I love this book & have read & re-read it many times since it came home with me from Half-Price Books in the U-District in Seattle. I was out of stuff to read last night & headed to the library today so I pulled this out to tide me over.

First, this is an oral history & I love good oral history. Studs Terkel has always been a huge hero of mine & Legs McNeil is way on up there with this book.

Next, this is a wonderful collection of words & musing about the American punk scene. I particularly love that it starts with the Velvet Underground and proceeds through MC5 & on to Iggy Pop - these are 3 of my favorites.

Then the New York Dolls & Television & The Ramones. Having spent a lot of time with this music & its ethos this book flat does it for me. ( )

An incredible study of some of the most decadent and original music ever written and the people who characterized it. ( )

In Please Kill Me, interviews with over 100 musicians, promoters, artists, and groupies overlap each other to paint a graphic picture of the punk movement in the U.S., from the rise of The Velvet Underground at Andy Warhol’s Factory in the early ‘70s to the fall of Dee Dee Ramone from The Ramones in the late ‘80s. Along the way, inhuman amounts of drugs are ingested, everyone has sex with everyone else, and some amazing music gets created and played—and largely ignored by the general public.

It was hard to find anyone likeable in the pages of Please Kill Me—most of them came off as sexist, racist, self-absorbed, self-destructive asses—and I was often flat-out horrified at what these people did to themselves and each other. If even a tenth of what they said is true (and I think everything related in the book needs to be taken with a grain of salt), it’s not the high number of early deaths that come as any surprise, but that people like Iggy Pop and Richard Hell are still alive.

Please Kill Me is fascinating and disturbing. It’s hard to look away. While I would recommend it to anyone interested in the punk movement and the ‘70s underground scene in New York, be prepared to see your idols shattered. In a warts-and-all portrait, this book is mostly warts. ( )

I couldn't actually finish this book. It was well researched and excellently compiled from primary sources. I also found the topic interesting, the birth of punk rock. I love punk rock. Unfortunately I have trouble readings books when I don't like any of the characters in them, both fiction and non-fiction. And well, most the people were or were portrayed as people you don't really want to relate to. There was little discussion of the music and a great deal of discussion of the drug use and groupies...and really my greatest complaint about punk is that it was just as misogynistic as previous movements. If your interested in the music and the scene you should check this out, but don't expect to come away with your hero's intact (which is probably a good thing) ( )