Reddit reviews Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk
We found 4 Reddit comments about Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Grove Press
Please Kill Me is good. Then if you are into the 90's Seattle scene, check out Everybody Loves Our Town as well.
That's a weird ass conclusion to draw ("The Monkees and the Outsiders started punk"). Obviously (and I'm sure the guy in the video would probably agree?) that there is no true answer, music and attitude just morphed into what got labeled as punk over time. If anyone is interested in this process, check out Nuggets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuggets:_Original_Artyfacts_from_the_First_Psychedelic_Era,_1965%E2%80%931968) as well as the book Please Kill Me (https://www.amazon.com/Please-Kill-Me-Uncensored-History/dp/0802125360)
Well, I read up a lot on the Velvet Underground in high school, but that was a long time ago and my memory is a bit fuzzy. Also from what I do remember, it was a pretty sudden decision that caught a lot of the band off guard, and Reed wasn’t much one to talk about it. I think the general consensus was pretty much that Lou Reed was a pretty prickly and cocksure dude, and hard to work with, and he didn’t really like sharing creative control. Cale was the reason some of VUs most popular songs were so iconic (Heroin, Venus in Furs, Sister Ray) and I think Cale pushed back on some of the more mainstream “pop” style that showed up a bit more on the following records. I just think all of that rubbed Reed the wrong way, so he had him replaced with Doug Yule who was a bit more of a yes man to Reed.
I would heartily recommend Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, and also Transformer: The Complete Lou Reed Story by Victor Brockis. I read both of those circa 2008, and they’re full of great insight and tidbits.
Which reminds me of another crazy bit of history - I'm sure you know this but just for the sake of this subthread. DOM (the methyl analog of DOC/DOB/DOI which was actually the first in the series) was discovered by Shulgin in the early 60s. By 1967 somebody was selling it in San Francisco as "STP" in 10+ mg tablets. If you know anything about the DOx series that's a crazy high starting dose, especially since people used to the quicker come-up of LSD would sometimes take more than one. I remember there's a reference in Please Kill Me to Iggy Pop taking STP and tripping for three days. Quite a few people went to the hospital on that shit.