And true to its subject, ''Please Kill Me'' is lurid, insolent, disorderly, funny, sometimes gross, sometimes mean and occasionally touching. In it, sex and drugs are inextricably linked to rock-and-roll so are dissension, ambition and death. It's a book of gossip, usually from the participants themselves, about couplings, petty crime, hustles, pratfalls, snubs, traffic mishaps, fistfights, knife fights and overdoses. ''Please Kill Me,'' named after a T-shirt once worn by a member of Television, doesn't have much to say about the music itself. McCain does not, assembles reminiscences from a good share of the musicians, photographers, artists, roadies and groupies who were present at the birth of punk. Mark's Church, where Patti Smith emerged. Legs McNeil has been credited with naming it in 1975, when he came up with Punk as the name of a new magazine Gillian McCain was a program coordinator of the Poetry Project at St. So it's an opportune moment for ''Please Kill Me,'' assembled by two people who were at the center of New York's mid-1970's punk scene. And 18 years after their quick flameout, the original Sex Pistols are on the road again, playing to far more listeners than ever heard them in the 1970's. The Ramones are gathering encomiums on a farewell tour. The punk poets who made New York the movement's core have re-emerged: Patti Smith with an album, book and tour, Richard Hell with a book. At the same time, the 20-year nostalgia gap between pop culture events and their fond revival has rolled around to the mid-1970's, when punk reached critical mass as a concept, style and self-conscious sect.
Nirvana and Green Day have sold millions of records, showing that an urban underground movement has turned into suburban party music. From Iggy Pop and Lou Reed to the Clash and the Sex Pistols (the first time around), McNeil and McCain document a time of glorious self-destruction and perverse innocence - possibly the last time so many will so much fun in the pursuit of excess.In the 1990's, suddenly everybody wants a piece of punk rock. Please Kill Me goes backstage and behind apartment doors to chronicle the sex, drugs and power struggles that were the very fabric of the American punk community, to the time before piercing and tattoos became commonplace and when every concert, new band and fashion statement marked an absolute first. Assembled by two key figures at the heart of the movement and told through the voices of musicians, artists, iconoclastic reporters and entrepreneurial groupies, Please Kill Me is the full decadent story of the American punk scene, through the early years of Andy Warhol's Factory to the New York underground of Max's Kansas City and later, its heyday at CBGB's, spiritual home to the Ramones, Talking Heads, Television and Blondie.
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