Talk About Punk Music
My college roommate freshman year introduced me to the Ramones and it was an instant addiction. Those one-minute songs, pounding and pulsing against the cinder block walls of our dorm room echoed every damn beat of my heart, newly released from high school, from the Midwest, and from parental supervision. That same year I went to New York for the first time, ate chicken vindaloo on Second Avenue and very innocently cruised 53rd and Third. It took thirty years and my son to explain to me the lyrics of “53rd and Third” but in all those years I never stopped listening to the Ramones. The first song lyric out of that same son at the age of eighteen months old was “Rock, Rock” from “Rock “n Roll High School” and the favorite sing-along in the car to this day is “Because the Night” as performed by Patti Smith.
I was well repaid for the intro to the Ramones when my son (twelve years later) brought me the music of Television, MC5, the Voidoids, and Handsome Dick Manitoba and the Dictators, as well as the Heartbreakers and Penetration. He convinced my seventy-three year old mother that there could be no better way to spend a summer afternoon than going to see James Chance and the Contortions at PS 1 In Queens, and he was right. Punk Rock is great, it always will be, and the book I read today (recommended by you-know-who) Please Kill Me, the Uncensored Oral History of Punk Rock by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain proves the vitality, the genuine fearlessness, and wild life of Punk. Punk is great and this is a great book about Punk.
The book is a compilation of hundreds of interviews of everyone who was anyone in the Punk music scene that emerged in Ann Arbor/Detroit and New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was rock ‘n roll that broke away from the earnest and unironic music of the 1960s and went into the arena of anything goes and no musical talent required. It was the “unallowed” music: everything forbidden or disdained came out in full force, ironic and sarcastic and really, really funny, and fun. As David Johansen of the New York Dolls says,”anybody could do it”. But only if they had the guts and the balls to do it, big and bold.
The title Please Kill Me refers to a t-shirt Richard Hell designed, a white shirt with a big red bulls eye in the center and bearing the words “Please Kill Me”: Bob Gruen says “for somebody to walk the streets of New York with a target on his chest, with an invitation to be killed — that’s quite a statement.” Punk was all about making a statement and then turning around the next day and making another one, maybe a totally opposite statement, but something outrageous that made others think and get agitated and maybe even just laugh, really hard. Punk was “about the apocalypse”: say whatever you want, because the end is near.
Despite all the tough guy black leather posturing, and the way too many downer and zoned-out drugs, these people clearly wanted to have fun, a lot of wild and crazy fun, and not get all philosophical or lyrical (well, maybe Patti Smith wanted to) or ecumenical about it all. The guys who started “Punk” magazine, thereby coming up with the term “punk”, postered all of lower Manhattan with the news that “Punk is Coming” (boy, were they right). They wanted to start a magazine that reflected what they liked: “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.” Gone was the iconic smiley face, to be replaced by the middle finger.
There are some really funny quotes, like Danny Fields saying “Musicians are assholes. I told you that. From day one.” We won’t ever forget it after reading the stories that come out in the gossiping, tattling, reminiscing words of all the greats and not-so-greats quoted in the book. Another good (funny but also really sad) line: Dee Dee Ramone explaining that all of the Ramones’ songs were really negative (“I Don’t Wanna Go Down in the Basement” or “I Don’t Wanna Walk Around with You”): “We didn’t write a positive song until ‘Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue’.” Real up-up-with-life stuff.
The women are a little pathetic in this book, except for Debbie Harry (she was in her own zone of empowerment: Blondie over all), Kathy Asheton (sister to two of the Stooges) and Patti — but even Patti Smith did the laundry of “her old man.” Sable Starr, groupie to everyone, was crazy for and with Johnny Thunders but then went with Keith Richards: “I was in such a neat place. I knew who I was — I was with Keith Richards, not [Thunders].” That was how she defined who she was? By whom she was with? The feminists came with No Wave music (shout out to Lydia Lunch), not with Punk.
Legs McNeil, one of the authors and “resident punk” at Punk magazine, explains Punk as a “wonderful vital force that was articulated by the music [and] 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 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.” Works for me.
Punk was also a little bit like Communism: a great idea but few people survived it intact and quite a few people died. Please Kill Me works as anti-drug manifesto, offering excruciating and numbing detail of all the drugs: the hustling and the copping, the shooting up, snorting, paper-bagging, and popping of too many horrible things that messed people up badly — or finished them off.
I cried at the end of this book with so many people ODing or just falling apart by the end of the Punk life cycle, but the last line got me rallying again: “Kick out the Jams!” from Wayne Kramer of MC5, invoking the spirit of deceased MC5 Member Rob Tyner. Kick it out, people, no matter who you are, you define yourself: be wild in your aspirations. You don’t have to be perfect. Punk gives this to you. Now go.
