Please Kill Me:
The Uncensored Oral History of Punk
by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain
According to Ed Sanders, lead singer of The Fugs and author of books on the Manson Family murders, a counter-current existed in the hippy subculture of the 1960s. While most hippies were middle or upper class kids who could afford the luxury of turning on, tuning, and dropping out due to the financial security they could return to if they left the scene, there was another growing faction of hippies that came from a blue collar background. Some of these people suffered from abusive parenting or strict religious upbringings. This underbelly of the hippy underclass were more negative and nihilistic in their outlook, being hard drinkers and hard drug users, prone to carrying switchblades or chains, and not afraid to use them. Some of these people drifted into motorcycle clubs like the Hells Angels or other biker gangs of the counter-culture while some began morphing into a hard-edged scene of their own. Those latter people were the seeds of what came to be known as Punks. Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain is an oral history of the proto-punk and first wave of the punk music scene, mostly centered in New York City’s Lower East Side, gradually spreading across America and eventually into Europe.
In the early 1970s, Legs McNeil and some friends saw a cultural trend emerging in the downtown music scene of Manhattan. It was a reclamation of primal rock and roll, a return to three minute songs, fast paced with high energy and high volume, confrontational lyrics, animalistic wildness, and a tough, streetwise attitude that could only have emerged from the scumpits of New York in its most decadent and crime ridden decade. McNeil and company put together a magazine dedicated to this new trend and called it Punk. The magazine caught on, the name stuck, and the rest is history. Maybe it is a history that some cultural critics wish we could forget, but staying true to its defiant nature, it, hasn’t been forgotten and probably won’t be as for a long time, just like the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki won’t be forgotten either. This book chronicles those origins and early days of the scene, piecemeal in a collage of quotes from articles and interviews involving people who were clear-headed enough to be able to speak about what they saw.
Obviously the story doesn’t start in 1975 with the first publication of Punk which had a drawing of Lou Reed on its cover. It starts in the 1960s with The Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol’s Factory. Amphetamines were the drug of choice in the Factory and the scene started to attract rough trade, the types of people who didn’t, or didn’t want to, fit in with the hippies. Andy Warhol became the manager for The Velvet Underground and they became the band that inspired thousands of others to become musicians despite their unpopularity during their short career.
Then came band manager Danny Fields, the man who signed The Doors to Elektra Records. He discovered MC5 and The Stooges, brought them to New York, and found himself on the wrong side of the record industry’s executives as those bands were a bit untame, too dangerous, unmarketable, and unable to make millions of dollars for the investors. But The Stooges’ front man Iggy Pop caught the attention of David Bowie and his band found a lifeline in the music industry. Meanwhile, while glam grew bigger in England, its glitter rock counterpart in New York took off with the New York Dolls, a band that performed in drag even though they weren’t gay. They weren’t just ordinary transvestites; they looked like the kind of street walkers that would haul you down an alley and stomp your head in with their platform shoes, not even bothering to steal your wallet. Their brand of rock picked up where Chuck Berry left off with Johnny Thunders playing guitar in a way that made you feel like you were standing under a jet airplane as it flew ten feet over your head and a freight train went by five feet off to your side.. Lead singer David Johanson’s advice to young musicians was “don’t worry if you can play well or not. Don’t worry about how good your equipment is. Just get up on stage and play.” This embodies the approach to punk rock. It was never about technical perfection. It prioritized feeling and energy over talent and the feeling conveyed was gritty, violent, mean, dirty, and aggressive. And it was always exhilarating.
By the mid-1970s, the venues of Max’s Kansas City and CBGB’s had become the world’s epicenters of punk. Bands like Television, Richard Hell and The Voidoids, Ramones, Dead Boys, The Heartbreakers, The Dictators, and the Patti Smith Group were reaching national stardom. Then Malcolm McLaren arrived in New York and envisioned marketing punk rock in England. He brought some bands over to London and a scene around the Sex Pistols took off. When McLaren brought the Sex Pistols to tour in America, they became a media sensation, punk became a fad and a commodity, and when the Sex Pistols broke up along with most other American punk bands, the first wave of punk was more or less over.
In this narrative, the timeline of punk history is actually pushed into the background so that most of the discussions are about the people and events happening in the scene. Some of the people quoted or interviewed may not carry name recognition for people unfamiliar with the territory. There is an extensive glossary at the back for those who need it. Some of the major stars of punk don’t make any direct contributions to the narrative while their friends, girlfriends, groupies, managers, roadies, and various others do. The effect is like being at a party and hearing all these people reminiscing about those bad old/good old days.
And the kinds of things they talk about could be seriously disturbing to people who aren’t ready for it. The early New York punk scene would have been a goldmine for psychologists who study social dysfunction. The scene was loaded with violence, heroin addiction, alcoholism, promiscuity, prostitution, and all around bad behavior. Some passages might make you feel grimy or nauseous. MC5, the band that played at the Democratic National Convention riots in Chicago 1968, find themselves in a riot when they try to play at the Fillmore East. Iggy Pop gets beat up continuously, loaded on drugs, sometimes falling off the stage, throwing bottles, raw meat and peanut butter at the audience, and going so far as to slice himself up with broken glass. The Ramones find each other because they are a bunch of complete weirdos. Johnny Thunders becomes the most notorious junky in rock history. Wayne County bludgeons Handsome Dick Manitoba with a microphone stand after some misunderstood friendly banter, breaking the Dictators’ lead singer’s collar bone and putting him in a wheel chair. Johnny Blitz of the Dead Boys almost dies after a brutal stabbing. James Chance assaults members of the audience during a concert and then cuts his face with a broken bottle when the bouncers try to throw him out. Stiv Bators one-ups Alice Cooper’s stage show by hanging himself with a noose, no props involved, during a Dead Boys show at CBGB’s. Nancy Spungen gets killed allegedly by Sid Vicious who soon after dies of a heroin overdose. Some luminaries of the scene, namely Tom Verlaine, Patti Smith, and Lou Reed don’t appear in such a favorable light by the end of the book either. Punk rock was a musical genre started by and for fuck ups. Like the porn industry, it attracted a lot of unstable people. But we’re still feeling the effects of it now.
Having said that, there is a lot of gallows humor in these pages as well. The Stooges use a picture of Elvis Presley as a target when they feel like shooting holes in the walls of their house. Sid Vicious uses water from a toilet full of vomit to shoot up amphetamines. Iggy Pop gets arrested while wearing a dress and then tells the guy who picks up at jail that it isn’t a woman’s dress, it is a man’s dress while the police laugh at him. Cheetah Chrome gets arrested after throwing an air conditioner out of a hotel room window, hitting a police car, and the police tell him to put his pants on not realizing that his flesh colored leotards actually are pants. A studio engineer gives Johnny Thunders a shirt because he feels sorry for him, thinking his ripped t-shirt means he is too poor to afford nice clothes. Sid Vicious meets a friend on the street outside the Chelsea Hotel; the friend says he is going to pick up a vacuum cleaner at a friend’s apartment and Sid Vicious thinks “vacuum cleaner” is New York slang for a bag of heroin and insists he wants to get a vacuum cleaner too. And so it goes on.
This book only scratches the surface though. McNeil and McCain select the most outrageous stories and elements of early punk. There are a lot of bands that go unmentioned and the second wave of hardcore punk is never brought up, nor is the corporate commercialization of punk in the 1990s, the pretentious and dull grunge scene and crappy MTV punk. Parallel scenes like new wave, no wave, post punk, and underground metal get almost no space here either.
Please Kill Me is a great book and a must read for anyone who is curious about the roots of the most dangerous and influential musical movement in history. I have heard a lot of talk these days about transgressive literature and art, but punks in the beginning were living a transgressive lifestyle, one that put their lives in danger on a daily basis. It was reckless abandonment and rock and roll excess taken to its extreme limits. It shouldn’t be a surprise that most of these people died before the age of thirty, and yet Iggy Pop, the biggest stooge of all Stooges, is still alive and thriving. I guess whatever didn’t kill him really did make hims stronger. And I still think it’s odd that he became a professional golfer. All of the bands mentioned in this book provided the soundtrack to my high school years and reading about the people who made the early punk scene a reality is truly mind-blowing for me. I can’t praise this book enough.
In the early 1970s, Legs McNeil and some friends saw a cultural trend emerging in the downtown music scene of Manhattan. It was a reclamation of primal rock and roll, a return to three minute songs, fast paced with high energy and high volume, confrontational lyrics, animalistic wildness, and a tough, streetwise attitude that could only have emerged from the scumpits of New York in its most decadent and crime ridden decade. McNeil and company put together a magazine dedicated to this new trend and called it Punk. The magazine caught on, the name stuck, and the rest is history. Maybe it is a history that some cultural critics wish we could forget, but staying true to its defiant nature, it, hasn’t been forgotten and probably won’t be as for a long time, just like the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki won’t be forgotten either. This book chronicles those origins and early days of the scene, piecemeal in a collage of quotes from articles and interviews involving people who were clear-headed enough to be able to speak about what they saw.
Obviously the story doesn’t start in 1975 with the first publication of Punk which had a drawing of Lou Reed on its cover. It starts in the 1960s with The Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol’s Factory. Amphetamines were the drug of choice in the Factory and the scene started to attract rough trade, the types of people who didn’t, or didn’t want to, fit in with the hippies. Andy Warhol became the manager for The Velvet Underground and they became the band that inspired thousands of others to become musicians despite their unpopularity during their short career.
Then came band manager Danny Fields, the man who signed The Doors to Elektra Records. He discovered MC5 and The Stooges, brought them to New York, and found himself on the wrong side of the record industry’s executives as those bands were a bit untame, too dangerous, unmarketable, and unable to make millions of dollars for the investors. But The Stooges’ front man Iggy Pop caught the attention of David Bowie and his band found a lifeline in the music industry. Meanwhile, while glam grew bigger in England, its glitter rock counterpart in New York took off with the New York Dolls, a band that performed in drag even though they weren’t gay. They weren’t just ordinary transvestites; they looked like the kind of street walkers that would haul you down an alley and stomp your head in with their platform shoes, not even bothering to steal your wallet. Their brand of rock picked up where Chuck Berry left off with Johnny Thunders playing guitar in a way that made you feel like you were standing under a jet airplane as it flew ten feet over your head and a freight train went by five feet off to your side.. Lead singer David Johanson’s advice to young musicians was “don’t worry if you can play well or not. Don’t worry about how good your equipment is. Just get up on stage and play.” This embodies the approach to punk rock. It was never about technical perfection. It prioritized feeling and energy over talent and the feeling conveyed was gritty, violent, mean, dirty, and aggressive. And it was always exhilarating.
By the mid-1970s, the venues of Max’s Kansas City and CBGB’s had become the world’s epicenters of punk. Bands like Television, Richard Hell and The Voidoids, Ramones, Dead Boys, The Heartbreakers, The Dictators, and the Patti Smith Group were reaching national stardom. Then Malcolm McLaren arrived in New York and envisioned marketing punk rock in England. He brought some bands over to London and a scene around the Sex Pistols took off. When McLaren brought the Sex Pistols to tour in America, they became a media sensation, punk became a fad and a commodity, and when the Sex Pistols broke up along with most other American punk bands, the first wave of punk was more or less over.
In this narrative, the timeline of punk history is actually pushed into the background so that most of the discussions are about the people and events happening in the scene. Some of the people quoted or interviewed may not carry name recognition for people unfamiliar with the territory. There is an extensive glossary at the back for those who need it. Some of the major stars of punk don’t make any direct contributions to the narrative while their friends, girlfriends, groupies, managers, roadies, and various others do. The effect is like being at a party and hearing all these people reminiscing about those bad old/good old days.
And the kinds of things they talk about could be seriously disturbing to people who aren’t ready for it. The early New York punk scene would have been a goldmine for psychologists who study social dysfunction. The scene was loaded with violence, heroin addiction, alcoholism, promiscuity, prostitution, and all around bad behavior. Some passages might make you feel grimy or nauseous. MC5, the band that played at the Democratic National Convention riots in Chicago 1968, find themselves in a riot when they try to play at the Fillmore East. Iggy Pop gets beat up continuously, loaded on drugs, sometimes falling off the stage, throwing bottles, raw meat and peanut butter at the audience, and going so far as to slice himself up with broken glass. The Ramones find each other because they are a bunch of complete weirdos. Johnny Thunders becomes the most notorious junky in rock history. Wayne County bludgeons Handsome Dick Manitoba with a microphone stand after some misunderstood friendly banter, breaking the Dictators’ lead singer’s collar bone and putting him in a wheel chair. Johnny Blitz of the Dead Boys almost dies after a brutal stabbing. James Chance assaults members of the audience during a concert and then cuts his face with a broken bottle when the bouncers try to throw him out. Stiv Bators one-ups Alice Cooper’s stage show by hanging himself with a noose, no props involved, during a Dead Boys show at CBGB’s. Nancy Spungen gets killed allegedly by Sid Vicious who soon after dies of a heroin overdose. Some luminaries of the scene, namely Tom Verlaine, Patti Smith, and Lou Reed don’t appear in such a favorable light by the end of the book either. Punk rock was a musical genre started by and for fuck ups. Like the porn industry, it attracted a lot of unstable people. But we’re still feeling the effects of it now.
Having said that, there is a lot of gallows humor in these pages as well. The Stooges use a picture of Elvis Presley as a target when they feel like shooting holes in the walls of their house. Sid Vicious uses water from a toilet full of vomit to shoot up amphetamines. Iggy Pop gets arrested while wearing a dress and then tells the guy who picks up at jail that it isn’t a woman’s dress, it is a man’s dress while the police laugh at him. Cheetah Chrome gets arrested after throwing an air conditioner out of a hotel room window, hitting a police car, and the police tell him to put his pants on not realizing that his flesh colored leotards actually are pants. A studio engineer gives Johnny Thunders a shirt because he feels sorry for him, thinking his ripped t-shirt means he is too poor to afford nice clothes. Sid Vicious meets a friend on the street outside the Chelsea Hotel; the friend says he is going to pick up a vacuum cleaner at a friend’s apartment and Sid Vicious thinks “vacuum cleaner” is New York slang for a bag of heroin and insists he wants to get a vacuum cleaner too. And so it goes on.
This book only scratches the surface though. McNeil and McCain select the most outrageous stories and elements of early punk. There are a lot of bands that go unmentioned and the second wave of hardcore punk is never brought up, nor is the corporate commercialization of punk in the 1990s, the pretentious and dull grunge scene and crappy MTV punk. Parallel scenes like new wave, no wave, post punk, and underground metal get almost no space here either.
Please Kill Me is a great book and a must read for anyone who is curious about the roots of the most dangerous and influential musical movement in history. I have heard a lot of talk these days about transgressive literature and art, but punks in the beginning were living a transgressive lifestyle, one that put their lives in danger on a daily basis. It was reckless abandonment and rock and roll excess taken to its extreme limits. It shouldn’t be a surprise that most of these people died before the age of thirty, and yet Iggy Pop, the biggest stooge of all Stooges, is still alive and thriving. I guess whatever didn’t kill him really did make hims stronger. And I still think it’s odd that he became a professional golfer. All of the bands mentioned in this book provided the soundtrack to my high school years and reading about the people who made the early punk scene a reality is truly mind-blowing for me. I can’t praise this book enough.
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