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©2023 By Zach Selwyn
I moved to Hollywood in 1997 and was quickly initiated into the music scene, which at the time was hanging by a thread to a lost rock & roll dream that grunge had laid waste to a mere six years earlier. The glitz and glam of Sunset Boulevard had moved east – away from Gazzarri’s and their tasteless “hot body bikini contests” to more turtleneck and ponytailed nightclubs like the Roxbury, where cocaine became less of a party drug and more of a designer hangover from the 1980’s. (Yes, the Will Ferrell-Chris Kattan sketch was based on a real place) … Read More
©2023 BY PAULINA SUBIA
“I like to be worshiped,” Richard Hell declares in “Love Letters,” one of the first poems featured in his latest offering, What Just Happened (Winter Editions, 2023). The collection comprises new poems—his first in decades—followed by “Falling Asleep,” a morbidly driven essay written with a hint of optimism, and “Chronicle,” a list of musings from Hell’s notebooks kept in recent years. The concept of worship coupled with a punk ethos poses an intriguing juxtaposition, going against the popularized “no gods, no masters” ideology that defined the early stages of punk in the 1970s. But this contrast is precisely what makes Hell’s work, and his place in the pantheon of punk culture, so appealing. … Read More
©2023 LEGSVILLE.COM
Cheetah Chrome, guitarist and songwriter for punk originals the Dead Boys, is alive and on the road with a new version of the iconic band. Legs talks to his old buddy about the good old days at CBGB, Dead Boys, dead friends, and life as punk survivor … Watch Video
“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.