Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk

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My two passions in life are music (especially punk rock) and history, so obviously books about music history really hit the spot for me. Despite the astonishing prevalence of drug addiction, the New York bands and scene-makers of the mid-’70s, led by the Ramones, had splendid instincts for music and style, and most subsequent pop culture is to some degree indebted to them. A lot about Edie was about covering up; in Please Kill Me, you rarely, if ever, get the feeling anyone is protecting a reputation or holding back. Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, David Johansen, Dee Dee Ramone, Nico, Patti Smith, Malcolm McLaren, and scores of other famous and infamous punk figures lend their voices to this definitive account of that outrageous, explosive era. But you want that name to last, you can't confine it to a few years in some shithole in the Bowery in the 70s.

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There is a similar book on England's movement, and it is on my to-read list if anyone is interested. He talks about meeting his girlfriend from hell, Connie (I never thought I'd get to see a picture of the woman who inspired the Ramones song "Glad to See You Go"): "She was a hooker, I was a Ramone, and we were both junkies.Sometime in the late 1960's, a bad mojo was beginning to well up within the ranks of the flower power movement. Outrageous, vulnerable and strikingly beautiful - in the 1960s Edie Sedgwick became both an emblem of, and a memorial to, the doomed world spawned by Andy Warhol.

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The enduring image of Walt Whitman is as a bearded old sage living out his years in his Camden home. There was zero mention of the West Coast scene (which had already birthed the Runaways, Dead Kennedys Black Flag, Christian Death and X - among others - by the time Sid Vicious kicked it), the Washington scene (home of Bad Brains and Minor Threat, among many others) or the Australian scene (where Radio Birdman sounded like Television crossed with the Ramones before either band had released an album to influence them).Iggy Pop had his moments too and I do like Television and Patti Smith enough to find some moments of interest in their stories. From its origins in the twilight years of Andy Warhol's New York reign to its last gasps as eighties corporate rock, the phenomenon known as punk is scrutinized, eulogized, and idealized by the people who were there and who made it happen. You'll have to find the book to get the actual verbatim, which is better phrased, but if you don't have time for the whole book (though you should make the time), that's the passage that brilliantly sums up the gist of that whole glorious punk rock movement.

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What a marvelous way of writing history--we see how the outrageous stories collide and intersect; we get to "hear" the youthful energy and enthusiasm first-hand; we gain fresh insights into folks we thought we'd learned all about years ago. Fans have gotten glimpses into the band's crazy world of backstage scandals, celebrity love affairs, rollercoaster drug addictions, and immortal music in Motley Crue books like Tommyland and The Heroin Diaries, but now the full spectrum of sin and success by Tommy Lee, Nikki Sixx, Vince Neil, and Mick Mars is an open book in The Dirt. I find it interesting and a little amusing that this was the term that was used to coin this movement. Immensely entertaining…I found these tales of unholy madness and drug-fueled abandon all too thought-provoking.Jim Morrison was often drunk and frequently terrible live, and wrote really bad high school-grade poetry. I fucking hate the narrative that americans invented punk and the british only copied it and completely ruined it in the process. The former led to me picking up a guitar, forming a band, and seeing scores of rock bands perform, which in turn led three decades later to me writing about this amazing time in I Was A Teenage Rock Fan.