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PLEASE KILL ME: THE UNCENSORED ORAL HISTORY OF PUNK ROCK – BOOK REVIEW
©2024 BY BURT KEARNS
Long before he was regarded as the most influential visual artist of the twentieth century, Andy Warhol worshipped Marlon Brando. Brando was a movie star, a handsome, tough yet tender actor whose sexual activity with men as well as women was already rumored and confirmed by some among the gay crowd of 1950s Manhattan. Warhol was a pale, pockmarked, balding, insecure, yet very successful commercial illustrator and artist, but he loved sex, and he loved Marlon Brando … Read More
©2024 CHRIS ZAPPA
It’s no secret that in modern-day America, we are burdened with an endless list of recurring traumatic phenomena that, by any conventional standards, should be considered radically abnormal.
However, as is typical for survivors of sustained trauma, we find ourselves desensitized to the horrors we now collectively accept as part of daily life in this crumbling country, which, for better or worse, we have to call home. Take, as just one horrific example, the now daily occurrence of mass shootings … Read More
©2024 LEGS MCNEIL
Lou mined the depth and articulation of sheer desperation. Whether I was waiting for my drug dealer, or trying to get off during sex, or some other private weirdness I was too mortified to admit, Lou’d already been there, and he’d come back with a song. … Read More
©2023 LEGS MCNEIL
(Originally published on Graydon Carter’s AirMail)
I present “The Untold Story of the Little Rock Nine”— about nine Black high school students who were the first to integrate the whites-only Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, after the Supreme Court ruled in “Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka” in 1954 that segregating Black and white students was unconstitutional … Read more
©2024 RICK JOHNSON
Lenny Kaye & Friends – Live At The Cat’s Cradle – A 50th Anniversary Celebration of Nuggets is being released in limited quantities on vinyl only for Record Store Day on April 20th, 2024, with proceeds supporting the non-profit Shalom Project in Winston-Salem, NC! … Read More
©2024 LEGS MCNEIL
On the 100th Anniversary of Marlon Brando’s Birth (April 3rd, 2024), Burt Kearns Honors Our Greatest Actor with “Marlon Brando: Hollywood Rebel,” the Tale of an Artist in a Search of Meaning … Read More
“The Filth and the Respectability” by Legs McNeil
Published on Air Mail
NOFX singer Fat Mike Burkett originally wanted to open a punk-focused record store. “And the idea just grew,” he says.
Fat Mike Burkett—blue-haired, self-described submissive cross-dressing queer, lead singer of the punk-rock band NOFX, and co-author of the best-selling memoir The Hepatitis Bathtub—just added another title to his résumé: founder of the Punk Rock Museum, in Las Vegas.
ABOUT LEGS
Photo by: Burt Kearns
INTRODUCTION TO MY COURSE:
ZEN AND THE ART OF THE NARRATIVE ORAL HISTORY
Copyright August 2021 by Legs McNeil ©2021-2022 by Legs McNeil (Based on the techniques developed by Legs McNeil)
Too long has the Oral History format been thought of as the bastard child of literature; assumed to be a “cut and paste” job for hack writers looking to make an easy buck. In other words, the bottom of the prose barrel. But when the art of the narrative oral history is mastered, it can transform the written spoken word by primary subjects—people who were in the room when the event occurred—into actually experiencing the event being described, with all the human emotion, even more so than the traditional omnipotent narrator.
Photo by: Burt Kearns
Photo by: Tom Hearn
Photo by: Chris Stein
Photo by: Mitchell Kearney
Photo by: Roberta Bayley
Photo by: Dina Regine
Photo by: Tom Hearn
Photo by: Burt Kearns
Photo by: Bob Gruen
Photo by: Tom Hearn
On the 20-year anniversary of ‘Please Kill Me: An Uncensored Oral History of Punk,’ Legs tells Marc why they wrote it in the first place and why it still resonates two decades later.
Author Roderick “Legs” McNeil — whose 1996 book, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, documents Bowie’s wild early-Seventies New York period — reacts to Bowie’s passing.
Relive the golden days of punk with Legs McNeil in this exclusive article from the April, 1982 issue of High Times, which we’re republishing on the occasion of McNeil’s 65th birthday on January 27.
“Legs, you asshole,” I said. “I am not doing this story on you. I am not taking the responsibility for making you famous.”
Various articles on Vice.com featuring Legs McNeil
“The more we fear the future, the more we recycle the past.” Legs McNeil
At the age of 19, McNeil gathered with two high school friends and decided to create “some sort of media thing” for a living. The name “Punk” was decided upon because “it seemed to sum up…everything…obnoxious, smart but not pretentious, absurd, ironic, and things that appealed to the darker side”.
McNeil occupies the oxymoronic status as an underground icon, thanks in part to his role as co-founder of PUNK, the irreverent ‘70s magazine that chronicled the New York punk scene and popularized the term ‘punk.’
McNeil stated that he has left the pleasekillme.com website. He stated simply: “I’M NO LONGER ASSOCIATED WITH THE PLEASEKILLME.COM WEBSITE.” Later, he added that he will be starting a website and project called Legsville.
At the age of 18, disgusted with the hippie movement that seemed to be going nowhere, McNeil gathered with two high school friends, John Holmstrom and Ged Dunn, and decided to create “some sort of media thing” for a living.