the tip of Florida. It's the best part of America because it's been left out of all this development. The south is the best, anyway. I love the south. I come from Kentucky. It's changing now, too. There's something about America where on a mass scale nothing is valued that's more than twenty years old. Once something's been around for twenty years somebody comes along who insists on tearing it down and putting up something else and everybody supports it. The gulf coast has been missed, it's the poor people's vacation spot. I'd like to take a leisurely few months, just eating and looking, x-ray visioning our way through the sand and Spanish moss.
(Cover, 1987)
Photos of Richard Hell by Barry Kornbluh
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