Pure Hell

Kenny “Stinker” Gordon, Preston “Chipwreck” Morris, and Michael “Spider” Sanders; it was in 1974 that they played out for the first time. It was a four song set – with two originals – at Gordon’s College Preparatory school in their hometown of Philadelphia, under the name Pretty Poison. They got their close friend Kerry “Lenny Steel” Boles to sing the covers, but as the band evolved he joined them on bass. Kenny was the frontman, Chip was on guitar, and Spider played drums. They had a penchant for swinging metal jewelry and ragged ripped clothing, and other fashions stuffs that at the time signified that they were really fucking bad news one way or the other. And then Kenny wanted to go faster, so he renamed the band Pure Hell – after an infamous drag racing car that had routinely careened off course during match races until a highway collision straight out of Final Destination took its wretched fuel-altered life.

Pure Hell siphoned their influences from the times, and it should be noted how absolutely novel and exhilarating some of these things were back then; phenoms like Iggy Pop and the Stooges, sounds like MC5, stuff that we can take for granted now. Underground filth trash films by John Waters, Hendrix, Funkadelic, Miles Davis’ Live Evil, Alice Cooper, Syd Barrett, Gil Scott-Heron, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, the violence of the 60s, the live horror of political assassinations. Spider had known Nancy Spungeon from skool daze, and was acquainted with Neon Leon, plus Johnny Thunders from the New York Dolls – and so this band of Philly teenagers decided to haul ass to New York to usher in the beginning of punk, and let me repeat; THEY RODE THE FIRST WAVE. Before the Sex Pistols.

“The New York Dolls took to us right away…Part hoodlums, part musicians, the same mould.” – Kenny. Pure Hell started out renting a room at the infamous Chelsea hotel just down the street from the drug-lagged New York Dolls, until they wore out their welcome there. They played Mothers and Max’s Kansas City, eventually The Masque, and shared stages with Richard Hell and the Voidoids, the Nuns, Wayne County & the Electric Chairs, Sid Vicious, Germs, Dead Boys, the U.K. Subs, the Cramps, and later on collaborated with Lemmy Kilmister from Motörhead. Spider subbed in for the Heartbreakers AND the Dolls. The band whiplashed across stages like shooting protons in a hadron collider, catching an early New York gig’s amp ablaze, getting into a decades long feud with their manager, finally going through the old tried and true bullshit about not getting a record deal because companies refused to sign a Black rock act. No wonder they came home from touring overseas and called it quits soon after, alongside the ubiquitous scandal of Sid and Nancy’s tragic deaths setting the moribund NY scene to broodingly quiet for a time.

But Pure Hell resurfaced. A year after their old masters went up for sale in a 2005 auction, a full-length album called Noise Addiction was released on Welfare Records. They’ve reunited several times, though Spider passed in 2002. Kenny has been featured in the documentaries Who Killed Nancy, and Stiv, and in recent years they’ve played Afropunk and Mosswood Meltdown. – Raeghan Buchanan

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