Go Now

On the road with the Blank Generation—a wild trip across the country and into the head of a down-on-his-luck punk musician.

It’s 1980. Burnt-out, strung-out, and just plain down-and-out, Billy Mud jumps at the chance to drive a car from California to New York, all expenses paid, and write a book about the journey. Accompanied by his ex-girlfriend who’s commissioned to contribute photos, Billy sees the book as an opportunity to beat his drug habit, test his talents, and maybe even get the girl.

As Billy skids and ricochets his way across America, Richard Hell explores the funny and frightening landscape inside his head: a labyrinth of hair pin turns, complicated detours, and roller-coaster ups-and-downs. Go Now brings the harrowing world of the underground brilliantly to life.

Richard Hell was born and grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, but dropped out of high school and moved alone to New York at the age of seventeen. He first came to public attention in the mid-1970s as an originator of punk. In 1984, he retired from music and returned to his original ambition of writing books. He is the author of several works of fiction, poetry, essays, notebooks, and autobiography, including The Voidoid, Across the Years, Artifact, Hot and Cold, Godlike, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, Massive Pissed Love, and What Just Happened, as well as coauthor of book-length collaborations, including the collection of poems Wanna Go Out? (published under the heteronym Theresa Stern) with the musician Tom Verlaine and the image-texts of Psychopts with the artist Christopher Wool.