Stop dancing like that. it looks like  youre  just  going  through  a  lot  of  trouble  right  now." So I let the girl who danced to an imaginary record do an imaginary routine, and then I played a real record—I played one I hadn't heard in a while, "Watching the Detectives," by the Stones—and we got to dancing to that. I had to get to dance on that record, because that was the day before she was leaving for school. It's probably the most memorable moment of my life—because we danced to that record, and we danced. And she danced with me. Interviewer Is that when it dawned on you? You weren't a dancer, you weren't a singer, what kind of performer are you? Richard Hell I had no identity at that moment. It was a good moment. Because there are times in life when the right thing to do is what comes naturally. Everything else is a formality. It was kind of a turning point, because I could see how everything could be better than it was, how everything could be as it should be—everything! With this one little girl—but everything had to be as it should be. And I realized that's what I've been looking for all these years—when I felt myself about to drown, that would be a perfect moment. Something to hold on to. That's a lot of what I have done in my life is just been in that. Peggy Moore The New Year's show was at Hurrah's. The night we were there, all of a sudden it started pouring rain, but as the band would go off, Peggy would go, "Wait, there's still more to be played," and she would play extra songs. Everybody had gone, and I was sitting alone with a group of people in this alcove by the bathrooms. It was pouring rain, but this strange thing happened, a little kid and his father came walking down from the front door, going backstage. They were looking for someone to help them. He had lost his wallet and the mother had a broken heel on one shoe. I called Peggy, and she said, "We can't play them this, we have to get ready to do the second show, we're playing in fifteen minutes. We got a deal to do and have to be out." But they showed up and I was sitting alone, so I said, "Come on in," and I started talking to them, and the father said, "Look, we don't have any money." I said, "I'm paying for you right now," and he said, "What do you mean, pay for us?" "Well, I'm going to give you a performance, and you're going to sit in, I'm going to put you on the stage." So the father said, "Is this some kind of thing you do to get out of paying?" And I said, "No, this is how I get paid, because this is how I make my living." Then we pulled up a chair and I started playing the drums—just playing. I couldn't play the piano, because there were no sheet music. I used an old comb and a piece of Scotch tape to hold the notes down, and we did this in this alcove with this little kid who couldn't have been more than six. I played this whole song. They had a little drum, they were playing along, and he had never seen anyone play drums before, he had no idea what was going on. It was a really funny performance, and then I think they tried to get on the bandwagon and started asking for songs, and Peggy was in a terrible hurry, so she just told them, "We're not doing that song, we're in a hurry." And they said, "Well, can you play it?" I'm looking at them in all their confusion, and I didn't have any sheet music to hold, and I wasn't sure how many beats were in "Midnight Rambler," I had never counted the beats. I was getting ready to sing, but I didn't know the song. And they were playing their little drum, and they wanted me to play the song, so I said, "Look, all of you sit down, you sit down." So they sat down, and I sat down and I was trying to count the beat, but when I got to seventeen, I could not remember if it was seventeen beats or not. So I started doing it without the drum, as a drumroll, and I started singing—at least I thought I was singing, but I guess I just made all these funny noises, because she looked at me with a scared look and asked, "Did you play this?" And I said, "Yeah," and she said, "We need the song." But we just started playing the song again, but I could hear her telling the band, "Stop. Sit down, now we're going to start over." I don't know how it happened, but we must have played through maybe twenty or thirty songs. There were a lot of people who could hear the drums, and I was really pleased that we found this thing that could work. It was something that we could do together, and I had this idea to have the little girl dressed in all black and a hat. I had a piece of black velvet in my pocket, and I had a friend of mine cut this really bad little red poppy out of his pocket, and I was going to dress the girl with the poppy. It didn't happen because the father showed up again and said he had to go, and he didn't want to pay. He said, "What do you want me to pay for? You want me to pay for something you don't use? What do I get for my money?" So I said, "Well, why don't you give it to the kid—here's your money. He has got your money, why don't you give it to the kid?" He gave it to him, and I think it would have been a lot better if I could have had a little black patent leather purse that he could have seen that there was a wallet in it, and he could have put the money in his pocket, and that would have taken the whole thing from him, because then I wouldn't have needed to have a drummer, because I would have played the piano, and there would have been four of us. But this was one of the first shows we had, so this guy probably thought we were the same person, that it was a free show. So he just threw the money on the floor, and that was our only contact with him, and it was not that he got in a bad way. He probably thought, "Oh, they're just a bunch of kids." But the thing I got most out of that was the look on his face when I told him that he needed to pay. He was embarrassed, he wasn't sure if he should pay or not. He was like a deer in headlights, and I was able to kind of push him into it, and he said, "Wait a minute, wait a minute," and I said, "I don't want to wait a minute," and I kept on pushing him, and he was a nice guy, and I was like, "He was nice to me," and I said to him, "Why don't you tell the other people how you felt about this guy who didn't pay for his child," so I thought that would get us a little more attention. I still got paid. I was at a place where I didn't want to call myself a drummer because I didn't want to get too focused on the whole thing about being a rock 'n' roller. I was just feeling my way through the thing. Because the thing is that I wasn't playing anything that was particularly beautiful, like most rock 'n' rollers at that time. I was playing in this mode, it was like a musical form that I didn't know yet, and it was like the way I was living my life at that time, that was the only kind of drumming I was doing. I was playing simple little songs in the backroom at night and didn't have much of an identity, I didn't know what kind of a life I was supposed to be living. So then I read this article about this beat that I had come up with. I don't remember what the name of it was, but I was thinking, "Oh, that's a great idea for a song. I'm going to do that, I'll do that for a tape," because I would take cassettes of myself out of the radio station when I was working there, and that was the kind of music I was listening to. I would make tapes of the show and then I would take them home and listen to them on the tapes, and I had to have a tape recorder to listen to the music that was on the radio. It was one of the first tapes I bought. And then I went up to see Jim Morrison. But we had this rehearsal space in the lower level of a building, where there were all these people rehearsing their bands. So I went and I wrote this song, "She'll Be There," just out of my memory from what I thought I remembered about her. She was there. She was not there by any real definition of the word. But it's easy to look at someone who is really fucked up and say, "You don't