Blank Generation (album)
| Blank Generation | ||||
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| Studio album by Richard Hell & the Voidoids | ||||
| Released | September 1977 | |||
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| Length | 39:44 | |||
| Label | Sire | |||
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| Richard Hell & the Voidoids chronology | ||||
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| Alternate cover | ||||
1990 CD reissue cover
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Blank Generation is the debut studio album by American punk rock band Richard Hell and the Voidoids. It was produced by Richard Gottehrer and released in September 1977 on Sire Records.
Kentucky-born Richard Mayers moved to New York City after dropping out of high school in 1966 aspiring to become a poet. He and his best friend from high school, Tom Miller, founded the rock band the Neon Boys, which became Television in 1973.
The pair adopted stage names after French poets they admired: Miller became Tom Verlaine, after the Symbolist Paul Verlaine, and Mayers became Richard Hell, inspired by A Season in Hell (1873) a poem written by Verlaine's idol Arthur Rimbaud. The group was the first rock band to play the club CBGB, which soon became a breeding ground for the early punk rock scene in New York. Hell had an energetic stage presence and wore torn clothing held together with safety pins and spiked his hair, which was to become punk fashion—in 1973, after a failed management deal with the New York Dolls, impresario Malcolm McLaren brought Hell's ideas back with him to England and eventually incorporated them into the Sex Pistols' image.
Disputes with Verlaine led to Hell's departure from Television in 1975, and he co-founded the Heartbreakers with New York Dolls guitarist Johnny Thunders. Hell did not last long with this band, and began recruiting members for a new one. For guitarists, Hell found Robert Quine and Ivan Julian—Quine had worked in a bookstore with Hell, and Julian responded to an advertisement in The Village Voice. They lifted drummer Marc Bell from Wayne County. The band was named the Voidoids after a novel Hell had been writing.
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Wikipedia