review of "Please Kill Me"

[RADIOFREEAL]

Please Kill Yourself
 
A new oral history captures the Punk power of negation
 
by Al Giordano
Boston Phoenix Literary Supplement, June 27, 1996

 
Please Kill Me: The uncensored oral history of Punk
by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Grove Press, 456 pages, $23
 
 
                "By a strange oversight, no historian
        has ever taken the trouble to study how people
        actually lived during the most extreme revolutionary
        moments."
 
                                - Raoul Vaneigem
                                  The Revolution of Everyday Life
 
 
 
        THERE HAVE BEEN rare moments in this century --- the art-
as-nonsense Dada movement of the 1910s, the American Beats of the
1950s, the '60s revolt by European Situationists and their Yippie
counterparts in the United States --- when critical masses of
individuals have come together to shake entire civilizations.
The impact of these events wasn't limited to the artists who
immortalized them; indeed, the stories of how all the participants
lived through their revolutionary moments --- what pop-culturist
Greil Marcus calls their "secret histories" --- have influenced
subsequent generations and live on, even when the moment is over,
for the participants themselves.
	Marcus describes the impact of such a moment on the veterans
of Dada's early days at the Cabaret Voltaire: "For the rest of their
lives, they returned again and again to their few days in a Zurich
bar. They tried to understand what had happened to them. They never
got over it."
	As Situationist Raoul Vaneigem noted, these stories are
seldom recorded in print.
	Please Kill Me is an oral history assembled by Punk magazine
writer Legs McNeil and poet and editor Gillian McCain --- two who
were there --- that begins to make up for the lack of documentation
of the punk phenomenon. In Please Kill Me the rockers, the fans, the
groupies, the producers, the drag queens and the drug dealers get
an opportunity, at last, to testify directly to the events that
changed their lives and the cultural landscape.
	"When I'd walk into CBGB's I'd get so excited," Mary Harron,
the director of Who Shot Andy Warhol, recalls of her nights as a
young rocker in the East Village bar, circa 1975. "My heart would just
be racing every time I did that block. The doors would open and I'd
be there....Everything was new, and it was so exciting because I knew
I was walking into the future."
	Producer Danny Fields, to whom the book is dedicated, provides
ongoing testimony: from the day Lou Reed met John Cale and formed the
Velvet Underground; the Detroit incubation of the MC5 and Iggy Pop
(whose singular contributions to alternative rock are finally
credited); Patti Smith's vision of fusing poetry and rock; Malcolm
McLaren's rip-off of American punk to launch the Sex Pistols in
London.
	The book is not without its gaps. Smith, for one, declined to
be interviewed (the authors instead used excerpts from 25-year-old
interviews), and McCain recently admitted to BBGUN magazine that she
and Legs never contacted Tom Verlaine, the guitar virtuoso from
Television.
	In the absence of such voices of art rock, punk's dark
underside surfaces as its defining characteristic. Punk came out
of what MC5 manager John Sinclair labels "lumpen hippies," working
class and poor kids who couldn't go home to the suburbs when things
got rough. Dee Dee Ramone and poet
Jim Carroll, among others, tell graphic tales of hustling tricks on
53rd and 3rd to afford their heroin habits. Joey Ramone wrote "Beat
on the Brat" after witnessing a mother in his Queens apartment
building chase her kid down the hall with a baseball bat. "A kind of
hostile street person," says poet and singer Ed Sanders, describing
what he calls "Punk types." Twenty percent of the people indexed in
the back of the book --- 30 of 150 --- are now dead, a sobering
thought until one considers the corollary: 80 percent of them
have survived.
	In Please Kill Me, everyone is screwing everyone else, getting
drunk, addicted, diseased, damned and destroyed. The book exposes the
petty jealousies and rivalries responsible for so much of the movement's
creative output. There's a lot of bad-mouthing and score-settling here,
but that's part of the charm --- everyone experienced the moment
differently. Please Kill Me is filled with contradictory accounts by
folks who attended the same events. Some may call it gossip, but
there's a point: Please Kill Me is Marcus' secret history, the story
of the real stuff, big and small, that moves people to crack the
world open.
	The mission, of course, was to do just that. Oversocialized
leftists have long argued against negation as a tool to change the
world: "Sure, you're disrupting things," they say, "but what's your
program?" The punk program *was* disruption. Punk codified the art
of "not-niceness." Artist Arturo Vega painted day-glo swastikas that
decorated the Ramones' apartment. He considered the paintings, "a
closet Nazi detector," exposing those who most loudly objected as
repressing their own authoritarian tendencies ("I always thought that
to conquer evil," he says, "you have to make love to it").
	And disruption sought to cause accidents --- accidents that
stole punk's spirit of rebellion back from its corporate co-optors.
Iggy Pop's chance encounter with black blues musicians in Chicago
gave him the idea to write about his white-trash experiences in their
class-struggle style; the MC5's performance there during the Democratic
National Convention in 1968 sparked a nationally-televised riot;
Malcolm McLaren's unsuccesful stint managing the New York Dolls, during
which he met Richard Hell, the poet-philosopher whose songs and fashion
he pirated for the Sex Pistols ("a 100-percent inspiration," McLaren
says of Hell); Jayne County's bashing, with a microphone stand, of
homophobic heckler, Dictators' singer Handsome Dick Manitoba, let to
gay rights gaining a foothold in the scene.
	Patti Smith's creations might have seemed accidental as well,
since so many of her works sprang from improvisation; but as poet
Penny Arcade recalls from her early '70s attempt to form a band with
Smith: "For me it was a goof. But for Patti something else was going
on, which I didn't get... Patti saw something really could be done."
	Please Kill Me, despite its often nostalgic tone, is a roadmap
for the present. The lesson of Punk is "do it yourself" --- don't wait
for a music company to record, don't wait for a society to revolt. Just
do it. The art of killing one's own oversocialization through the
submergence of the self into the revolutionary moment is the highest
calling of creative life. The lesson of punk, in fact, is "please
kill yourself," an ironically hopeful message found everywhere in
this book of powerful testimonies.