Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk

Rating:
Summary: Spend Your Time Listening to the Music
Review: Save yourself the 5 hours and keep Legs from getting more royalties for this gratuitous, self-glorifying collection of interview excerpts. Put on the Stooges' "Raw Power," some early Patti Smith, and anything by the Ramones. That, my friends, is emminently more enjoyable and representative of the formation of punk music than reading this book. Lessons learned from "Please Kill Me":
1. Iggy Pop was/is a messed up rock god
2. Everyone in the late 60's/early 70's "scene" was into drugs, bi-sexuality, or both
3. See #2
4. Lou Reed was a jerk
5. The MC5 was a great garage rock band that was exploited by the activist community
6. Bebe Buell slept with everybody

Rating:
Summary: They should have titled it the History of Dope
Review: First of all, there is no definitive history of anything. People can only give their points of view. Granted, some points of view are more "privileged" in terms of access to first hand knowledge, but no one was everywhere at once or knew everything that went on. Having the voices of various "leading figures" of punk rock, gives this book crediblity but it doesn't speak for everyone.
Reading this book you get the feeling that punk was mostly about taking drugs of one kind or another. Yes, there were at lot of drugs going around in the 70s, but punk was more than that. Remember, it's called punk "ROCK!" There was very little of the excitement of the music, which was about the excitement of the moment-being young, full of rage and joy, and not knowing what would happen next. Reading "Please Kill Me" I got disgusted, and at times, bored. Having to read for the umpteenth time about someone trying to cop or od'ing is not a fun read.
Another problem with the book is, that for us who lived through these times, there is not much new. We either heard it all, or saw it all, or lived it all. And for young people, it just hits a few highlights ( or lowlights), so it's hardly a comprehensive history of a complex movement and time.
Having said all that, there were a few moments that touched me. Reading about the death of Johnny Thunders again brought tears to my eyes. But such moments were few and far between.This book isn't really history,but gossip-and old gossip at that. If you want to read a good history of punk, read "England's Dreaming" by Jon Savage. It's an intelligent, insightful, and more thorough book about the history of punk, albeit from the perspective of British punk. That's it.

Rating:
Summary: lots of details/I wish it was twice as long!
Review: I really enjoyed this in depth story of the punk era.The stories about iggy+stooges were the highlight for me as i was/am a huge fan of them.Great stuff about the great patti smith,also pistols, dead boys and more.I liked the interviews--and the stories about what a jerk lou reed is(i've seen him in concert in the seventies and eighties-he really was a jerk).However,i gotta say that it's sad that so many of them seemed to be in it only to get high,lost touch with the great music,and died very young.

Rating:
Summary: My all time favorite PUNK book!!!
Review: Forget the Sex Pistols. What I like most about this book is how it points out Malcolm McLaren DIDN'T "invent" punk! He managed the NY Dolls, payed careful attention to Richard Hell's fashion sense (tattered clothes held together by safety pins), probably saw a couple issues of Punk magazine around, THEN he went back to England and put together the Sex Pistols!!!

The 2nd thing I love most about this book is so many people are interviewed, it's in their own words. It really takes you back to that time and place. The people just come alive. I love it!

Rating:
Summary: Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History Of Punk
Review: Tis' A very grand book a must have for any punk rocker! This has to be the best of all the books i've read having to do with the history of punk, being in all everythings by people that were in the scene not just some turd trying to cash in on punk.

Rating:
Summary: Get it.
Review: I couldn't put this book down. Chock full of snippet quotes from the Punk/Rock/Glam world. Great for those of us w/ short attention spans. There's great stuff & some horrible stuff, too, but, like driving by an accident, you just gotta look.

Rating:
Summary: Swallow all you can/ when the music mattered
Review: When I got this book, i just knew i'd be thrilled with it. of corse, i was right. it is such a great book. it's truthful, demanding, and leaves everthing at your feet. take it or leave it, because it holds nothing back. its written by the dreamers & artists; the raw ones who lived it. There is no writters, it was all interviews with people and then Legs and Gillian edited it. it skims over nothing important, because everything, in this book, is both important and unimportant. it is sure to change your outlook on life. pick it up if you want to read about punks, like punks, love the music, are a punk, are intersted in that lifestyle, crazy events, or just want a cool read. WARNING: Should not take everything so seriously, it may sometimes be intense and you may want to read it over and over again. COOL: It, at the very least, mentions every punk god from years past. Like iggy pop, nancy spungen / sid vicious, richard lloyd, patty smith and so many, many more!! Just buy it for the cool pictures, ok, it's in your face and cool. Besides you'll know so much more about the past.

Rating:
Summary: Punk Is Coming
Review: A facsinating account of pre-punk and early punk scene starting in NYC. The book is written by combining interviews and writings of different people in the early scene. Tons who were there comment on what happened. The book runs like a conversation. The effect is mesmorizing. People are crazy, yet increadably verbose. Even if you aren't into punk rock, individuals such as Andy Warhol, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Joey Ramone, Patti Smith, etc will whirl you round their world. Although the book is wonderful, it is also easy to put down. It traps you for a while, but then you zone out. So it isn't a book that you will finish in a night, but it is definately worth the read.

Rating:
Summary: Blitzkrieg Book
Review: This is one of those books that I loved so much it's actually kind of hard for me to put into words and write a review for. My husband had it on order... months before it came out, and after he brought it home, we practically fought over who got to read it first. We eventually had to work something out where we took turns and read it in shifts. Either that or one of us would sneak out and read it when the other fell asleep. If you like punk rock, it's hard to put down.

I love "oral history" style books, and this is one of the best I've ever read. At first I planned just to read everything about The Ramones (which was a lot)and not the rest. But I had so much fun reading everything else I just read it straight through. I wasn't around for the New York punk scene in the mid-late 70's, but this book gives you such a vivid idea of what it was like that I felt like I was there. I'm partial to any of the Ramones-related sections, but Dee Dee Ramone's voice really stood out. He tells enough in PKM that it could almost fill another book. He's definitely just as good of a storyteller as he is a song writer, has a good sense of humor, and his prose was definitely different. He talks about meeting his girlfriend from hell, Connie (I never thought I'd get to see a picture of the woman who inspired the Ramones song "Glad to See You Go"): "She was a hooker, I was a Ramone, and we were both junkies."

If you want gossip and dirt about the NY scene, there's plenty of good stuff. Who slept with who, who wanted to sleep with who, who back-stabbed who (sometimes literally), who didn't get along, who did what drug and how much, and much more. Even if you thought you'd read everything there was about the NY scene, or your favorite band from that time, there's stories you never heard before. This back doesn't try to glamorize anything, in fact the scene was sleazier than I thought (I remember wondering about halfway through if there was anyone that WASN'T doing heroin or sleeping with everybody else at some point). You still, however, get an idea of how fun it must have been. I went back and forth between being glad I was reading about it instead of being there and wishing that I really had been there. It really covers just about everything, and continues on to the present day. The last 1/5 or so of the book has many of the people involved in the scene getting ill and/or dying (mostly caused directly or indirectly from drugs) so it does get pretty sad and even depressing, but that's what happened, and they don't try to gloss it over. I'm just glad the book came out before Joey Ramone passed away or even got sick, because there's enough heart-breaking stuff in there as it is.

I actually prefer the first edition. True, there are some stories in the updated edition that are pretty funny, in particular one someone told about running into Sid Vicious and saying they had to go pick up their vacuum cleaner, and Sid assuming "vacuum cleaner" was some kind of drug lingo and wanting to come along. It does end on a positive note with a mostly re-united MC-5. However, I thought that the ending to the first edition was stronger. The original ending, with Jerry Nolan in the hospital remembering seeing Elvis as a kid, was so vivid and haunting that it actually choked me up, and still does a little every time I read it. I wasn't expecting such a poignant ending, and it really caught me off guard. Since the last part of the book has so many deaths in it, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was. Anyway, in my opinion, ending the book the way it was the first time was much more effective.

I'd recommend this book to anyone who likes a good music-related oral history, or to anyone whose favorite bands were the early punk scene. I'd also recommend it for kids not even born when most of the book happened that think punk rock was started by Green Day (or the Sex Pistols). Recently, I heard someone at work complaining that they heard an interview where Joey Ramone had the nerve to say that the Ramones helped start punk rock. I shut them up with 5 words: "Name one punk band before 1975". I think those were also the last 5 words I ever spoke to that guy, but it just goes to show how this book should be required reading for people who have misconceptions about how punk really began. Anyone interested in music history from the 1970's on would probably also enjoy the book. I guess the only people I wouldn't recommend it to are those who have an idealized picture of that time and place (like I did before I read it) and don't want it shattered because they would rather leave things to their imagination.

However, a review --or my review, at least--just can't do this book justice. Whether you're reading about Dee Dee Ramone turning tricks for dope money (along with doing heroin, another common activity most people seemed to share back was sleeping with Dee Dee Ramone) and later getting stabbed in the butt by his jealous girlfriend, or finding out which bathroom at CBGBs had the best graffiti, or Legs McNeil painting such a vivid portrait of what the neighborhood outside the 'office' for Punk Magazine looked like that you can almost smell it, you'll definitely be entertained. The book is also worth a few re-reads, because there's so much interesting stuff and it's so smoothly and brilliantly put together. This is one amazing book, and I doubt that a more definitive or passionate book about the punk scene in NYC will ever be written. I don't see how it could get any better.

Rating:
Summary: The next best thing to being there
Review: I first read this book a few years ago, on the recommendation of a friend. Since then I've re-read it a few times and always learn something new. It's a great book, pure and simple. It contains a wealth of information not just on the bands that were pivotal to the scene, but also lots of amusing anecdotes and gossip. The format is particularly effective. The reader actually feels like they are sitting around with all of these characters, getting the inside scoop. A must-read for anyone interested in the origins of punk.