Slipping in and out of phase

The best passages in Richard Hell’s essential autobiography I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, published in 2013, arrive as Hell pushes up against the limits of language to describe rock and roll. (His memories and writing about the seduction, bliss, and brutality of heroin addiction is also indelible, among the best I’ve read about the cultural/personal/sexual politics of drug addiction. Hell had a lot of fun, experienced a lot of agony, and got out.) Embedded among his startlingly-clear memor...