Why'd you decide to revisit Please Kill Me on this tour? I'm gonna read part of it and see what kind of reaction it gets. It turned out she was a junkie, but she didn't look like it. I thought if I had to be honest about her, I should also be honest about myself. I was on Valium or Xanax all the time, and my therapist said I should write about what happened, so I did.

They amputated her leg, and she didn't survive. She was admitted to the hospital, and I couldn't find her. She'd just flown home and told me her leg hurt. I was in the middle of doing my porn book, The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Industry, and a TV show at the same time, so I'd fly her in to wherever I was. McNeil: It's about my five-month affair with the love of my life, and it's also about Punk magazine. I asked him about both before his trip to Madison. He'll also share selections from a new memoir, Girl With the Most Cake. McNeil will read from it at Mickey's Tavern this Wednesday, Oct. It turns respectable rock fans into music-history junkies. It's read and reread, studied and quoted. It meant 'drunk, obnoxious, smart but not pretentious, absurd, funny, ironic, and things that appealed to the darker side,' he and Gillian McCain explain in their 1996 book Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk.įor many punks, Please Kill Me is a bible of sorts.

The name symbolized what they loved about their favorite musicians. He started a magazine called Punk with a couple of friends.

He lived in 1970s New York, otherwise known as hell. Gillian McCain is the co-editor (with Legs McNeil) of Dear Nobody: The True Diary of Mary Rose, and is the author of two books of poetry, Tilt and Religion. A collaborative work called Descent of the Dolls will be published this year by Blazevox Books.Punk groupie Sable Starr teases Legs McNeil. His other works include The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Film Industry as well as Dear Nobody: The True Diary of Mary Rose, which he co-edited with Gillian McCain. 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.Legs McNeil was the Resident Punk at Punk Magazine, a senior editor at Spin, and currently contributes to Vice. Iggy Pop, Danny Fields, Dee Dee and Joey Ramone, Malcom McLaren, Jim Carroll, and scores of other famous and infamous punk figures lend their voices to this definitive account of that outrageous, explosive era. Please Kill Me is the first oral history of the most nihilist of all pop movements.

Legs mcneil and gillian mccain