2026 Book #15

"Please Kill Me" by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain

2026 Book #15: Please Kill Me (1996; revised 2016) by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain

What is punk rock? Why does punk exist?

This entertaining, sprawling oral history (more like “popular oral history,” by my definition: more on that later) takes those questions, and answers in a bit of a sneer: “More like ‘what WAS punk rock,’ lame-ass. If you weren’t there in New York in the 70s, well, you missed it.”

In other words, one of the implicit arguments of the book is that punk was a movement with a beginning (the circle around Andy Warhol in late 60s Manhattan, plus a couple of key places in Michigan: specifically, Detroit and Ann Arbor), a middle (CBGB’s on the Bowery, circa 1975-77), and an end (the book stumbles into the 80s a bit, and nods toward the 90s, but it’s clear that the authors think the music was no longer vital and the scene had largely consumed itself by then).

Well.

I’m no punk, and I never was confused for one, but the authors, by focusing on 1970s New York as not just the epicenter but apparently the whole sum and substance of punk, one of the most necessary and vital music breakthroughs of my lifetime, make the same mistake that other cultural historians make when they talk about “the 60s”: they forget that movements are like tidal waves. Tsunamis come FROM somewhere – an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, an asteroid, maybe even a missile explosion – but their impact spreads far and wide, and it takes awhile for the waves to spread out. By the time “the 60s” got to Middle America, it felt like they were kinda over in places like Berkeley or LA; by the time punk got to, say, Central Jersey, where I spent a fair bit of my time in the later part of high school at City Gardens, the punk venue in Trenton that was scuzzy and dangerous but a critical way station in the burgeoning punk ecosystem, it was the mid-to-late 80s, and while some of the original bands were long gone, there was a lot of life left in the genre. Local bands sprung up, sometimes for just a show or two; national bands toured through regularly, some on the way up, some on the way down, some just lifers who were trying to make a living and keep alive the music they loved. I saw dozens of punk artists at City Gardens or other places in the local music scene, places like VFW halls and the like; most of them were performers in “battle of the bands” or package shows featuring maybe a dozen bands, two or three songs each, thank you very much, and remember, no stage diving.

I remember the name of just one of those local bands, Road Kill, which was a Lawrence High/Princeton High band; I’d known three members for literally years (and was gobsmacked at what a couple of them had been up to when I was looking the other way). The one and only time I stood on stage to sing was when the Road Kill gang – and it’s a sad fact of old-dude memory that I can’t even remember if the band was spelled with one word or two, and I haven’t been able to find the tape they sold for five bucks, which featured their great song “Bank Holiday” (as well as their cover of the Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry,” which indicates that there was more going on here than just punk, but we move on) – hit the City Gardens stage as relative veterans of the scene, and were indulged by the staff when they pointed the fingers at their fans up front and invited them up to sing along on the chorus.

All of which is to say that I was on the fringes (I mean, fringe of the fringe, really – ask my friend Jesse Nover if you really want to hear what was up in punk in New Jersey and elsewhere in the 80s; my late friend Anne Mysiak was also up in New York all the time, and she would come back with tales of seeing Iggy Pop castigating the crowd and rolling around in broken glass, and I presume these were as true in 1986 as they were in 1972; basically, I’ve been trying to catch up to Anne and Jesse for almost four decades now and they still have me in their respective rear view mirrors), but even I knew that punk yet lived into the 80s and beyond. Ask Fugazi and the rest of the DC Dischord scene; ask Dinosaur Jr. and the rest of the New England scene; ask X and the rest of the LA scene; ask Hüsker Dü or the Replacements and the rest of the Minneapolis scene. Shit, ask Fishbone, those amazing freaks who blended punk’s in-your-face attitude with ska’s rhythms and melodies, mixed in some racial egalitarianism and all the best of the 80s hardcore rejection of Reagan-era policies, and pulled out a sound that was just incredible – if there was a better band than Fishbone from 1986-1992 or so, I dunno who that was. (And while we’re blending punk and other sounds, ask Billy Bragg about punk + folk, or Black 47 about punk + traditional Irish music.)

Not to mention that punk became global – certainly cross-Atlantic, anyway, with a critical punk scene that broke in England in the immediate aftermath of New York’s. Our authors and their interlocutors make pretty clear their belief that the UK punk scene wasn’t just later than, it was a watered-down version of, the real thing in New York. To hear them tell it, Malcom McLaren came to the US, picked up the New York Dolls as their manager in their waning moments, learned a few lessons about attitude and look, and then transferred that back to London, seeking out a bunch of Sex Pistols who would plug and play (in this version of the story, the Pistols are basically, I dunno, One Direction? Danity Kane? The Cheetah Girls?), which is an oversimplification and probably incorrect (and even if it’s more true than not, the Pistols’ impact was simply enormous). I don’t know if there’s an equivalent oral history of the UK punk scene – I bet not, but there’s been so much else written about it, and it’s been mythologized as much as the New York punk scene so I don’t need to speak up for it here. It’s fun to be reminded of just how much the US media flipped out over the Sex Pistols during their very-brief existence – Walter Cronkite was publicly baffled by the Pistols’ US tour, commenting with some aghast on kids with safety pins in their cheeks on the CBS Evening News, speaking there as always for Middle America (and my grandparents agreed); the New York Post basically made them front cover fixtures all the way through the Sid Vicious/Nancy Spungen horrors. Almost everyone in these pages thinks Sid didn’t kill Nancy, by the way; his OD death a few months later is one of the symbolic end points of the true Punk Era, with Patti Smith’s domestic retirement being the other; for whatever it’s worth, Occam’s Razor leads me to assume that Sid did indeed stab Nancy, but we’ll never know for sure.

One thing this volume implicitly argues is that punk, as originally conceived by people like Iggy Pop, the Ramones, the Dictators and the Dead Boys (among many, many others) was not directly political. Rejecting the hippie sounds of the 60s also meant rejecting the “change the world” message of the 60s. And yet, of course, all art is political, and there’s an underlying current here whereby the artists and the others who made up their scenes were attempting to create as well as destroy. What the original punks of the 70s were NOT was partisan: you could read this whole book, all 500 pages of it, and never once have an idea of who was in the White House (or Gracie Mansion), what the prevailing politics of the time were, and what the prevailing politics of the punks themselves were. There were a few of the early punks, including a key member of the original Stooges, who were drawn to Nazi iconography – arguing, mostly post facto, it appears, that this was more a thumb in the nose to the prevailing moral code than it was an embrace of the murder of 6 million Jews; this was a pretty lame excuse at the time, I’d have to say (I’m being charitable here; being less charitable, it pissed me off and shows one of the limitations of the oral history format, as there’s no sense that anybody, interviewers or others, pushed back on this Nazi crap), and all the more so by the time people were looking back on it in these interviews with the benefit of hindsight and after having had a few decades of telling the stories over and over again to have decided which version makes them feel most flattered. On the other hand were the punks (and proto-punks like the MC5) who were, thank goodness, engaged politically and on the side of good – I think here of the Clash (and Billy Bragg), but also many of the 80s punks whom the book elides completely. (When Kissinger died, my mental soundtrack for days and days was “Henry Kissmyassinger” by MDC, one of the many great ones on “Jess’s Bitchin’ Rad – But Eclectic – Hardcore Mix,” a tape that Jesse Nover made for me shortly before my family moved out of New Jersey, which I played the hell out of for years and would love to someday find again, almost as much as I dearly hope someday to unearth that Road Kill tape.)

You’d read this book, too, and assume that punk was pretty much just about guys – there are plenty of women in these pages, and many of them kept the punks alive, literally (and, in part because they were often the survivors, they later kept the stories alive), but the punk guys treated them terribly and there is a lot of simply awful behavior strewn throughout these pages. Also, did I miss some kind of law in the 1970s that musicians were only allowed to sleep with underage girls? Were women in their 20s and beyond kept away from downtown Manhattan by some municipal code passed under Abe Beame that I was unaware of? Ugh: these guys are going around with girls, literal girls, children. We hear from some of those girls looking back with at least a bit of fondness on their supposed glory days, but those are the survivors, the ones who with the benefit of hindsight still found something memorable or worthwhile in what they experienced in the scene; from what we’re seeing here, there must have been dozens, even hundreds more kids who were drawn like moths to the flame of the new sound and the dangerous guys in the spotlight, and then were burned or worse. Just because this was also true in the 50s (Jerry Lee Lewis at least got in trouble for marrying his 13-year-old cousin), the 60s (the Beatles, thank goodness, dated and married actual grown-up women, but the scenes around the Rolling Stones and the Doors were pretty creepy), and the 80s (talk to the surviving hair metal fans) and beyond doesn’t make it any less scummy.

There are exceptions in the “punk was a guy thing” theme as seen here: Debbie Harry, Patti Smith, plus Nico from punk’s progenitors, the Velvet Underground. (Side note: do we have to keep hearing that Patti Smith has a large chest? I mean, this is one of the key figures of the downtown scene, and there’s far more in here about her dating history and far less about who was in the room when she recorded Horses.) It’s not difficult to tell the story of punk otherwise, centering women and/or people outside the gender binary, but that’s not what the authors/collectors are up to here. They do nod to the way punk overlapped with Manhattan’s queer community, dating back to the Velvet Underground (Lou Reed’s lover and muse Rachel Humphreys being a key figure here). Coincidentally, trans and punk icon Jayne County (who is all over this book, and I am glad of that) is recently back in the news for defending the Kinks song “Lola” after Moby called it “unevolved,” and Moby is mostly wrong. (If he’d called the song “dated,” he would be maybe onto something, but it’s not a punk song so we’ll move on.)

The story of gender and punk continued to evolve, by the way: riot grrrl grew out of Tacoma, Washington and elsewhere in the late 80s (Kathleen Hanna literally calling the girls to the front of the room), but there were plenty of female-fronted punk bands when I was going to the shows at City Gardens and elsewhere, I promise you. Meanwhile, I follow Patti Smith’s Substack and she’s morphed into a kind of earth mother elder; I love her, but I can rarely bring myself to click on the videos where she reads Rimbaud aloud and talks about her residencies all over the world.

All the above caveats and boundary-pushing comments aside, what, then, is this book? Trained historians would tell you (and I am one, so I feel it’s incumbent upon me to wear that hat for a moment) that this is NOT oral history. This is what I call “popular oral history,” à la Studs Terkel’s many (very worthy) books, or Tom Shales’ memorable SNL book a quarter century ago. It’s a collection of snippets of interviews, edited together to create a narrative flow, to emphasize the most dynamic moments (and there are a lot of those), to give both sides of various controversies an opportunity to speak their piece (but to leave it up to the reader to decide, or to decide not to decide). Legs McNeil was there – he was one of the founders of Punk, the short-lived fanzine that gave the movement a name, that emphasized that this was a moment not just about music but also about attitude, about trash culture, about rejecting social niceties. He and co-author Gillian McCain sat down with hundreds of musicians, promoters, journalists, scenesters, and others, and then painstakingly sifted out and collaged together the best bits into this book. It’s a valuable service, and it’s often a lot of fun. It’s not oral history, though, which has all kinds of rules that aren’t being followed here. (I hope, at minimum, that the authors have kept all the tapes and will someday turn them over to an appropriate archive for safekeeping and later study – NYU’s Tamiment Library feels like one possibility.)

As I’ve emphasized already, this is a book about New York. Iggy and the Stooges, the MC5, and a few others of the key players, were woodshedding out in the cities of the heartland, but McNeil and McCain are telling a story about a scene that came of age in New York. “Why New York?” isn’t a question that’s really posed nor answered here, but it’s safe to assume that the answer in part is “because that’s where Andy Warhol’s Factory was.” I’m not sure I believe the Velvet Underground were punk rock – Lou Reed was critical to the image of the movement, but John Cale certainly wasn’t punk, nor Mo Tucker, nor Nico. (And by the mid-70s, Lou was touring live shows that were great, incredible, but not really punk at all, more of-the-moment guitar soloing that I love listening to, but his band sounds more like Television than Suicide at this point, and at times dangerously close to, I dunno, Bad Company?) Regardless, the DIY element of the Velvets’ music, their boundary-pushing lyrical topics, plus their in-your-face attitude, helped set the tone for what would follow, so I do not regret their inclusion in these pages.

Then there’s the drugs: oh lord, the drugs. Could punk have existed without all the drugs? Ian MacKaye down in DC a decade or so later gave it a try, reacting against the self-destructiveness of so many of the key players in the original punk story, many of whom didn’t make it out the other side – Johnny Thunders, for example, but he’s just one of many martyrs to the lifestyle. McNeil and McCain are clearly thrilled by all the drug stories here – and there’s a frisson to the most excessive of these stories, I’m not going to lie – but, and here I’m showing my own straight-edge prudery, a little goes a long way, and “a little” is not the way the punks were likely to go when it comes to getting high.

The title, by the way, comes not from a song lyric, but from a t-shirt that Richard Lloyd wore (or maybe he designed it, but Richard Hell wore it? I should have flagged the page and the book doesn’t have an index so I had to give up after flipping around for a few minutes). New York in the 70s was a tough place: the shirt, a bullseye design inviting homicidal intent, got a rise out of people, but also, it wasn’t the kind of thing you wore more than once. But it sums up the central punk moment pretty well: youthful bravado, snotty attitude, DIY design, a hint of danger, no regrets. The book is best read in chunks – it can be difficult to hold onto all the stories and the many individuals without plowing right through (and/or having a lot of knowledge about the whole scene already, which I thought I had, but I guess I was at least a little overconfident), but it’s also really a lot, one excess after another.

I was imagining handing this book to my 82-year-old mom (with whom I spent several days recently, including a very long car ride – and no, I did not play her the Spotify playlist associated with this book, from the very entertaining website that the authors kept going until it petered out not too long ago) and letting her open to any page at random to see if she could figure out what was going on; not only would she have shrieked and tossed it away almost immediately, but also, her frame of reference for the drug talk is essentially nil. And yet, my parents were rough contemporaries of Lou Reed, and were only about a decade older than, say, the Ramones. I can remember dinner table conversations at my grandparents’ house in the late 70s when my uncles and aunts were talking about Debbie Harry, debating her sound and her image (and her sex appeal; my youngest uncle went to college in 1976). This was in Verona, New Jersey; after dinner, we could take a short walk up to the cliffs and look out directly toward the Manhattan skyline. New York City was right there: punk was happening on those streets, in those clubs. (For what it’s worth, hip hop was, too, which we didn’t know anything about until later; so, also, was disco, which we did glom onto because it was crashing onto the pop charts and into the movie theaters with Saturday Night Fever, the soundtrack to which was in the record collection of every suburban baby boomer home.) Punk wasn’t for them; I guess you could make a case that it wasn’t for me, either (parachute me into New York in 1975 and send me to CBGB’s and everyone would assume I was a narc, or at least a poseur). But I think punk was for all of us. And I know that punk isn’t in the past tense, either.