Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil at the Ace Hotel. The book was for me what punk was for everyone who was involved in it: a way out.
I was someone else, I was somewhere else, amongst creative people who designed the lives they wanted to live which, at that point, I never felt I could do. Marks Church alongside music by Lenny Kaye, bringing the audience to its knees with her Rimbaud-inspired verses. I was listening to Patti Smith recite her poetry at St. Suddenly, with this book, I wasn't walking the halls of my high school, batting away mosquitoes in the dead of a humid South Florida October while crying about my grades yet again: I was on the sidewalk of legendary punk venue CBGB on the Bowery in New York, having a cigarette before I went back inside to see the Ramones play, where the bottom of Johnny's black leather jacket would inevitably crunch against his guitar. The book follows the lives and the deaths, the dreams and misfortunes, of the people who made the music (or were just around the music) that would, arguably, define a generation.įor the anal-retentive overachiever that I was, Please Kill Me became an escape. It starts in the mid-1960s with the birth of the Velvet Underground in New York, gives a taste of Detroit and the musicians who would become MC5 and the Stooges/Iggy Pop, then comes back to New York for the emergence of the New York Dolls, the Ramones, Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Television, and more. Legs McNeil-who I would find out was one of the founders of Punk magazine, from which the music genre got its name-and Gillian McCain, a New York-based poet, had assembled an oral history of the genre, interviewing hundreds of people involved in its development, from artists to photographers to band managers to groupies to, most importantly, musicians. Music nerd in training that I was, I did as I was bidden without question.Īnd so I entered the world of punk from its very beginning, told by the people who lived it.
"Go to the bookstore and get that book," he said. He wrote the words “Please Kill Me” on it and handed it to me. One of the clerks, Chris, ripped out a tiny slip of paper from behind the counter. I used to hang out at a record store in South Florida, where I'm from, and at one point the store clerks decided to take me under their wing. Please Kill Me made its way into my life 13 years ago, when I was 14. "Well, if this is your bible," he said, "then I must be God!" Easing his cigarette into his mouth, he took my withered and beloved book into his hands, and flipped open to the title page, pink pen poised at the ready. He laughed and flicked ash onto the sidewalk. "Your book is the closest thing I've ever had to a bible," I said when I walked up to him, shaking his hand. He did a reading at a gallery in the East Village and was standing outside afterward having a smoke, informally signing some books.
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