Kirkus Reviews called Legs McNeil’s memoir, “Reliably diverting. Casually obscene. Frequently hilarious.” And that’s kind of what we were aiming for all along.
When Gillian McCain asked me to write about my experience working on Resident Punk, I wasn’t sure where to begin. After all, Legs and I first started kicking the idea around back in early 2011 after I’d written a birthday tribute to him for a pop culture website. I’ve known Legs since I was a teenager, and I’d done a lot of transcribing for him over the years, but this was the first time we’d tried to tackle a project together.
The original concept was that each chapter would begin with a first person essay written by Legs, and close with a third-person history written by me to fill in the gaps. We began with a chapter about his relationship with Norman Mailer as proof of concept. I did a lot of research, interviewed Legs; his best friend growing up, Tom Hearn; former members of the band Legs managed, Shrapnel; and a few other people who were there when these seemingly disparate worlds kind of crashed together at Mailer’s house in Brooklyn.
We were excited about the idea, doubly so when we were walking through the East Village hashing it all out, and ran into Richard Hell. If that wasn’t a good omen… well, it wasn’t a good omen. Our enthusiasm faded. Legs got busy with another project, and we abandoned the book.
Around a year later, I read an excerpt from my third-person section of the Mailer chapter during a showcase of the Greenpoint Writers Group at the bookstore WORD in Brooklyn, and the response was great. Lots of laughs. I was happy to close out my time working on Resident Punk with what felt like a win.
And that was that. Until around four years ago, when Legs and I started talking about the book again. This time it was gonna be about vampires wreaking havoc on the punk scene, and I was going to be part of the story as a Van Helsing-esque vampire hunter. No, I’m absolutely not kidding. That I was still in elementary school until 1981 was an issue for another time.
That spooky iteration didn’t last long, though, and we revived the first person/third person Resident Punk concept, signed with a literary agent, and got to work on a proposal. We had lively meetings with renowned editors from major publishing houses. But as the feedback started rolling in, it became clear that these editors liked us, but Legs and I were the only two people on the planet who actually liked our concept for Resident Punk.
We licked our wounds for a minute, realized we still had a great story to tell, and put together a new proposal, all first-person this time, a traditional memoir, albeit one brimming with misadventure and cautionary tales. This version, as you can see when you hold the book in your hot little hands, was a success.
Working with Legs McNeil, as Gillian could tell you, is not always easy. It isn’t always fun. He’s a pain in the ass. He occasionally yells. He gets cranky and upsets people who don’t know him as well as I do. He burns the odd bridge here and there.
But he’s also really great. He’s sharp and funny and works his ass off, and he has very little ass to begin with. He’s also quick to offer gratitude, which sometimes came when I needed to hear it most. Right now, with Resident Punk about to be released, and with some very good reviews making waves, we’re giving gratitude to one another. We’ve actually done that all along, and it happened again about an hour ago on the phone. And then, because he’s a man of a certain age, he accidentally butt dialed me when he was walking his dogs.
Legs and I spent a lot of time working on this book, though living on opposite sides of the country, that meant we mostly connected over the phone or through email. And occasional butt dials. But I think we worked well together, even when it was a struggle.
I was disappointed when we stopped working on the book the first time, and though I’ve had three other books published since then, I always hoped we’d come back to it. I knew it would be good, and I knew Legs has lived a life people would want to read about.
This time around I worked just as hard as ever, but didn’t let myself get excited about any of the various stages of the process until they’d already happened. When my author copies of Resident Punk arrived, when I could flip through the pages and see what we’d done, that’s when I finally breathed a sigh of relief.
Oh, and the vampires? They very nearly had a cameo in the book. We worked on a chapter that I thought was really funny and gory, but even after I said it could appear as a dream, Legs thought we should cut it instead. And we did. And reading Resident Punk today, he was absolutely right.
I hope you’ll pick up a copy of Resident Punk, and I also hope you’ll love it. And maybe buy a copy for everyone you know, too. They’ll appreciate it, and so will I.
— Crispin Kott, co-author of Resident Punk: How I Smoked, Drank, and Stumbled My Way Through the ‘70s Punk Scene (and Beyond)