DESTINY STREET [REMIXED] [1/22] NEW VINYL
Sold Date:
July 28, 2021
Start Date:
February 28, 2021
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Additional Information from Movie Mars
Product Description
Richard Hell & The Voidoids: Richard Hell (vocals, bass); Robert Quine, Naux (guitar); Fred Maher (drums).
Includes liner notes by Richard Meyers.
It's a rare artist who can look at their work without imagining what they could change if they had the chance, and musicians are hardly exempt for this. Acts from Ryan Adams to Frank Zappa have chosen to revise albums from their back catalog after a distance of several years, for a wide variety of reasons but nearly always with a similar result -- almost invariably, fan prefer the original versions of the recordings over the "improved" editions that emerge later on. Richard Hell presumably thought he could beat the odds of this game when, after a long legal battle, he won back the rights to his 1982 album DESTINY STREET, the second and last LP he cut with his band the Voidoids. Hell has made no secret of the fact he was unhappy with the way the album turned out -- it was produced during a period of physical and psychological crisis compounded by serious drug addiction -- but since the original multitrack session tapes and stereo mixdown reels for the album had long been lost, there wasn't much he could do about it. When a tape unexpectedly emerged of a two-track mixdown of the original rhythm tracks for DESTINY STREET without vocals or guitar leads, Hell took the unusual step of overdubbing fresh vocals and solos onto these basic tracks, and he's named the finished product DESTINY STREET REPAIRED. The title points to the biggest flaw of this new variant on the album -- Hell has tried to fix something that wasn't really broken. DESTINY STREET may be flawed, especially compared to his landmark debut BLANK GENERATION, but if you can sometimes hear the wear and desperation in Hell's voice, it also adds to the edgy power and drama of the album, and the songs often reflect or compliment Hell's condition at the time, making the original version a more accurate reflection of the time and place that gave them life. Hell was also still a working musician when he recorded DESTINY STREET, and the new vocals sound like the product of a man who gave up performing more than twenty years ago -- Hell is a more confident and nuanced performer on these tracks, but he lacks the passion of his younger self and he slips out of pitch and meter more frequently. An even stickier issue rises from the new guitar parts on DESTINY STREET REPAIRED. Robert Quine, who was Hell's key musical collaborator in the Voidoids, was among the most distinct and gifted guitarists of his generation, and stripping these songs of his bracing, wiry solos robs them of something vital. Hell brought in three stellar musicians to record new guitar leads for this version, and Marc Ribot, Bill Frisell and Ivan Julian all do superb work that honors Quine's memory (he died in 2004, making it impossible for him to take part in the "repair" project). But ultimately, they're trying to fill a space left by Quine's musical thinking (particularly since they're playing along with rhythm parts laid down by Quine and second guitarist Naux), and none of them have come up with a piece that fits the puzzle quite as well as the original. DESTINY STREET REPAIRED is far from a failure -- Hell's songs still resonate, the energy of the album is on a par with the original, and if Ribot, Frisell and Julian don't achieve the impossible goal of truly replacing Quine's leads, they more than justify Hell's faith in their talents, and the extended blowing session that closes the title track is excellent. But Hell hasn't repaired DESTINY STREET so much as he's thrown a coat of paint over the parts he didn't like, and frankly the original colors were more flattering, even if the basic framework is still strong enough to bear plenty of weight.
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