Though Britain's notorious Sex Pistols shoved punk rock into the face of mainstream America, the movement was already brewing in the U.S. in the 1960s with bands like the Velvet Underground and Iggy and the Stooges. Through hundreds of interviews with forgotten bands as well as the ones that made names for themselves--including Blondie and the Ramones--Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain chronicle punk rock history through the people who really lived it. Please Kill Me is a thrash down memory lane for those hip to punk's early years and an enlightening history lesson for youngsters interested in the origins of modern "alternative" music.


From Publishers Weekly
As its sensationalist title suggests, this stresses the sex, drugs, morbidity and celebrity culture of punk at the expense of the music. Starting out with the electroshock therapy Lou Reed received as a teenager, working through such watersheds as the untimely deaths by overdose or mishap of Sid Vicious, Johnny Thunders and Nico, as well as the complicated sexual escapades of the likes of Dee Dee Ramone, the portrayal here of the birth of an alternative culture is intermittently entertaining and often depressing. McNeil, one of the founding writers of the original 'zine, Punk, in 1975 , is certainly qualified to tell this tale. But the book's take on punk rock as "doing anything that's gonna offend a grown-up" overemphasizes the self-destructive side of the movement. Details of Iggy Pop's drug abuse and seedy sex with groupies receive more attention than important bands such as Television and Blondie, which had comparatively puritan lifestyles. Constructed as an oral history, the book weaves together personal accounts by the crucial players in the scene, many of whom seem to have been so drugged out most of the time that their reliability is questionable. McNeil and McCain (Tilt) provide a vivid look at the volatile and needy personalities who created punk, if they do not offer perceptive musical or cultural analysis. Photos. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Imagine one of those on-line "chat rooms" filled with the aging movers and shakers of American punk rock?former members of the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, the New York Dolls, the Ramones, and others?as well as assorted hangers-on, all reminiscing about the glory days of punk. Denizens remember when downtown Manhattan was the epicenter of a musical and cultural earthquake whose aftershocks are still felt long after its initial impact. The stories told by these musicians and scenesters trace the history of punk from its earliest incarnations in the late Sixties, through its appropriation by British imitators in the Seventies, and ending just before its stylistic balkanization and quick decline in the early Eighties. Unfortunately, this oral history depends almost entirely on voices from Detroit and a small core of New York bands, ignoring the important scenes in Los Angeles, Boston, and Cleveland. Numerous behind-the-scenes anecdotes make this book undeniably fun reading. But the lack of any index, bibliography, discography, or overarching narrative context keeps it from being much more than that. Not an essential purchase, but worth considering for larger collections. (Photos not seen.)?Rick Anderson, Penacook, N.H.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Punk rock, known to most people through the notoriety of England's Sex Pistols, began in America in the '60s with bands like the Velvet Underground and Iggy and the Stooges. McNeil and McCain chronicle punk rock history through hundreds of interviews with the people who really lived it, the streetwise ex-hippies disgusted with corporate/stadium rock and disco who reinvented rock and roll by making the old new again. The authors have interviewed members of short-lived, forgotten bands like the Dictators, Television, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, and Johnny Thunder's Heartbreakers, as well as the bands that made it big: the Ramones, Blondie, and the Patti Smith Group. There are some great stories, too, about the origins of glitter and the ripped T-shirt, Iggy Pop's proclivity for taking off his clothes, bar fights, groupie sex, inflated egos, drugs, drugs, and more drugs, and the deaths. For the uninitiated, the authors provide brief bios of the 220-member cast of characters. David Siegfried


From Kirkus Reviews
Punk's chaotic energy and revolutionary spirit come through vividly in this mesmerizing account of American punk. For instance, Kathy Asheton notes, ``I remember the day of his [Iggy Pop's] wedding because that was the day Iggy and I started our romantic relationship.'' Legions of groupies and other American punk scene denizens are similarly heard from here, as are central figures, including Iggy, Richard Hell, Malcolm McLaren, and members of the Velvet Underground, the Patti Smith Group, et al. During the heyday of hippiedom, the Velvets, the Stooges, and the MC5 distinguished themselves by their refusal to have any part of the peace-and-love agenda. Their unromanticized visions of boredom, violence, drug use, and weird sex had little commercial appeal. But the Velvets' Lou Reed and especially the Stooges' drug-crazed Iggy Pop became icons for a generation of disaffected kids who identified with the impulse to roll around shirtless in broken glass while howling ``I Wanna Be Your Dog.'' In the early '70s the New York Dolls continued the tradition, combining goofy glamour and short, fast songs; the overdose death of the Dolls' first drummer cemented narcotics abuse as a central feature of the punk life. Authors McNeil, one of Punk magazine's founders, and McCain, a former promoter of downtown New York poetry readings, definitively assert punk's all-American origins; British impresario Malcolm McLaren tells here how he molded the Sex Pistols after patterns set by the Dolls and Richard Hell. Despite the astonishing prevalence of drug addiction, the New York bands and scene-makers of the mid-'70s, led by the Ramones, had splendid instincts for music and style, and most subsequent pop culture is to some degree indebted to them. An essential accompaniment to the first, still-thrilling punk records, this preposterously entertaining document just reeks with all the brilliance and filth of the Blank Generation. (illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk is the one story about the 1970s and the Blank Generation that has never before been told. Chronicling the birth of what we now call punk, from Andy Warhol's Factory to Max's Kansas City and CBGB's in the 1960s and 1970s, and on to the UK in the 1980s, authors Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain deliver the explosive story of America's most misunderstood pop phenomenon. Seamlessly constructed from a chorus of voices, Please Kill Me is oral history with all the narrative drive and excitement of a novel. In hundreds of interviews with all of the original players, including Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Dee Dee and Joey Ramone, Debbie Harry, Nico, Wayne Kramer, Danny Fields, Richard Hell, and Malcolm McLaren, we go backstage and behind apartment doors to relive what started in New York's underbelly as an exclusive art scene and became a truly revolutionary moment in music. Please Kill Me begins when CBGB's and the Bowery were a veritable no-man's-land: relives the heyday of the Velvet Underground, the Ramones, the MC5, the Stooges, the New York Dolls, Television, and the Patti Smith Group; and explores punk's demise - when it became front-page news and a new trend for latecomers.

FROM THE CRITICS

James Marcus

In Please Kill Me, Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain track the rise and fall of American punk, from its late-'60s roots to its Reagan-era demise. We hear from all the usual suspects -- including John Cale, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Richard Hell and the Ramones -- as well as a vast constellation of fringe figures, who mostly document the sex lives and substance-abuse patterns of the stars.

Not surprisingly, many of the participants are nostalgic for the golden age of 1975. But others, like Dee Dee Ramone, have long since exhausted their patience with "the little-boy look, the bowl haircut and the motorcycle jacket" (which McNeil himself seems to favor to this very day). By the end of the book it's hard not to share Dee Dee's feelings, and to wonder whether the authors haven't expended 100 pages too many on this particular cultural moment.

Still, Please Kill Me often makes for hilarious reading. Its loony pile-up of detail does manage to catch the jolting energy of the period. And Danny Fields' description of the rapport between pre-punk titans Jim Morrison and Nico is worth the price of admission, even as it serves as a corrective to mythomaniacs like Oliver Stone: "They were both too poetic to say anything. It was a very boring, poetic, silent thing that was going on between them. They formed a mystical bond immediately -- I think Morrison pulled Nico's hair and then he proceeded to get extremely drunk and I fed him whatever was left of my drugs that Edie Sedgwick hadn't stolen." -- Salon

Publishers Weekly

As its sensationalist title suggests, this stresses the sex, drugs, morbidity and celebrity culture of punk at the expense of the music. Starting out with the electroshock therapy Lou Reed received as a teenager, working through such watersheds as the untimely deaths by overdose or mishap of Sid Vicious, Johnny Thunders and Nico, as well as the complicated sexual escapades of the likes of Dee Dee Ramone, the portrayal here of the birth of an alternative culture is intermittently entertaining and often depressing. McNeil, one of the founding writers of the original 'zine, Punk, in 1975 , is certainly qualified to tell this tale. But the book's take on punk rock as "doing anything that's gonna offend a grown-up" overemphasizes the self-destructive side of the movement. Details of Iggy Pop's drug abuse and seedy sex with groupies receive more attention than important bands such as Television and Blondie, which had comparatively puritan lifestyles. Constructed as an oral history, the book weaves together personal accounts by the crucial players in the scene, many of whom seem to have been so drugged out most of the time that their reliability is questionable. McNeil and McCain (Tilt) provide a vivid look at the volatile and needy personalities who created punk, if they do not offer perceptive musical or cultural analysis. Photos. (July)

Library Journal

Imagine one of those on-line "chat rooms" filled with the aging movers and shakers of American punk rock-former members of the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, the New York Dolls, the Ramones, and others-as well as assorted hangers-on, all reminiscing about the glory days of punk. Denizens remember when downtown Manhattan was the epicenter of a musical and cultural earthquake whose aftershocks are still felt long after its initial impact. The stories told by these musicians and scenesters trace the history of punk from its earliest incarnations in the late Sixties, through its appropriation by British imitators in the Seventies, and ending just before its stylistic balkanization and quick decline in the early Eighties. Unfortunately, this oral history depends almost entirely on voices from Detroit and a small core of New York bands, ignoring the important scenes in Los Angeles, Boston, and Cleveland. Numerous behind-the-scenes anecdotes make this book undeniably fun reading. But the lack of any index, bibliography, discography, or overarching narrative context keeps it from being much more than that. Not an essential purchase, but worth considering for larger collections. (Photos not seen.)-Rick Anderson, Penacook, N.H.

Kirkus Reviews

Punk's chaotic energy and revolutionary spirit come through vividly in this mesmerizing account of American punk.

For instance, Kathy Asheton notes, "I remember the day of his [Iggy Pop's] wedding because that was the day Iggy and I started our romantic relationship." Legions of groupies and other American punk scene denizens are similarly heard from here, as are central figures, including Iggy, Richard Hell, Malcolm McLaren, and members of the Velvet Underground, the Patti Smith Group, et al. During the heyday of hippiedom, the Velvets, the Stooges, and the MC5 distinguished themselves by their refusal to have any part of the peace-and-love agenda. Their unromanticized visions of boredom, violence, drug use, and weird sex had little commercial appeal. But the Velvets' Lou Reed and especially the Stooges' drug-crazed Iggy Pop became icons for a generation of disaffected kids who identified with the impulse to roll around shirtless in broken glass while howling "I Wanna Be Your Dog." In the early '70s the New York Dolls continued the tradition, combining goofy glamour and short, fast songs; the overdose death of the Dolls' first drummer cemented narcotics abuse as a central feature of the punk life. Authors McNeil, one of Punk magazine's founders, and McCain, a former promoter of downtown New York poetry readings, definitively assert punk's all-American origins; British impresario Malcolm McLaren tells here how he molded the Sex Pistols after patterns set by the Dolls and Richard Hell. Despite the astonishing prevalence of drug addiction, the New York bands and scene-makers of the mid-'70s, led by the Ramones, had splendid instincts for music and style, and most subsequent pop culture is to some degree indebted to them.

An essential accompaniment to the first, still-thrilling punk records, this preposterously entertaining document just reeks with all the brilliance and filth of the Blank Generation.