"I don't
just want to be reduced to this punk-guy"Legs McNeil on punks, drugs, hippies, politics and untold american history For a long time many people in the New York scene didn't want to be called punks. You were the first to speak of himself as punk. Why? We all grew up on top-40-radio. It was just brilliant, you had Hendrix, The Stones, Tommy James And the Shandells, The Supremes, and you had the Fruitgum-company "Yummi, Yummi, Yummi I got Love In My Tummy", David Bowie singing "Jean Jeannie". We'd been listening to that Dictators-Album for that whole summer. John kept saying: "We should make a magazine like the Dictators-Album, rock & roll and comic books and old movies, and bad TV.“ So we founded this magazine and called it punk. We thought we were very commercial, we also thought that the Ramones were the most commercial band in the world, that was such pop. There are various opinions on who invented the term punk. We were kind of failed hippies, we had to invent something new. All this old time rock-critic guys, like Dave Marsh who would say "Oh Legs McNeil thinks he came up with the name punk. But I used it in a record-review in 1969.” That's not the reason why everybody became punk. They became punk, because Punk Magazine happened, so we started a movement. Billy Oldman had a magazine called punk in Rochester New York, which we were not aware of. The cover story of the first issue of punk magazine was based on an interview with Lou Reed. You annoyed him with questions about his favorite hamburgers. Was that your strategy? In the early days. When we didn't know what we were doing, we tried to get as drunk as possible and tried to piss people off and created chaos and looked what happened. Did that work? It worked for a while. With Reed we went to a restaurant. I remember that we were all so hungry and I can see Lou Reed eating these big cheeseburgers. I just wanted to grab it out of his hand. I was so hungry, we had no money. But he made us, these brady little kids, watch him having dinner. He liked John afterwards. He hated me. Probably from this first interview. Why? He was doing lots of speed and I was drinking. I don't think drunks and speedfreaks mix too well. I was a downer-kind of guy, he was a upper-kind of guy. I think I had my first detox at 22 and my last one at 32. For „Please Kill Me“ you let people describe very detailed situations with sex and drugs. The people you talked to never asked you not to publish what they'd said? If you sit down for an interview and you say it is for the book and you save it on tape and they say okay, you don't need to get releases. Everybody in the scene knew it. Those stories had been circulating for years. But I didn't know the structure. It all came together and made sense. The ridiculous theater and glitter. It all came together. You kind of get a feeling for the times. How were the times? Which social background did the punks come from? Is punk basically a thing of middle-class dissidents or a working class thing or something that is mixing the best of both worlds. Probably the worst of both worlds. My mother was a teamster, we voted for Democrat. Most of us grew up with these conservative-liberal mums and dads. For the hippies the Vietnam War played a central role. Not for the punks, who didn't care about politics at all. Why? I remember watching on the news that the marines landed in Da Nang in 1965. I was eight years old. Everybody thought the sixties were about peace and love, it was about fucking violence, man. Everybody remembers Kent State University where four students were shot by soldiers. Everybody forgets that the same thing happened to two black students at Jackson Mississippi University. German shepards on black kids in Alabama. It was a horrible decade. Growing up back then you were permanently occupied with demonstrating. Everything was very political. 1973 the vietnamisation came in. (annotation: The US-army was gradually replaced by soldiers from South-Vietnam.) So the draft was winding down as the seventies came along. By 1974 no one cared about Vietnam anymore. The hippie aesthetics had become worthless. There is nothing wrong with peace and love, but by talking about it all the time it sort of became wallpaper. People were actually writing books called “I`m okay, you`re okay”. That’s what we were reacting against. “I`m not okay, and you`re a fucking asshole” that’s basically what we were saying. In the beginning we were extremely reactionary, because the left was so oppressive. We wanted to leave it open as a blank.I don’t think anybody can give a definit answer what the politics of punk are. We've made it ambigious. It was the L.A.-scene from the West coast with bands like the Dead Kennedys, which made punk political. But that isn't the story that „Please Kill Me“ is about. Punks in the United States had a preference for fascist symbols. Swastikas and nazi-badges didn't only emerge with Sid Vicious. There were not many offensive symbols. You had to take what you could get. The iron cross, for example, was pretty cool. I remember guys, who sprayed it on their cars or surfboards.I don't believe they thought of nazis as cool. It was just about the symbol. I remember seeing a very famous picture of Brian Jones wearing this nazi-uniform. It looked dangerous and cool at the same time. Dee Dee grew up in Germany. The song "Blitzkrieg Bop" started off with "I'm a Nazi Baby, I'm a Nazi, Baby" and then the Ramones came out with their black leather jackets. It evoked feelings of danger and excitement at the same time. They were just majestic. Back then, there was nothing better: ripped Blue Jeans, Sneakers, Black Leather-Jackets and the T-Shirts. To me it really meant as a comment to the hippie-fashism. Of course, there where no nazis, none of us had the discipline to be a nazi. We thought we could do it on our own terms. But if you where in a concentration camp and you got a number tatooed to your arm, you wouldn`t laugh about it. The roots of punk undisputively were in New York. Not only „Please Kill Me“ shows this. Still, it was in Britain where Malcom McLaren made punk enter the mainstream by filling it with new symbols and values. Back in the seventies: What did you think when the Sex Pistols toured the US? I was with Joey Ramone, when we played „White Riot“ by the Clash, it was on a single. We both were like “Wow man, they are stealing”. Of course The Clash were developing into a completely different game, but I think all those early groups started off playing Ramones-songs. At that time it pissed us off. Later I met Sid Vicious from the Sex Pistols personally. He was an idiot. He was stoned from Heroin all the time and couldn't speak a clear sentence. When the Sex Pistols came along, they only played for two weeks and than they broke up. And they ruined everybody`s chances to play in a punkband. Because the record companys said "Why invest money into a band, that is going to break up?" It was music business, not musictherapy. But besides stealing our scene, “Never Mind The Bollocks” was a great record, which pissed us off even more. Some critics said that the portrait of punk that “Please Kill Me” was drawing the British version only as a version of the American roots and that this was overlooking the genuine impact that British bands had on punk. What do you say to this argument. When I started „Please Kill Me“, Jon Savage had already written in “England`s Dreaming”. I don’t think it was my job to write his book. I wanted to write the American version, I wasn’t competing with him. He's a good writer too. He's got a lot of my quotes wrong, which I wonder how many other quotes he got wrong. In the public reception of the USA you're known as the resident punk. I was glad when Sid Vicous came and took the mantle. I have been punk since I was 18. I'm in my forties now, and people ask me this same stupid questions, over and over again. For one year, Gillian McCain (co-author of „Please Kill Me“, annotation) and I travelled through the US and read from „Please Kill Me“. I don’t usually go to symposiums or anything university-like. I have been teaching journalism at a college in California for a friend because she did me a favor.This subject tires me. I don't just want to be reduced to this punk-guy, I'm a lot more complicated and I have other interests. Which ones? History basically. I just finished a book on the history of porn film in Hollywood, it's called „ The Other Hollywood : The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry“). It took six years. I had to talk to the mobsters and I had to go back to the FBI, and to go back to the Mobsters and back to the FBI, and then interview porn-stars. Is there a connection between punk and porn? There are no connections, that’s why I did the book. I wanted to pick a story that I had no knowledge of and where I wasn't already known as this guy from the New Yorker East Village who wrote „Please Kill Me“. In California I'm an anonymous figure. I picked up a story that I really had no involvement in and see if I could get inside and crack it. It took me six years, but I think I did it. Where did your interest for porn film originally come from? In 1974, right before we did punk magazine, I had worked as assistant director on a porn film called ÑBlow Dry“. I didn’t realize that the porn industry was only two years old at that time. The modern porn industry really started in 1972 with “Deep Throat”. I always wondered what had happened to all these people. Also I have always been interested in porn as a subject, how it got so big and what happened when video was invented. It just seems to be the great untold American story. Back to punk: which impact did punk have on cultural and political life in the USA? In the media you've got The Simpsons, Beavis And Butthead, the whole humor. Its hard to say, because it is so far reaching. Now people don’t have to be nice, basically. I mean they have taken it to extreme levels. Like these horrible reality shows and these stupid situation comedies. Politically there don't seem to be consequences, otherwise we wouldn’t have George Bush for president. When Reagan came things became so oppressive. Clinton was a pretty good president, we had eight years of peace and prosperity. They turned it into the whole Monika Lewinsky-thing. It took 60 Million to investigate it. We wasted a lot of time with the president getting a blow job. It's awful. Do you really want to know what happened with the cigar, I don’t. Doesn't the idealistic vision of the hippies fit much better into social-political values than the nihilism of punk. Shouldn't punks tend to become cynics when they grow older? The nihilism: look at Richard Hell, he's got a daughter and he just got married. He's the most unnihilistic guy in the world. It was a pose you put on when you're younger and snotty, cause we all were. As soon as people, like Joey and Dee Dee, start dying you become uncynical and appreciate life. Interview by Nils Michaelis |
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