I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp

The autobiography of Richard Hell, icon of an indelible era of rock and roll and "rueful, battle-scarred, darkly witty observer of his own life and times" ( The New York Times).
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 Debbie 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 Trampevokes with feeling, lyricism, and piercing intelligence both the world that shaped him and the world he shaped.
"In his poetic memoir, Hell takes us on a tour of a lost world and stakes out his place in cultural history." - Los Angeles Times
"There are very few books that make me want to start writing my own; this is one of them." -Kathleen Hanna
"Not only an absorbing cultural history but also a clear-eyed story that superbly channels the attitude expressed in the first blurt to his best-known song 'Blank Generation': 'I was saying let me out of here before I was even born.'" - The Boston Globe