Because if you get a great story that moves the narrative forward, you’ve got to use it. LM: Doing an oral history, you have to stay very loose. Other than that I think we kind of learned as we went along. We knew we wanted to show it started in New York. We knew we were going to start with the Velvets and then go to Detroit. … About the structure: We had certain key points. Sometimes he’d over-edit, and I’d go back. GM: I think maintaining the integrity of the voices. I know that if you were really adamant about something, I’d really have to reconsider. So for Richard Lloyd it’s copping dope in a limousine for Duncan it’s going - and then everything goes down. Gillian was like, “This has to go in.” I go, “No way is this … going in.” And then at one point I realized, right before everything falls apart, everybody has to realize what their rock-’n’-roll fantasy is. There was a part in the book about Duncan Hannah going to the Deauville Film Festival. Gillian’s great at imagining bigger stuff. GM: Legs has a theory that the reason people were so frank is they didn’t think the book would get published. Like, Richard and Roberta, they didn’t want to talk about it.
LM: You know, it was just part of their everyday lives. Legs has a theory that the reason people were so frank is they didn’t think the book would get published. Previously, histories like it had been rare - McNeil and McCain were primarily inspired by “Edie” by Jean Stein, edited by George Plimpton - but now they’re everywhere, with “Freaks and Geeks,” the March on Washington and lobster rolls getting the oral history treatment. “Please Kill Me,” five years in the making, was important not just because it made visible the genealogy of an underground music scene (the Velvet Underground to the New York Dolls to the Stooges to Television, Blondie and the Ramones) but because it showed how brilliantly an oral history could capture culture.
“My story?” It took the help of McCain, a friend, fellow lover of oral histories and patient co-conspirator, to make the project come together. Not even McNeil, Punk Magazine’s “resident punk” from its founding in 1976 through its 1979 end, who couldn’t bring himself to write a memoir. The format was ingenious - no single person could lay claim to know the whole of the sprawling, anarchically creative, drug-riddled scene. 20 years ago, Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain published “ Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk” with Grove Press. They came not to bury punk but to praise it.
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