Legs McNeil doesn’t come across as sentimental. It’s what happens when you’ve dumped out decades’ worth of memories and stories as part of your life’s work documenting the origins of punk rock for the better part of 50 years.
McNeil has made a career out of reliving the gritty tales of debauchery and explosive expression that gave rise to the Ramones and CBGB’s and shocking tales of New York in the 1970s. Having co-written the seminal tome on the subject, the 1996 N.Y. punk oral history, “Please Kill Me,” as well as several other books, there’s a sense that he’s been talked out on a lot of the well-trodden territory of a culture that he captured as the co-founder of Punk magazine as the outlet’s wiley mascot, a.k.a. “Resident Punk.” This time-worn moniker is now the title of his new memoir (released Tuesday), “Resident Punk: How I Smoke, Drank and Stumbled My Way Through the ’70s Punk Scene (and Beyond).”
Written with fellow author Crispin Knott and a foreword by Blondie guitarist Chris Stein, the book is a compilation of stories, insights and snapshots of the early origins of punk from the self-described “f— up who lived to write about it.” With a cartoonishly brash and hilarious demeanor in his younger days (and still a bit today) he became the avatar for a movement that turned him into not only a writer but one of punk journalism’s key figures.
Today, at age 70, he’s ready to tell his side of the origin story of punk from his view as a journalist, a friend and a fan of not only the Ramones but seminal artists like Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Andy Warhol and many more. Between copious hits from a vape, relaxing in his home office in rural Pennsylvania, McNeil talks about the strange process of writing about his own punk rock life for a change.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
As a punk historian who’s written so much about this music and its icons, why do you think now is the right time to time to tell your story?
Money.
I like money too, but then once you decided, “Hey, I need a paycheck,” how did you bring these stories out of yourself?
I had written parts of it over the years. So there’s a lot there that I had already done. And my publisher actually limited my word count, so I couldn’t tell the whole story. So I had to kind of do it in snapshots of different periods of my life. So there’s a snapshot from my days at the Mud Club, a snapshot from my time with Joey Ramone, a snapshot with Richard Hell, a snapshot of Patti Smith. … So just kind of encounters and exchanges and dialog and cool scenes.
What helped you recall a lot of this stuff? Did you use tape recordings, or did you have conversations with people to help jog your memory?
I ingested substances that made me time travel back to those times, and I had to live in those times. It was hell on my wife because I was just in my head the whole time, but I’m mostly in my head anyway. It was really kind of exciting to remember the great times with people and the fun parts I had with different people over the years.
You talk in the book about escaping the suburbs of Connecticut to come to New York and establish yourself there in as a young man in 1975. How did that spirit of adventure and wanting to leave home inspire you to become a journalist?
Well, I always wanted to be a writer. But I was severely dyslexic. I can’t spell … words, you know? And actually, [TV writer] Elaine Aronson said a funny thing about [my new] book. She says, “I can’t believe you can put a sentence together, let alone a paragraph. I love the book.” She’s married to Curtis Armstrong, who played “Booger,” [in “Revenge of the Nerds” ] who also wrote a great endorsement for the book. [Elaine is] very funny. I like good funny writers, you know, like Mark Jacobson — people that get it, you know?
Joey Ramone and McNeil pretending to read.
(Roberta Bayley)
What’s your take on how punk is reexamined and memorialized today with things like the Punk Museum in Las Vegas, various historic exhibitions, the Ramones’ 50th anniversary, etc?
I don’t really think about it. I’m on to other things. I’m a real history buff, so I’m always going back and checking out different stories outside of punk.
In “Resident Punk,” you talk about your days going to the Mud Club, which was nearly as important on the origins of punk as CBGB’s but usually doesn’t get the same credit. What was it about that experience or that time in your life that felt important to capture in this book?
You could do anything you wanted. It was really that open and free. I used to get into the Mud Club free with 10 of my guests. I’d get everybody in. The doorman Richard Bach knew me. He was a really nice guy, and he wrote a great book called “The Mud Club.”
How would you describe the dynamic in the early days between you and Punk magazine co-founder John Holmstrom when it came to creating this historic magazine from scratch?
We were searching for a way out, and we were searching for something to do, and John was very, very brilliant and was very much a contrarian, and he didn’t think like other people. I learned how to write from John. I learned narrative structure. It was like going to college, you know. It was very cool. John was very inspiring.
Do you guys still talk today? What’s your relationship like?
No, he hates me because I became more famous. John’s crazy, you know? He’s also brilliant, but he’s crazy.
Legs McNeil
(Roberta Bayley)
What do you feel is the essence of punk journalism?
Well, you have to invite people in and you have to make them feel like they’re in the room. I hope I did in the new book.
I think you definitely accomplished that; from the beginning it draws you in. I loved how you described CBGB’s as “a hellhole of a Bowery Bar, like the place where you went for your last drunk before slitting your wrists upstairs at the Palace Hotel.”
Yeah, great line, huh?
As someone born way too late to ever be there, it was great to have a chance to see it through your eyes.
It really reminded [me] of one of those film noir dive bars, where they go in and everything would just be despair. Like this is just where you go, man. It was very cool in that way. New York was very film noir back then in the ‘70s, even though there was a lot of color.
Your book talks about the ‘70s New York punk scene from the perspective of the writer, which I think is very important. I think it definitely will inspire some journalists, whether they’re covering music or not, when it comes to seeing what it was like to get the story of what was happening around you at the time.
Oh, well, thank you. It sounds like you’re talking about somebody else [laughs] because it was just my life, you know?
Was it weird to write about yourself in this way after so many years of interviewing other people and so many extreme characters in punk rock?
It was weird. I must say, it was really bizarre to tell the truth. You know, sleeping in the playhouse and my friend Tommy Hearn, just pulling up in his car alongside the road and opening the passenger door and just waiting for me to like realize he pulled over, I just climb in the car and shut the door, we pull out, and I smoke one of his cigarettes, which drove him crazy. Because I never had any cigarettes. I got arrested breaking into the Cheshire Reformatory which is now the Cheshire Maximum Security Prison [in Connecticut]. There was a lot of stories like that, but the publisher set the ceiling [on the book] at 80,000 words, and I’d already written 110,000. I had to cut it down. So that’s why it became snapshots. I couldn’t tell the whole story.
Legs McNeil doesn’t come across as sentimental. It’s what happens when you’ve dumped out decades’ worth of memories and stories as part of your life’s work documenting the origins of punk rock for the better part of 50 years.
McNeil has made a career out of reliving the gritty tales of debauchery and explosive expression that gave rise to the Ramones and CBGB’s and shocking tales of New York in the 1970s. Having co-written the seminal tome on the subject, the 1996 N.Y. punk oral history, “Please Kill Me,” as well as several other books, there’s a sense that he’s been talked out on a lot of the well-trodden territory of a culture that he captured as the co-founder of Punk magazine as the outlet’s wiley mascot, a.k.a. “Resident Punk.” This time-worn moniker is now the title of his new memoir (released Tuesday), “Resident Punk: How I Smoke, Drank and Stumbled My Way Through the ’70s Punk Scene (and Beyond).”
Written with fellow author Crispin Knott and a foreword by Blondie guitarist Chris Stein, the book is a compilation of stories, insights and snapshots of the early origins of punk from the self-described “f— up who lived to write about it.” With a cartoonishly brash and hilarious demeanor in his younger days (and still a bit today) he became the avatar for a movement that turned him into not only a writer but one of punk journalism’s key figures.
Today, at age 70, he’s ready to tell his side of the origin story of punk from his view as a journalist, a friend and a fan of not only the Ramones but seminal artists like Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Andy Warhol and many more. Between copious hits from a vape, relaxing in his home office in rural Pennsylvania, McNeil talks about the strange process of writing about his own punk rock life for a change.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
As a punk historian who’s written so much about this music and its icons, why do you think now is the right time to time to tell your story?
Money.
I like money too, but then once you decided, “Hey, I need a paycheck,” how did you bring these stories out of yourself?
I had written parts of it over the years. So there’s a lot there that I had already done. And my publisher actually limited my word count, so I couldn’t tell the whole story. So I had to kind of do it in snapshots of different periods of my life. So there’s a snapshot from my days at the Mud Club, a snapshot from my time with Joey Ramone, a snapshot with Richard Hell, a snapshot of Patti Smith. … So just kind of encounters and exchanges and dialog and cool scenes.
What helped you recall a lot of this stuff? Did you use tape recordings, or did you have conversations with people to help jog your memory?
I ingested substances that made me time travel back to those times, and I had to live in those times. It was hell on my wife because I was just in my head the whole time, but I’m mostly in my head anyway. It was really kind of exciting to remember the great times with people and the fun parts I had with different people over the years.
You talk in the book about escaping the suburbs of Connecticut to come to New York and establish yourself there in as a young man in 1975. How did that spirit of adventure and wanting to leave home inspire you to become a journalist?
Well, I always wanted to be a writer. But I was severely dyslexic. I can’t spell … words, you know? And actually, [TV writer] Elaine Aronson said a funny thing about [my new] book. She says, “I can’t believe you can put a sentence together, let alone a paragraph. I love the book.” She’s married to Curtis Armstrong, who played “Booger,” [in “Revenge of the Nerds” ] who also wrote a great endorsement for the book. [Elaine is] very funny. I like good funny writers, you know, like Mark Jacobson — people that get it, you know?
Joey Ramone and McNeil pretending to read.
(Roberta Bayley)
What’s your take on how punk is reexamined and memorialized today with things like the Punk Museum in Las Vegas, various historic exhibitions, the Ramones’ 50th anniversary, etc?
I don’t really think about it. I’m on to other things. I’m a real history buff, so I’m always going back and checking out different stories outside of punk.
In “Resident Punk,” you talk about your days going to the Mud Club, which was nearly as important on the origins of punk as CBGB’s but usually doesn’t get the same credit. What was it about that experience or that time in your life that felt important to capture in this book?
You could do anything you wanted. It was really that open and free. I used to get into the Mud Club free with 10 of my guests. I’d get everybody in. The doorman Richard Bach knew me. He was a really nice guy, and he wrote a great book called “The Mud Club.”
How would you describe the dynamic in the early days between you and Punk magazine co-founder John Holmstrom when it came to creating this historic magazine from scratch?
We were searching for a way out, and we were searching for something to do, and John was very, very brilliant and was very much a contrarian, and he didn’t think like other people. I learned how to write from John. I learned narrative structure. It was like going to college, you know. It was very cool. John was very inspiring.
Do you guys still talk today? What’s your relationship like?
No, he hates me because I became more famous. John’s crazy, you know? He’s also brilliant, but he’s crazy.
Legs McNeil
(Roberta Bayley)
What do you feel is the essence of punk journalism?
Well, you have to invite people in and you have to make them feel like they’re in the room. I hope I did in the new book.
I think you definitely accomplished that; from the beginning it draws you in. I loved how you described CBGB’s as “a hellhole of a Bowery Bar, like the place where you went for your last drunk before slitting your wrists upstairs at the Palace Hotel.”
Yeah, great line, huh?
As someone born way too late to ever be there, it was great to have a chance to see it through your eyes.
It really reminded [me] of one of those film noir dive bars, where they go in and everything would just be despair. Like this is just where you go, man. It was very cool in that way. New York was very film noir back then in the ‘70s, even though there was a lot of color.
Your book talks about the ‘70s New York punk scene from the perspective of the writer, which I think is very important. I think it definitely will inspire some journalists, whether they’re covering music or not, when it comes to seeing what it was like to get the story of what was happening around you at the time.
Oh, well, thank you. It sounds like you’re talking about somebody else [laughs] because it was just my life, you know?
Was it weird to write about yourself in this way after so many years of interviewing other people and so many extreme characters in punk rock?
It was weird. I must say, it was really bizarre to tell the truth. You know, sleeping in the playhouse and my friend Tommy Hearn, just pulling up in his car alongside the road and opening the passenger door and just waiting for me to like realize he pulled over, I just climb in the car and shut the door, we pull out, and I smoke one of his cigarettes, which drove him crazy. Because I never had any cigarettes. I got arrested breaking into the Cheshire Reformatory which is now the Cheshire Maximum Security Prison [in Connecticut]. There was a lot of stories like that, but the publisher set the ceiling [on the book] at 80,000 words, and I’d already written 110,000. I had to cut it down. So that’s why it became snapshots. I couldn’t tell the whole story.
Legs McNeil doesn’t come across as sentimental. It’s what happens when you’ve dumped out decades’ worth of memories and stories as part of your life’s work documenting the origins of punk rock for the better part of 50 years.
McNeil has made a career out of reliving the gritty tales of debauchery and explosive expression that gave rise to the Ramones and CBGB’s and shocking tales of New York in the 1970s. Having co-written the seminal tome on the subject, the 1996 N.Y. punk oral history, “Please Kill Me,” as well as several other books, there’s a sense that he’s been talked out on a lot of the well-trodden territory of a culture that he captured as the co-founder of Punk magazine as the outlet’s wiley mascot, a.k.a. “Resident Punk.” This time-worn moniker is now the title of his new memoir (released Tuesday), “Resident Punk: How I Smoke, Drank and Stumbled My Way Through the ’70s Punk Scene (and Beyond).”
Written with fellow author Crispin Knott and a foreword by Blondie guitarist Chris Stein, the book is a compilation of stories, insights and snapshots of the early origins of punk from the self-described “f— up who lived to write about it.” With a cartoonishly brash and hilarious demeanor in his younger days (and still a bit today) he became the avatar for a movement that turned him into not only a writer but one of punk journalism’s key figures.
Today, at age 70, he’s ready to tell his side of the origin story of punk from his view as a journalist, a friend and a fan of not only the Ramones but seminal artists like Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Andy Warhol and many more. Between copious hits from a vape, relaxing in his home office in rural Pennsylvania, McNeil talks about the strange process of writing about his own punk rock life for a change.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
As a punk historian who’s written so much about this music and its icons, why do you think now is the right time to time to tell your story?
Money.
I like money too, but then once you decided, “Hey, I need a paycheck,” how did you bring these stories out of yourself?
I had written parts of it over the years. So there’s a lot there that I had already done. And my publisher actually limited my word count, so I couldn’t tell the whole story. So I had to kind of do it in snapshots of different periods of my life. So there’s a snapshot from my days at the Mud Club, a snapshot from my time with Joey Ramone, a snapshot with Richard Hell, a snapshot of Patti Smith. … So just kind of encounters and exchanges and dialog and cool scenes.
What helped you recall a lot of this stuff? Did you use tape recordings, or did you have conversations with people to help jog your memory?
I ingested substances that made me time travel back to those times, and I had to live in those times. It was hell on my wife because I was just in my head the whole time, but I’m mostly in my head anyway. It was really kind of exciting to remember the great times with people and the fun parts I had with different people over the years.
You talk in the book about escaping the suburbs of Connecticut to come to New York and establish yourself there in as a young man in 1975. How did that spirit of adventure and wanting to leave home inspire you to become a journalist?
Well, I always wanted to be a writer. But I was severely dyslexic. I can’t spell … words, you know? And actually, [TV writer] Elaine Aronson said a funny thing about [my new] book. She says, “I can’t believe you can put a sentence together, let alone a paragraph. I love the book.” She’s married to Curtis Armstrong, who played “Booger,” [in “Revenge of the Nerds” ] who also wrote a great endorsement for the book. [Elaine is] very funny. I like good funny writers, you know, like Mark Jacobson — people that get it, you know?
Joey Ramone and McNeil pretending to read.
(Roberta Bayley)
What’s your take on how punk is reexamined and memorialized today with things like the Punk Museum in Las Vegas, various historic exhibitions, the Ramones’ 50th anniversary, etc?
I don’t really think about it. I’m on to other things. I’m a real history buff, so I’m always going back and checking out different stories outside of punk.
In “Resident Punk,” you talk about your days going to the Mud Club, which was nearly as important on the origins of punk as CBGB’s but usually doesn’t get the same credit. What was it about that experience or that time in your life that felt important to capture in this book?
You could do anything you wanted. It was really that open and free. I used to get into the Mud Club free with 10 of my guests. I’d get everybody in. The doorman Richard Bach knew me. He was a really nice guy, and he wrote a great book called “The Mud Club.”
How would you describe the dynamic in the early days between you and Punk magazine co-founder John Holmstrom when it came to creating this historic magazine from scratch?
We were searching for a way out, and we were searching for something to do, and John was very, very brilliant and was very much a contrarian, and he didn’t think like other people. I learned how to write from John. I learned narrative structure. It was like going to college, you know. It was very cool. John was very inspiring.
Do you guys still talk today? What’s your relationship like?
No, he hates me because I became more famous. John’s crazy, you know? He’s also brilliant, but he’s crazy.
Legs McNeil
(Roberta Bayley)
What do you feel is the essence of punk journalism?
Well, you have to invite people in and you have to make them feel like they’re in the room. I hope I did in the new book.
I think you definitely accomplished that; from the beginning it draws you in. I loved how you described CBGB’s as “a hellhole of a Bowery Bar, like the place where you went for your last drunk before slitting your wrists upstairs at the Palace Hotel.”
Yeah, great line, huh?
As someone born way too late to ever be there, it was great to have a chance to see it through your eyes.
It really reminded [me] of one of those film noir dive bars, where they go in and everything would just be despair. Like this is just where you go, man. It was very cool in that way. New York was very film noir back then in the ‘70s, even though there was a lot of color.
Your book talks about the ‘70s New York punk scene from the perspective of the writer, which I think is very important. I think it definitely will inspire some journalists, whether they’re covering music or not, when it comes to seeing what it was like to get the story of what was happening around you at the time.
Oh, well, thank you. It sounds like you’re talking about somebody else [laughs] because it was just my life, you know?
Was it weird to write about yourself in this way after so many years of interviewing other people and so many extreme characters in punk rock?
It was weird. I must say, it was really bizarre to tell the truth. You know, sleeping in the playhouse and my friend Tommy Hearn, just pulling up in his car alongside the road and opening the passenger door and just waiting for me to like realize he pulled over, I just climb in the car and shut the door, we pull out, and I smoke one of his cigarettes, which drove him crazy. Because I never had any cigarettes. I got arrested breaking into the Cheshire Reformatory which is now the Cheshire Maximum Security Prison [in Connecticut]. There was a lot of stories like that, but the publisher set the ceiling [on the book] at 80,000 words, and I’d already written 110,000. I had to cut it down. So that’s why it became snapshots. I couldn’t tell the whole story.
Legs McNeil doesn’t come across as sentimental. It’s what happens when you’ve dumped out decades’ worth of memories and stories as part of your life’s work documenting the origins of punk rock for the better part of 50 years.
McNeil has made a career out of reliving the gritty tales of debauchery and explosive expression that gave rise to the Ramones and CBGB’s and shocking tales of New York in the 1970s. Having co-written the seminal tome on the subject, the 1996 N.Y. punk oral history, “Please Kill Me,” as well as several other books, there’s a sense that he’s been talked out on a lot of the well-trodden territory of a culture that he captured as the co-founder of Punk magazine as the outlet’s wiley mascot, a.k.a. “Resident Punk.” This time-worn moniker is now the title of his new memoir (released Tuesday), “Resident Punk: How I Smoke, Drank and Stumbled My Way Through the ’70s Punk Scene (and Beyond).”
Written with fellow author Crispin Knott and a foreword by Blondie guitarist Chris Stein, the book is a compilation of stories, insights and snapshots of the early origins of punk from the self-described “f— up who lived to write about it.” With a cartoonishly brash and hilarious demeanor in his younger days (and still a bit today) he became the avatar for a movement that turned him into not only a writer but one of punk journalism’s key figures.
Today, at age 70, he’s ready to tell his side of the origin story of punk from his view as a journalist, a friend and a fan of not only the Ramones but seminal artists like Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Andy Warhol and many more. Between copious hits from a vape, relaxing in his home office in rural Pennsylvania, McNeil talks about the strange process of writing about his own punk rock life for a change.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
As a punk historian who’s written so much about this music and its icons, why do you think now is the right time to time to tell your story?
Money.
I like money too, but then once you decided, “Hey, I need a paycheck,” how did you bring these stories out of yourself?
I had written parts of it over the years. So there’s a lot there that I had already done. And my publisher actually limited my word count, so I couldn’t tell the whole story. So I had to kind of do it in snapshots of different periods of my life. So there’s a snapshot from my days at the Mud Club, a snapshot from my time with Joey Ramone, a snapshot with Richard Hell, a snapshot of Patti Smith. … So just kind of encounters and exchanges and dialog and cool scenes.
What helped you recall a lot of this stuff? Did you use tape recordings, or did you have conversations with people to help jog your memory?
I ingested substances that made me time travel back to those times, and I had to live in those times. It was hell on my wife because I was just in my head the whole time, but I’m mostly in my head anyway. It was really kind of exciting to remember the great times with people and the fun parts I had with different people over the years.
You talk in the book about escaping the suburbs of Connecticut to come to New York and establish yourself there in as a young man in 1975. How did that spirit of adventure and wanting to leave home inspire you to become a journalist?
Well, I always wanted to be a writer. But I was severely dyslexic. I can’t spell … words, you know? And actually, [TV writer] Elaine Aronson said a funny thing about [my new] book. She says, “I can’t believe you can put a sentence together, let alone a paragraph. I love the book.” She’s married to Curtis Armstrong, who played “Booger,” [in “Revenge of the Nerds” ] who also wrote a great endorsement for the book. [Elaine is] very funny. I like good funny writers, you know, like Mark Jacobson — people that get it, you know?
Joey Ramone and McNeil pretending to read.
(Roberta Bayley)
What’s your take on how punk is reexamined and memorialized today with things like the Punk Museum in Las Vegas, various historic exhibitions, the Ramones’ 50th anniversary, etc?
I don’t really think about it. I’m on to other things. I’m a real history buff, so I’m always going back and checking out different stories outside of punk.
In “Resident Punk,” you talk about your days going to the Mud Club, which was nearly as important on the origins of punk as CBGB’s but usually doesn’t get the same credit. What was it about that experience or that time in your life that felt important to capture in this book?
You could do anything you wanted. It was really that open and free. I used to get into the Mud Club free with 10 of my guests. I’d get everybody in. The doorman Richard Bach knew me. He was a really nice guy, and he wrote a great book called “The Mud Club.”
How would you describe the dynamic in the early days between you and Punk magazine co-founder John Holmstrom when it came to creating this historic magazine from scratch?
We were searching for a way out, and we were searching for something to do, and John was very, very brilliant and was very much a contrarian, and he didn’t think like other people. I learned how to write from John. I learned narrative structure. It was like going to college, you know. It was very cool. John was very inspiring.
Do you guys still talk today? What’s your relationship like?
No, he hates me because I became more famous. John’s crazy, you know? He’s also brilliant, but he’s crazy.
Legs McNeil
(Roberta Bayley)
What do you feel is the essence of punk journalism?
Well, you have to invite people in and you have to make them feel like they’re in the room. I hope I did in the new book.
I think you definitely accomplished that; from the beginning it draws you in. I loved how you described CBGB’s as “a hellhole of a Bowery Bar, like the place where you went for your last drunk before slitting your wrists upstairs at the Palace Hotel.”
Yeah, great line, huh?
As someone born way too late to ever be there, it was great to have a chance to see it through your eyes.
It really reminded [me] of one of those film noir dive bars, where they go in and everything would just be despair. Like this is just where you go, man. It was very cool in that way. New York was very film noir back then in the ‘70s, even though there was a lot of color.
Your book talks about the ‘70s New York punk scene from the perspective of the writer, which I think is very important. I think it definitely will inspire some journalists, whether they’re covering music or not, when it comes to seeing what it was like to get the story of what was happening around you at the time.
Oh, well, thank you. It sounds like you’re talking about somebody else [laughs] because it was just my life, you know?
Was it weird to write about yourself in this way after so many years of interviewing other people and so many extreme characters in punk rock?
It was weird. I must say, it was really bizarre to tell the truth. You know, sleeping in the playhouse and my friend Tommy Hearn, just pulling up in his car alongside the road and opening the passenger door and just waiting for me to like realize he pulled over, I just climb in the car and shut the door, we pull out, and I smoke one of his cigarettes, which drove him crazy. Because I never had any cigarettes. I got arrested breaking into the Cheshire Reformatory which is now the Cheshire Maximum Security Prison [in Connecticut]. There was a lot of stories like that, but the publisher set the ceiling [on the book] at 80,000 words, and I’d already written 110,000. I had to cut it down. So that’s why it became snapshots. I couldn’t tell the whole story.
Legs McNeil doesn’t come across as sentimental. It’s what happens when you’ve dumped out decades’ worth of memories and stories as part of your life’s work documenting the origins of punk rock for the better part of 50 years.
McNeil has made a career out of reliving the gritty tales of debauchery and explosive expression that gave rise to the Ramones and CBGB’s and shocking tales of New York in the 1970s. Having co-written the seminal tome on the subject, the 1996 N.Y. punk oral history, “Please Kill Me,” as well as several other books, there’s a sense that he’s been talked out on a lot of the well-trodden territory of a culture that he captured as the co-founder of Punk magazine as the outlet’s wiley mascot, a.k.a. “Resident Punk.” This time-worn moniker is now the title of his new memoir (released Tuesday), “Resident Punk: How I Smoke, Drank and Stumbled My Way Through the ’70s Punk Scene (and Beyond).”
Written with fellow author Crispin Knott and a foreword by Blondie guitarist Chris Stein, the book is a compilation of stories, insights and snapshots of the early origins of punk from the self-described “f— up who lived to write about it.” With a cartoonishly brash and hilarious demeanor in his younger days (and still a bit today) he became the avatar for a movement that turned him into not only a writer but one of punk journalism’s key figures.
Today, at age 70, he’s ready to tell his side of the origin story of punk from his view as a journalist, a friend and a fan of not only the Ramones but seminal artists like Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Andy Warhol and many more. Between copious hits from a vape, relaxing in his home office in rural Pennsylvania, McNeil talks about the strange process of writing about his own punk rock life for a change.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
As a punk historian who’s written so much about this music and its icons, why do you think now is the right time to time to tell your story?
Money.
I like money too, but then once you decided, “Hey, I need a paycheck,” how did you bring these stories out of yourself?
I had written parts of it over the years. So there’s a lot there that I had already done. And my publisher actually limited my word count, so I couldn’t tell the whole story. So I had to kind of do it in snapshots of different periods of my life. So there’s a snapshot from my days at the Mud Club, a snapshot from my time with Joey Ramone, a snapshot with Richard Hell, a snapshot of Patti Smith. … So just kind of encounters and exchanges and dialog and cool scenes.
What helped you recall a lot of this stuff? Did you use tape recordings, or did you have conversations with people to help jog your memory?
I ingested substances that made me time travel back to those times, and I had to live in those times. It was hell on my wife because I was just in my head the whole time, but I’m mostly in my head anyway. It was really kind of exciting to remember the great times with people and the fun parts I had with different people over the years.
You talk in the book about escaping the suburbs of Connecticut to come to New York and establish yourself there in as a young man in 1975. How did that spirit of adventure and wanting to leave home inspire you to become a journalist?
Well, I always wanted to be a writer. But I was severely dyslexic. I can’t spell … words, you know? And actually, [TV writer] Elaine Aronson said a funny thing about [my new] book. She says, “I can’t believe you can put a sentence together, let alone a paragraph. I love the book.” She’s married to Curtis Armstrong, who played “Booger,” [in “Revenge of the Nerds” ] who also wrote a great endorsement for the book. [Elaine is] very funny. I like good funny writers, you know, like Mark Jacobson — people that get it, you know?
Joey Ramone and McNeil pretending to read.
(Roberta Bayley)
What’s your take on how punk is reexamined and memorialized today with things like the Punk Museum in Las Vegas, various historic exhibitions, the Ramones’ 50th anniversary, etc?
I don’t really think about it. I’m on to other things. I’m a real history buff, so I’m always going back and checking out different stories outside of punk.
In “Resident Punk,” you talk about your days going to the Mud Club, which was nearly as important on the origins of punk as CBGB’s but usually doesn’t get the same credit. What was it about that experience or that time in your life that felt important to capture in this book?
You could do anything you wanted. It was really that open and free. I used to get into the Mud Club free with 10 of my guests. I’d get everybody in. The doorman Richard Bach knew me. He was a really nice guy, and he wrote a great book called “The Mud Club.”
How would you describe the dynamic in the early days between you and Punk magazine co-founder John Holmstrom when it came to creating this historic magazine from scratch?
We were searching for a way out, and we were searching for something to do, and John was very, very brilliant and was very much a contrarian, and he didn’t think like other people. I learned how to write from John. I learned narrative structure. It was like going to college, you know. It was very cool. John was very inspiring.
Do you guys still talk today? What’s your relationship like?
No, he hates me because I became more famous. John’s crazy, you know? He’s also brilliant, but he’s crazy.
Legs McNeil
(Roberta Bayley)
What do you feel is the essence of punk journalism?
Well, you have to invite people in and you have to make them feel like they’re in the room. I hope I did in the new book.
I think you definitely accomplished that; from the beginning it draws you in. I loved how you described CBGB’s as “a hellhole of a Bowery Bar, like the place where you went for your last drunk before slitting your wrists upstairs at the Palace Hotel.”
Yeah, great line, huh?
As someone born way too late to ever be there, it was great to have a chance to see it through your eyes.
It really reminded [me] of one of those film noir dive bars, where they go in and everything would just be despair. Like this is just where you go, man. It was very cool in that way. New York was very film noir back then in the ‘70s, even though there was a lot of color.
Your book talks about the ‘70s New York punk scene from the perspective of the writer, which I think is very important. I think it definitely will inspire some journalists, whether they’re covering music or not, when it comes to seeing what it was like to get the story of what was happening around you at the time.
Oh, well, thank you. It sounds like you’re talking about somebody else [laughs] because it was just my life, you know?
Was it weird to write about yourself in this way after so many years of interviewing other people and so many extreme characters in punk rock?
It was weird. I must say, it was really bizarre to tell the truth. You know, sleeping in the playhouse and my friend Tommy Hearn, just pulling up in his car alongside the road and opening the passenger door and just waiting for me to like realize he pulled over, I just climb in the car and shut the door, we pull out, and I smoke one of his cigarettes, which drove him crazy. Because I never had any cigarettes. I got arrested breaking into the Cheshire Reformatory which is now the Cheshire Maximum Security Prison [in Connecticut]. There was a lot of stories like that, but the publisher set the ceiling [on the book] at 80,000 words, and I’d already written 110,000. I had to cut it down. So that’s why it became snapshots. I couldn’t tell the whole story.
Legs McNeil doesn’t come across as sentimental. It’s what happens when you’ve dumped out decades’ worth of memories and stories as part of your life’s work documenting the origins of punk rock for the better part of 50 years.
McNeil has made a career out of reliving the gritty tales of debauchery and explosive expression that gave rise to the Ramones and CBGB’s and shocking tales of New York in the 1970s. Having co-written the seminal tome on the subject, the 1996 N.Y. punk oral history, “Please Kill Me,” as well as several other books, there’s a sense that he’s been talked out on a lot of the well-trodden territory of a culture that he captured as the co-founder of Punk magazine as the outlet’s wiley mascot, a.k.a. “Resident Punk.” This time-worn moniker is now the title of his new memoir (released Tuesday), “Resident Punk: How I Smoke, Drank and Stumbled My Way Through the ’70s Punk Scene (and Beyond).”
Written with fellow author Crispin Knott and a foreword by Blondie guitarist Chris Stein, the book is a compilation of stories, insights and snapshots of the early origins of punk from the self-described “f— up who lived to write about it.” With a cartoonishly brash and hilarious demeanor in his younger days (and still a bit today) he became the avatar for a movement that turned him into not only a writer but one of punk journalism’s key figures.
Today, at age 70, he’s ready to tell his side of the origin story of punk from his view as a journalist, a friend and a fan of not only the Ramones but seminal artists like Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Andy Warhol and many more. Between copious hits from a vape, relaxing in his home office in rural Pennsylvania, McNeil talks about the strange process of writing about his own punk rock life for a change.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
As a punk historian who’s written so much about this music and its icons, why do you think now is the right time to time to tell your story?
Money.
I like money too, but then once you decided, “Hey, I need a paycheck,” how did you bring these stories out of yourself?
I had written parts of it over the years. So there’s a lot there that I had already done. And my publisher actually limited my word count, so I couldn’t tell the whole story. So I had to kind of do it in snapshots of different periods of my life. So there’s a snapshot from my days at the Mud Club, a snapshot from my time with Joey Ramone, a snapshot with Richard Hell, a snapshot of Patti Smith. … So just kind of encounters and exchanges and dialog and cool scenes.
What helped you recall a lot of this stuff? Did you use tape recordings, or did you have conversations with people to help jog your memory?
I ingested substances that made me time travel back to those times, and I had to live in those times. It was hell on my wife because I was just in my head the whole time, but I’m mostly in my head anyway. It was really kind of exciting to remember the great times with people and the fun parts I had with different people over the years.
You talk in the book about escaping the suburbs of Connecticut to come to New York and establish yourself there in as a young man in 1975. How did that spirit of adventure and wanting to leave home inspire you to become a journalist?
Well, I always wanted to be a writer. But I was severely dyslexic. I can’t spell … words, you know? And actually, [TV writer] Elaine Aronson said a funny thing about [my new] book. She says, “I can’t believe you can put a sentence together, let alone a paragraph. I love the book.” She’s married to Curtis Armstrong, who played “Booger,” [in “Revenge of the Nerds” ] who also wrote a great endorsement for the book. [Elaine is] very funny. I like good funny writers, you know, like Mark Jacobson — people that get it, you know?
Joey Ramone and McNeil pretending to read.
(Roberta Bayley)
What’s your take on how punk is reexamined and memorialized today with things like the Punk Museum in Las Vegas, various historic exhibitions, the Ramones’ 50th anniversary, etc?
I don’t really think about it. I’m on to other things. I’m a real history buff, so I’m always going back and checking out different stories outside of punk.
In “Resident Punk,” you talk about your days going to the Mud Club, which was nearly as important on the origins of punk as CBGB’s but usually doesn’t get the same credit. What was it about that experience or that time in your life that felt important to capture in this book?
You could do anything you wanted. It was really that open and free. I used to get into the Mud Club free with 10 of my guests. I’d get everybody in. The doorman Richard Bach knew me. He was a really nice guy, and he wrote a great book called “The Mud Club.”
How would you describe the dynamic in the early days between you and Punk magazine co-founder John Holmstrom when it came to creating this historic magazine from scratch?
We were searching for a way out, and we were searching for something to do, and John was very, very brilliant and was very much a contrarian, and he didn’t think like other people. I learned how to write from John. I learned narrative structure. It was like going to college, you know. It was very cool. John was very inspiring.
Do you guys still talk today? What’s your relationship like?
No, he hates me because I became more famous. John’s crazy, you know? He’s also brilliant, but he’s crazy.
Legs McNeil
(Roberta Bayley)
What do you feel is the essence of punk journalism?
Well, you have to invite people in and you have to make them feel like they’re in the room. I hope I did in the new book.
I think you definitely accomplished that; from the beginning it draws you in. I loved how you described CBGB’s as “a hellhole of a Bowery Bar, like the place where you went for your last drunk before slitting your wrists upstairs at the Palace Hotel.”
Yeah, great line, huh?
As someone born way too late to ever be there, it was great to have a chance to see it through your eyes.
It really reminded [me] of one of those film noir dive bars, where they go in and everything would just be despair. Like this is just where you go, man. It was very cool in that way. New York was very film noir back then in the ‘70s, even though there was a lot of color.
Your book talks about the ‘70s New York punk scene from the perspective of the writer, which I think is very important. I think it definitely will inspire some journalists, whether they’re covering music or not, when it comes to seeing what it was like to get the story of what was happening around you at the time.
Oh, well, thank you. It sounds like you’re talking about somebody else [laughs] because it was just my life, you know?
Was it weird to write about yourself in this way after so many years of interviewing other people and so many extreme characters in punk rock?
It was weird. I must say, it was really bizarre to tell the truth. You know, sleeping in the playhouse and my friend Tommy Hearn, just pulling up in his car alongside the road and opening the passenger door and just waiting for me to like realize he pulled over, I just climb in the car and shut the door, we pull out, and I smoke one of his cigarettes, which drove him crazy. Because I never had any cigarettes. I got arrested breaking into the Cheshire Reformatory which is now the Cheshire Maximum Security Prison [in Connecticut]. There was a lot of stories like that, but the publisher set the ceiling [on the book] at 80,000 words, and I’d already written 110,000. I had to cut it down. So that’s why it became snapshots. I couldn’t tell the whole story.
Legs McNeil doesn’t come across as sentimental. It’s what happens when you’ve dumped out decades’ worth of memories and stories as part of your life’s work documenting the origins of punk rock for the better part of 50 years.
McNeil has made a career out of reliving the gritty tales of debauchery and explosive expression that gave rise to the Ramones and CBGB’s and shocking tales of New York in the 1970s. Having co-written the seminal tome on the subject, the 1996 N.Y. punk oral history, “Please Kill Me,” as well as several other books, there’s a sense that he’s been talked out on a lot of the well-trodden territory of a culture that he captured as the co-founder of Punk magazine as the outlet’s wiley mascot, a.k.a. “Resident Punk.” This time-worn moniker is now the title of his new memoir (released Tuesday), “Resident Punk: How I Smoke, Drank and Stumbled My Way Through the ’70s Punk Scene (and Beyond).”
Written with fellow author Crispin Knott and a foreword by Blondie guitarist Chris Stein, the book is a compilation of stories, insights and snapshots of the early origins of punk from the self-described “f— up who lived to write about it.” With a cartoonishly brash and hilarious demeanor in his younger days (and still a bit today) he became the avatar for a movement that turned him into not only a writer but one of punk journalism’s key figures.
Today, at age 70, he’s ready to tell his side of the origin story of punk from his view as a journalist, a friend and a fan of not only the Ramones but seminal artists like Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Andy Warhol and many more. Between copious hits from a vape, relaxing in his home office in rural Pennsylvania, McNeil talks about the strange process of writing about his own punk rock life for a change.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
As a punk historian who’s written so much about this music and its icons, why do you think now is the right time to time to tell your story?
Money.
I like money too, but then once you decided, “Hey, I need a paycheck,” how did you bring these stories out of yourself?
I had written parts of it over the years. So there’s a lot there that I had already done. And my publisher actually limited my word count, so I couldn’t tell the whole story. So I had to kind of do it in snapshots of different periods of my life. So there’s a snapshot from my days at the Mud Club, a snapshot from my time with Joey Ramone, a snapshot with Richard Hell, a snapshot of Patti Smith. … So just kind of encounters and exchanges and dialog and cool scenes.
What helped you recall a lot of this stuff? Did you use tape recordings, or did you have conversations with people to help jog your memory?
I ingested substances that made me time travel back to those times, and I had to live in those times. It was hell on my wife because I was just in my head the whole time, but I’m mostly in my head anyway. It was really kind of exciting to remember the great times with people and the fun parts I had with different people over the years.
You talk in the book about escaping the suburbs of Connecticut to come to New York and establish yourself there in as a young man in 1975. How did that spirit of adventure and wanting to leave home inspire you to become a journalist?
Well, I always wanted to be a writer. But I was severely dyslexic. I can’t spell … words, you know? And actually, [TV writer] Elaine Aronson said a funny thing about [my new] book. She says, “I can’t believe you can put a sentence together, let alone a paragraph. I love the book.” She’s married to Curtis Armstrong, who played “Booger,” [in “Revenge of the Nerds” ] who also wrote a great endorsement for the book. [Elaine is] very funny. I like good funny writers, you know, like Mark Jacobson — people that get it, you know?
Joey Ramone and McNeil pretending to read.
(Roberta Bayley)
What’s your take on how punk is reexamined and memorialized today with things like the Punk Museum in Las Vegas, various historic exhibitions, the Ramones’ 50th anniversary, etc?
I don’t really think about it. I’m on to other things. I’m a real history buff, so I’m always going back and checking out different stories outside of punk.
In “Resident Punk,” you talk about your days going to the Mud Club, which was nearly as important on the origins of punk as CBGB’s but usually doesn’t get the same credit. What was it about that experience or that time in your life that felt important to capture in this book?
You could do anything you wanted. It was really that open and free. I used to get into the Mud Club free with 10 of my guests. I’d get everybody in. The doorman Richard Bach knew me. He was a really nice guy, and he wrote a great book called “The Mud Club.”
How would you describe the dynamic in the early days between you and Punk magazine co-founder John Holmstrom when it came to creating this historic magazine from scratch?
We were searching for a way out, and we were searching for something to do, and John was very, very brilliant and was very much a contrarian, and he didn’t think like other people. I learned how to write from John. I learned narrative structure. It was like going to college, you know. It was very cool. John was very inspiring.
Do you guys still talk today? What’s your relationship like?
No, he hates me because I became more famous. John’s crazy, you know? He’s also brilliant, but he’s crazy.
Legs McNeil
(Roberta Bayley)
What do you feel is the essence of punk journalism?
Well, you have to invite people in and you have to make them feel like they’re in the room. I hope I did in the new book.
I think you definitely accomplished that; from the beginning it draws you in. I loved how you described CBGB’s as “a hellhole of a Bowery Bar, like the place where you went for your last drunk before slitting your wrists upstairs at the Palace Hotel.”
Yeah, great line, huh?
As someone born way too late to ever be there, it was great to have a chance to see it through your eyes.
It really reminded [me] of one of those film noir dive bars, where they go in and everything would just be despair. Like this is just where you go, man. It was very cool in that way. New York was very film noir back then in the ‘70s, even though there was a lot of color.
Your book talks about the ‘70s New York punk scene from the perspective of the writer, which I think is very important. I think it definitely will inspire some journalists, whether they’re covering music or not, when it comes to seeing what it was like to get the story of what was happening around you at the time.
Oh, well, thank you. It sounds like you’re talking about somebody else [laughs] because it was just my life, you know?
Was it weird to write about yourself in this way after so many years of interviewing other people and so many extreme characters in punk rock?
It was weird. I must say, it was really bizarre to tell the truth. You know, sleeping in the playhouse and my friend Tommy Hearn, just pulling up in his car alongside the road and opening the passenger door and just waiting for me to like realize he pulled over, I just climb in the car and shut the door, we pull out, and I smoke one of his cigarettes, which drove him crazy. Because I never had any cigarettes. I got arrested breaking into the Cheshire Reformatory which is now the Cheshire Maximum Security Prison [in Connecticut]. There was a lot of stories like that, but the publisher set the ceiling [on the book] at 80,000 words, and I’d already written 110,000. I had to cut it down. So that’s why it became snapshots. I couldn’t tell the whole story.
Legs McNeil doesn’t come across as sentimental. It’s what happens when you’ve dumped out decades’ worth of memories and stories as part of your life’s work documenting the origins of punk rock for the better part of 50 years.
McNeil has made a career out of reliving the gritty tales of debauchery and explosive expression that gave rise to the Ramones and CBGB’s and shocking tales of New York in the 1970s. Having co-written the seminal tome on the subject, the 1996 N.Y. punk oral history, “Please Kill Me,” as well as several other books, there’s a sense that he’s been talked out on a lot of the well-trodden territory of a culture that he captured as the co-founder of Punk magazine as the outlet’s wiley mascot, a.k.a. “Resident Punk.” This time-worn moniker is now the title of his new memoir (released Tuesday), “Resident Punk: How I Smoke, Drank and Stumbled My Way Through the ’70s Punk Scene (and Beyond).”
Written with fellow author Crispin Knott and a foreword by Blondie guitarist Chris Stein, the book is a compilation of stories, insights and snapshots of the early origins of punk from the self-described “f— up who lived to write about it.” With a cartoonishly brash and hilarious demeanor in his younger days (and still a bit today) he became the avatar for a movement that turned him into not only a writer but one of punk journalism’s key figures.
Today, at age 70, he’s ready to tell his side of the origin story of punk from his view as a journalist, a friend and a fan of not only the Ramones but seminal artists like Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Andy Warhol and many more. Between copious hits from a vape, relaxing in his home office in rural Pennsylvania, McNeil talks about the strange process of writing about his own punk rock life for a change.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
As a punk historian who’s written so much about this music and its icons, why do you think now is the right time to time to tell your story?
Money.
I like money too, but then once you decided, “Hey, I need a paycheck,” how did you bring these stories out of yourself?
I had written parts of it over the years. So there’s a lot there that I had already done. And my publisher actually limited my word count, so I couldn’t tell the whole story. So I had to kind of do it in snapshots of different periods of my life. So there’s a snapshot from my days at the Mud Club, a snapshot from my time with Joey Ramone, a snapshot with Richard Hell, a snapshot of Patti Smith. … So just kind of encounters and exchanges and dialog and cool scenes.
What helped you recall a lot of this stuff? Did you use tape recordings, or did you have conversations with people to help jog your memory?
I ingested substances that made me time travel back to those times, and I had to live in those times. It was hell on my wife because I was just in my head the whole time, but I’m mostly in my head anyway. It was really kind of exciting to remember the great times with people and the fun parts I had with different people over the years.
You talk in the book about escaping the suburbs of Connecticut to come to New York and establish yourself there in as a young man in 1975. How did that spirit of adventure and wanting to leave home inspire you to become a journalist?
Well, I always wanted to be a writer. But I was severely dyslexic. I can’t spell … words, you know? And actually, [TV writer] Elaine Aronson said a funny thing about [my new] book. She says, “I can’t believe you can put a sentence together, let alone a paragraph. I love the book.” She’s married to Curtis Armstrong, who played “Booger,” [in “Revenge of the Nerds” ] who also wrote a great endorsement for the book. [Elaine is] very funny. I like good funny writers, you know, like Mark Jacobson — people that get it, you know?
Joey Ramone and McNeil pretending to read.
(Roberta Bayley)
What’s your take on how punk is reexamined and memorialized today with things like the Punk Museum in Las Vegas, various historic exhibitions, the Ramones’ 50th anniversary, etc?
I don’t really think about it. I’m on to other things. I’m a real history buff, so I’m always going back and checking out different stories outside of punk.
In “Resident Punk,” you talk about your days going to the Mud Club, which was nearly as important on the origins of punk as CBGB’s but usually doesn’t get the same credit. What was it about that experience or that time in your life that felt important to capture in this book?
You could do anything you wanted. It was really that open and free. I used to get into the Mud Club free with 10 of my guests. I’d get everybody in. The doorman Richard Bach knew me. He was a really nice guy, and he wrote a great book called “The Mud Club.”
How would you describe the dynamic in the early days between you and Punk magazine co-founder John Holmstrom when it came to creating this historic magazine from scratch?
We were searching for a way out, and we were searching for something to do, and John was very, very brilliant and was very much a contrarian, and he didn’t think like other people. I learned how to write from John. I learned narrative structure. It was like going to college, you know. It was very cool. John was very inspiring.
Do you guys still talk today? What’s your relationship like?
No, he hates me because I became more famous. John’s crazy, you know? He’s also brilliant, but he’s crazy.
Legs McNeil
(Roberta Bayley)
What do you feel is the essence of punk journalism?
Well, you have to invite people in and you have to make them feel like they’re in the room. I hope I did in the new book.
I think you definitely accomplished that; from the beginning it draws you in. I loved how you described CBGB’s as “a hellhole of a Bowery Bar, like the place where you went for your last drunk before slitting your wrists upstairs at the Palace Hotel.”
Yeah, great line, huh?
As someone born way too late to ever be there, it was great to have a chance to see it through your eyes.
It really reminded [me] of one of those film noir dive bars, where they go in and everything would just be despair. Like this is just where you go, man. It was very cool in that way. New York was very film noir back then in the ‘70s, even though there was a lot of color.
Your book talks about the ‘70s New York punk scene from the perspective of the writer, which I think is very important. I think it definitely will inspire some journalists, whether they’re covering music or not, when it comes to seeing what it was like to get the story of what was happening around you at the time.
Oh, well, thank you. It sounds like you’re talking about somebody else [laughs] because it was just my life, you know?
Was it weird to write about yourself in this way after so many years of interviewing other people and so many extreme characters in punk rock?
It was weird. I must say, it was really bizarre to tell the truth. You know, sleeping in the playhouse and my friend Tommy Hearn, just pulling up in his car alongside the road and opening the passenger door and just waiting for me to like realize he pulled over, I just climb in the car and shut the door, we pull out, and I smoke one of his cigarettes, which drove him crazy. Because I never had any cigarettes. I got arrested breaking into the Cheshire Reformatory which is now the Cheshire Maximum Security Prison [in Connecticut]. There was a lot of stories like that, but the publisher set the ceiling [on the book] at 80,000 words, and I’d already written 110,000. I had to cut it down. So that’s why it became snapshots. I couldn’t tell the whole story.
