Richard Hell. (Photo by Iniz & Vinoodh)

In January, I was on the Bowery with Richard Hell, who invented punk rock. We went into an art bookstore on Bond Street and he found a collection of pictures by Richard Prince. After a minute, he jabbed me on the shoulder.

“Check this out!” he rasped, surprised, pointing at the book. It was a picture of Richard Hell, decades ago, wearing the ripped-shirt, short-hair look, his mane black and spiky, smiling with full lips, a crooked nose and purple sleeplessness under his eyes. “I didn’t know this was in here.”

The photograph was taken in the early 1980s, when Mr. Hell still played in the Voidoids, gigging a half a block away at CBGB, the now-gone Bowery rock club largely credited with housing the first yelps of punk. The younger version of himself must have been on his mind, as Mr. Hell has an excellent new memoir, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, that describes that wild, reckless and important era in downtown Manhattan with candor, wit and reverence. He and his spiky hair discovered CBGB back when he was in the band Television and began a residency on Sunday nights. Then came the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads and Patti Smith. The story is not only about rock ’n’ roll, but also about the city experiencing a creative renaissance even as it nearly went bankrupt.

These days, the block by CBGB is stainless and pretty. The onetime beer-soaked punk den now sells fashionable variations on Ramones leather jackets for thousands of dollars. Nearby are luxury hotels, prohibitively expensive apartments and sidewalks clean enough to lick. It’s the only Bowery I’ve ever known, but for Mr. Hell, sometimes, it’s still the New York he once escaped to, the dirty Bowery where he started punk rock.

Richard Hell was born Richard Meyers in Kentucky, but he was not long for that name or that state.

“My favorite thing to do was run away,” he writes on the opening page of Tramp. “The words ‘let’s run away’ still sound magic to me.”

At 17, he hitchhiked down south with a prep school pal and future bandmate, Tom Miller, another misfit who would later change his name to Tom Verlaine. The teenagers made it just across the Florida border. As Mr. Hell recalls their escape in his book, the two friends were in a green world, humid and happy, something almost prelapsarian.

“We didn’t know anybody there,” he writes, “or know anything about the place except that it was warm and airy, and there was plenty of citrus fruit and seafood, and girls who smelled like suntan and had little particles of sand on them here and there, including inside the waistbands of their panties.”

The duo got snatched up by cops and sent back to school, but they would run away together again. Mr. Verlaine eventually joined Mr. Hell in New York, where he was trying to break into the downtown poetry scene (their adoptive surnames nod to those star-crossed Symbolists, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, whose first book was called A Season in Hell). Mr. Verlaine had another idea: they’d start a band, with himself on guitar and Mr. Hell on bass. They were first the Neon Boys, then Television, and then Hell stumbled into that dive, CBGB.

The birthplace of punk was a garbage dump. In an unpublished column he wrote during the club’s formative years that is included in Tramp, Mr. Hell says, “the first thing I noticed is that it smelled like dogshit. Then I saw the damned dog.”

Mr. Hell agreed, after some wrangling, to meet for coffee at The Smile, right by Bowery and Bleecker and not too far from his apartment in the East Village. It’s a faux-rustic spot favored by models and fashion publicists. As we spoke, the Velvet Underground came on. A kid with zippers on his pant legs walked by. Mr. Hell—whose face has changed miraculously little since he was a young man, save for the goatee on his chin—was wearing a nice sweater but still had cigarette burns on his knuckles. No one recognized him as Richard Hell, maybe because he doesn’t dress like a punk anymore, or maybe because no one knew who he was in the first place. And he tended to downplay everything, speaking elliptically.

“It was an expression of how things were at that moment,” he said, describing the impact of Television, whose first album, Marquee Moon, is perhaps the most hyper-literate of early punk artifacts, a fancily dexterous but punishing record. Having helped forge the group’s downright mathematical guitar playing, Mr. Hell left Television just before the recording of Marquee Moon and went on to form the equally influential, slightly messier band the Heartbreakers. “It wasn’t like we brought something to the world that changed the world, it’s that the world brought us something and we acted on it.”

He was more forthcoming about the impact of his look. Hints of his music can be heard in any band with a guitar today—the raw genius of early Television before Mr. Verlaine kicked him out, the rollicking heroin stupor of the Heartbreakers, the art-damaged menace of his next band, the Voidoids, with whom Mr. Hell dubbed his epoch the “Blank Generation.” But his physical appearance—he cultivated a kind of Truffaut street-rat allure—is at least as enduring a contribution.

“I was amazed, walking by Macy’s in Herald Square, to see ripped-up T-shirts in the windows,” Mr. Hell told me. “That was just three years after I was in my first band, when I was the only person in the world wearing ripped T-shirts.”

In Tramp, Mr. Hell recounts Blondie guitarist Chris Stein showing him a European rock rag with a feature on a new band put together by British impresario Malcolm McLaren, who had booked Television a few shows in New York. Mr. McLaren had always been taken with Mr. Hell’s personal style, particularly how it expressed “alienation and disgust and anger” in the face of hippie love, as Mr. Hell writes. With that in mind, Mr. McLaren went back to England to put together a band called the Sex Pistols.

“Everyone in the band had short, hacked-up hair and torn clothes and there were safety pins and shredded suit jackets and wacked-out T-shirts and contorted facial expressions,” Mr. Hell writes of the Sex Pistols. “The lead singer had changed his name to something ugly. It gave me kind of a giddy feeling. It was flattering.”

The Sex Pistols would quickly cement themselves as the foremost figures of the punk scene, but the debt to Mr. Hell may soon be exposed. When the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art opens its PUNK: Chaos to Couture exhibition in May, the first gallery, the portion devoted to punk’s first rumblings, will be represented by Mr. Hell. He’s also writing a preface to the catalog.

“I kind of assumed I wouldn’t be involved,” he said. “They asked me late, and people totally associate punk with the Sex Pistols. But fortunately, the Met did enough research to know that some of the stuff done by the Sex Pistols was influenced by me.”

If Mr. Hell embodied all of punk’s early promise, he also encompassed its darker side. In Tramp, he recalls his struggles with drugs vividly and without remorse. Though he’s now clean—and the book ends with him finally shuffling to N.A. meetings—this is no recovery story.

“How can I say I regret heroin?” he said to me. “It would be like saying, ‘Wouldn’t you rather be somebody else?’ It’s a meaningless thing to say.”

And anyway, as he puts it at one point, “sex pervades all.” Among the girlfriends he mentions throughout his narrative, all of whom he clearly worshipped, are teenage hookers, French chanteuses, married art patrons, Rolling Stones groupies, Andrew Wylie’s little sister, bassists, the door girl at CBGB and the doomed Nancy Spungen. Many of them overlapped. Men writing about their conquests are often boring; luckily for us, Mr. Hell is a regular Henry Miller when it comes to sex scenes. Take, for example, the following description of coitus with a 16-year-old, in Paris, a tryst that happened while Mr. Hell was waiting for a fiancée, Lizzy, to return from South Africa.

I bent her over the Corbusier. We were in our element. There’s a point where extreme, knowing drug abandon becomes a kind of delicious hell ... It’s like a ballet performed at 1/1000 speed and that’s how I put my granite hard-on into Ava and watched her face and watched her lips as she said something snotty and grateful to me, grinning, and meanwhile Lizzy was in the back of my mind and my heart was breaking, drily and brittle though, not as if I had any meaning to lose.

It’s like one of his songs in miniature: the corny hope that two chords and the right words can save your soul.

Mr. Hell, perhaps mercifully, stops his story in the mid-’80s, when he quits music to be a novelist, insisting that “a writer’s life is fairly uneventful.” There is, however, an epilogue, and it concerns what may be the most intriguing thread of the story, one hidden behind the debauchery of beautiful New York weirdos and the rise of a cultural phenomenon: the falling out between two best friends, Richard Meyers and Tom Miller, Rimbaud and Verlaine. In the time since their teenage trips down south, their struggles with words and women in New York and the pioneering of a new type of rock ‘n’ roll, the two have spoken only a handful of times.

“There are people in the book that I’m critical of that I don’t give a shit what they think,” Mr. Hell said of Mr. Verlaine at The Smile. “We don’t have a relationship anymore.”

(A representative at Mr. Verlaine’s record label told me the guitarist had asked him “not to request any interviews regarding Richard Hell.”)

After we left The Smile, he ended up buying that Richard Prince book with his picture in it. We left the store and went back out to the Bowery again.

“Well, you know, actually, it has changed,” he sighed, looking at the scrubbed stretch of Bowery at Bleecker Street. We crossed and stood next to the old CBGB, which now has the name “John Varvatos” printed on its storefront. “I can see people from way back, on this corner.”

editorial@observer.com

CBGB's last stand (Getty Images)

Yesterday, Jen Carlson from Gothamist posted that she had it on "good authority" that legendary Bowery scene club CBGB was "alive in spirit" and was possibly looking for a new space to open in Manhattan. Which is so vague it could mean literally anything. Which already is a terrible sign.

When Hilly Kristal died in 2007, most of the money went to his daughter Lisa Kristal Burgman and the "spirit" of CBGB died a little death with every attempt to cash in on the infamous club's name: a Las Vegas spin-off that never opened; a John Varvatos store for tourists in the historic landmark; a second Morrison Hotel gallery devoted entirely to photography from the club that was stillborn when the Morrison closed.

Brooklyn Vegan took Gothamist's tip and added fuel to the fire by pointing out that a CBGB Twitter account that "claims to be official"  had tweeted earlier this month, "Who would you like to see at the #CBGB Music Festival this summer? No band to big or to small."

The tweet has since been deleted. Take from that what you will. The New York Observer has reached out to the person behind the CBGB website as well as Ms. Kristal Burgman, but has yet to receive an official response.

What do you think? Should CBGB be kept alive in spirit only, or would you like to see it resuscitated at a different venue?

"Oh, right, the place from the t-shirts!"

As far as we can tell, CBGB is little more than a series of letters appearing on t-shirts in suburban malls. Apparently it was a rock club once, right? Well, anyway, now that three Ramones are dead and David Byrne is busy with White House Correspondents dinner bashes and whatnot, it's time to focus on what really matters: the money.

Bloomberg reports that the estate of CBGB owner Hilly Kristal, the late owner of the legendary venue, is putting the club's "brand" up for auction. The task of bleeding dry the birthplace of punk rock looks awfully exhausting! Assets associated with the CBGB brand and included in the deal are "trademarks, domain names, recordings and artifacts from the club." Artifacts, like a chunk of the stage with Iggy Pop's blood on it or something? Have fun with that, wealthy brand-buyer.

And it's not cheap, either.

“We’re expecting it to trade well in excess of a couple million,” said Jack Hazan, a principal in Needham, Massachusetts-based Streambank, which specializes in intangible asset transactions.

Enjoy the "CBGB Punk Rock Coffee Mug," coming soon to a Starbucks near you.

The former CBGB Gallery space at 313 Bowery is on the market. The former den of the Ramones and Blondie was only a couple of years ago rescued from a perilous conversion into a bank branch by the Morrison Hotel Gallery. With its recent Lynn Goldsmith exhibit of Dylan and Springstein's scowling mugs, the gallery has helped it keep some of its edge. (The space next door, at 315, also occupied by the club, has been converted to a John Varvatos restaurant). 

But Cushman & Wakefield has been retained by the Max's Kansas City Company to sublease the space, to the dismay of boomers everywhere. "We're only entertaining offers from tenants, whether they are a restaurant or traditional retailer, that can appreciate the history of the space and the Bowery," said Steven Soutendijk, who along with Chris Schwart is leasing the space. He added that CBGB's nostalgia is "clear and present with some of the original wear and tear that can be seen within the physical features of the space, and the preservation of one of the most famous rock and roll venues stands true to form."

But with the Bowery becoming an increasingly chi-chi venue for restaurants and upscale clothing stores, we'll just have to wait and see how long the bathroom graffiti will survive. 

lkusisto@observer.com 

Lowe's installation, up June 3 through Sept. 5, will take over four of the museum's galleries and feature walls papered in Day-Glo collages involving movie stars, vintage book covers and illustrations of insects.

The Wadsworth Atheneum was founded in 1842, and has always had a bit of a wild democratic streak:

Hartford art patron Daniel Wadsworth (1771-1848) founded the Wadsworth Atheneum to share the wonders of art with the public. In the mid-nineteenth century, average citizens had little if no exposure to fine art, antiquities, or beautiful objects. Only the very wealthy purchased paintings or decorative arts, and then only for their own enjoyment. Thus, Wadsworth's generous gesture was an exciting turn of events that raised the cultural fortunes of an entire community.

It is, however, in Connecticut.

Like, really young. Slightly-out-of-place-because-he-does-not-yet-have-any-gray-hair young.

Not that this was a bad thing, especially considering the reason for this demographic role-reversal was a rare and intimate appearance by the legendary New York Dolls, who took the stage around 9:45 p.m. in what was once the equally legendary Bowery punk club, CBGB.

“Oh, this is beautiful!” said singer David Johansen, who emerged before a wall-to-wall crowd in a snug black blazer and skintight jeans, with a silky leopard print scarf draped around his neck, and who, along with guitarist Syl Sylvain, is one of the band’s two surviving original members. (Guitarist Johnny Thunders died a mysterious, drug-related death in 1991; Jerry Nolan, the band's second and longest-running drummer, suffered a stroke in 1992; and bassist Arthur “Killer” Kane passed away from leukemia just weeks after the British singer Morrissey reunited the Dolls for a concert in London in June 2004.)

“This is beyond my wildest dreams,” the rail-thin Mr. Johansen continued a few songs later. “Did you hear that shit? That was good. Let’s dance to this next one!”

To the disappointment of some in the audience, almost all the songs played during the roughly 45-minute set were new, save a half-blazing, half reggae-esque version of the classic Dolls' anthem “Trash” during the encore. But the performance was, after all, a record release party for the band's new disc, ‘Cause I Sez So, as well as the launch of Mr. Varvatos’ new rock ’n’ roll show on Sirius Radio, which was broadcast live.

Mr. Varvatos, a die-hard rock fan who said he’d seen hundreds of shows at CBGB over the years (he also mentioned that he first saw the Dolls in Michigan in 1972 at the age of 16) has tried to keep the spirit of the original club alive since opening his boutique in the former hard rock spot just a year ago. Much of the grime that characterized the old CBGB—stickers, show flyers, graffiti, even cracks and smoke damage—remains intact. And Mr. Varvatos has been hosting regular concerts there, including performances by Joan Jett, Blondie’s Clem Burke and Wayne Kramer of the MC5.

Of course, not everyone is pleased with Mr. Varvatos’ presence on the onetime skid row, not least of all some neighborhood activists, who associate his store with the dreaded G-word. But speaking to the Daily Transom backstage about an hour before the Dolls went on, dressed in a military-band-style jacket, black jeans and a “315 Bowery” T-shirt, all of his own design, the 54-year-old designer didn’t seem fazed.

“I think, since we’ve opened, people have come to see the reality that we’re doing something good here,” he said. “We’re still bringing live music to the Bowery. It’s always free. We’re putting our profits back into supporting the music scene in New York. And the Dolls called us. They wanted to come back to their roots, back to the Bowery, and do something fun.”

Standing nearby with a tall boy of Pabst Blue Ribbon in her right hand was America’s Next Top Model winner–turned–Oxygen reality show host Carrie Dee English. Turns out she is a massive fan.

“I mean, they started the whole glam rock scene and that’s why I love them,” gushed Ms. English, who confessed to also being a fan of Mr. Johansen’s short-lived wonky alter ego, Buster Poindexter.

“I’m an ’80s child!” she said.

Also spotted in the crowd were Mr. Varvatos' fellow rock ’n’ roll designers Michael H. (Tommy Hilfiger’s adopted younger brother) and former Project Runway contestant Kevin Christiana, Richard "Handsome Dick" Manitoba of the Dolls' proto-punk counterparts, the Dictators, and the famed 63-year-old rock ’n’ roll photographer Leee Black Childers, who politely declined to comment when the Daily Transom approached him near the bar.

But it was O.K., because we’d already talked to another famed rock ’n’ roll photographer earlier in the evening—Bob Gruen!

Mr. Gruen, a longtime friend of the band’s, shot dozens of hours of New York Dolls footage in the early ’70s, which was later edited into a documentary. We wondered if he was just as excited to see the band more than three decades later.

“Life goes on and things change, but David’s the best entertainer around and the band is one of the best out there,” he said. “I don’t live in the past, and I don’t think the Dolls do either.”

“I don’t need any water!” exclaimed an exasperated Mandy Stein, nervously working the red carpet outside the AMC Loews Village 7 cinemas on Friday, April 24, while relatives and aides hassled her with questions, advice and refreshments.

Ms. Stein, daughter of the late Linda Stein, real estate agent to the stars and one-time manager of the iconic New York rock group the Ramones, directed the documentary film Burning Down The House: The Story of CBGB, which premiered at the East Village movie theater that night.

The Daily Transom asked whether the film was her own personal protest against the 2006 shuttering of the renowned rock club, which, in its heyday, helped launch the likes of the Ramones, Blondie and Talking Heads (whose 1983 hit “Burning Down the House” lends the film its title).

“I basically shot what happened,” said Ms. Stein, wearing heels and a deep blue frock. “When I arrived, there was this grass-rooted community of, you know, patrons that went to the club, loved the music and I just, you know, came in there with no angle, no direction. I just wanted to tell the story.”

Ms. Stein offered kind words for Hilly Kristal, the club’s legendary founder who passed away shortly after the club’s closure.

“Hilly’s genius, I think, was just letting what happened happen,” she said, “and that’s amazing, just to know that--I’m just gonna let it develop how it develops.”

“He wasn’t like these crazy club type guys,” added former Ramones drummer Marky Ramone, looking unmistakenly punk in a black t-shirt,  jeans and Converse sneakers.

“He was very generous,” Mr. Ramone went on. “And he was very fatherly-like and he was very--he really knew how to cater to the bands. I mean, the dressing rooms weren’t the greatest but he gave us the chance to perform, to hang out, and he gave us free drinks.”

Mere minutes before the movie started, Blondie’s Debbie Harry showed up in a leopard-print coat and shades. (Shattering our “Heart of Glass,” Ms. Harry didn’t stop for interviews.)

Rapper and Law & Order actor Ice-T arrived even later, alongside his buxom wife, Nicole “Coco” Austin. The couple got about halfway down the carpet before someone alerted them that the documentary was already rolling.

“The movie’s started?” Mr. T exclaimed. He turned to the still-beckoning reporters. “Am I dissing you ‘cause the movie’s started?” he asked rhetorically. “Bye, y’all!”

As everyone cleared out, the actor D.J. Qualls turned up and was immediately accosted by a reporter who recognized him, but couldn’t quite recall what film he was in. “You have to know,” Mr. Qualls teased. (The answer: director Todd Phillips' 2000 Tom Green vehicle Road Trip.)

“I’m here to promote a short that my friend directed,” Mr. Qualls told the Daily Transom.

Not hunting for Debbie Harry’s autograph then?

“Debbie Harry is here?!” he says, “Oh man…”

With mischievous glee, he added, “Maybe we should crash that party.”

The fashionable 50-something self-professed "music junkie"—whose past ad campaigns have featured rockers Perry Farrell and Scott Weiland—will join a group of "special guest judges" in weeding out the most talented performers from a pool of up-and-coming, unsigned bands who upload a video performance of original music to the site.

“Music is the heart and soul of this brand," Mr. Varvatos said in a statement. "Hosting this contest on the internet allows bands from all four corners of the globe to participate.”

In September, finalists will be flown to New York City to perform live at Mr. Varvatos' barely one-year-old boutique at 315 Bowery, the hallowed site of the defunct CBGB rock club, during Fashion Week.

In an interview with The Observer last April, Mr. Varvatos discussed the controversy surrounding his decision to open a fancy retail shop in the legendary club space—the grand opening attracted a bevy of anti-gentrification protesters—and his intention to funnel store profits into an "artist development fund" that would bankroll monthly live music performances there.

"There's something pretty cool about that," the designer said at the time.

The new annex, opening in November, will include such priceless artifacts as Johnny Ramone's Mosrite guitar and the graffiti-clad phone booth from defunct legendary rock club CBGB.

"We're in a landmarked area of great cast-iron buildings," Joel Peresman, president and CEO of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, said of the location, which was picked "for a variety of reasons," he added. "One, for the size; two, just as importantly, the location. You know, the location in this area is fantastic. There's plenty of people that live in this area. There's tourists who feel free to come. It's easily accessible by mass transportation."

Mr. Peresman added, however, that the facility is "too small" to conduct induction ceremonies. This year's inductions will take place in Cleveland. When the inductions return to New York the following year, he said, the ceremonies will take place at the Waldorf Astoria.

The "Piano Man," Mr. Joel, said he would donating a bunch of "stuff" to the new facility: "I'm supposed to give the annex here the jersey I was given at Shea Stadium ... but actually, that jersey is in a road case on its way to Hong Kong. So, this morning I went around my house looking for chotzkes that I could give you. And I was pulling stuff off the wall, so I've got some stuff that people are probably going to be ticked off because they gave them to me and now I'm giving them to [the annex].

"The first item here," Mr. Joel said, brandishing a wooden baseball bat, "was given to me by New York Mets player David Wright. So, David, sorry, but it's going in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame."

Mayor Bloomberg then added, "For those of you that don't come from New York, I'll translate chotzkes later on."