Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk

by Legs McNeil

Anyway, they put him in a hospital where he received shock treatment as a kid.

They put the thing down your throat so you don’t swallow your tongue, and they put electrodes on your head. That’s what was recommended in Rockland County then to discourage homosexual feelings. The effect is that you lose your memory and become a vegetable. You can’t read a book because you get to page seventeen and have to go right back to page one again.

Lou had these songs where there was an element of character assassination going on. He had strong identification with the characters he was portraying.

Lou was very full of himself and faggy in those days. We

But Lou was dazzled by Andy and Nico. He was completely spooked by Andy because he could not believe that someone could have so much goodwill and yet be so mischievous—in the same transvestite way that Lou was, all that bubbling gay humor.

So for me, there was a strong pull toward the dark side. Lou and Billy Name would go to this Vaseline bar called Ernie’s—there would be jars of Vaseline on the bar and there was a back room where the guys would go to fuck each other. While I was never gay, I was into sex, and when you’re thirteen or fourteen, sex is not that available from women. So I figured, Gee, wouldn’t it be great to be gay? So I tried it, but I was a miserable failure. I remember I was actually sucking this guy off once, and he said, “Man, you’re not into this.” I went, “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry.”

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.

If you read her manifesto, SCUM—for “The Society for Cutting Up Men”—it’s mad but brilliant and witty.

The people just have to die for the music. People are dying for everything else, so why not the music? Die for it. Isn’t it pretty? Wouldn’t you die for something pretty?

Perhaps I should die. After all, all the great blues singers did die. But life is getting better now. I don’t want to die. Do

it was wide open, but it wasn’t gay, thank god. We hated gay bars. Gay bars? Oh please, who wanted to go to gay bars? At Max’s you could fuck anyone in the room, and that was what was sweet about it.

Before the Chicago riots, we moved from Detroit to Ann Arbor because of the 1967 Detroit race riots. It was real scary. I was living in an apartment at Second and Alexandrine, and the first couple of killings were right in that neighborhood. It was all police murders. The police just went insane and shot the place up for a week—killed forty or fifty people. Shit started getting real tense after that. Some of our girlfriends got raped and our gear got ripped off a few times. I mean, we’d get to the place where we practiced and the door would be busted open and three more guitars would be gone. So we moved into two fraternity houses in Ann Arbor.

Then we started hearing about the Black Panthers and how the revolution was bubbling under, so it was “Oh, let’s change it to the White Panthers. Yeah, we’ll be the White Panthers.”

KATHY ASHETON: John Sinclair was a pig. He really took over the MC5 as far as instilling them with his political garbage. They got really into all that “brother and sister” kind of stuff, which was good for a live show, but …

WAYNE KRAMER: We were sexist bastards. We were not politically correct at all. We had all the rhetoric of being revolutionary and new and different, but really what it was, was the boys get to go fuck and the girls can’t complain about it. And if the girls did complain, they were being bourgeois bitches—counterrevolutionary. Yep, we were really shitty about it. We tried free love and that didn’t work so we went back to the traditional way—”No, honey, I didn’t fuck nobody on the road, and by the way, I gotta go to the VD clinic.” I was the second runner-up in our band, I think I had the clap nine times. But Dennis beat me—he had it twelve times.

DANNY FIELDS: Of course, I thought all that male bonding was sexy. It was a world I never knew. I mean, there was the myth of the Beatles living in adjoining rooms in Help! But everyone knew that was a myth, that bands didn’t really live in the same house with the living rooms connected. But this band did! So I thought that was wild. I just thought they were the sexiest thing I’d ever seen. I just thought it was quaint! I mean, there was a minister of defense carrying a rifle! Wearing one of those bullet things—a cartridge belt! With real bullets in it! I never saw a man wearing a cartridge belt. Even the girls were wearing these things. And they were serious!

We were telling people at our shows to smoke reefer, to burn their bras, to fuck in the streets—it wasn’t just a matter of “Well, they were a little too wild for the record industry,” which we were, but it went beyond that. Peace and love worked in the realm of the music business, but once you went beyond that, to revolution … that’s bad.

The government figured it out. It was obvious. “These people do pot and hash and psychedelics and then they get revolutionary, and they come up with all these new ideas like ‘Hey, let’s change this world. And let’s eliminate these fascist politicians!’

We were purged from the White Panther Party for counterrevolutionary ideals, because we bought sports cars that our parents signed for.

Patti’s idea of feminism seemed to me to be about not being a victim—that women should make choices in full control of their faculties and make a rebel stand.

Everyone was completely with her—”Oh, that’s really cool, she forgot her poem”—but then she said, “But I’ll make it up anyway, what the fuck,” and she made it up as she went along. So she was really a punk, a punkette, and it was very, very effective. The audience was completely blown away. Nobody had ever seen anything like it.

don’t know where the glitter thing came from. We were just very ecological about clothes. It was just about taking old clothes and wearing them again.

we thought that’s the way you were supposed to be if you were in a rock & roll band. Flamboyant.

You’ve got to understand where David was coming from, so when Lou Reed would talk about the New York drag queens, for David that meant that America was the most wide-open, wonderful place. When David said in Melody Maker that he was gay—then he changed it, and said he was bisexual, which was what he really meant—he never would have had the balls to do that unless he’d been hanging around with Iggy and Lou. Because they represented this place across the ocean where things were changing, so fuck all the English hypocrites.

While David Bowie was palling around with Iggy, I was fucking David’s wife. He didn’t mind, I didn’t mind, we never felt weird about any of that.

At first I thought it was Johnny Thunders. You know, everybody used to think that Johnny was the type of guy who’d OD. Billy’s death may not have been foul play, but it was real abuse. He went to a party with a lot of highbrow, stuck-up, rich teenage English kids. They had these pills called Mandies. They were a heavy barbiturate down. And all day long kids kept giving him these pills. When Billy fell asleep everybody fucking panicked. So you know what they do? They throw him in the goddamn fucking bathtub to try to shake him out of it. They fucking drowned him! They drowned the kid! These fucking rich kids freaked out and ran away. They all split on the guy. What a fucking waste.

PATTI SMITH: Physical presentation in performing is more important than what you’re saying. Quality comes through, of course, but if your quality of intellect is high, and your love of the audience is evident, and you have a strong physical presence, you can get away with anything.

The first time I saw Richard Hell, he walked into CBGB’s wearing a white T-shirt with a bull’s-eye painted on it, and the words “Please Kill Me” written on it. That was one of

don’t think Dee Dee was a full-time hustler and I know he wanted girls more than he wanted boys. I thought that was very modern. I think everybody should be able to fuck everybody and that gender should be of little consideration. In that way, Dee Dee was very modern. I don’t think he was ashamed of having done it.

There was also the nighttime scene during the summer—on Central Park West, right across from the Museum of Natural History. That was pretty good. I mean, the park was much better than a car, I always thought.

The one thing that impressed me was that they were always asking people for their clothes, especially girls. They were like, “I like your shirt. Can I have it?”

thought they were leaving because they hated the group and thought there was no genuine likelihood of them having success in Tampa.

Three Stooges. Kids that had parties when their parents were away and destroyed the house. You know, kids that stole cars and had fun. So I said, “Why don’t we call it Punk?” The word “punk” seemed to sum up the thread that connected everything we liked—drunk, obnoxious, smart but not pretentious, absurd, funny, ironic, and things that appealed to the darker side.

mean, how was I to know that Handsome Dick Manitoba wasn’t like one of those guys? I thought he wanted to kill a faggot, a queer, a drag queen, you know what I mean?

Everybody knows that drag queens are the most vicious butch dykes in the world. They’ll clobber you. They have to be strong—if you dress like that, you gotta be strong to take all that shit.

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.

“Punk magazine is gonna expose the gay mafia”—that’s what Lester was telling people. And the scene was so small, everybody heard about it. Everybody was scared. I guess people were more in the closet back then. I didn’t even know what the gay mafia was supposed to be. It was like a joke somebody made up. The “gay mafia”? There was no gay mafia! It was Lester’s idea. And Punk magazine took the rap for it.

That’s what I thought was cool. And if you’re white, you’re like us. You don’t try to be black. What I thought was stupid was white people trying to act black. Like Lester. His use of the word “nigger” was his way of trying to act black. He was trying to be the “white nigger.” The “white nigger” idea was Norman Mailer’s fifties lesson in how to be cool. And we were really rejecting that. We were rejecting the fifties and sixties instructions on how to be hip.

had a “whirling dervish” philosophy about her performance, and felt that her obligation to the audience was to put herself into a trance. So she told me that she used to masturbate onstage.

Punk was like, This is new, this is now, the apotheosis, powerful. But it wasn’t political. I mean, maybe that is political. I mean, the great thing about punk was that it had no political agenda. It was about real freedom, personal freedom. It was also about doing anything that’s gonna offend a grown-up. Just being as offensive as possible. Which seemed delightful, just euphoric. Be the real people we are. You know? I just loved it.

I don’t know about you, but I also wouldn’t yell at a car filled with Puerto Ricans. I think my mom told me one day, “Don’t cross the street without looking both ways and don’t ever yell at a car filled with Puerto Ricans.”

But the answer that came back was, “Oh, you wouldn’t understand. Punk started in England. You know, everyone is on the dole there, they really have something to complain about. Punk is really about class warfare and economic blah, blah, blah.”

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.