McNeil & McCain — Please Kill Me

Author: Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain
Title: Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk
Year: 1996
Type: Book (Grove Press; twentieth-anniversary edition, 2016)

The title walked into the book off a T-shirt. Richard Hell stenciled PLEASE KILL ME above a bull’s-eye on a shirt he could not face wearing himself; his Television bandmate Richard Lloyd wore it once, upstairs at Max’s Kansas City, and after fans came up offering to oblige, never put it on again.¹ The book behind the title started the same distance from respectability: Dee Dee Ramone approached McNeil about a book on his own life, and McCain, a poet who ran programming at the Poetry Project (and later chaired its board), proposed the bigger thing — a full oral history built from interviews with several hundred of the scene’s principals and stripped of narration entirely.² The montage is the argument. Punk in this telling is born in New York, runs from the Velvet Underground and the Stooges through the Ramones and CBGB, and reaches London only as an export. McNeil’s stated method: “We didn’t want the book to be about punk, we wanted the book to be punk. There’s a difference, you know?”³

McNeil’s name is on the word itself. Punk magazine was founded in 1975 by cartoonist John Holmstrom, publisher Ged Dunn, and McNeil, the nineteen-year-old “resident punk”; the first issue hit newsstands in January 1976 with Lou Reed on the cover, and the magazine welded a word that had meant mid-sixties garage bands onto the scene at CBGB — Holmstrom later called it “the print version of the Ramones.”⁴ McNeil’s gloss in the book runs the definition out loud: “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.”⁵ The press treated it as an event. Christgau’s New York Times Book Review verdict called it “an immensely entertaining portrait of a bohemia,” and Time Out New York and the Daily News put it on their year-end lists. It has since gone into twelve languages, and Grove reissued it for its twentieth anniversary with previously excluded interviews and new photographs. The music oral history became a shelf of its own in its wake.⁶

The review that mattered doubled as the prosecution. Christgau disputed the naming credit (the word “had long been floating around rock criticism” before the magazine), faulted the book for minimizing the print culture beyond Punk magazine (Creem above all), and noted that Tom Verlaine and David Byrne are among the figures “virtually absent” while lesser ones talk for pages. He found Holmstrom’s closing defense of the scene’s racism unconvincing and the musical analysis missing altogether.⁷ The UK’s answer in kind arrived in 2006: John Robb’s Punk Rock: An Oral History runs the same method through London voices, the counterweight to a book whose New York is the whole map.⁸ England’s Dreaming holds the London end of the story and this book holds New York’s, and the split runs deeper than geography: analysis against montage.

Key contributions

• The American origin story: the Velvets-to-Ramones lineage in the participants’ own uncensored voices.
• The naming stake: McNeil co-founded the magazine that welded “punk” onto the living scene, and the book documents the christening from inside.
• The montage method — several hundred interviews, no narrator — that made the music oral history a genre of its own.
• The counter-history to the London telling: the two-city argument over punk’s birthplace, held up from the New York end.

See also

• England’s Dreaming — the London pole: the analysis this book’s montage answers
• Our Band Could Be Your Life — the next American generation: what the kids who read about this scene built
• Punk — the family whose New York birth runs on this book

Footnotes

1. The T-shirt story per NPR’s All Songs Considered page on the book (accessed July 16, 2026). In NPR’s telling Hell designed the shirt for himself and could not face wearing it; accounts differ on how it reached Lloyd, and agree that one wearing and the fans’ offers ended its run. ↩

2. The Dee Dee Ramone genesis and McCain’s counter-proposal per Elyssa Goodman, “‘Please Kill Me,’ 20 Years Later,” Vice, July 29, 2016; “constructed entirely of excerpted interviews with several hundred principals” per Robert Christgau, “Inventing Punk,” The New York Times Book Review, July 28, 1996; McCain’s Poetry Project role per her Wikipedia article (all accessed July 16, 2026). ↩

3. The Vice interview (accessed July 16, 2026). ↩

4. The founding trio, the January 1976 first issue with Lou Reed’s cover, the word’s garage-rock prehistory, and Holmstrom’s “print version of the Ramones” line per Punk magazine’s Wikipedia article; Holmstrom’s credit for narrowing the word onto New York’s nightlife per Grant Wong, “Punk Magazine,” Perspectives on History, October 21, 2025 (all accessed July 16, 2026). ↩

5. McNeil in the book, as quoted in Wong’s Perspectives on History essay (accessed July 16, 2026). ↩

6. Christgau’s review; the year-end lists per the Vice piece; the twelve languages and the oral-history trend per the book’s Wikipedia article (all accessed July 16, 2026). ↩

7. Christgau’s review (accessed July 16, 2026). ↩

8. John Robb, Punk Rock: An Oral History (Ebury, 2006; US edition PM Press, 2012). ↩