Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk

by Legs McNeil

You could actually go in drag, but it was funny because you could really be arrested, because there was this law in Atlanta, where if your hair touched the top of your ears you could be arrested for being homosexual.

BOB GRUEN: I was standing in the back of CBGB’s, there was all this commotion, we didn’t quite know what was going on except there was some chaos. It seemed like a fight—people screaming and yelling. Next thing I knew, they dragged Handsome Dick Manitoba out—literally, two guys were dragging him, he was like limp in between their shoulders, with blood pouring out of the side of his head. They dragged him out the door and Wayne stood up on the stage and said, “Do you want me to quit or do you wanna rock & roll?” Everybody started screaming, “Rock & roll! Go Wayne! On with the show!” So Wayne kept playing and finished the set.

TERRY ORK: 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.

For me, I felt that it was kind of a turning point, that all these guys had to fess up and say that Wayne’s our friend, and we stand up for him and it’s not okay to come into a club and call a guy a queer—it’s not okay.

So we said, “No, being gay doesn’t make you cool. Being cool makes you cool, whether you’re gay or straight.” People didn’t like that too much. So they called us homophobic. And of course, being the obnoxious people we were, we said, “Fuck you, you faggots.”

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.

MARY HARRON: We really didn’t have anything to be idealistic about, and I was so sick of hippie culture. People were trying to keep up those peace-and-love ideals, but it was so devalued. That was the era of real hip capitalism too, and you just didn’t buy it anymore. It was exhausted, but, because what hippies stood for was good, no one could let go and say “This is over.” It was like you were forced to be optimistic and caring and good. And believe in peace and love. And, even though I probably did, I resented everyone telling me what to believe. I disliked the hippie culture, I found it nauseating and prissy and sentimental, and smiley-faced. So Richard Hell just came over and said, “This is what we are, we’re the blank generation. It’s over.” It was very exciting. What was so thrilling about it was that we were moving forward into the future and I had no idea what that future was. I felt like everything was new. There were no definitions, or boundaries, it was just moving forward into the light, it was just the future—everything new, no rules, no nothings, no definitions. “What are we? We don’t know.” It wasn’t for years that I realized it was nihilism. Or whatever.

I would say, “You just ripped your shirt to look like a punk.” But all those guys—Richard Hell, Johnny Thunders, and Dee Dee—were all the same in that James-Dean-tortured-soul kind of way. They all had that tortured “I need to be saved by a woman” look. And all the women fell for it. They’d start out buying them drinks, and then they’d take them to buy dope, and that would be the way it went. And then they’d get dumped and then they’d go on to the next guy.

At that point, the universe began contracting. We’d ridden our challenge as far as it could go. It was “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine” up to that point. After the fall, “reconciliation” is what we were about. We got off the road. We had to cancel the European tour. We stayed home for a year—the year punk rock took over the world. And we were there on the sidelines, really frustrated.

LEGS MCNEIL: 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.

PATTI GIORDANO: I had a ‘66 Mustang convertible and that made it easier to go from Max’s Kansas City to CBGB’s. We would do that run back and forth—Max’s to CBGB’s—depending on which bands were playing. If there were five different bands playing and we could swing it, and if it was boring at one place, we’d say, “All right, let’s leave.” Then jump in the car, go back, and see another band.

PAM BROWN: One night after the Ramones played the 82 Club, I was walking back to the Ramones’ loft at four in the morning, and this Cadillac pulls up next to me and this guy says, “I’ll give you fifty dollars for a blow job.” I thought, Wow, fifty dollars!

I mean, who was this news for? It was news for the wrong reasons. It was like, here’s the Pistols making front-page news in England every time they burp and fart, which they did a lot. So it was reported in America, and it couldn’t help but define punk rock, because as soon as something is on the seven o’clock news and on the front page of the newspapers, then that is punk rock. It’s the Sex Pistols and what does it do? It burps and farts and curses. Does it make music? Maybe, maybe not. Who can be bothered to listen to the music? Do you think Walter Cronkite was going to listen to twenty seconds of the music? There was no music on the network coverage of the Sex Pistols. It was simply that this sociological phenomenon from England that happened to play music was playing here.

BOB GRUEN: When we finally made it to San Francisco, the band was feeling the strain. So Noel Monk took the guys out to buy leather jackets for behaving themselves. We went to this gay store in San Francisco, a giant supermarket of leather stuff, so that the band could buy their leather jackets. But they also had all of these dildos and K-Y jelly. So Sid bought all of these leather bracelets, leather belts, and then he bought some K-Y jelly, or some lubricant, some butt-fucker’s lubricant, and put it in his hair. It was like Crisco and Sid shoved it all in his hair and his hair was sticking up and Johnny Rotten said, “Great, Sid. Now you can stick your head up somebody’s ass.”

Overnight, punk had become as stupid as everything else. 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.

Then Keith Richards had a birthday party at a roller rink. Cheetah and Richard Lloyd were racing and Cheetah fell on his face and broke his arm. CHEETAH CHROME: I was racing with Mick Jagger and Richard Lloyd on roller skates and I fell and broke my wrist. It was the stupidest thing to do …

WAYNE KRAMER: After I got out of jail, I was living in a halfway house, and I heard that Patti Smith was playing in Ann Arbor, so I thought, I should go thank her for putting my name on her record. Patti had put “Free Wayne Kramer” on the record sleeve of the Radio Ethiopia album, which was a brotherly kind of revolutionary thing to do. After the show, it was really hard to get backstage. I felt uncomfortable, because you know how icky those backstage situations can be. I saw Fred Smith, and he was being weird with me, and then I saw he was with Patti. I said, “Hi, Patti. I’m Wayne Kramer. I just thought I’d come by and say hello, and thank you for mentioning me on your record.” She kind of went, “Oh,” and space-cadeted away from me. I felt like, She doesn’t know who I am. She doesn’t care who I am.

She said, “This coat cost ten thousand dollars. I sleep in it. I live in it. I haven’t taken this off in …” So she was showing off this fur coat, and I don’t know for a fact, but I believe that her hands were in her pockets, and she was like doing something funny down there. I don’t know what. She was gyrating around.

I mean, Dont Look Back was Patti’s inspirational movie. She didn’t wanna become her own oldies act, she didn’t want to go out there and sing “Gloria,” she didn’t feel like Jesus had died for somebody’s sins but not hers anymore. She had solved the question that she’d opened up, her artistic question, and now she was on to her next art.

So drugs brought money back and Ronald Reagan was elected president and, you know, shit went on. In fact, that’s the sad part. Hippies survived Nixon, but punk caved in to Ronald Reagan, know what I’m saying? Punk couldn’t actually take a good challenge.

Finally Johnny comes back and we go to his place on Twenty-first Street, which is right across from the police station. There’s all these cops and police academy recruits walking up and down the block, and Johnny goes to pull the keys out for his apartment, and this huge bag of coke falls out on the sidewalk. He kind of looks up and down the block like, Is anybody noticing? Then quickly scoops it up back into his pocket and said, “Sorry, Bob, I ain’t got no class.” I said, “No, you got a lot of style, but you got no class.”

WILLY DEVILLE: New Orleans is a marvelous place, but it really is very strange. If you’re not careful, funny things can happen in New Orleans. People come down here from New York and think that because we have trees in the housing projects that nobody’s gonna fuck with them.

I felt cold. I was not really aware of what I had just heard. Six months before Stiv Bators had died, and my friend Phil Smith had just died. Life seemed pretty cheap at that moment. I got up and left. I was hoping that I would be next.

There was Havel, the Velvets, my family, Sylvia Reed, and a few of the people who had been in that Chapter 77 thing. One guy had spent eight years in prison for playing rock & roll. Eight years for being in a band. There was one band who used to go out into the woods and have secret concerts of Velvet songs. They printed up lyrics from our first album and made about two hundred little booklets, and they passed them out to people they could trust, because it was known that if anyone got caught with this—big damn trouble.

JERRY NOLAN: Elvis was wearing a white jacket, black baggy peg-leg pants with a pleat—white inside with little white stitching. He had two-tone shoes on, white on the top, black on the sides—rock & roll shoes. I think he had on a silver lamé short-sleeved shirt. And he wore his belt buckle, a skinny little belt, on the side, to be cool. I was pretty excited. Everyone was carried away. I had never seen anyone put on a show like that. I was almost embarrassed. It was just shocking. I was even more interested in my sister. She was screaming and jumping around. I was amazed she was doing this. At one moment, Elvis threw himself on his back, sort of doing the splits, with one leg pointed right at me. I could see that his shoes were worn out. Maybe they were just his favorites and he didn’t want to quit wearing them. But I also had a tinge of pity, thinking maybe he was poor. But I dug it. I thought he looked like a real street kid from Williamsburg. That show, even at ten years old, really changed my life. I was overwhelmed by Elvis. I was overwhelmed by the musicians. I could feel the playing. But most of all, I remember two things from that show: my sister completely losing her cool, and the hole in Elvis’ shoe.