please kill me oral history of the punk movement

There were these big sliding glass doors where of course the methhead psychos lurking in the dark could watch me mopping, all lit up, but I couldn't see out, and most nights I'd be really on edge and ready to run for the parole guys' room if any of the scary noises I heard outside turned out to be some twisted someone smashing through the glass and grabbing my spleen as an ingredient to use in his basement meth lab.Īnyway, that one night I didn't have time to worry about getting chopped into pieces by violent, spun-out hicks, because I was too busy drinking Vanilla Coke after Vanilla Coke in the office, not mopping the place and absorbing (naturally) this very absorbing oral history of the seminal New York City punk scene. I was the only person awake and not severely mentally-ill in the whole building, except for the parole guys, who I was pretty sure were faking it, or at least greatly exaggerating. I read most of this one night while working the graveyard shift at a very institutional group home in the real methy part of SE Portland. He says he came up with the name punk because Telly Savalas used the line 'You lousy punk!' on the show 'Kojak.' According to McNeil: 'After four years of doing Punk magazine, and basically getting laughed at, suddenly everything was 'punk,' so I quit the magazine.' Nicknamed 'Resident Punk' in the magazine, he claims (to much dispute) that he was the first person (along with co-founder John Holmstrom) to have coined the term 'punk' to describe a certain type of music, fashion, and attitude. In Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, McNeil said that the magazine was inspired by two chief influences: Harvey Kurtzman and The Dictators' debut album The Dictators Go Girl Crazy!, indicating that the magazine was started strictly so that its creators could 'hang out with the Dictators'. The name 'Punk' was decided upon because 'it seemed to sum up.everything.obnoxious, smart but not pretentious, absurd, ironic, and things that appealed to the darker side'. They settled upon a magazine, assuming that people would 'think cool and hang out with ' as well as 'give free drinks'.

He is also a former senior editor at Spin Magazine, and the founder and editor of Nerve magazine (print only 1992).Īt the age of 18, disgusted with the hippie movement that seemed to be going nowhere, McNeil gathered with two high school friends, John Holmstrom and Ged Dunn, and decided to create 'some sort of media thing' for a living. 1956 in Cheshire, Connecticut), is the co-founder and a writer for Punk Magazine.

Please kill me oral history of the punk movement