Two of my favorite people from the New York underground scene, Richard Hell and Zoë Lund, actually collaborated and shared a close creative partnership. Both Hell and Lund have always fascinated me they’re beautiful, complicated people who poured themselves into their passion projects, sometimes selfishly. They fit the cliché image of the drug-addicted artist, but anyone who has dealt with addiction or intense mental health struggles knows there’s nothing romantic about it. Still, people like them resonate with me. I see parts of myself in their flaws and in the rawness of their art. Tragic, beautiful people have always been my thing maybe that’s just me being a little vain and pretentious.
Richard Hell with Tom Verlaine
Richard Hell (born Richard Lester Meyers) is known for his influence on the New York punk scene. He never originally set out to become a musician his true calling was writing. He even dropped out of high school and ran away to New York with his classmate Tom Miller (later Tom Verlaine of Television and one of Patti Smith’s muses/lovers) to pursue poetry. Hell actually succeeded in that: he published chapbooks and worked in the small-press world. But in the early 1970s he shifted into music. He and Tom formed a band called The Neon Boys, which eventually evolved into Television. Hell left the band around 1975, before they recorded their first album, mostly because he and Verlaine constantly clashed over creative control.
Richard With The Heartbreaks | Richard Hell & the Voidoids
After leaving Television, Hell drifted through a few other projects like a short stint with The Heartbreakers (featuring former New York Dolls members like Johnny Thunders) before finally forming his own band, Richard Hell & the Voidoids. They released Blank Generation, a cornerstone proto-punk record. Hell is also credited as a major influence on punk style itself: the ripped shirts, DIY aesthetic, disheveled hair, and anti-establishment attitude. By the 1980s, as punk died down, he focused more on writing publishing books, poetry, and screenplays, and collaborating with other artists and small presses.
Zoë Lund (born Zoë Tamerlis) came from creative, intellectual parents her mother, Barbara Lekberg, was a Swedish-American sculptor, and her father, Victor Tamerlis, was a Romanian rare-book dealer. Her politics and artistic identity were shaped early: she grew up reading Marx, composing award-winning music, and participating in the Lower Manhattan counterculture of the 1980s, blending art, activism, and gritty realism.
Zoë Lund as Thana in Ms. 45 (1981)
At 19, she starred in Abel Ferrara’s Ms .45 (1981), playing a mute garment worker who becomes a vigilante after being assaulted her most iconic role. Lund was also a writer: she wrote poetry, essays, and screenplays, and collaborated with Ferrara on the 1992 film Bad Lieutenant, which she also acted in. Zoë was a heavy drug user and openly advocated for recreational heroin use. She died at 37 in Paris due to complications related to substance use. Richard also struggled with addiction, though he left that life behind along with his punk career in the late ’70s.
Richard Hell and Zoë Lund
It’s no surprise the two met and connected creatively, especially moving through the same New York underground world. Hell even commented on Zoë’s relationship with drugs:
“She also loved drug users, junkies foremost. I’ve known a lot of junkies, but I’ve never known one as committed, as dedicated, as faithful to heroin as Zoe.… Not Zoe, as far as I know. She may have suffered but her faith didn’t waver. Heroin was God and she was its nun.” — Zoe Notes, Richard Hell
Stills of Richard Hell and Zoe Lund reading his screenplay Meet Theresa Stern (29 Oct., 1988)
Hell also described Zoë as a kind of muse for him, reflecting on their creative closeness:
“The other particular experience I remember was in the late 80’s reading aloud and walking through the action of the first half of an early draft of my film script, ‘The Theresa Stern Story,’ with Zoe.… Zoe was an obvious person to try out in the role and we videotaped the reading in my apartment. It’s eerie for me to see her there, because it reminds me of all the convolutions of time and our lives.” — Zoe Notes, Richard Hell
Both Hell and Lund represent the contradictions of the New York underground scene: brilliant, flawed, and deeply influential. Their connection resonates with me not just as historical figures, but as a reminder that some of the most interesting work comes from navigating both talent and turmoil.
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