Rod McKuen was labeled ‘The King of Kitsch’ by critics and “McGoon” by academics (a label that included Bob Dylan too) and hated by the hipsters. And yet, Richa...
Nick Drake, Bert Jansch, Paul Simon, Sandy Denny, Al Stewart and others borrowed a few tunes (and whole dollops of melancholy) from this great songwriter. The l...
A driving force of musical dissent in the 1960s, Phil Ochs (1940-1976) and his musical legacy are ripe for a new audience in the Age of Trump. Though he wrote a...
His tragic death at age 34 has spun a mysterious web around Elliott Smith’s musical legacy and spawned a cult following that sometimes seems to miss the point o...
The singing/drumming half of the 1970s' hitmakers the Carpenters died at age 32 in 1983 of health issues related to anorexia. As popular as she was in her lifet...
Comics historian Jon B. Cooke has whipped up a Please Kill Me-like oral history of underground comix of the late 1970s and 1980s. Specifically, he tells the h...
In the best of all possible worlds, a man who has made music with the likes of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Nice, Paul McCartney, Ian Anderson, Peter Townshend...
On the 50th anniversary of the groundbreaking film, which made a star of Jack Nicholson, rekindled the careers of Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, and proved agai...
Sandy Denny (1947-1978) had one of the most remarkable voices in British folk-rock as well as superior songwriting skills, but her darker impulses got the best ...
50 years after the publication of the now literary (and film) classic Slaughterhouse-Five, our editor Alan Bisbort looks back on some of his personal encounters...
Though she has been dead for more than a quarter-century, Karen Dalton, a staple of the Greenwich Village folk scene, had the sort of voice that still haunts th...
Because he’s so good on the guitar, the Missouri native’s million other hats are often overlooked in the shuffle: writer, archivist, collector of weird albums, ...
Hunter S. Thompson became a known quantity with the publication of Hell’s Angels (1967), but it wasn’t until he teamed up with Ralph Steadman for the first time...
Time to raise a celebratory, non-alcoholic toast because Sweet Adversity by Donald Newlove (one of PKM’s “Best Books By Drunks”) has just been reissued, after 4...
Alan Bisbort is the Editor of PleaseKillMe.com, as well as a freelance writer and a collage artist. He currently teaches a course called Paper Bullets: Propaganda in American History at UConn-Waterbury and is working on a book by that title, to be published in 2018. He’s the author of numerous books, including Beatniks: A Guide to an American Subculture and Rhino’s Psychedelic Trip.
