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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Legs McNeil
Read between
August 9 - August 20, 2021
NICO: Some things you are born to, and Edie was born to die from her pleasures. She would have to die from drugs, whoever gave them to her.
SUSAN PILE: People did strange things when they did speed. There was one guy who showed up at Max’s Kansas City with his arm in a sling. Everyone was like, “What happened to you?” He said, “Oh, I took a shot of speed and I couldn’t stop brushing my hair for three days.”
That record became very key for me, not just for what it said, and for how great it was, but also because I heard other people who could make good music without being any good at music. It gave me hope.
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. They could go back home. They could call their mom and say, “Get me outta here.”
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.
Andy was different after he got shot. I mean Andy would say hello to me and talk to me but he was really scared. He was scared about what that kind of insanity could bring—which was six bullets in the chest.
DANNY FIELDS: Jim Morrison was a callous asshole, an abusive, mean person. I took Morrison to Max’s and he was a monster, a prick. And his poetry sucked. He demeaned rock & roll as literature. Sophomoric bullshit babble. Maybe one or two good images.
Ronnie, Scotty, and Dave were very good dreamers, which is mostly what my dusty Midwest is all about. The land that time forgot. Pete Townshend said something nice about that. He said it must be really difficult for a bright person in the Midwest because you don’t have a London or a New York City that can provide you with fresh input, that can rub against you and rub off any illusions
That’s when I thought, Look how awful they are, and they’ve got the number-one single in the country! If this guy can do it, I can do it. And I gotta do it now. I can’t wait any longer.
that I welcomed any support. I mean, it could’ve been Charles Manson in the front row, and I would have gone, “Yeah, Charlie, good to see you, baby, right on, hey, we got a fellow here in the front row tonight who’s really standing America on its ear, let’s have a hand for him.”
DAVID JOHANSEN: It was real easy to take over because there was nothing happening. There weren’t any bands around so we just came in and everybody said the Dolls are the greatest thing since Bosco. But we were the only band around, really, so we didn’t have to be that good.
I wanted the music to come out of the speakers and just grab you by the throat and just knock your head against the wall and just basically kill you.