On January 22nd, Omnivore Recordings released the Destiny Street Complete collection in CD and digital formats, featuring the work of Richard Hell and The Voidoids, which explores the entire “saga” of the Punk album Destiny Street and the definitive remixed version of that work. The album, which follows 1977’s Blank Generation, was recorded in 1981 and released in 1982, but neither Richard Hell nor the band were very happy with the quality of the mixing on the release. The album has finally received a worthy mix version for its 40th anniversary.
The new collection actually features a wealth of material, including the original release remastered, the version of the album that was reconstructed by Richard Hell titled Destiny Street Repaired, the newly remixed edition created after the lost master tapes were discovered in 2019, and, lastly, a collection of demos spanning Richard Hell’s work during this period. On top of all that, Richard Hell also helped create liner notes with photos and ephemera that help set the stage for this project. As a longtime writer and book publisher, you get Richard Hell’s expertise applied to those notes and the design of the set, and if you’re a vinyl fan, don’t despair, an LP of Destiny Street Remixed received same-date release.
Richard Hell recently spoke with me about the long road to the remix of this album, creating the new set, discovering the original tapes, and what his mindset was like at the time it was originally recorded in 1981.
Hannah Means-Shannon: The Destiny Street Complete collection seems like a tremendous undertaking, from gathering the different elements to creating the liner notes. How long were you working on it?
Richard Hell: It was spread out over a couple of years. We discovered the two-inch master tapes toward the end of 2019, so a year plus. Once I made an agreement with Omnivore, it was another few months before we really got down to work. I would have loved to work on it at my leisure, but everything was fairly compressed. I designed it, too.
Omnivore made that possible by collaborating long-distance since I knew how I wanted it to look and what I wanted it to include, and they were accommodating about it. That was kind of high-pressure because we’d be exchanging e-mails all day with tweaks and design PDFs. The text was also continuously revised as we went along. A lot of the work had to be compressed into a six-week period.
The LPs had to be done first because they take longer to manufacture, so I would write liner notes for those, then versions of those would be included in the CD version. But because the CD came later, I got to alter and distill the text that I wrote for the vinyl. But I got the double CD in the mail and I’m really happy with it.
HMS: Did that make it real to you, to finally hold it in your hands?
RH: That’s something I’ve always really liked about publishing and writing books as well as bringing out records, the whole process of it where every stage of it is a little kick for me. I was looking at it so much on the computer screen in the process of designing it, but still when you hold the thing in your hands, there is a final satisfaction and sense of fulfillment.
HMS: The booklet for the CD is really like a little art book, with the photos and ephemera that are included. It gives context and is really nicely done.
RH: That’s what makes CDs worth manufacturing at all. They provide that extra material that you can’t get from streaming something. It was always important to me to have as much information there and look at good as possible, but it’s really crucial now to do that.
HMS: That’s a really great point. I hear a lot about what vinyl has to offer and the role of physical media, but especially when this kind of effort goes into sets, it makes a big difference to fans.
RH: When the Blank Generation 40th anniversary double vinyl came out, we were able to do a booklet that was twelve inches by twelve inches, which was really fun to work on that scale. When the CD of that came out, I had to revise the booklet to make it legible and had to think differently about it. But I am happy with the amount of info and background we were able to get into the booklet.
HMS: What are your personal feelings about vinyl, CD, and digital formats?
RH: I don’t play vinyl that much, though I have a good turntable and set up. Frankly, it’s only been this year for me, but I’ve discovered streaming from the computer. I postponed that because I like my stereo system, even though it’s 15 years old. But I’ve been thinking that I needed to figure out how to play from the computer. I was finally able to modify the stereo so that I can play through it. There’s nothing to it. You just plug in a Bluetooth. That’s how I’ve been playing everything for the past year ago. I go for the convenience.
I love vinyl for what it provides in the way of an artifact. I do feel like there’s a warmth that comes from playing vinyl that’s on some level beyond digital music, but I don’t know that I can really detect that. My hearing is pretty shot from a lot of loud amps over the years. I can understand the appeal of vinyl and I’m really looking forward to seeing the clear vinyl of the Remix LP. Do you feel that you can hear a difference between vinyl and digital?
HMS: I feel like I can, but then again, I’m a fan of Blues and early Rock ‘n Roll, and I’m buying those older records to hear them in their original format. I grew up partly in Memphis, so that influences me. But even with Punk and Metal, I like to hear them on vinyl because I think it changes my perspective on the music.
RH: I love Memphis. I have one of the fairly recent Elvis collections with all of his earlier stuff, including all the things that he recorded for his mother when he went into the studio. It’s called The Boy from Tupelo. That stuff he’s singing at the beginning is so corny. He was a big admirer of Dean Martin and he liked to croon. It was sugary. I’m not sure how much he was pushed to change later, or whether it came naturally, but it sure is a contrast with what he chose to record at the beginning versus what he ended up being famous for.
That really is how you look for music in the United States, and maybe everywhere. It has to do with that city it comes from. There’s New Orleans. There’s Memphis. There’s Atlanta. There’s New York. All of them have their own style. When I’m looking for music to stream, I will search by city as often as I search by genre.
HMS: Wow, I haven’t tried searching by city! That’s a great idea.
RH: It’s where you find the great music in America. I would say 70% of it is associated with cities.
HMS: When you were younger, before you went there, did you think that New York was a music center?
RH: No, not really. It was just the center of everything. It was the center of all activity, ambition, and achievement. It is sort of its own thing. There’s the United States, and then there’s New York.
HMS: I’ve been able to listen to a lot of the music in this collection, and the new remixes sound absolutely fantastic. I can hear a big difference there and I’m so glad you did the remix. What made you want to also include the original release in the set also, though? Was it for comparison?
RH: It was so that people could compare, but it’s also an artifact of that moment. It wouldn’t make much sense not to, and it doesn’t really cost extra or make the packaging more difficult. Also, there’s a lot of resistance to this project from people who have knowledge of me or follow me. I got a lot of mockery for “Repaired”. I knew that was going to happen if I did that record without [Robert] Quine.
Between Destiny Street Repaired and the original, it was working at a disadvantage, since it was using a cassette tape of the original live tracks playing as its foundation. I also had to sing every song again, thirty years later. The internet is a hive of snark and people love to get angry and sarcastic. I knew it was going to happen and I was fine with it. All of this is just for my own satisfaction and fulfillment. I am trying to demonstrate, though, the underlying virtues of the material and the playing. So, of course, I wanted to include the first one because it is remastered, too, to the extent that we can.
I think it is the best version of the original album available. When I got the rights to it back, in the early 2000s, I was so disgusted with the issues surrounding the record that I didn’t allow the licensing to be renewed. I didn’t accept any offers to bring out new rereleases. I waited until now. So it is the best version of the original ever released. I also thought that Repaired had many virtues and I was happy to release that again. I thought it was a better representation of the material even though we didn’t have the guitar players’ solos. It was still a better treatment and I was happy with the results.
Then, finding the original masters was a thrill. It made this entire remix version possible. There were still limits because we only had the original recordings to work with, and it wasn’t that well recorded. There was also a lot of excess and insanity in the playing. [Laughter] What happened on that record is that everybody was just let off their leash and indulged themselves to the Nth degree. But also, on some of those tracks, there are six guitars, so it’s really gratifying to be able to make a new mix and this is certainly the definitive version.
HMS: What was the context for finding the master tapes? I know that you had believed they were gone forever.
RH: The guy who owned the so-called record company, Red Star, was this character called Marty Thau. He was a typical, sleezy, music business hustler. He was lurking around CBGBs like some kind of parasite. He put out a few records on Red Star and they were interesting bands, like Suicide, and The Flesh Tones, but he was always scamming. When I came to my senses a few short years after we made the album, and I realized how much I’d neglected when recording that album. Then I asked about the tapes in the hopes of doing an improved version, and he said the tapes were lost. The same thing happened with Sire, though not for the same reasons. They lost Blank Generation. Record companies don’t care about their artists unless they are getting rich from them.
With Thau, it was because he didn’t pay the bills, as it became clear. I sued him in the early 2000s to get the rights back because he’d been licensing the album around the world for years in Germany and England, and also in America, without even telling me, much less paying me. I got the rights back and got the record out of circulation. I just had to accept that the tapes were lost.
Then, in 2019, I got an e-mail from a wonderful cat called Scheebo [Pampillonia] who was working with the guy who owned the studio where we did the final mixing on the album. The owner, Chris Hanley, had been working as a film producer, and he told Scheebo there was a storage space in upstate New York where some boxes from the original studio had been put. He was assigned to clear out the space and told that he could do what he wanted with the boxes to dispose of them.
Scheebo is a conscientious guy and a musician himself, so when he spotted my name on the boxes, he contacted me. They were, technically, my property since all materials were mine now due to the lawsuit. It was fantastic, and great luck, but it’s all thanks to Scheebo and Chris Hanley that I was able to recover them.
HMS: Was that quite an explosive revelation for you, considering what you had gone through previously to try to locate the tapes and create new versions?
RH: It was a great surprise. I had accepted that the tapes were gone. I had the satisfaction of having been able to make the repaired version. But, as a person who thinks too much, I did see a certain aptness in the way it all played out. The theme of that album is time. Not only that, but the title song, “Destiny Street”, is about a guy meeting himself from many years before. It all just seemed to fall into place in this pleasing, gratifying way. So it wasn’t like a big “boom” of thrill, ecstasy, or joy, but it was wonderful and just sort of seemed natural. That’s what so nice about how it turned out. It just all seemed destined.
HMS: That’s a wonderful story. Were the tapes in good shape for use?
RH: Yes, it was like they were made yesterday. The durability of tapes is incredible. Even though, as anyone who has had experience in the process of recording knows, these old, really heavy, thick, two-inch tapes absorb humidity and become unplayable in that condition. If you put them on a tape machine, you might get one decent play-through, but it’ll destroy the tape. But people discovered a solution, which is that you literally “bake” the tapes. Then, it’s as if they were new. There’s hardly any loss. We’ve gotten great digitizations of them.
HMS: I can definitely hear that on the tracks. What was the context for recording this album, originally? Was it secondary to playing these songs as part of a live set, or was writing to record them the focus?
RH: At that point, I was so debilitated by drugs and despair, and general indifference to everything, that I would only play live if I needed to pay the rent. I had no interest. The same would go for touring. We never did real tours. I had a manager who, when the bank account needed refreshing, would put together a loop out to Pennsylvania and down to Ohio for a week or two. I’d put together a band for that because I didn’t want to be responsible for a stable and consistent band. At the time, I really didn’t care. That’s the condition I was in.
But when this opportunity came up to do a record of the material that I’d accumulated in the previous couple of years, I went to Quine and we put together a band, accepting his recommendations. We rehearsed for two or three weeks, then went to the studio. Really, none of those guys had played any of the material when we started rehearsing.
HMS: Were any of the songs written in the studio?
RH: The song that they all get some credit on, “Destiny Street” is one where they came up with their parts in the studio, so I credited it to all four of them. That was worked out in the studio. I came up with all the structures and chords, but their playing was central to how it works.
Photo credit: Roberta Bayley
