Last week, Richard Lloyd’s reading at the Strand turned into an unexpected fact-checking session when the son of CBGB impresario Hilly Kristal questioned some of recollections shared in Lloyd’s new memoir, Everything Is Combustible: Television, CBGB’s and Five Decades of Rock and Roll. There was some debate about whether the three-tiered stage at CBGB was built for Television, as Lloyd remembered it, or for Patti Smith, as Dana Kristal claimed.
In search of the answer, we turned to I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, the memoir of Lloyd’s onetime Television bandmate Richard Hell. He had this to say: “There’s also the tale that we built the stage. I don’t remember that either, and it sounds like something Lloyd made up.”
Uh-oh.
Lloyd has said he’s on “friendly terms” with his former Television bandmates, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it from his memoir. He describes Richard Hell not wanting two Richards in the band (“Why was Richard Hell so enamored with his first name? How the hell would I know?”) and says that Hell and frontman Tom Verlaine had “universal contempt,” sometimes for him. But the most direct shot at Hell comes when Lloyd recounts their threesome with Ruth Kligman, the mistress of Jackson Pollock who was famously with the painter during his fatal drunk driving accident and who later embarked on an epic quest to authenticate what she said was his last painting.
Here’s Lloyd’s take on how the threesome started: “One time she said, ‘Maybe you could bring a friend over and we could have a ménage à trois.’ I thought about who might join us, and since Richard Hell was still in Television, I invited him.” When they all got to Kligman’s place, “she got out the ropes and Richard started to balk while I developed an outrageous hard on,” Lloyd writes. “I screwed her first and then Richard decided he didn’t want anything to do with this scene anymore—and he left.”
Here’s where things get catty:
Afterwards the gossip was that she said she screwed half of Television, and one band member couldn’t get it up and the other band member couldn’t get it down. I know who is who, but sometimes people’s egos force them to lie, which is what happened when a certain book was written by another member of the band. Our roles were reversed in that book.
It’s safe to assume the book in question is Hell’s. Indeed, in his chapter about the “sex” portion of “sex, drugs and rock n roll,” the East Village writer-musician has this to say about the Kligman encounter:
One drunken drug-sodden night I let Richard Lloyd tag along to her loft with me and she was excited to have us tie her to her bed in her underwear, etc. But that was comparatively slight as S&M.
So who tagged along with whom? With Kligman no longer alive, the answer is probably destined to remain as nebulous as the identity of Jackson Pollock’s last painting. Or maybe Tom Verlaine can write a memoir that will settle this once and for all.