Matador Records
2002
Time
About This Album
There's little arguing that Richard Hell was one of the most important figures in the early New York punk rock scene, and he left behind an impressive body of work that merged a distinctive and literate lyrical intelligence with the primal force of stripped-down rock & roll. However, by his own admission, the man lacked the ambition or inclination for a long-term career, and for the most part he pulled the plug on his life in music in the early '80s. But there's been enough lingering interest in Hell's music that he's periodically released collections of material from his archives, and this retrospective, Time, is essentially an upgraded and augmented version of his 1984 odds and ends compilation, R.I.P. In fact, disc one of Time contains R.I.P. in its entirety, with three additional tracks -- a unreleased demo of "Chinese Rocks" cut with Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, and two tracks from a 1979 session with the Voidoids, "Time" and "Funhunt." The material has been remastered, and the audio is certainly an improvement over the ROIR cassette version (and the European CD), though the Heartbreakers demos still sound like they were dubbed from wobbly fifth-generation cassettes and some of the demo material is a bit thin (though Robert Quine's and Ivan Julian's guitars sound noticeably stronger).
Track List

Disc 1 (try tracks 2,10 and 12)

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Disc 2 (try tracks 3,5 and 6)

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