When he moved into his East Village apartment in 1974, Richard Hell was 24 years old and playing bass in Television, the influential proto-punk band that was one of the first to play at CBGB. At the time, the rent on the one-bedroom unit was about $110 a month.
“The heat would be off for months at a time,” Mr. Hell recalled, “but then they would forget to collect rent, so it kind of balanced out.”
Over the next 50-plus years, he formed a few new bands (including the Heartbreakers and the Voidoids), starred in a couple of movies (including Susan Seidelman’s “Smithereens”), and quit music for a writing career, penning volumes of poetry and cultural criticism, two novels, and a celebrated 2013 autobiography, “I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp.” In February, New York Review Books reissued “Godlike,” his visceral 2005 novel about a pair of dissolute New York poets in the 1970s.
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