RESIDENT PUNK

The co-author of Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (1996) delivers an uncensored memoir.

Born in 1956, McNeil grew up in Cheshire, Connecticut, in “the brokest family in town.” As a teenager, his “weekly antics” included “running away from home, weaseling beer and cigarettes out [of] every mark I could find, and run-ins with the cops.” He found salvation when his friend John Holmstrom introduced him to the first Dictators album; Holmstrom, who had left Connecticut for New York, tapped McNeil to help him run a magazine that captured rock music’s rebellious spirit. McNeil named the magazine PUNK—“that’s what I’d been called all my life, so I might as well use it, right?”—and became its “resident punk,” a job whose responsibilities didn’t interfere with his commitments to getting wasted and laid. That PUNK’s star burned bright in 1976 didn’t solve its money problems, so McNeil ended up going freelance and then working for SPIN magazine. But this book’s main attraction is his accounts of the legends he fraternized with during PUNK’s heyday, among them CBGB denizens Patti Smith, Richard Hell, and the Ramones (“PUNK magazine believed they were the next Beatles”). McNeil is an unstintingly entertaining guide who cultivates an improbably endearing sad-sack persona (“I was more a drunken fuckup than a bad boy”), but is he a force for good? Aside from an indulgent, late-in-the-game section devoted to a tragic romance, the book finds him fighting the good fight: “The idea that you could do something on your own and without a lot of money in corporationland was truly revolutionary, and hopefully rock ‘n’ roll would be never again worshipped as a religion but taken as a tribal rite in the next step to sane living.” Hey, he tried.

Reliably diverting. Casually obscene. Frequently hilarious.