Quicktake Book Review: "Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk" by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain (1997)

In the mid 1970s, future Spin Magazine editor Legs McNeil was just a burnout kid from the outer boroughs of New York City who -- with friends John Holmstrom and Ged Dunn -- put together a fanzine so they could hang out with their favorite band, The Dictators.

The fanzine was called Punk Magazine. It became a cultural touchstone and (if McNeil himself is to be believed) gave a name to an underground culture and music movement that was just starting to bubble up as a reaction against hippies, disco, and the growth of stadium rock.

More than 20 years later, McNeil put together this book, which is a collection of interviews with everyone from Lou Reed (The Velvet Underground), Iggy Pop (The Stooges), Wayne Kramer (the MC5), Patti Smith, and about a million others, going back to the early 1960s and narrating the chaotic rise of a movement that -- like all movements -- wasn't really a movement at all. These kids had no idea what they were doing or where any of this would lead. For them it was all about sex, drugs, puking, sleeping in gutters, hustling at Times Square, taking more drugs, talking shit about each other, getting stabbed by their girlfriends, puking some more, and occasionally playing some music.

McNeil doesn't contextualize very much, and he doesn't try to make this book comprehensive. He just lets the people involved speak for themselves. This is about how punk rock was born, and -- with the exception of a few epilogues toward the end telling us where some of these characters would end up (most of them not well) -- the narrative pretty much stops at the 1980s. We don't hear anything about Southern California hardcore, post-punk, emo, or any of the offshoots that sprung out of the original scene. The Dead Kennedys aren't even mentioned, much less Green Day.

But, like McNeil's subsequent oral history The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry, Please Kill Me provides a fascinating and unvarnished look at the details that made up the movement, such as it was. McNeil and McCain wisely narrow their focus to a few pertinent characters: primarily Pop, Kramer, Smith, Dee Dee Ramone, and Johnny Thunders from the New York Dolls. But they include snippets of interviews from literally hundreds of people (I really appreciated the appendix at the end listing all the participants), and in so doing manags to create an almost anthropological study in how a subculture like this comes to be. It's fascinating to see how disparate the influences were -- hot rod racing in Detroit, Warhol's Factory, the gay underground in New York City, just to name a few -- and how, over the course of years, it all coalesced into something that was, while not entirely cohesive, certainly a musical and cultural a paradigm shift.

And we get great stories on such topics as the birth of CBGBs, Malcolm McLaren's disastrous stint as the Dolls' manager, Handsome Dick Manitoba's feud with Wayne County, the squalid and doomed romance between Nancy Spungen and Syd Vicious, and much more.

And, yes, there's lots of sex, drugs, blood and vomit.

Highly recommended.