Please Kill Me:
The Uncensored Oral History of Punk
By Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain
Grove Press, 424 pages, $25
Legs McNeil had the good fortune to be a messed-up, creative kid in New York City just as a groundswell of rock bands like the Dictators and the Ramones were beginning to make noise at a joint called CBGB in the mid-1970s. It soon became the center of a certain universe.
McNeil wanted to capture this scene in a magazine. He and his pals, John Holmstrom and Ged Dunn, created Punk, with Holmstrom claiming the editor’s title, Dunn the publisher’s mantle and McNeil, well, as there was nothing left, he became the “resident punk,” his job chiefly consisting of getting drunk and doing interviews with the emerging anti-stars and miscreants roaming this new turf.
Why the name Punk? (Punk was not yet a trend or marketing term.)
“The word `punk’ seemed to sum up the thread that connected everything we liked,” writes McNeil (with Gillian McCain) in “Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk.” “Drunk, obnoxious, smart but not pretentious, absurd, funny, ironic, and things that appealed to the darker side.”
It is primarily McNeil’s Punk work that informs the multivoiced “Please Kill Me,” with its emphasis on music and culture (which is to say sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll) from 1974 to 1980. There are earlier sections on pre-punk–the Velvet Underground, Stooges, New York Dolls. There’s an epilogue called “Nevermind,” where some of the survivors look back at the principal players. Englishmen like Malcolm McLaren and the Clash factor in somewhat, but this is unabashedly a story of New York punk.
The voices that tell the story include Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Dee Dee and Joey Ramone, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Debbie Harry, the Dead Boys and Iggy Pop. McNeil and McCain arrange those voices in a chronological, if cacophonous, narrative–making more sense of the scene than anyone might have been able to at the time.
The downside of this in-their-own-words approach is that there’s not as much discussion of the artistry involved as there is of the decadence. If the music didn’t have validity and its players didn’t possess creative powers, none of this would matter. McNeil’s folks are more likely to recollect the dirt and the damage, which, of course, makes for scurrilous, highly readable gossip.
Punk or new wave was a pariah genre. It was about rejecting the established and polished and embracing the new and raw. McNeil explains the Punk magazine methodology: “Our style of getting people to talk was to hang out, get as drunk as possible, and let the whole thing deteriorate into a stupor. Basically the `Punk’ interview was a good excuse to get smashed. Then I’d just keep asking the same dumb questions over and over: `What kind of hamburgers do you like to eat? Are Blimpies better than McDonald’s?’ ” (McNeil cleaned up his act later.)
Punk music sputtered, got co-opted. Of course, as we all know, it has risen again in new clothes. Take “Please Kill Me” as a caustic, cautionary tale from the first era.
