Richard Hell releases his timely epitaph

Richard Hell and the Voidoids : Time

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"Only time can write a song that's really really real"

In April of 1980 Richard Hell released a seven inch EP which included some of his pre-Television work with Tom Verlaine in the Neon Boys as well as what may be his best Voidoids song, a ballad called "Time". Rolling Stone calls it "one hell of an epitaph". It is pretty much impossible to find.

I'm surprised to find no allusion to it in Hell's memoir I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp.

Time and time again I knew what I was doing and
Time and time again I just made things worse
It seems you see the most of what is really true when
You're stepping into your hearse
Only time can write a song that's really really real
The most a man can do is say the way its playing feels
And know he only knows as much as time to him reveals
And when I want to write a song that says it all at once
Like time sublimely silences the whys
I know that if I try I'm going to take a fall at once
And splatter there between my lies
Only time can write a song that's really really real
The most a man can do is say the way its playing feels
And know he only knows as much as time to him reveals
We are made of it and if we give submission
Among our chances there's a chance we can choose
And if we take it, by uncertainty's permission
Then it's impossible to lose
Only time can write a song that's really really real
The most a man can do is say the way its playing feels
And know he only knows as much as time to him reveals

40 Year Itch: David Bowie Writes "Time"

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David Bowie performed two concerts in New Orleans in mid November. The first was uptown, November 14 at the Jesuit university, Loyola, which always had a better meal plan than Tulane University across the street. The second was November 22 at The Warehouse downtown, where Jim Morrison performed his last show with The Doors and where a friend of mine made out with a shockingly beautiful girl at a 1982 Talking Heads concert and discovered she was a he. It was sometime during this week that he wrote "Time" which would greatly benefit from the piano theatrics of Mike Garson when it was recorded a month later at Trident Studios.

The song is best known for its line : "Time; He flexes like a whore/ Falls wanking to the floor". RCA was fine with the masturbation imagery but removed the line "in quaaludes and red wine" from the US single. Not a big fan of the cabaret theatrics of Bowie, I like other things on 1973's Aladdin Sane a great deal more ( "Panic In Detroit", "The Jean Genie", "Cracked Actor").