Richard Hell was born Richard Meyers on October 2, 1949, and raised in Lexington, KY. He dropped out of high school in 1966 to come to New York and make his way as a poet. Hell became known in the mid-Seventies as an originator of the punk movement [as documented, for instance, in the books From the Velvets to the Voidoids by Clinton Heylin (Penguin, 1993), and Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain (Grove Press, 1996)]. His album Blank Generation was chosen by the New York Times as one of the ten best albums of the decade.