Punk Progenitor Richard Hell’s Book Tour Comes to Powell’s
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You know how Richard Hell invented punk rock? The Sex Pistols? They found their muse in Hell. Malcolm McLaren, the manager who assembled the Pistols, has said he all but created the band in Hell’s image after seeing Hell perform with his band Television at CBGBs in the early ’70s. The spiky hair, the ripped clothes brutally mended with safety pins—that was Hell. Acid wit and devil-may-care, DIY attitude, too.
Hell knew rock ’n’ roll was a young person’s game, however, and since the ’80s he’s put most of his energy toward writing prose and poetry. His 2013 autobiography, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, runs through the early days with all the score-settling you’d hope. He’s on tour and coming to Powell’s Wednesday (7pm, March 11) to celebrate the reissue of his 2005 novel, Godlike. It’s similarly full of 1970s Manhattan textures, but centers an illicit, gay affair between characters whom Charles Schultz (in a recent review for The Brooklyn Rail) called “reincarnations” of nineteenth-century French poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. Of course, Tom Verlaine, with whom Hell cofounded Television, took his stage surname from the poet, but Hell did not have a tempestuous love affair with his bandmate.
Paul Verlaine was 27 and married when he and Rimbaud, age 16, got together. The affair notoriously ended with a gunshot and a jail sentence. Hell’s adapted characters are named Paul Vaughn and Randall Terence Wode, but the setup is the same. “They fuck, they get high, they get drunk, they go to parties—consequences be damned,” Schultz writes. “It’s both a young person’s book and not,” Schultz goes on, noting that the reissue comes from New York Review Books Classics, the literary journal’s publishing arm devoted to saving important works of literature from obscurity. Per NYRB, Godlike “achieves a lyricism both profane and profound as it conjures the frenetic vitality as well as the existential malaise of an era.” Pretty punk rock, no?
More things to do this week
MUSIC St. Vincent
8PM FRI, MAR 6 | ARLENE SCHNITZER CONCERT HALL, $72+
“In an alternate reality, I just would have been like a cabaret singer,” Annie Clark, a.k.a. St. Vincent, recently told Willamette Week. Clark, whose collaborators include David Byrne and Taylor Swift, and who’s won six (!) Grammys, was talking about her upcoming Portland show headlining the Biamp Portland Jazz Festival. Though she’s known as pop music’s favorite art rock guitar virtuoso, she described her plans for this show as “my jazz club cabaret fever dream.” Jazz legends Tuck & Patti open, and—you can’t make this up—Tuck & Patti are Clark’s aunt and uncle. She was their roadie as a teenager.
OPERA Fellow Travelers
7:30PM MAR 7, 11 & 13; 2PM MAR 15 | NEWMARK THEATRE, $25+
Set in the ’50s during the Lavender Scare, when the US government systematically identified and fired as many gay and lesbian employees as it could find, Fellow Travelers is a love story about two State Department officials forced into a different kind of double life. Portland Opera and its orchestra host the latest stop of this touring production celebrating the 10th anniversary of composer Gregory Spears and librettist Greg Pierce’s acclaimed opera, which was adapted from Thomas Mallon’s novel of the same title.
THEATER Lizard Boy
THRU MAR 29 | PORTLAND CENTER STAGE, $25+
Trevor is the Lizard Boy at the center of Justin Huertas’s indie rock musical. He has lizard scales instead of skin, and, though he doesn’t yet know it, he’s a superhero of a kind. A Grindr date and a potentially mortal catfishing episode propel the plot, which forces him to finally leave his apartment, get the guy, and, of course, save the world. Chip Miller directs this local production at Portland Center Stage.
Elsewhere...
- Madam Cooper and Her Daddy Issues playing “9 to 5” with Pink Martini’s Thomas Lauderdale and Hunter Noack in a new “pink light district.” (Willamette Week)
- What’s going on with all that Arts Tax money. (Oregon ArtsWatch)
