Michael Jandrok's Reviews > Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk

Sometime in the late 1960s, a bad mojo was beginning to well up within the ranks of the flower power movement. There were quite a few disaffected outsiders that seemed to have figured out that the revolution was not destined to last, that it was in fact quickly becoming a sham. As corporate America began to swallow and repackage the '60s, some of the folks left behind by the peace and love generation began to vent their anger and shape a new vision. Proto-punk bands like the MC5 and The Stooges started to build upon the foundation that had been laid by the Velvet Underground. Their music was raw and violent in its presentation, sonically threadbare and unpretentious. By the mid-1970s, a true scene began to happen in New York City that would serve to galvanize and give a true voice to this disaffected generation, a scene that would take its cues directly from the violent and sleazy underground that it dwelled in.

Co-author Legs McNeil was a founding member of the seminal fanzine that helped give the nascent scene its name and identity. "Punk" magazine was truly a groundbreaker, giving vital press to bands who would have otherwise gotten precious little exposure in the mainstream rock fanzines.

"Please Kill Me" covers New York punk from its birth in the mid-60s at Andy Warhol's Factory all the way to its eventual death in the late '70s, as corporate America once again begins to catch the wave and numerous members of the original first wave of punk begin to burn out from the excessive and dangerous lifestyles that they embraced. McNeil and co-author Gillian McCain present their material in the form of interviews with a vast number of the people who were there on the front lines, experiencing and inventing the punk scene as it developed. Johnny Thunders, Iggy Pop, Debbie Harry, The Ramones, Richard Hell, Danny Fields....they are all heard from here along with a host of groupies, drug dealers, hookers, agents and managers, club owners, and other scene hangers-on.

Overall, it's a great book, and the interview format really works well. The book is worth its price just on the strength of the Iggy stories alone, but there is a ton of great source material here covering a lot of ground. it's a weighty tome at 500+ pages, but it reads fast and the stories never drag. I might have wished for a slightly larger photo section, but that's a minor gripe at best.

Readers must make note that this book covers primarily the development of 1970s-era New York punk, with a side detour to England to witness the birth of the Sex Pistols and British punk. Punk did indeed die at the end of the '70s, and it has of course been resurrected and reinvented by succeeding generations. But if you want to know where the whole thing began, you have to get this book.

Coda: I pulled this out to reread it after I had recently made my way through Mickey Leigh’s “I Slept With Joey Ramone.” The distillation of New York punk rock is made crystal clear in these interviews. That so many subcultures could coalesce to create the movement was a small miracle in and of itself. The music itself was almost secondary to the boiling vat of street poets and posers and prostitutes and junk dealers (and users) that populate these pages. Add to that stew the burgeoning LGBT movement and it was the perfect setup for raw, uncompromising, real music made at ground level. The stuff that came later, like hardcore and crossover and grunge…...all of that owes a debt to these misfits that dared to compose a musical statement of what their lives were really like. Don’t get me wrong, I love a ton of the music and artists that came after….but this was the true genesis, the bedrock foundation from which sprang all manner of wayward spawn. This is one of the few truly essential books on punk rock that you should own if you have any interest at all in the subject. Tell ‘em that Iggy sent ya.