Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk

by Legs McNeil

They said, “Well, that would be okay, but we don’t have a place to live …”

The problem with the hippies was that there developed a hostility within the counterculture itself, between those who had, like, the equivalent of a trust fund versus those who had to live by their wits. It’s true, for instance, that blacks were somewhat resentful of the hippies by the Summer of Love, 1967, because their perception was that these kids were drawing paisley swirls on their Sam Flax writing pads, burning incense, and taking acid, but those kids could get out of there anytime they wanted to.

So there developed another kind, more of a lumpen hippie, who really came from an abused childhood—from parents that hated them, from parents that threw them out. Maybe they came from a religious family that would call them sluts or say, “You had an abortion, get out of here” or “I found birth control pills in your purse, get out of here, go away.” And those kids fermented into a kind of hostile street person. Punk types.

We knew the world generally sucked and we didn’t want to be a part of it. We wanted to do something else, which amounts to not wanting to get up in the morning and have a real job.

WILLIAM BURROUGHS: I always thought a punk was someone who took it up the ass.

“Man, where did you get this stuff?”

The Dead Boys fit right in, they were like us, and in appreciation for our hospitality Stiv presented us with our very own Nazi Mother’s Crosses to make us honorary Dead Boys, but Joey and I were laughing at them, like, “Oh great, just what we always wanted, Nazi necklaces!” The Ramones sang that they were Nazis in the song “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World,” but they weren’t Nazis. You see, the entire seventies culture was based on being “nice.” You had to be nice. It’s no accident that smiley faces became the symbol of the seventies. So when the Ramones sang that they were Nazis, they were really saying, “We refuse to be nice.” I mean, Joey is Jewish, but I don’t think Joey was offended by the gift. We just thought the Dead Boys’ swastikas were stupid because Arturo Vega, the guy who owned the Ramones’ loft, was a painter who made Day-Glo swastikas.

So I always thought that to conquer evil, you have to make love to it. You have to understand it. But I also like the way people react to the swastika paintings—people freak out. The paintings are a closet Nazi detector, you know? They bring out the Nazi in you if you’re a closet Nazi, because the people that are gonna be offended are the ones that have something to hide. The people that act so defensively are always the people who are closet fascists. That’s why the paintings are so beautiful—they find you out.

DANNY FIELDS: It wasn’t, “Oh, I’m a Nazi and all you Jews better watch out!” It wasn’t anything like that. It wasn’t political, it was sexual. I know that some people have trouble making the distinction nowadays, but it wasn’t a racial threat. I mean, there is no one more conscious of the fact that my relatives, even though I never knew them, were wiped out by the Nazis for being Jewish.

At one point, in England, David had gotten out at Victoria Station in an open-topped Mercedes Landau limousine and did a Hitler salute, which was on the front page of three English newspapers.

was so stoned that I was walking around in a red jockstrap and nothing else, except red lipstick and swastikas drawn all over my body.

Mass movements are always so unhip. That’s what was great about punk. It was an antimovement, because there was knowledge there from the very beginning that with mass appeal comes all those tedious folks who need to be told what to think. Hip can never be a mass movement. And culturally, the gay liberation movement and all the rest of the movements were the beginning of political correctness, which was just fascism to us. Real fascism. More rules.

JAYNE COUNTY: I’m sorry it happened, I’m sorry Handsome Dick got hurt, but he really pushed it too far that night. I was on speed, I was paranoid, I reacted, a spur-of-the-moment reaction, adrenaline. And five black beauties. Do you remember what those black beauties were like?

JOHN HOLMSTROM: After the gay mafia fiasco, I realized Lester Bangs was not to be trusted. And then, later, he wrote that article, “The White Noise Supremacists,” calling us racists. He pretty much tar-and-feathered us in that article. I don’t know why he did it. I tried to talk to him about it. But he would just, like, blow it off. He just said, “What are you getting upset for?”

I mean, we weren’t racists. But we were unashamedly saying, “We’re white, and we’re proud.” Like, they’re black and they’re proud. That’s fine. We were totally into that, you know?

The doctors started working on Johnny immediately. But when the surgeon saw Johnny’s swastika, he just stopped working on him. The surgeon was Jewish. A black doctor came over and said, “We can’t stop doing this, man.” So the black doctor worked on him for eight hours. The black doctor saved Johnny’s life. He was cool.

This wonderful vital force that was articulated by the music was really about corrupting every form—it was about advocating kids to not wait to be told what to do, but make life up for themselves, it was about trying to get people to use their imaginations again, it was about not being perfect, it was about saying it was okay to be amateurish and funny, that real creativity came out of making a mess, it was about working with what you got in front of you and turning everything embarrassing, awful, and stupid in your life to your advantage.

We went to pick Sid up at the courthouse when he got out of jail again. It was really quick. I mean, we went in and the judge said a few words to Sid and then we left with Sid. He came out of jail wearing this white T-shirt, because he had to appear in court. So the first thing he did when he got home was put on the swastika T-shirt.

JAMES GRAUERHOLZ: Patti actually managed a pretty canny thing. She managed to be a rock & roll death without having to die.

JAMES GRAUERHOLZ: William Burroughs’ son, Billy, died in March of 1981. And William had really gotten started back on junk in the summer of 1978, as a result of being in Boulder, and going through Billy’s liver transplant surgeries, and hanging out with these Boulder punks, who, like so many of the other people, got off on giving heroin to William Burroughs.

So I loaded up a twenty-foot moving truck with all these archives and shit from the Bunker and drove across country to Lawrence, Kansas.

And I also frankly was hoping to lure him here to Lawrence to retire. Because at his age, and with his fame, it would just become intolerable in New York and he would burn out and he would OD or he would drink himself to death, because everyone would come around and everyone would want to get high with the Godfather of Dope, as they saw him. And it was a real dancing bear phenomenon: “We’re going to go see Burroughs.”

PAUL MORRISSEY: Nico died from not having health insurance in Ibiza. She wore these hateful hippie woolen clothes to disguise her figure, which had deteriorated from the drug addiction. And she was bicycling, wearing these woolen things in the middle of summer in the hottest climate, and she had this little sunstroke, which probably would have been very easy to deal with. But this man who picked her up off the road took her to two or three hospitals in Ibiza, and none of them would take her. Finally the Red Cross took her and she died there.