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With Please Kill Me: An uncensored oral history of punk, Legs McNeil, co-founder and editor of Punk magazine, which began in 1974, and Gillian McCain of the Poetry Project New York, have created a valuable historical record of one of the last American countercultural scenes, the invention and flowering of “punk rock” in New York City at the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies. I've been trying to find a used copy somewhere in Denver for years, and only just succeeded at Kilgore Books' one year anniversary event.
Punk rock is widely miscast as a British import. Some modern fans may not realize the scene only got going in England after a visit by the Ramones. America started with Andy Warhol’s Velvet Underground in 1968, the MC5 and the Stooges in Detroit, or early glitter with the New York Dolls in the Apple, after which acts like The Dictators, The Ramones, Television, and The Dead Boys appeared regularly in New York City in clubs like Max's Kansas City and CBGB's throughout the seventies.
The Sex Pistols only toured America once in 1978, and broke up at the end of the tour, but are still thought of as the archetypal punk band, possibly because of Sex Pistol bassist Sid Vicious’ hard-to-forget apparent murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen in 1978. The paradoxical movement has staying power. Since punk’s fade from the headlines, many splinter affiliations like New Wave, Hardcore, Grunge, Anti-folk, Taqwacore and even "punk poetry" have come about because of its influence.
Continually shifting voice and perspective from interviews with the principals and quotes from band-members, managers and hangers-on, Please Kill Me reads like a documentary, provides all the sex, drugs and violence you might expect along with an practical, humanist stance on the characters involved in these escapades. The first wave of punk was dead by the end of the 70's, and has since been resurrected and reinvented by succeeding generations. To hear how the whole thing began, read this book.
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