I guess I felt the need to re-read Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk after listening to the live CD by GANG WAR, the short lived band formed by the guitar duo of Wayne Kramer from the MC5 and Johnny Thunders of the NEW YORK DOLLS and the HEARTBREAKERS, and hearing Thunders drop about a hundred racial slurs, lecture the audience on “how to treat your bitch”, and respond to a fan with, “Yeah, I’ll testify. I’ll put it up your fuckin’ ass.”
Let’s just say, it sort of opened a window into a long-gone era, specifically some time in 1979, in which a band could perform in a tiny VFW hall in liberal Ann Arbor, similar to ones I’ve been to countless times, have their guitarist make such statements, and not have the plug pulled on them or get beat up by disgruntled feminists or progressive political activists.
In fact the Popmatters review of the CD complained that the Johnny Thunders song “London Boys” was “homophobic”, when it’s just a response to the SEX PISTOLS song “New York”, in which Johnny Rotten also uses the word for “bundle of sticks” and has nothing to do with gay people. It’s just a good old-fashioned “diss track”, predating what the rappers would do less than a decade later; also while dropping words for “bundles of sticks” and a hundred racial slurs.
But, as we all know, things were different then, and many modern politically correct punk rockers, who lecture folks on “isms” and “phobias” and shellac entire labels for allegedly naughty behavior, would balk and be shocked by what punk rock was in the 70s. After all, GLENN DANZIG said that punk rock would never have gotten anywhere if the cancel culture of today existed in the mid/late-70s. If you think I’m full of shit, just ask yourself if anyone today would get away with adorning their clothing with swastikas or writing songs with the word for “bundle of sticks” in the lyrics; let alone unleashing such lovely gems as “Get Raped” by EATER or “I Feel Like a Wog” by THE STRANGLERS. Or, as my friend Barry Goubler once said, “They thought punks were all Nazis until they realized what great useful idiots they could make.”
But, when Please Kill Me came out way back in 1996, not only were the politically correct conceits of the modern era only just starting to set in (all swastikas now had to be crossed out, to be sure), but the music that was being called punk, whether it was the gazillion-selling skate punk of GREEN DAY and the OFFSPRING, or the similarly gazillion-selling grunge of NIRVANA, PEARL JAM, and SOUNDGARDEN, or the brutal metalcore of EARTH CRISIS and SICK OF IT ALL or the “socially aware” hipster college rock of SONIC YOUTH, FUGAZI, and REFUSED or even “old school” throwbacks like RANCID, THE DWARVES, and THE QUEERS, was so far removed from the source, both in sound and substance, that it’s a wonder all of these bands fall under the same musical umbrella.
Yeah, sure, they share a “common ancestor” in TE RAMONES and the Sex Pistols, but a kid putting on the Ramones’ self-titled debut album or Never Mind the Bollocks… Here’s the Sex Pistols for the first time in the mid-90s might be surprised by how slow and NOT particularly aggressive the early version of punk is. Yeah, both bands had their amps set on 11, but the Ramones sounded like the BEACH BOYS with loud guitars, and the Sex Pistols played mid-tempo hard rock with a few Keith Richards leads and some obnoxious cretin shouting at you in a thick Cockney accent.
And don’t even get me started on dressing punk in the mid/late-90s! Everyone wore oversized clothing, and punk bands were no different. The punk look of the past, whether you dressed like the Ramones with the shoulder length hair, tight jeans, and motorcycle jacket, or the Sex Pistols with the spikey hair, torn blazers, and safety pins, or THE EXPLOITED with the plaid bondage pants, motorcycle jacket, and foot-tall Mohawk, was considered cheesy, outdated, and essentially a glorified Halloween costume.
The Exploited
Hell, the movies about Punk rock, such as The Punk Rock Movie, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, The Decline of Western Civilization, Class of 1984, Suburbia, Repo Man, Sid and Nancy, and The Return of the Living Dead, or hilarious punk episodes of 80s TV shows like Quincy and Square Pegs seemed like they were from another century, and they weren’t even twenty years old.
So, yes, Please Kill Me was going to set the story straight on punk. Does it, though? Eh, sort of, but not really. I’ve read Please Kill Me probably five times since my brother got it for me back in 2000 (along with Fun House by THE STOOGES, thanks Elya!), and, for the most part, it’s a very entertaining book that introduced me to several great bands, like THE DICTATORS, THE DEAD BOYS, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, and RICHARD HELL AND THE VOIDOIDS; not to mention that, according to Barry Goubler, the 90s garage punk kids treated it like their bible. Sadly I lost my old copy, and the one I just read was the 20th anniversary edition, which has extra photos and a few added lines from musicians, but nixes the “additional depraved testimony” section at the end of the original and replaces it with a completely unnecessary afterward that attempts to explain what an “oral history” is; as if we’re a bunch of dumbasses who can’t figure it out for ourselves.
I think, and I could be mistaken, that they did this to create plausible deniability for the people who have since discovered how narrow, overly-simplistic, and borderline incorrect much of Please Kill Me is. Basically the book’s version of the punk story begins in the 1960s with the VELVET UNDERGROUND doing their arty concerts with whip dancers and strobe lights in front of New Yorkers who were all over Andy Warhol’s jock and ends in the early 90s with New York Dolls and Heartbreakers drummer Jerry Nolan blabbering on his hospital death bed about seeing ELVIS PRESLEY when he was a kid and complaining about how MÖTLEY CRÜE and POISON stole Johnny Thunders’ look.
In between, we get partial histories and anecdotes about the Stooges, the MC5, the New York Dolls, the Dictators, the Heartbreakers, the Ramones, the Dead Boys, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, PATTI SMITH, TELEVISION, WAYBE/JAYNE COUNTY, the guys who started Punk magazine, the Sex Pistols' photographer Bob Gruen, and a bunch of groupies and hangers on talking about who they shacked up with; along with passing mentions of the DOORS, DAVID BOWIE, ALICE COOPER, ELVIS COSTELLO, BLONDIE, the Sex Pistols, THE CLASH, and THE DAMNED. There’s also way too much crap about New York’s ridiculous theater, essentially a bunch of gay people who put on trashy, tasteless, “off-Broadway” plays, and some pointless talk near the end from the rock writer Mick Farren bemoaning the death of Lester Bangs, and how punk couldn’t survive Ronald Reagan; even though punk rock, hardcore punk, rockabilly revival, new wave, death rock, post-punk, and other punk subgenres thrived under Ronald Reagan. Hey, wait, he’s British; isn’t his enemy supposed to be Margaret Thatcher?
What does Mick Farren have to do with any of this anyway? He’s a Ladbroke Grove Anarchist hippie who sang for THE DEVIANTS and associated with HAWKWIND, THE PINK FAIRIES, and MOTÖRHEAD. I suppose there’s a connection between that and British punk, but the book doesn’t talk about British punk, other than to dismiss it as a copy of New York punk, which is, of course, total bullshit. Sure, there are parallels between the New York and London scenes, but the story Please Kill Me tells is that Malcolm McLaren managed the New York Dolls, hung around Richard Hell, took the look and sound to London, gave them to four directionless teenagers, and, a few months later, spat out the Sex Pistols, and by extension, British punk. Doesn’t that just sound ridiculous?
Johnny Rotten was dressing like a punk rocker before Malcolm McLaren had even met him; after all, Malcolm saw him for the first time walking down King’s Road wearing that “I hate Pink Floyd” t-shirt. And most of the people going to early punk shows at CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City were arty people from the Andy Warhol scene or long-haired rocker types. Yeah, sure, there was the occasional Richard Hell or Johnny Thunders looking guy with spikey hair and torn t-shirt, but, like, come on, Alice Cooper wore a torn t-shirt.
I found it especially frustrating when Jerry Nolan claimed that, when the New York Dolls started in the early 70s, the only other bands that existed were a bunch of self-indulgent progressive rock acts that wrote songs that took up one side of an entire album; as if, before the New York Dolls came on the scene, the only music that existed was Thick as a Brick by JETHRO TULL and Close to the Edge by YES. This overly simplistic explanation implies that, before punk came along and aside from a handful of proto-punk bands like the Dolls, the Stooges, the FLAMIN’ GROOVIES, and THE MODERN LOVERS, the 70s literally had zero good music. Does that make sense? Even if you don’t like progressive rock (which I do, hehe) are you really gonna drop shade on BLACK SABBATH???
Furthermore, the claim that the New York Dolls had the monopoly on the three minute song in the early 70s is not even true!!! I know Nolan probably did lots of drugs that clouded his memory, but had he not heard of, I dunno, SLADE, SWEET, T. REX, MOTT THE HOOPLE, or Alice Cooper even at the time?? Did THOSE bands write self-indulgent pieces that took up one side of an LP? Every one of those bands has been cited as an influence on punk. So what makes the New York Dolls, or, for that matter, the MC5 (who I’ll get to later) or the Velvet Underground (who I’ll also get to later) any more important than these other bands, other than Please Kill Me says they are? That’s the kind of open-ended question the book doesn’t really answer.
And, by the way, if punk rock is just a return to the quick, three minute song, what would punks have to say about “Rock and Roll” by LED ZEPPELIN, “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath, “Fireball” by DEEP PURPLE, or “Modern Times Rock ‘n’ Roll” by QUEEN? Those songs are all fast and short too, but I believe Nolan would be too hip to admit he likes any of that stuff. And, speaking of bands that have a song that takes up one side of an LP, Nolan may want to have a word with LOU REED about “Sister Ray.”
Instead of being the “uncensored oral history of punk”, it’s more like the “uncensored oral history of a bunch of underground bands that we like, along with a bunch of anecdotes from groupies and other non-musicians who nobody cares about.” This “oral history” approach might seem like the “real deal” to the authors, since it lets the participants tell the story in their own words, but it both assumes the reader already knows quite a bit about the bands themselves, and it sheds no light on what punk rock or punk culture actually IS; either musically OR thematically. There’s no mention of the legacy of punk and the influence it had on music and culture. There’s no mention of the various subgenres and offshoots of punk. Please Kill Me makes it seem as though punk existed in a vacuum, consisted of the handful of bands it talks about, and then just disappeared.
The closest the book gets to explaining what punk is in the chapter in which Legs McNeil, John Holmstrom, and Ged Dunn start the magazine called Punk after listening to the first Dictators album in the summer of 1975. I guess, in their view, punk is being a smartass who sees the hippie dream as a dead end, is into “trash culture” (low budget horror movies, pro-wrestling, comic books), and has an irreverent sense of humor; all set to non-overly technical rock music. And, I suppose the Stooges, the Dictators, the New York Dolls, the Heartbreakers, the Dead Boys, and, of course, the Ramones roughly fit within this framework of the apolitical side of punk. And, when it comes to the actual politics of bands like the Clash, the book dismisses them outright.
But, because the book doesn’t describe any of the music in a truly substantive way, this means that, the kids who discover a band like the Dictators, whose lead guitarist is an Eddie Van Halen-tier shredder named Ross the Boss Friedman, who also played in mega-metal barbarians MANOWAR, might not consider the group to be punk at all. In fact, Ross Friedman even commented on one of my FB posts, that the Dictators were too punk for the metal crowd and too metal for the punk crowd. Furthermore, in the afterward of the 1996 edition of Please Kill Me, someone from the band mentions how the Dictators had one foot in the CBGB’s underground New York punk scene and one opening for arena rockers like KISS. See, THAT is interesting; not reading about some groupie hooking up with Elvis Costello.
My point is, if early punk rock and punk culture is described the way above, how the hell do bands like the MC5 and Television fit in? The first MC5 album, Kick Out the Jams, has more in common with the blues-based, heavy psychedelic proto-metal of BLUE CHEER and GRAND FUNK RAILROAD than, well, the raw, garage-y three-chord rock of Stooges or the New York Dolls; and, while the second MC5 album, Back in the USA, does have a bunch of short and punchy little songs which could have influenced punk, the book doesn’t even mention it! Yeah, the story of the fiasco of the 1968 Democratic National Convention is interesting, but what does it have to do with punk? Not to mention that Rob Tyner sounds like every other 70s rock singer; and done nobody calling Ian Gillan punk!
And don’t even get me started on Television! Have you heard Marquee Moon? Do they sing about punk themes? Does jazzy dual-guitar interplay in extended pieces sound like punk to you? In one chapter, Richard Lloyd bitched that THE CARS were a more commercial version of them. Is that the case, or are the Cars simply a better band? You can probably guess what my answer will be.
But, now that we’re on the topic of “what’s punk” – and I know I’m making a rather controversial statement here – I never quite understood how the Velvet Underground fits in either. I never got how what they did in the 1960s led to what the Ramones did in the 70s. The Velvet Underground played basic garage rock, but so did a lot of bands; and most of those bands played it faster, catchier, better, and didn’t have a singer who sounds like a crotchety old man. That the Velvet Underground had a viola player and a plain German broad named NICO moaning and groaning on some songs might have made them avant-garde; but what made them punk? I don’t see how the Velvet Underground is any more influential on punk than, say, THE WHO or all the garage bands from the 60s that you find on Back from the Grave and Teenage Shutdown compilations or 1950s rock ‘n’ rollers like CHUCK BERRY and EDDIE COCHRAN. Personally speaking, THE SONICS sound closer to what became punk than what the Velvet Underground did; I know Jeff Bale is going to yell at me for saying that.
As for the rest of Please Kill Me, the chapters on the Stooges, the New York Dolls, the Dictators, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, the Ramones, the Dead Boys, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, and Wayne/Jayne County are entertaining and informative. Since I’m not a Patti Smith or Television fan, I found their chapters to be kind of boring; if you like those artists, you might not. I chuckled when I read about how Dee Dee Ramone struggled to make an E chord when he was auditioning for Television, and how the Ramones angrily stormed off the stage at one of their earliest gigs after each member began playing a different song, and when Iggy Pop egged on a bunch of bikers who were throwing things at the stage at the final Stooges gig, and when Iggy couldn’t go onstage until he found a vein to shoot heroin into, and when Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan quit the New York Dolls when they were in Florida so they could go back to New York and get more heroin.
And I especially enjoyed the chapter called “Fun with Dick and Jayne”, in which transvestite punk rocker Wayne (now Jayne) County was performing at CBGB’s and swung his microphone stand at Dictators singer Handsome Dick Manitoba, shattering his collar bone in response to Manitoba shouting, “Queer!” from the crowd. Manitoba, of course, meant no hostility and was just trying to engage with the band in a way that’s since become typical at small club shows, but Wayne/Jayne County was drunk and high on amphetamines and mistook Handsome Dick going to use the pisser, which was near the stage, as an attempt to get onto the stage and attack him for being gay. The entire incident resulted in lines being drawn in the sand between the Wayne County and Dictators camp, with the latter being accused of being a bunch of unsophisticated louts who bash gay people, and the former their victims. Eventually the matter was resolved, but it’s since become one of the legendary stories in early punk.
The book also talks about Dead Boys drummer Johnny Blitz getting stabbed by a Puerto Rican gang member and the resulting Blitz benefit concerts held at CBGB’s to raise money for his medical bills; the coolest part about that being, of course, that John Belushi filled in on drums. And I got a kick out reading about how Richard Hell and the Voidoids went over to the U.K. for three weeks to support the Clash; with Voidoids lead guitarist Bob Quin smashing some punk rocker in the head with his guitar for spitting on him, and that later, said punk rocker came backstage and thanked him for the souvenir.
See, I wish Please Kill Me had more of THAT stuff and not some groupie talking shit about James Williamson from the Stooges.
But, nearly three decades after Please Kill Me came out, its relevance has dwindled. After reading countless books and watching lots of documentaries about various bands and musical subcultures, all the stories about sex, drugs, and debauchery in Please Kill Me are not especially unique. Nearly every musician in the book was just a typical dude with dreams of making it big, having a lot of sex, doing a bunch of drugs, and living the teenage lifestyle in perpetuity. The music they made just happened to be a little different; and, in many cases, it wasn’t even all that different.
And, thanks to the internet and its hype machine, not to mention every amateur filmmaker’s desire to make a documentary, obscure also-rans are now popping up out of nowhere to further push the bands in Please Kill Me into the background; case in point, that power trio with the three brothers (literally and figuratively) DEATH from Detroit. Nobody at the time ever heard of them or played a show with them, but their 1975 demo was unearthed in 2006, and now they’ve been shoehorned into the “official” punk story. I mean, I think I know the real reason why, but let’s not go there.
But to some who only have a tangential connection with the whole punk thing, such as TWISTED SISTER members J.J. French and Mark “the Animal” Mendoza, bands like the New York Dolls, the Stooges, the Dead Boys, the Dictators, and the Ramones are just mediocrities that failed to break through in a big way.
I certainly don’t think that! I think they’re all great rock ‘n’ roll! As are UFO, SCORPIONS, THIN LIZZY, CHEAP TRICK, AC/DC, AEROSMITH, VAN HALEN, Motörhead, and ZZ TOP, who, by the way, also did a song about heroin.
Edwin Oslan
Revenge of Riff Raff
11th August, 2023
What does Mick Farren have to do with any of this anyway? He’s a Ladbroke Grove Anarchist hippie who sang for THE DEVIANTS and associated with HAWKWIND, THE PINK FAIRIES, and MOTÖRHEAD. I suppose there’s a connection between that and British punk, but the book doesn’t talk about British punk, other than to dismiss it as a copy of New York punk, which is, of course, total bullshit. Sure, there are parallels between the New York and London scenes, but the story Please Kill Me tells is that Malcolm McLaren managed the New York Dolls, hung around Richard Hell, took the look and sound to London, gave them to four directionless teenagers, and, a few months later, spat out the Sex Pistols, and by extension, British punk. Doesn’t that just sound ridiculous?
Johnny Rotten was dressing like a punk rocker before Malcolm McLaren had even met him; after all, Malcolm saw him for the first time walking down King’s Road wearing that “I hate Pink Floyd” t-shirt. And most of the people going to early punk shows at CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City were arty people from the Andy Warhol scene or long-haired rocker types. Yeah, sure, there was the occasional Richard Hell or Johnny Thunders looking guy with spikey hair and torn t-shirt, but, like, come on, Alice Cooper wore a torn t-shirt.
The ancient British custom of hating on Pink Floyd.
I found it especially frustrating when Jerry Nolan claimed that, when the New York Dolls started in the early 70s, the only other bands that existed were a bunch of self-indulgent progressive rock acts that wrote songs that took up one side of an entire album; as if, before the New York Dolls came on the scene, the only music that existed was Thick as a Brick by JETHRO TULL and Close to the Edge by YES. This overly simplistic explanation implies that, before punk came along and aside from a handful of proto-punk bands like the Dolls, the Stooges, the FLAMIN’ GROOVIES, and THE MODERN LOVERS, the 70s literally had zero good music. Does that make sense? Even if you don’t like progressive rock (which I do, hehe) are you really gonna drop shade on BLACK SABBATH???
Furthermore, the claim that the New York Dolls had the monopoly on the three minute song in the early 70s is not even true!!! I know Nolan probably did lots of drugs that clouded his memory, but had he not heard of, I dunno, SLADE, SWEET, T. REX, MOTT THE HOOPLE, or Alice Cooper even at the time?? Did THOSE bands write self-indulgent pieces that took up one side of an LP? Every one of those bands has been cited as an influence on punk. So what makes the New York Dolls, or, for that matter, the MC5 (who I’ll get to later) or the Velvet Underground (who I’ll also get to later) any more important than these other bands, other than Please Kill Me says they are? That’s the kind of open-ended question the book doesn’t really answer.
And, by the way, if punk rock is just a return to the quick, three minute song, what would punks have to say about “Rock and Roll” by LED ZEPPELIN, “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath, “Fireball” by DEEP PURPLE, or “Modern Times Rock ‘n’ Roll” by QUEEN? Those songs are all fast and short too, but I believe Nolan would be too hip to admit he likes any of that stuff. And, speaking of bands that have a song that takes up one side of an LP, Nolan may want to have a word with LOU REED about “Sister Ray.”
Instead of being the “uncensored oral history of punk”, it’s more like the “uncensored oral history of a bunch of underground bands that we like, along with a bunch of anecdotes from groupies and other non-musicians who nobody cares about.” This “oral history” approach might seem like the “real deal” to the authors, since it lets the participants tell the story in their own words, but it both assumes the reader already knows quite a bit about the bands themselves, and it sheds no light on what punk rock or punk culture actually IS; either musically OR thematically. There’s no mention of the legacy of punk and the influence it had on music and culture. There’s no mention of the various subgenres and offshoots of punk. Please Kill Me makes it seem as though punk existed in a vacuum, consisted of the handful of bands it talks about, and then just disappeared.
The closest the book gets to explaining what punk is in the chapter in which Legs McNeil, John Holmstrom, and Ged Dunn start the magazine called Punk after listening to the first Dictators album in the summer of 1975. I guess, in their view, punk is being a smartass who sees the hippie dream as a dead end, is into “trash culture” (low budget horror movies, pro-wrestling, comic books), and has an irreverent sense of humor; all set to non-overly technical rock music. And, I suppose the Stooges, the Dictators, the New York Dolls, the Heartbreakers, the Dead Boys, and, of course, the Ramones roughly fit within this framework of the apolitical side of punk. And, when it comes to the actual politics of bands like the Clash, the book dismisses them outright.
But, because the book doesn’t describe any of the music in a truly substantive way, this means that, the kids who discover a band like the Dictators, whose lead guitarist is an Eddie Van Halen-tier shredder named Ross the Boss Friedman, who also played in mega-metal barbarians MANOWAR, might not consider the group to be punk at all. In fact, Ross Friedman even commented on one of my FB posts, that the Dictators were too punk for the metal crowd and too metal for the punk crowd. Furthermore, in the afterward of the 1996 edition of Please Kill Me, someone from the band mentions how the Dictators had one foot in the CBGB’s underground New York punk scene and one opening for arena rockers like KISS. See, THAT is interesting; not reading about some groupie hooking up with Elvis Costello.
My point is, if early punk rock and punk culture is described the way above, how the hell do bands like the MC5 and Television fit in? The first MC5 album, Kick Out the Jams, has more in common with the blues-based, heavy psychedelic proto-metal of BLUE CHEER and GRAND FUNK RAILROAD than, well, the raw, garage-y three-chord rock of Stooges or the New York Dolls; and, while the second MC5 album, Back in the USA, does have a bunch of short and punchy little songs which could have influenced punk, the book doesn’t even mention it! Yeah, the story of the fiasco of the 1968 Democratic National Convention is interesting, but what does it have to do with punk? Not to mention that Rob Tyner sounds like every other 70s rock singer; and done nobody calling Ian Gillan punk!
And don’t even get me started on Television! Have you heard Marquee Moon? Do they sing about punk themes? Does jazzy dual-guitar interplay in extended pieces sound like punk to you? In one chapter, Richard Lloyd bitched that THE CARS were a more commercial version of them. Is that the case, or are the Cars simply a better band? You can probably guess what my answer will be.
But, now that we’re on the topic of “what’s punk” – and I know I’m making a rather controversial statement here – I never quite understood how the Velvet Underground fits in either. I never got how what they did in the 1960s led to what the Ramones did in the 70s. The Velvet Underground played basic garage rock, but so did a lot of bands; and most of those bands played it faster, catchier, better, and didn’t have a singer who sounds like a crotchety old man. That the Velvet Underground had a viola player and a plain German broad named NICO moaning and groaning on some songs might have made them avant-garde; but what made them punk? I don’t see how the Velvet Underground is any more influential on punk than, say, THE WHO or all the garage bands from the 60s that you find on Back from the Grave and Teenage Shutdown compilations or 1950s rock ‘n’ rollers like CHUCK BERRY and EDDIE COCHRAN. Personally speaking, THE SONICS sound closer to what became punk than what the Velvet Underground did; I know Jeff Bale is going to yell at me for saying that.
As for the rest of Please Kill Me, the chapters on the Stooges, the New York Dolls, the Dictators, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, the Ramones, the Dead Boys, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, and Wayne/Jayne County are entertaining and informative. Since I’m not a Patti Smith or Television fan, I found their chapters to be kind of boring; if you like those artists, you might not. I chuckled when I read about how Dee Dee Ramone struggled to make an E chord when he was auditioning for Television, and how the Ramones angrily stormed off the stage at one of their earliest gigs after each member began playing a different song, and when Iggy Pop egged on a bunch of bikers who were throwing things at the stage at the final Stooges gig, and when Iggy couldn’t go onstage until he found a vein to shoot heroin into, and when Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan quit the New York Dolls when they were in Florida so they could go back to New York and get more heroin.
And I especially enjoyed the chapter called “Fun with Dick and Jayne”, in which transvestite punk rocker Wayne (now Jayne) County was performing at CBGB’s and swung his microphone stand at Dictators singer Handsome Dick Manitoba, shattering his collar bone in response to Manitoba shouting, “Queer!” from the crowd. Manitoba, of course, meant no hostility and was just trying to engage with the band in a way that’s since become typical at small club shows, but Wayne/Jayne County was drunk and high on amphetamines and mistook Handsome Dick going to use the pisser, which was near the stage, as an attempt to get onto the stage and attack him for being gay. The entire incident resulted in lines being drawn in the sand between the Wayne County and Dictators camp, with the latter being accused of being a bunch of unsophisticated louts who bash gay people, and the former their victims. Eventually the matter was resolved, but it’s since become one of the legendary stories in early punk.
The book also talks about Dead Boys drummer Johnny Blitz getting stabbed by a Puerto Rican gang member and the resulting Blitz benefit concerts held at CBGB’s to raise money for his medical bills; the coolest part about that being, of course, that John Belushi filled in on drums. And I got a kick out reading about how Richard Hell and the Voidoids went over to the U.K. for three weeks to support the Clash; with Voidoids lead guitarist Bob Quin smashing some punk rocker in the head with his guitar for spitting on him, and that later, said punk rocker came backstage and thanked him for the souvenir.
See, I wish Please Kill Me had more of THAT stuff and not some groupie talking shit about James Williamson from the Stooges.
But, nearly three decades after Please Kill Me came out, its relevance has dwindled. After reading countless books and watching lots of documentaries about various bands and musical subcultures, all the stories about sex, drugs, and debauchery in Please Kill Me are not especially unique. Nearly every musician in the book was just a typical dude with dreams of making it big, having a lot of sex, doing a bunch of drugs, and living the teenage lifestyle in perpetuity. The music they made just happened to be a little different; and, in many cases, it wasn’t even all that different.
And, thanks to the internet and its hype machine, not to mention every amateur filmmaker’s desire to make a documentary, obscure also-rans are now popping up out of nowhere to further push the bands in Please Kill Me into the background; case in point, that power trio with the three brothers (literally and figuratively) DEATH from Detroit. Nobody at the time ever heard of them or played a show with them, but their 1975 demo was unearthed in 2006, and now they’ve been shoehorned into the “official” punk story. I mean, I think I know the real reason why, but let’s not go there.
But to some who only have a tangential connection with the whole punk thing, such as TWISTED SISTER members J.J. French and Mark “the Animal” Mendoza, bands like the New York Dolls, the Stooges, the Dead Boys, the Dictators, and the Ramones are just mediocrities that failed to break through in a big way.
I certainly don’t think that! I think they’re all great rock ‘n’ roll! As are UFO, SCORPIONS, THIN LIZZY, CHEAP TRICK, AC/DC, AEROSMITH, VAN HALEN, Motörhead, and ZZ TOP, who, by the way, also did a song about heroin.
Edwin Oslan
Revenge of Riff Raff
11th August, 2023
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