Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk

by Legs McNeil

NICO: In Paris, Edie Sedgwick was too occupied with her lipstick to listen, but Gerard Malanga told me about the studio where they worked in New York.

But people that were most “in-loved-with” were the people, I think, who fucked the least—like Andy. I mean the people who you really know went to bed with Andy, you could count on the fingers of one hand. The people who really went to bed with Edie or Lou or Nico were very, very few. There really wasn’t that much sex, there were more crushes than sex. Sex was so messy. It still is.

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.” Whereas someone who was raised in a project on Columbia Street and was hanging out on the edge of Tompkins Square Park can’t escape. Those kids don’t have anyplace to go. They can’t go back to Great Neck, they can’t go back to Connecticut. They can’t go back to boarding school in Baltimore. They’re trapped. 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.

RON ASHETON: We invented some instruments that we used at that first show. We had a blender with a little bit of water in it and put a mike right down in it, and just turned it on. We played that for like fifteen minutes before we went onstage. It was a great sound, especially going through the PA, all cranked up. Then we had a washboard with contact mikes. So Iggy would put on golf shoes and get on the washboard and he would just kind of shuffle around. We had contact mikes on the fifty-gallon oil drums that Scotty played, and he used two hammers as drumsticks. I even borrowed my ma’s vacuum cleaner because it sounded like a jet engine. I always loved jet airplanes. VVVVVRRRRR!

To me, that’s what rock & roll should always come down to—the un-allowed.

IGGY POP: It was very professional. I don’t think I hit anyone. RUSSELL WOLINSKY: I was up front. I did get thrown up on. Iggy got me on the shoulder.

In my opinion, John Vaccaro was more important than Charles Ludlam, because Ludlam followed theatrical traditions and used a lot of drag. People felt very comfortable with Charles Ludlam. Everyone’s attitude going to see Charles’ plays was that they were going to see a really funny, irreverent, slapstick drag show. They never felt embarrassed. But John Vaccaro was way past that. Way, way past that. John Vaccaro was dangerous. John Vaccaro could be very embarrassing on many levels. He used thalidomide babies and Siamese triplets joined together at the asshole. One actor had this huge papier-mâché prop of a big cock coming out of his shorts, down to his knees. He also couldn’t control his bowel movements, so shit was dripping down his legs the whole time and everyone loved it. People loved that kind of visually confrontational theater. And John Vaccaro used tons of glitter, that was his trademark. Everyone wore glitter. The whole cast was always covered with glitter.

And I used glitter as a way of presentation. Nothing more. Glitter was the gaudiness of America, that’s what I interpreted it as. And it was pretty. Glitter was makeup. I used it because it was shoving America back into the American faces. It was the gaudiness of Times Square. You know, take away the lights and what do you have in Times Square? Nothing.

JOHN VACCARO: Jackie Curtis was the least talented of the people who worked for me. Jackie Curtis was a drag queen who carried his clippings around in a shopping bag everywhere he went. That’s what these people did. They carried their clippings. This was their crutch. They couldn’t live without having these things with them.

You took hot, molten wax, put it on your face, let it dry, and then grabbed it and pulled it off. So what it did was rip out your beard by the roots, which made your face swell up all red, bloated, and ugly. Then they’d put this Woolworth’s makeup on, because that was all they could afford—this Woolworth’s orange makeup all over their red faces—and then go out in public! No one thought they were women, no one thought they were men! No one knew what they were! And they dressed in old-lady dresses. This old lady died next door to us, and Jackie walked the ledge from our window to her window and broke into her apartment to steal all her clothes. Those were the clothes that Jackie wore, the dead old lady’s dresses!

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.

I said, “Holy shit! These kids are doing what nobody else is doing. They’re bringing back the three-minute song!” These were the days of the ten-minute drum solo, the twenty-minute guitar solo. A song might take up a whole side of an album. I was fed up with that shit. Who could outplay who? It was really boring. It had nothing to do with rock & roll.

Then of course there was David Bowie and Lou Reed, watching and learning. David Bowie came to see the New York Dolls a lot. Lou came to see them a few times.

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.

LEEE CHILDERS: I think David Bowie’s infatuation with Iggy had to do with Bowie wanting to tap into the rock & roll reality that Iggy lived—and that David Bowie could never live because he was a wimpy little South London art student and Iggy was a Detroit trash bag. David Bowie knew he could never achieve the reality that Iggy was born into. So he thought he’d buy it.

I think he wanted David to be in the limelight and the Stooges were just for association. I mean, that’s very David Bowie.

The Hells Angels were shocking, but I didn’t feel threatened by knives and guns, I felt threatened by guys in makeup and dresses.

What happened was by the time I finished Raw Power, my standards were different than other people’s. That’s the only way I can put it. 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.

So, no, I wasn’t shocked by Connie stabbing Arthur—I wasn’t even sad. I was just disappointed, that’s the word. I was disappointed with the fact that much of their behavior was wasted energy—I didn’t think it even had any philosophical purpose. It was a trashy energy, easily disposable energy, an energy that didn’t really bear any genuine point of view, except jealousy, which is so time-wasting.

RICHARD HELL: We tried to show Dee Dee a song and he was just dying. He would just play bar chords, because that’s all he knew. You only need one finger to play a bar chord. And we’d tell him, “Okay, this is in C.” And he’d start playing, and we’d say, “C.” And he’d say, “Oh! Oh!” And just start playing something else. It was total trial and error. And we’d say, “No. No. No, man, C!” Dee Dee would look up with this quizzical look and move his finger a little bit … We’d shake our heads no and he’d move it a little bit further … He was really funny. He was just like a little puppy dog coming to this audition. But eventually we had to say, “Sorry.”

Hilly was like, “What kinda music do you play?” We said, “Well, what does ‘CBGB-OMFUG’ stand for?” He said, “Country, Bluegrass, Blues, and Other Music for Uplifting Gourmandizers.” So we said, “Oh yeah, we play a little of that, a little rock, a little country, a little blues, a little bluegrass …”

DEBBIE HARRY: I remember the look on Patti’s and Tom’s faces when they were caught kissing behind CBGB’s, whoaa. Tom blushed and Patti went, “Fuck off.”

DAVID JOHANSEN: I’m terrible. One time, me and Syl were coming out of Performance Studios, and Monte used to have the Ramones there, rehearsing in the back. We were leaving and we saw the Ramones rehearsing, and we said, “Oh, forget it! Give up!” I’m really terrible. I can’t pick ‘em. I also remember telling Chris Frantz, the Talking Heads drummer, “You’re such a nice kid. What do you want to do this for? You don’t stand a chance.” Yeah, I was a real inspiration.

And I realized that Patti had sixteen people around her telling her that she was the best thing since sliced bread, and for her to see someone like me, who knew her, she just couldn’t see me. And I felt really bad for her. But I still didn’t wanna be there.

GAIL HIGGINS: We HATED Malcolm. He was putting the Dolls in those red commie-inspired suits and doing the whole political thing, and the Dolls had nothing to do with politics. None of them knew anything about politics. We just thought it was ridiculous.

DEBBIE HARRY: Fred Smith fucking quit Blondie. I was pissed. I was pissed at all of them—all of Television, all of the Patti Smith Group, and Patti and Fred. I was pissed at Patti because she talked Fred into joining Television. Boy, did he make a mistake, ha ha ha.

MALCOLM MCLAREN: I just thought Richard Hell was incredible. Again, I was sold another fashion victim’s idea. This was not someone dressed up in red vinyl, wearing bloody orange lips and high heels. Here was a guy all deconstructed, torn down, looking like he’d just crawled out of a drain hole, looking like he was covered in slime, looking like he hadn’t slept in years, looking like he hadn’t washed in years, and looking like no one gave a fuck about him. And looking like he didn’t really give a fuck about you! He was this wonderful, bored, drained, scarred, dirty guy with a torn T-shirt. I don’t think there was a safety pin there, though there may have been, but it was certainly a torn and ripped T-shirt. And this look, this image of this guy, this spiky hair, everything about it—there was no question that I’d take it back to London. By being inspired by it, I was going to imitate it and transform it into something more English.

LEEE CHILDERS: The first time I went to CBGB’s was with Wayne County. There were six people in the audience. We ate the chili, which, years later, Bebe Buell was horrified to learn. She said, “You ate the chili? Stiv told me the Dead Boys used to go back in the kitchen and jerk off in it.” I said to her, “So what? I’ve had worse in my mouth.”

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.

DEBBIE HARRY: John Holmstrom and his living cartoon creature, Legs McNeil, were two maniacs running around town putting up signs that said, “PUNK IS COMING! PUNK IS COMING!” We thought, Here comes another shitty group with an even shittier name.

So I knew that punk was a direct descendant of William Burroughs’ life and work. And I said, “We’ve gotta put these two things together for the benefit of all parties.” And that’s what I did. WILLIAM BURROUGHS: I always thought a punk was someone who took it up the ass.

Then you’d get a little bag back, and get the fuck outta there, hoping they’d say, “Green light.” That meant you could walk out, there was no cops on the street. If they said, “Red light,” then you had to stay in there, and that was really scary, but it wasn’t until years later I realized that was a big part of the rush.

I could barely stand up, and that night Elton John came out onstage in this gorilla costume. I was like, “Oh my god! What can I do?” I couldn’t fight him. I could barely stand. I was just too stoned to move, to react. You know, and things like that were happening constantly.

MICKEY LEIGH: I think everybody was a little nervous because we were in London, and out of our turf for the first time. All of us, the Ramones and the roadies, were walking down this alley to get to the backstage door of the Roundhouse, and standing in the alley like a posse was the Clash. They were all wearing black leather jackets, and they were all trying to be real fucking tough and we were a little scared. Tommy was popping Valium and his hands were shaking because he was so fucking nervous. So as we were walking toward the door, they said, “We’re the Clash, man. We’re gonna be bigger than anybody.” It wasn’t like, “Hey, we liked your record!” It was an act. They were acting punk, because that’s how they figured bands in New York acted—tough.

Basically the Ramones said to them, which they said to countless other bands, “You don’t have to get better, just get out there, you’re as good as you are. Don’t wait till you’re better, how are you ever gonna know? Just go out there and do it.”

I had no idea of what he was talking about, because at that time, punk was still just the magazine, the Ramones, Richard Hell, Johnny Thunders, Patti Smith, and the Dictators. There was only about a hundred people hanging out at CBGB’s. And half of those people were not punks, they were from the art world, inspired to come to the Bowery by the yuppie whine of David Byrne. The Dictators lived in the Bronx and hardly hung out. And it seemed like everyone but me and Joey was a junkie. So punk, the entire movement, seemed like our own little in-joke, and destined to stay that way.

So I turned around to Johnny Blitz, the drummer, and I said, “GET THOSE FUCKING THINGS OFF.” He said, “I don’t really know what they even stand for.” I said, “GET THEM FUCKING OFF AND I’LL TELL YOU WHAT THEY STAND FOR. They stand for a race of people that were almost annihilated. They stand for that your manager is Jewish. The owner of this recording studio is Jewish. And I’m Jewish and I’m your producer and I can lose the drums VERY FUCKING EASY!” He took off the swastikas. I mean, I knew the Dead Boys weren’t Nazis. I knew that they were young punks. Anything that’s “baaaddd” they wanted to do. I was there once. But not with swastikas. So I turned them on to bagels. They never had a fucking bagel. In Cleveland! I said, “What’s with Cleveland? Where were you, in Dachau? What do you mean you never had a bagel!” They didn’t know what a bagel was. I mean, you fuck, what part of Cleveland did you come from? Cleveland, Germany?

MALCOLM MCLAREN: As a child, whenever they used to tell me to write “I will not be bad” I just changed the “not” to “I will be so bad.” And that amused me no end—but in art school, it was somewhat of a loss. To me, the establishment’s notion of bad needed to be redefined. And the notion of good meant to me things that I felt absolutely needed to be destroyed.

It took me a while to work that out, because now it’s commonplace that people use symbols ironically. But in the hippie days, styles of dress or symbols were used unironically. It was, This is what you are—you have long hair; you wear this; you are a peace person. So if you wear swastikas you are a Nazi. And suddenly a movement comes along with no transition, nobody saying anything, and they’re using swastikas and it’s not about that; it’s a costume and an assault. It’s about something completely different—it’s about gesture, and shock tactic. I kind of knew that instinctively, but I didn’t really have a way of articulating it for ages. It wasn’t until years later that I really could sit and write an analysis of it. But that’s what made it so interesting: You couldn’t write an analysis of it, you just didn’t know what the fuck was going on, it was happening so fast.

And their first album was a really cool record. I thought that was a terrific record, but on the other hand, I gotta say that I looked at the album cover, I looked at the device of every guy named Ramone and remembered that’s what Danny Fields had tried to do with us. Danny just made me “Iggy Stooge” on the first album without asking me. They called it product identification. Yeah, like America’s gonna run out and say, “Oh, that’s Iggy Stooge, yeah, we’ll buy him right away.” Iggy Stooge. I’d never been Iggy Stooge. Danny just made that up and I was furious. I was somewhere between furious and suicidal over that. So when I saw the Ramones’ first record, I thought, Well, Danny finally got his Muppet band. But on the other hand I thought, Yeah, it’s a great album.

LEGS MCNEIL: Glitter rock was about decadence: platform shoes and boys in eye makeup, David Bowie and androgyny. Rich rock stars living their lives from Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, you know, Sally Bowles hanging out with drag queens, drinking champagne for breakfast and having ménages à trois, while the Nazis slowly grab the power. Decadence seemed so lame, because decay suggests that there’s still some time, and there wasn’t any more time. Things had collapsed. We had lost the war in Vietnam to a bunch of guys with sticks in black pajamas. Vice President Spiro Agnew had to resign because he was caught taking bribes in the White House. And Richard Nixon had the Watergate burglars break into the Democratic national headquarters because he was so paranoid. I mean fucking Nixon had won the election by the biggest landslide in history. He was just insane. And then he had to resign. And then President Gerald Ford told New York City to drop dead when it went bankrupt. I mean, New York City declared bankruptcy! Compared to what was going on in the real world, decadence seemed kind of quaint. So punk wasn’t about decay, punk was about the apocalypse. Punk was about annihilation. Nothing worked, so let’s get right to Armageddon. You know, if you found out the missiles were on their way, you’d probably start saying what you always wanted to, you’d probably turn to your wife and say, “You know, I always thought you were a fat cow.” And that’s how we behaved.

MALCOLM MCLAREN: I knew the Bill Grundy show was going to create a huge scandal. I genuinely believed it would be history in the making, and in many regards it was, because that night was the real beginning—from the media’s and from the general public’s point of view—of what became known as “punk rock.”

ELIOT KIDD: The Heartbreakers were better, but the Pistols were more outrageous. The English bands were basically doing their impression of what they thought was going on in New York, and it was overexaggerated. Like punk, punk, punk—I mean, were the Talking Heads tough? Was Television tough? Was Blondie tough?

ELIOT KIDD: The only thing that made the music different was that we were taking lyrics to places they had never been before. The thing that makes art interesting is when an artist has incredible pain or incredible rage. The New York bands were much more into their pain, while the English bands were much more into their rage.

Johnny Rotten was the person who if anybody offered him anything he’d be over there, but if there was somebody who’d love him more than the person next to him, he’d be over there. He would suffer less criticism than everybody else, same as David Johansen.

LEEE CHILDERS: The Heartbreakers and I were at Caroline Coon’s house for Christmas dinner. She was a journalist and she had money. And we were rock performers and we had none. On Christmas Day in London, everything shuts down. There are no buses, there are no subways. How are poor people supposed to go visit their relatives? It really is cruel. There’s only taxis, and they’re double fare. So we scraped our pences together and got a taxi to Caroline Coon’s house because then she would at least feed us.

But once we were there, we were trapped. Along with every other punk rock band in London at the time. The Clash were all there, the Damned were all there, the Sex Pistols were all there. Everyone was at Caroline Coon’s house. She was trying to make herself the queen of punk. She was an awful woman. The whole Christmas dinner was set up to seduce Paul Simonon from the Clash. Which she got away with. She got laid. So that’s fine. I’ve done worse. Oh, everyone was very well behaved. They literally behaved just the same as other people all over England were behaving on Christmas. They just looked weird, that’s all. Caroline was having the Christmas pudding in her basement—”the ground floor,” in her language—and so they had just set it on fire and everyone was standing around waiting for it to burn before they served it. And I heard Jim Reeves drifting down through the stairwell singing … Jim Reeves songs.

When I first got to London, Sid was playing bass and singing in this band, the Flowers of Romance, that I tried to manage. I felt very protective of Sid. He would sleep with me, cuddled in my arms. Sid didn’t live with me, but he more or less did. He’d come by, get drunk on beer, and sleep over. We never had sex. But he would curl up in my arms like a little baby and sleep all night.

That was the whole trip about the Pistols. It was all an act. Everything was a fucking act. They were young. They were kids. We were a lot older. When it came down to the real nitty-gritty shit, throwing works on the table and cooking up some junk, they got scared.

City of Night by John Rechy!”