The Agenda

Ten Years Later

by Ika Johannesson

The Bible of Punk turns ten. Time to talk about Please Kill Me again, one of the best books on music ever written. The Agenda sent their Swede down to New York to hang out.

It’s Halloween and I’m spending it with three punk rock veterans: Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, authors of Please Kill Me, and Danny Fields—legendary scenester, the Ramones manager who got the MC5 and the Stooges their recording contracts, and main voice in the book. Well, four actually, since Gillian McCain is married to Jim “The Hound” Marshall, a DJ and bar owner who is also interviewed in the book.

We’re on the stoop of McCain and Marshall’s giant townhouse in Chelsea and all geared up for the invasion of monsters, superheroes and little girls dressed like older girls. There’s a big bucket of candy, filled with eyeglobes made of chocolate, bloodied marshmallow fingers and other horrible goodies, more scary due to chemical content than shape.

“I just got back from Tokyo where I’m doing an exhibition, and the kids are walking around with Please Kill Me under their arms—like a status symbol. They can’t even read it! It was a very odd experience,” says Danny Fields and passes out some candy to Darth Vader who walks by on the street.

A few weeks ago Please Kill Me was re-released in a tenth anniversary edition. In those years it’s become one of the most important and poignant books about a cultural movement. It’s a book about music, but without the music. Who cares about the music? Everyone’s already heard it, no need to read about it. Instead the book is centered on juicy gossip, decadence and the plain history of how the punk scene in New York developed. So what better way to talk to McNeil, McCain and Fields than to do it just the way they did it?

Who cares about the music? Everyone’s already heard it, no need to read about it.Legs: DeeDee Ramone approached me and he had this manuscript for an autobiography. I said, why don’t we do this as an oral history, like the Edie Sedgwick book? But you know, DeeDee was a little bit wack. We parted ways amicably and I just continued interviewing people. I would do Danny Fields once a week and it was just so funny. I’d show the transcripts to Gillian and she started circling the funniest parts with a purple highlighter.

Gillian: And then I’d do exclamation marks.

Legs: We went out for about ten minutes and then we became best friends in the world. Eventually I asked her to do the book with me. We kind of knew that we wanted to do the CBGB’s scene, but we didn’t really know the whole history of the Stooges and Velvet Underground so we had to work backwards and forwards at the same time. We kind of started in the middle.

Gillian: We didn’t know where we were gonna end up. We had no idea that we were gonna get into the Theatre of the Ridiculous, for example.

Danny: They didn’t know DeeDee Ramone would kill himself because of this book.

Gillian: Oh, Danny!

Danny: Give me your email honey, and I’ll tell you all about it.

Legs: I saw him two months before he died and he was still complaining about the book. Mickey Leigh says that he saw DeeDee at 53rd and 3rd, which is a corner of male prostitution. And I think he was still upset.

Danny: That his teenage wife would find out that he had been a male prostitute!

Gillian: People really opened up to us. Especially people who never had a chance to speak before because someone else in the band would be interviewed instead. They’ve always got the best stories.

Legs: See, the stars never have the best stories because everyone’s looking at them. They don’t remember anything. That’s why Mick Jagger had to give the money back for his biography because he couldn’t remember anything. He got like three million. The people around the stars are gonna tell you the most outrageous stuff in the world. When we talked to Iggy I went out to smoke, because we already had him. We only needed him to fill in the blanks.

Gillian: In his own words. We were asking him about Nico and he was really forthcoming and thoughtful. He was a great interview.

As you get older everything is motivated by money, as it should be.Danny: This was in 1991 and a lot of the friction was gone. The bands were no longer in competition with each other. It was easier to just relax. “Oh, play the god damn Richard Hell song, we don’t hate him anymore.” Passage of time softens the stories that are usually motivated by sex and envy in the early years. As you get older everything is motivated by money, as it should be.

Jim: And what can you possibly say about Lou Reed that hasn’t been said already?

Legs: Yeah, exactly.

Jim: But few people are as articulate as Scotty Asheton.

Legs: He had a crush on Gillian.

Gillian: Aw, just because I asked about his dog once.

Legs: We worked on the book full time for four years. We had two transcribers coming in every day and one that came in at night.

Gillian: Do you wanna order something from the diner?

Legs: Are you hungry, Danny?

Danny: No, I’m on speed.

Legs: Adderall?

Danny: Yeah.

Legs: Awriiiight! Danny’s always wicked on speed, yeah.

Gillian: We were almost finished with the book when we went to publishers. Three major publishing houses were interested and we chose Grove.

John Waters doesn’t give quotes, but he started calling all of his friends and reading the book to them.Legs: We were supposed to get two or three months off before the book came out. What happened was, they got some advance copies, what they call galleys, to send out to get quotes. And they sent one to John Waters. This is what did it, did you hear this? John Waters doesn’t give quotes, but he started calling all of his friends and reading the book to them. Suddenly my phone started ringing with people saying “John Waters has a book, where is my book?”. And I didn’t even have a book! It was just like, oh my God. I literally couldn’t get off the phone.

Gillian: But the wild thing was when you were sitting at Café Mogador and you saw that car pull up to an apartment building. And a guy just ran down from the tenement, handed the galley to the guy in the car and it sped off!

A guy just ran down from the tenement, handed the galley to the guy in the car and it sped off!Legs: That was amazing. We didn’t think the book would ever sell, because none of these groups ever sold any records, you know. But I think punk is the last time any white people in America did something interesting. Black people did rap, you know. I think punk is the last truly authentic scene and it’s become a rite of passage—when kids in America become teenagers, a lot of them seem to become punks. They play in their garage and they have their own punk scene around the neighborhood. Also, when everyone dies, it’s safer. You don’t have the reality of it around. I always said that the day CBGB’s closes is the day that punk is really gonna explode. Because they won’t have anybody to say “no, that’s not how it was, you can’t wear that—this is how it was”.

Danny: Everyone still wants to talk to me about punk. All the time. Punk is haunting me, but that’s OK because they have to pay me to remember it.

Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, tenth anniversary edition, is available from AK Press (ISBN: 0802142648 ), for $16. Or, you can pass up the new afterword, and buy a used copy of the original Grove paperback edition for maybe half that.