Punk Book Review

“Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk” by Legs McNeil and Gillian Anderson

The argument has been going on since the first Clash album as to who “started” punk rock.

The between-the-lines argument is just as old: US versus UK. Depending on who you ask, the music we anarchists(TM) cherish was born to the tradition of urban bohemia of Manhattan’s Lower East Side or on the trash-laden streets of King’s Road in London.

The brief on the New York side of the debate is ably given forth in Leg’s McNeil’s collection of interviews Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk Between the firsthand accounts of the Velvets, MC5, and the Stooges, and the salvo-after-salvo by various Heartbreakers, Dead Boys, and other hangers-on at the British spikers as a bunch of callow copycats, the argument is almost effortlessly made that punk is an American child of American music. For those of you wondering, McNeil was one of the founders of Punk magazine; he hung out with the people whose words he’s using, and if he has a score to settle with the redcoats, you may at least be sure he’s got the evidence to do it.

History may well end up coming down on the American side through sheer weight of fact. Whatever music was or wasn’t getting played in London in 1975, in 1965 no place on earth had a band as subversive as Velvet Underground (okay, maybe the Mysterians, but no one on the British side ever mentions them). And while John Lydon can argue as reasonably as he wants that the Pistols were in existence well before the Ramones 1976 UK tour, there’s no way he can possibly deny the debt his band owes to the Stooges.

The roots of punk on both sides of the pond were spreading and forming underground in the States in the late sixties and early seventies, in reaction to the British Invasion and the harder-edged hippie sounds coming out of California. McNeil is careful to document these elements into a satisfying whole.

To wit: we start with a prologue in which Lou Reed, Nico, John Cale, and various members of Andy Warhol’s factory scene describe the rise and near-miss of the Velvets, who lost their novelty when the Doors stole a march on them. After a quick chapter of anecdotes that delightfully piss on the God Jim Morisson, we cutaway to Detroit, where the nitro that will fuel the movement was just then being distilled. We discover that the Motor City Five were five greasers who thought the hippies had a great idea, and that James “Iggy Pop” Osterberg was once a straight-laced kid in loafers with a passion for blues drumming. Like VU before them, the Five and the Stooges almost conquer the rock world but are simply too raw for the mainstream to handle. They’ve sown well, however, and when we return to New York in 1971 we run into Patti Smith and a handful of guys who come upon the clever gimmick of playing simple three-chord Fifties style rock while wearing lipstick and glitter, known as the New York Dolls. Hilarity ensues.

What’s great about “Please Kill Me” is the almost-offhand way McNeil uses his plethora of sources to remind us of old myths before using other sources to tear them down. For example, the title of the book comes from a legendary T-shirt worn by Richard Hell of Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Only it turns out Hell never wore the shirt, his erstwhile Television band-mate Richard Lloyd did. It’s also interesting to find out that the band who made the scene at CBGB’s wasn’t the Ramones but Television, who was there at least five months before and playing to decent crowds.

Another reason to pick the book up is its cast of characters. Alongside the band members, managers, and critics are a host of fans and other scene-makers. Thus, not only is the book able to simultaneously tell us about the music and musicians from both perspectives, but you generally get to feel like you know what the scene was about, who was actually in CBGB’s on a regular night, and what was going on there. And the stories are truly classic.

Where the book engages in overkill is where it starts whining. Blame is squarely laid at the Sex Pistol’s feet for the failure of punk to really get inside the record industry. They imploded on tour in America just as the movement was really gathering steam, goes the theory, so the record companies just walked away from everyone in a black leather jacket. There may be some truth to that theory, at least in terms of the larger, LA-based companies, but anyone who reads the book thoroughly might conclude that there was another, more sinister culprit behind the collapse of the NY punk scene.

Say it with me: HER. O. IN.

Iggy couldn’t get enough of it, neither could Dee Dee, Stiv, or Hell. Johnny Thunders was so stuck on it that he became the Keith Richards of the scene, undeniable talent and unescapable joke. It was their wives and it was their lives. The music couldn’t survive because the men behind it couldn’t not live what they were singing about. And decadence, though fun, does not sustain. Besides, what the fuck do you think made the Pistols split up in the first place? Their smack-head replacement bassist, maybe?

I could complain about the way the book ends in 1992, and the way the epilogue seems to lose track of certain characters (like Cheetah Chrome) but hey, you can’t have everything. The punk revival of the 90’s will get its own history written soon enough. “Please Kill Me” remains a definitive account for those of us who would occasionally like to read a musical history of punk that doesn’t fill our head with secondhand observational anal-ysis, that recognizes the obvious fact that any musical movement is a bunch of musicians pushing a sound and an image, for whatever that’s worth. It’s not the complete history by any means, but it’s got the folk tales, and those are always more interesting anyway.

Buy Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (An Evergreen book) here!

Filed under: Punk History by admin