Legs McNeil vividly remembers the reaction he got from the original CBGB bands in 1975 when they heard the name of the magazine he co-founded: Punk, the first publication ever dedicated to the form. Johnny Ramone demanded that we cross out every reference to punk in an article about them.” Flash forward a few years and, “suddenly everybody wanted to be called a punk!” McNeil said. After all, his affinity for the punk attitude and ethos ran so deep, he received billing in the magazine as its “resident punk”.
As an illustration-heavy publication that was driven by the zany art of the magazine’s co-creator John Holmstrom, each issue presented McNeil as a consummately sly and seedy cartoon character, instantly transforming him into a real-life answer to Mad Magazine’s mascot of snark, Alfred E Neuman. But I was that guy.” In a way, he still is. While the mission of this interview, which takes place at a diner in Brooklyn, is to delve into McNeil’s new memoir, titled Resident Punk: How I Smoked, Drank and Stumbled My Way Through the ’70s Punk Scene (and Beyond), the opinions he spews today, at 70, are just as gleefully free of nuance as they were when he was the 20-year-old brat he channels in his prose.
In a wide-ranging conversation (ie a rambling one), McNeil has this to say about the Beatles’ crowing achievement, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band: “It’s a stupid record – except for that John Lennon song, A Day in the Life.” About Tom Verlaine, leader of Television, one of the most vaunted bands to emerge from the club that launched punk, CBGB, he said, “He was full of shit, and he couldn’t sing.” On artists and academics: “You can flush ’em both down the toilet as far as I’m concerned.” On music criticism: “I hate it! Writing about music is not something that comes across on the page. I’d rather read about action and crime and war.” On the iconic rock critic Lester Bangs: “He smelled bad.
And he started the worst band [Birdland] in the history of the world.” But if McNeil’s sensibility has barely budged in the last five decades, his lifestyle has by miles. He left New York in 1998 when it became a place where “you couldn’t smoke anywhere”, eventually settling down in a town of 1,500 in Pennsylvania where he lives with his wife and dogs in a three-story brick farmhouse from 1870. Helping to finance the move was the smash success of the book he co-wrote with Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me, the hilarious and definitive oral history of punk that has sold more than 2.5m copies worldwide since it was published in 1996.
Why would a book about them sell?” he said. Before that they really didn’t know what it was, or where it came from,” he said. We should have listened to this stuff the first time!” Of course, as a self-identified fuck-up, McNeil was no stranger to having his feelings and experiences ignored.
In his book, he describes a childhood scarred by death, small-mindedness and his own hapless character. When he talks about that time now he sounds like a cross between a lost Ramones lyric and a scuttled Rodney Dangerfield routine. He was just three months old when his father died of stomach cancer at age 33.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
