20th Century Boy:
Notebooks Of the Seventies
by Duncan Hannah
I don’t ordinarily dumpster dive for reading materials, but when I looked into a recycling bin outside a grocery store and saw a bunch of copies of this one, I thought I’d better check it out. Duncan Hannah’s 20th Century Boy is a memoir from the 1970s art and music scene, mostly taking place in New York City. That much alone was enough to pique my interest and after opening it and leafing through a few pages, I saw it had photographs of Debbie Harry, Richard Hell, the Talking Heads, Andy Warhol, and a few other notables of the underground scene. I knew I was in territory that was both familiar and interesting.
Artist and sometimes actor Duncan Hannah kept journals from his high school years and through his twenties. He extracted the most interesting bits and put them together for this collection which captures the feel of aimless bohemian living at the margins of the art world. The first thing that caught my attention is his writing style. Hannah writes in short, no-frills sentences that recall the simplistic prose of Hemingway. I find Hemingway to be a bore though. Hannah largely succeeds in writing this way. He writes with a flow and consistency that I always found absent that other writer’s style. Reading Hemingway is like trying to drive a car with the emergency brake on; reading Duncan Hannah is like zipping in and out of fast-moving traffic on a finely tuned motorcycle.
Then the content is something else. The author starts this book as a teenager in Minneapolis just when the sexual revolution begins to blossom. He sleeps around with a lot of girls, does a lot of drugs and alcohol, plays in a band, and has ambitions to become an artist, all while his parents fret over the possibility of him becoming a permanent screw-up. He becomes an art student at Bard college located in downstate New York, continuing on a similar course until he finally winds up in Greenwich Village where he continues his studies.
One night at a concert, he catches the attention of Danny Fields, the rock band manager who signed The Doors, MC5, and The Stooges to Elektra records. Hannah is a good-looking boy with a sense of fashion and the two hit it off immediately. Danny Fields introduces him to a lot of rock stars and artists and Hannah easily adapts to the in-crowd at Max’s Kansas City among other places.
One of the exciting things about this book is all the rock concerts and related parties the author goes to. Most of this involves the proto-punk and glam scene of the early 1970s. He sees some of the earliest performances of Patti Smith and Television. He probably also sees more New York Dolls shows than anybody else in history. He even gets to meet Iggy Pop backstage and then watches him come on stage with The Stooges too loaded to stand up, let along sing. Iggy falls on the drum set then falls off the stage before they carry him out on a stretcher, leaving the band to play an all-instrumental set to the audience’s disappointment.
Then there is the sex, the drugs, and the parties. Hannah snorts up what must be most of the cocaine in Peru and a huge cargo of whatever came out of Colombia, Ecuador, and Bolivia too then tempers his highs with gallons of liquor so that, aside from being popular, he also earns a reputation for being a hardcore lush. This never stops him from getting laid though. Despite going through life being alcoholically challenged, he still manages to get it up with women and maintain long-term relationships. Duncan Hannah gets more ass than a toilet seat. And then there are the men. You see, Hannah is a cute, androgynous prick-tease so he gets hit on by every gay man who can’t keep his hands to himself, but since he is straight, he always disappoints them and one even gets violent when rejected. Overall, it’s a wild and exciting life, one that most people never get to live let along survive. In the latter half of the book, he is much more engaged with his art.
A typical day for Duncan Hannah goes like this. “I woke up at 11:30 AM with a poisonous hangover, not sure if I slept through one night or two. I went down to the corner where I saw Patti Smith hanging out so we got some breakfast. I did some coke, spent a couple hours painting then went to visit a gallery uptown. I took my girlfriend out to dinner where Tom Verlaine and three members of Blondie were sitting at nearby tables. We all got drunk then I had sex with my girlfriend in the bathroom. I went off to watch a French movie starring Alain Delon, headed uptown to a Roxy Music show, said hi to Johnny Thunders in the concert hall, and got invited to party where I tried to talk to David Bowie and Andy Warhol. I smoked a joint with Jim Jarmusch, did a few lines of coke and a hit of acid and ended up in bed with some girl who smelled bad but had a nice body. Anita Pallenberg came in and told us to get out of her bed and Mick Jagger stepped on my toes as I made my way out the door. I hope I can sell some paintings tomorrow.”
This is the kind of book that could suffer from redundancy, but it moves along at such a fast pace that it never slows down or gets dull. The copious amounts of name-dropping can be a little annoying at first; it’s like listening to some nobody trying to impress others by talking about all the important people they know, but Hannah’s encounters with this legendary crowd are persistently interesting and he does have some good conversations and experiences with them. Besides, he fits in with them and never sounds fake or pretentious.
While I am not a huge fan of Duncan Hannah’s paintings, I find 20th Century Boy to be a fascinating chronicle of New York’s downtown scene in the 1970s, probably the best decade the city has ever seen for its exploding music scene and dynamic social life. It was a time when New York was still affordable, fun, and stylish, a time when the greatest social asset one could have was simply to be an interesting person. New York, and America in general, just aren’t like that anymore. As a document of glam, punk, the drug culture, the Sexual Revolution, old New York, and the lives of starving artists, this book can’t be beat.
Artist and sometimes actor Duncan Hannah kept journals from his high school years and through his twenties. He extracted the most interesting bits and put them together for this collection which captures the feel of aimless bohemian living at the margins of the art world. The first thing that caught my attention is his writing style. Hannah writes in short, no-frills sentences that recall the simplistic prose of Hemingway. I find Hemingway to be a bore though. Hannah largely succeeds in writing this way. He writes with a flow and consistency that I always found absent that other writer’s style. Reading Hemingway is like trying to drive a car with the emergency brake on; reading Duncan Hannah is like zipping in and out of fast-moving traffic on a finely tuned motorcycle.
Then the content is something else. The author starts this book as a teenager in Minneapolis just when the sexual revolution begins to blossom. He sleeps around with a lot of girls, does a lot of drugs and alcohol, plays in a band, and has ambitions to become an artist, all while his parents fret over the possibility of him becoming a permanent screw-up. He becomes an art student at Bard college located in downstate New York, continuing on a similar course until he finally winds up in Greenwich Village where he continues his studies.
One night at a concert, he catches the attention of Danny Fields, the rock band manager who signed The Doors, MC5, and The Stooges to Elektra records. Hannah is a good-looking boy with a sense of fashion and the two hit it off immediately. Danny Fields introduces him to a lot of rock stars and artists and Hannah easily adapts to the in-crowd at Max’s Kansas City among other places.
One of the exciting things about this book is all the rock concerts and related parties the author goes to. Most of this involves the proto-punk and glam scene of the early 1970s. He sees some of the earliest performances of Patti Smith and Television. He probably also sees more New York Dolls shows than anybody else in history. He even gets to meet Iggy Pop backstage and then watches him come on stage with The Stooges too loaded to stand up, let along sing. Iggy falls on the drum set then falls off the stage before they carry him out on a stretcher, leaving the band to play an all-instrumental set to the audience’s disappointment.
Then there is the sex, the drugs, and the parties. Hannah snorts up what must be most of the cocaine in Peru and a huge cargo of whatever came out of Colombia, Ecuador, and Bolivia too then tempers his highs with gallons of liquor so that, aside from being popular, he also earns a reputation for being a hardcore lush. This never stops him from getting laid though. Despite going through life being alcoholically challenged, he still manages to get it up with women and maintain long-term relationships. Duncan Hannah gets more ass than a toilet seat. And then there are the men. You see, Hannah is a cute, androgynous prick-tease so he gets hit on by every gay man who can’t keep his hands to himself, but since he is straight, he always disappoints them and one even gets violent when rejected. Overall, it’s a wild and exciting life, one that most people never get to live let along survive. In the latter half of the book, he is much more engaged with his art.
A typical day for Duncan Hannah goes like this. “I woke up at 11:30 AM with a poisonous hangover, not sure if I slept through one night or two. I went down to the corner where I saw Patti Smith hanging out so we got some breakfast. I did some coke, spent a couple hours painting then went to visit a gallery uptown. I took my girlfriend out to dinner where Tom Verlaine and three members of Blondie were sitting at nearby tables. We all got drunk then I had sex with my girlfriend in the bathroom. I went off to watch a French movie starring Alain Delon, headed uptown to a Roxy Music show, said hi to Johnny Thunders in the concert hall, and got invited to party where I tried to talk to David Bowie and Andy Warhol. I smoked a joint with Jim Jarmusch, did a few lines of coke and a hit of acid and ended up in bed with some girl who smelled bad but had a nice body. Anita Pallenberg came in and told us to get out of her bed and Mick Jagger stepped on my toes as I made my way out the door. I hope I can sell some paintings tomorrow.”
This is the kind of book that could suffer from redundancy, but it moves along at such a fast pace that it never slows down or gets dull. The copious amounts of name-dropping can be a little annoying at first; it’s like listening to some nobody trying to impress others by talking about all the important people they know, but Hannah’s encounters with this legendary crowd are persistently interesting and he does have some good conversations and experiences with them. Besides, he fits in with them and never sounds fake or pretentious.
While I am not a huge fan of Duncan Hannah’s paintings, I find 20th Century Boy to be a fascinating chronicle of New York’s downtown scene in the 1970s, probably the best decade the city has ever seen for its exploding music scene and dynamic social life. It was a time when New York was still affordable, fun, and stylish, a time when the greatest social asset one could have was simply to be an interesting person. New York, and America in general, just aren’t like that anymore. As a document of glam, punk, the drug culture, the Sexual Revolution, old New York, and the lives of starving artists, this book can’t be beat.
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