Watch poet Patti Smith in the 1972 documentary film, West Side Stories with actor Jonathan Miller. The film focuses on their individual New York City experiences and personal histories....
"Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain wrote a book that changed Marc's life. On the 20-year anniversary of 'Please Kill Me: An Uncensored Oral History of Punk,' Legs and Gillian tell Marc why they wrote it in the first place and why it still resonates two decades later. " ...
It's just another Tuesday night in the Tribeca area of New York City. As I enter The Roxy Hotel's toasty Django Bar, I see a room full of familiar faces. Littered across the intimate space were a gaggle of elite rockers known to swim in the same circles as the uninhibited downtown crowd. Rock photographer's Bob Gruen and Mick Rock, Andy Rourke of The Smiths, Bob Bert of Lydia Lunch's Retrovirus, David Johansen, Chris Franz of the Talking Heads, among other notables....
As authors of Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History Of Punk, Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil influenced a lot of people on several levels. Now regarded as the best-selling book on punk rock of all time, Please Kill Me first and foremost described what the heyday of the New York City punk scene was like as according to people that were around it. It cleared up myths about key players in the scene, and also helped readers pick up on some of the era’s underappreciated characters. ...
The Critic's Choice Documentary Awards have announced their nominations for 2016. In the category of Most Compelling Living Subject of a Documentary they nominated Brendan Toller's Danny Says, and Jim Jarmusch's Gimme Danger....
Music legend (and WFMU freeform pioneer) Danny Fields chats and programs music alongside filmmaker Brendan Toller, director of the documentary Danny Says. Gaylord Fields hosts....
Twenty years ago, Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain published Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, a scabby inside-look at the wildly fun, incredibly seedy and at times terrifying underbelly of the 1970s New York City punk scene.
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Early this month Legs and Gillian were guests of Howard Thompson in Bridgeport, CT on his great radio program called "Pure" on 89.5 FM in the Fairfield County area, or WPKN.org online....
via Literary Hub - The Original Chroniclers of Punk on How They Did It -
When Jean Stein and George Plimpton began compiling their book American Journey: The Times of Robert Kennedy, using the oral history format, little did they realize that they were inventing a revolutionary new literary genre that, ten years later, would land them on the best-seller list....
IF YOU’VE READ it, you probably remember exactly where you were when you first encountered Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. I first came across the book as a 16-year-old kid in a small town in southwestern Colorado. I’d recently discovered punk, and went about putting safety pins in my clothes and calling myself a punk, but for all I knew, punk rock began and ended with the Sex Pistols. When I found Please Kill Me on the shelf of the local bookstore, I bought it without question, expecting mohawks and mosh pits. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
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PKM 20th in the NME!! - -
"Please Kill Me, the oral history of punk written by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, was published 20 years ago this year. It's credited as the book that popularised the oral history format, but, more than that, it's an essential read for anyone with even the slightest interest in the movement. "...
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. And so I entered the world of punk from its very beginning, told by the people who lived it....
Please Kill Me is the first oral history of the most nihilist of all pop movements. Iggy Pop, Danny Fields, Dee Dee and Joey Ramone, Malcom McLaren, Jim Carroll, and scores of other famous and infamous punk figures lend their voices to this definitive account of that outrageous, explosive era. From its origins in the twilight years of Andy Warhol’s New York reign to its last gasps as eighties corporate rock, the phenomenon known as punk is scrutinized, eulogized, and idealized by the people who were there and who made it happen. ...
