Arturo Vega: I always thought the ONLY way to really conquer evil is to make love to it. My favourite dream is always the one where I face the devil. I'm in the nude and the devil appears, and he is a beautiful blue. He looks like a mannequin, he looks like a robot. He doesn't have any clothes on, of course, and he's blue and shiny. I keep hearing voices that say, "It's him! It's him!" And I go, "Okay." The PKM Ebook edition features an expanded and updated photo gallery, and features a new cover with a classic photo of Iggy and the Stooges, photographed by Danny Fields. Lee was an extraordinary person. She never capitalized on her involvement with the Beatniks. She had no interest in having her fifteen minutes of fame. I think we created a world," McNeil says. Because there's nothing punk about a dawdling, boring history. "We didn't want the book to be about punk, we wanted the book to be punk," he says. "There's a difference, you know? And that was really important. We didn't want to do, like, "The punk scene started in…" It's just like, 'we're just gonna hang out in front of Discount Records spitting on cars.'" Everyone feels so close and their experiences are so vibrant that you feel like you're living them, too. It's a wonderful place to get lost if you're looking to escape your own life for a while.

Sound good? Kind of. But a few major gripes here. This book, first and foremost should be about the history of NEW YORK punk. Or "people Legs McNeil was friends with." It is embarrassing that the Talking Heads were completely excluded from this because the writers thought that they were "yuppies." How you can talk about Blondie, Television and Patti Smith and completely leave out David Byrne (for better or worse) to me seems ludicrous. It's the same with the British movement. Malcolm Mclaran is of course given his due here but the raging prejudice put against the UK bands ("The Damned were posers! The Clash didn't know what they were talking about!") seems more like territorial squabbling than actual criticism. Little did I realize that the punk movement started as early as 1968 with the Velvet Underground and amphetamine usage. Thus begins Please Kill Me, a compilation of interviews with some of the most influential talent in the industry and on the streets through the early 90s. Photos throughout urn:oclc:5171972 Republisher_date 20140403111800 Republisher_operator [email protected];[email protected];[email protected] Scandate 20140219015812 Scanner scribe2.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Worldcat (source edition)So why isn't Legs McNeil proud of blazing a trail for this new wave of 21st century oral histories? Everyone was on drugs. How did punk even get started? I mean really, it amazes me that punk even remotely got off it's feet, everyone was so messed up. It wasn't easy, because we started interviewing people from ['60s garage band] ? and the Mysterians," says McCain. "So we weren't sure we weren't going to go that avenue, but it ended up we didn't. There's so many garage bands. And the people around the Velvet Underground were in the narrative later, so they were part of this intertwining—with Iggy, and Lou on the cover of Punk magazine. But with the garage bands, there was no interconnectedness." Drugs, drugs, drugs. Sex, sex, sex. Violence and vomit and just a little bit of music. Virtually no analysis and not much beyond "first we did this, and then we did this, and then we went there, and we were so stoned, man." The Sex Pistols were afraid to meet the Ramones after their show in England because they thought they would beat them up.

McCain, on the same phone call, is more diplomatic. "When I look at just the punk books that have come out as oral histories, not even oral history music books, I think there's a hundred, literally. It's just unbelievable," she says. "So Legs may not be proud that we were the trailblazers, but I am." There’s nothing like the impact of hearing an outrageous story from someone who experienced it firsthand. That’s why Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain wanted to publish an oral history of the Manson Family murders and the late Sixties. “It’s people making bad decisions in real time,” McNeil says. For more than 20 years, the duo has been working on 69, the follow-up to Please Kill Me, their 1996 definitive history of the New York punk scene. They’re almost done, they swear. Porównanie tych dwóch prawd – prawdy, którą Patti Smith napisała o sobie w „Poniedziałkowych dzieciach” i prawdy opowiedzianej o niej przez jej znajomych – jest szczególnie interesujące. Jakbyśmy oglądali dwie zupełnie inne osoby. Jakbyśmy czytali o dwóch różnych światach. McNeil's stance may sound like punk posturing, but actually the pair adhered to some strict rules while doing Please Kill Me that later imitators have often ignored, usually to their detriment. McNeil: I don’t think it really mattered who was there. Charlie was just getting so frustrated and so unhappy, he just wanted people to go out and kill people.But at the same time, I don't want anyone to shy away from this book just because they're worried they won't recognize all of the famous names. In fact, it would almost be more fun to go into this knowing nothing about the punk movement in America, because the book is really that masterful - even if I started out not knowing who, say, Danny Fields was, the characters all drift in and out of the narrative that the editors weave, and everyone is so memorable it's not too hard to keep the huge cast of characters straight in your head.

McCain: Pretty much up until that it was a real family commune. And it wasn’t a big sex thing. It was mainly the women had [such deep] friendships. To be fair, I prompted the inscription. 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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I know, I know. It's not really fair to go there, but man is this book a real piece of work. I mean, it starts off pretty cool, and has some interesting stories from time to time. It just gets old and depressing when well over half the book is just variations on how trashed so and so was and what stupid thing they did because of it. It's like reliving every inane conversation I've ever had with my old college roommates or the people I hung out with in my early to mid twenties. There is a reason I don't have those conversations anymore. These bands, except Patti Smith, were men, and were self-destructive. Their behavior was off the charts, but most were extremely artistic. How they attracted so many women in such a decrepit state is beyond me. I guess like attracts like. Please Kill Me made its way into my life 13 years ago, when I was 14. 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. One of the clerks, Chris, ripped out a tiny slip of paper from behind the counter. He wrote the words “Please Kill Me” on it and handed it to me. "Go to the bookstore and get that book," he said. Music nerd in training that I was, I did as I was bidden without question. Alene had clear plans to use her intellect and revered physical beauty to become an individual. This additional excerpt from “Sisters” reveals her desire to form her own identity, free from societal constraints.

McNeil: I do think he was very charismatic, and if you take 16, 17, 18-year-old kids and you give them a lot of acid, you can convince them of anything. Alene Lee’s electric persona and intelligence was undeniable. In her 2010 essay, Alene’s daughter, Christina Diamente, quotes Lucien Carr, the man whom her mother was romantic partners with for eleven years. “When I was given an IQ test, I scored 155, but I consider Alene to be smarter than I am. She is the most intelligent woman I know.” Allen Ginsberg is also quoted as saying, “Alene was a peer, and we [Kerouac, Burroughs, and Carr] considered her an equal.” 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". Holstrom wanted to call it "Teenage News Gazette" to which Ged said, "Absolutely not." The name Punk was McNeil's idea; Dunn agreed to it instantly, Holmstrom rather reluctantly. Fifty years ago, followers of hippie cult leader Charles Manson shot, bludgeoned and stabbed to death five people, including pregnant actress Sharon Tate, in a seemingly random home invasion in the Hollywood Hills. A second night of murders followed. Alene has often been wrongly labeled a mere “groupie” to the Beat writers, having provided the persona and wit that directly inspired seminal pieces of Beat writing. She was present, active, and not a mere bystander to the machismo-soaked sexuality of that group. Her daughter has a private archive of Alene Lee’s unpublished writing, and has mentioned that Grove Press editor, Fred Jordan, dissuaded Lee from pursuing any further writing during her lifetime because her subject matter was not, “ commercially viable.”

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Everyone involved in the early American punk scene was one big incestuous relationship. Everyone had sex with everyone else at one point or another. Male, female, transsexuals, johns, etc.