Twenty years later, that book about 'junkies and whores' is a classic. At one lunch meeting, McCain recalls, their editor said, 'I think there's too much sex in it.' At one point, there was some discussion about whether the book would be excerpted in Vanity Fair, but their publisher said, 'Legs, it's a book about junkies and whores.are you kidding me?'

'I was more confident that people would want to read it,' McCain says, 'but Legs was like, 'No one's going to read this.'' Happily, McCain was ultimately proved correct-three publishers wanted Please Kill Me.Įven with a publisher lined up, there were challenges along the way. The authors were passionate about the project but weren't sure how it would be received by publishing houses. 'They say you forget the pain of childbirth.well, I don't forget the pain of doing that book.'

'I still remember how hard it was,' says McCain. When the interviews were done and the story was laid out-from Lou Reed's beckoning opening lines ('Come over here so I can talk to you…') to New York Dolls' Jerry Nolan dying in a hospital bed-McCain felt relieved. Please kill me : the uncensored oral history of punk by McNeil, Legs McCain, Gillian. McCain and McNeil spoke to everyone McNeil could remember from the scene who they could reach. She developed some tricks: 'You've got to wait.because the minute they see the tape recorder, they're kind of freezing up a little.' Between her and McNeil, they built up a kind of act: 'We had a great 'good cop bad cop' thing-he'd ask someone, 'Who are you fucking?' and then I'd roll my eyes and go, 'He's so disgusting!'' 'I never thought of it as interviewing-it was just talking.' McCain went into interviews without notes, armed only with a tape recorder. 'You know what? I'd never really interviewed anyone before, come to think of it,' she says good-naturedly. The two quickly found ways to get their subjects to open up-be they groupies, label dudes, scenesters, or massive stars like Miles Davis, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, and Andy Warhol.

Urn:oclc:5171972 Scandate 20110803131339 Scanner McCain on board, the book shifted from being a history of The Ramones to an account of the punk scene as it spread from Malcolm McLaren's London and the Sex Pistols to New York's CBGB, Television, and Blondie-and far beyond. OL16072264W Page-progression lr Page_number_confidence 92.58 Pages 480 Pdf_module_version 0.0.20 Ppi 514 Related-external-id urn:isbn:0349108803 Urn:lcp:pleasekillmeunce00mcne:epub:a5d1f7ee-1960-458d-a62e-36c2f2d9098b Extramarc Columbia University Libraries Foldoutcount 0 Identifier pleasekillmeunce00mcne Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t76t1m81r Isbn 0802115888ĩ780316881470 Lccn 95049841 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary_edition Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 17:00:25 Boxid IA1397503 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donorįriendsofthesanfranciscopubliclibrary Edition 1.

Please kill me by legs mcneil