Home2024-03-27T21:25:32+00:00

WELCOME TO LEGSVILLE

YOU’RE INVITED TO BECOME A PERMANENT RESIDENT OF LEGSVILLE, TO EXPLORE EVERYTHING ARTISTIC AND FASHIONABLE AND LITERARY AND GLAMOROUS AND VISUALLY EXCITING, AND WHAT’S GREAT AND WHAT SUCKS, AND WHERE ONLY BORING MUSIC, BORING ART, AND BORING WRITING IS FORBIDDEN!

GET YOUR PASSPORT TO LEGSVILLE:

©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

©2024 LEGS MCNEIL

On the 61st Anniversary of The Beatles coming to America on February 7, 1964, in Pan Am Yankee Clipper flight 101 from London’s Heathrow Airport, landing at New York’s Kennedy Airport to play The Ed Sullivan Show– we present the oral history of the event that changed the world. But if it wasn’t for Jane Asher, and her eccentric family’s home on Wimpole Street, where Paul McCartney lived for years, and John and Paul wrote many of their early hit records, the story might have had a different beginning … Read More

©2024 BY PAULINA SUBIA

In a eulogy she wrote for The New Yorker, in the days following Verlaine’s passing on January 28, 2023, Smith recalls meeting him in 1973 and going to an early Television gig: “As I watched Tom play, I thought, Had I been a boy, I would’ve been him.” Their relationship became a legend in rock history, constant companions through fame, loss, and everything in between. … Read More

FROM THEPARISREVIEW.ORG

Originally Published on The Paris Review By Paula Mejia May 12, 2017

On Jean Stein’s greatest legacy, the narrative oral history.

“McNeil, a “former resident punk at Punk Magazine,” had lived through the movement and knew many of the personalities central to punk’s story—an advantage when he and McCain started work on Please Kill Me Read More

FROM THEPARISREVIEW.ORG

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 … 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
LEGS MCNEIL IS THE GUY WHO NAMED A MOVEMENT, AND THEN TOLD THE TRUE STORY OF HOW THAT MOVEMENT CAME TO BE IN PLEASE KILL ME; THE UNCENSORED ORAL HISTORY OF PUNK, AMONG SEVERAL OTHER BOOKS.

Photo by: Burt Kearns

APPLY FOR YOUR VISA AND ENJOY YOUR VACATION TO LEGSVILLE!

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.

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.

Title

Go to Top