Book 49 - Legs McNeil "Please Kill Me"

[jazzy_dave]

Legs McNeil "Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk" (Grove Press)





In Please Kill Me, interviews with over 100 musicians, promoters, artists, and groupies overlap each other to paint a graphic picture of the punk movement in the U.S., from the rise of The Velvet Underground at Andy Warhol’s Factory in the early ‘70s to the fall of Dee Dee Ramone from The Ramones in the late ‘80s. Along the way, inhuman amounts of drugs are ingested, everyone has sex with everyone else, and some amazing music gets created and played—and largely ignored by the general public.

It was hard to find anyone likeable in the pages of Please Kill Me—most of them came off as sexist, racist, self-absorbed, self-destructive asses—and I was often flat-out horrified at what these people did to themselves and each other. If even a tenth of what they said is true (and I think everything related in the book needs to be taken with a grain of salt), it’s not the high number of early deaths that come as any surprise, but that people like Iggy Pop and Richard Hell are still alive.

Please Kill Me is fascinating and disturbing. It’s hard to look away. While I would recommend it to anyone interested in the punk movement and the ‘70s underground scene in New York, be prepared to see your idols shattered. In a warts-and-all portrait, this book is mostly warts.