Walter Mori, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Update 12-12-25 I originally published this on Hubpages, but since the website is closing down, I’m moving my articles to WordPress.
Look Back In Resentment
This book is not just about the Punk scene; it is about the New York art scene from the sixties to the early eighties, with brief side trips to California, the Midwest, and London.
It keeps this unique pacing with its rotating cast of characters telling their anecdotes as members of the American (and British) art and music scenes during Punk culture’s birth, expansion, and burnout. The people tell stories of the endless cycles of crashing, burning, and pointing fingers at fellow members of the Punk world. Everyone reveals everything about each other, deconstructing this era’s nostalgia and dirty glamour. Furthermore, this swaggering arrogance amongst people interviewed in this book comes and goes from the movement as a whole. Nothing hagiographic about it; it’s full of intimate details and you-had-to-be-there conversations. Reading this book fascinated me because the people telling these stories spoke about their feelings of awe and hatred of each other. I found this book the equivalent of listening to someone’s monologue while they recover from a hangover. The book’s pacing is rapid and filled with individuals venting their long-buried frustrations over their peers (or praising them) and confessing to crimes they really should have been held accountable for the harm they caused. For example, the book begins with Lou Reed talking about John Cale committing a hate crime against a gay man to prevent a marriage to his sister.
Bernard Gotfryd, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Andy Warhol, Punk and Glam’s Specter
From what I gleaned from various interviews, everyone loved and hated Andy Warhol’s dominating presence and control over the art and music scenes during the sixties. While Mary Harron loved Warhol’s work, Cyrinda Foxe and image-conscious Malcolm McClaren were less than impressed with the Pop Art leader. While Warhol was known for his underground films, the underground film community saw him as a latecomer to an established movement. Warhol saw his underground films as a significant investment but needed more unity. According to Paul Morrissey, Andy Warhol acted as the face of his studio, the Factory, but people inside created art. The Factory was Andy’s court, and everyone wanted to be a Warhol Superstar. Furthermore, the Factory could be all-inclusive to people who loved it and intimidate people who did not understand it.
The book remembers Warhol’s tastes and quirks, such as owning a Tiffany couch and not having positive feelings about the New York Times involving his soup cans. According to the Tiffany & Co. website, he did graphic design for them before gaining fame from the painting. Also, judging by people’s accounts of Warhol, was he agoraphobic? He also apparently recorded himself to make enough material for a play.
The book recounts that Warhol initially had no interest in the Velvet Underground, but he found them new, exciting, strange, and loud, and he loved it. Beyond designing Velvet’s album, the book explains that he collaborated with the band by helping them create a multimedia performance that acted as a sensory overload for anyone watching. Iggy Pop said he would use that sensory overload to influence his performances. Even as the Velvets broke up, Warhol became this ghost hanging over the New York music scene even as Glam Rock took over. However, even after the attempted murder by Valerie Solanas, his Factory was still open. According to the book, while Warhol saw the New York Dolls perform, he ignored them in person but made eye contact with David Bowie. Even as Warhol faded out, the Warhol Superstars alumni, such as Penny Arcade, continue to narrate this era in the book.
Hostile Attitudes and Competition
Please Kill Me interviewed other avant-garde musicians. Yoko Ono receives a mention about her connection to La Monte Young, who collaborated with Cale and their part of the avant-garde movement. Before Cale joined the Velvet Underground (he loved Lou Reed for going anti-folk music), he was part of La Monte Young’s Dream Syndicate. The proto-punk movement challenged established gender identities and wanted to make harsh music. Everyone who listened to the Velvet Underground found their music difficult and dense. Still, when I first heard the music, it sounded no different from the music I grew accustomed to growing up in the nineties. While the interviewed people talked about not being radio-friendly and anti-mainstream, the harsh-sounding music is now ubiquitous today. When I first listened to the Velvet Underground & Nico album, it seemed almost normal to my ears.
As the Punk era officially began, it was marked by self-destruction and tension within the cultures it influenced. This narrative included the hostility between Warhol and the Velvets and the emergence of cliques and prominent duos (such as Patti Smith and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe) during the Glam Rock era of the seventies.
Another significant factor in the tension in this book is Punk’s desire to stop time itself and stay perpetually young, for the movement lived in terror of becoming part of the past. That was Patti Smith’s problem, and that’s the problem with youth movements; everyone knew it. The larger culture commodifies and then dies or becomes something else. It still happens today. One can’t stop time from taking something new and strange, commodifying it, and then it goes away. In the end, Legs McNeil, the co-editor of this book, accepted Punk’s commodification and commercialization.
The Punk Scene’s Photography and Art
Beyond the musicians and singers, the book interviewed different types of artists and discussed the many mediums that created and/or captured the punk era’s visual design and image. Such as John Holmstrom designing Punk Magazine‘s visual style and Arturo Vega‘s graphic design for the Ramones. Photography dominated the art parts of Please Kill Me. Photographers such as Marcia Resnick, Leee Childers, and Dustin Pittman remembered their days during that era, photographing musicians such as Iggy Pop. Photographer (and Warhol Superstar) Gerard Malanga took most of the pictures featured in the book. Those consisted of portraits of multiple people or just one lone person. Bob Gruen and Drew Godlis were inspired by Robert Frank and Brassai‘s work when he photographed bands at CBGB. Godlis talked about being awestruck by Frank. Artists tried different mediums beyond their own, such as photographer Annie Leibovitz and Patti Smith working with paint.
References to Art and Architecture
Beyond the contemporary art scene, the people interviewed in the book discussed their art preferences from different centuries. Sterling Morrison spoke of his preferences for Old Masters from Flanders to other art movements that rebelled against established trends during their eras. Danny Fields mentioned Michelangelo. Iggy Pop reminisced about seeing the dirty side of Chicago, the dregs of the factories polluting nature, and Marina City’s towers. In New York during the seventies, Saint Mark’s Church in the Bowery and the Mercer Arts Center were used as performance venues for people such as Patti Smith. However, the people interviewed had a low opinion of the Mercer space and, amusingly, compared it to a movie with Edie Sedgwick. You can now take part in themed tours of these places. The book would name Grace Church during the book’s exploration of seventies New York.
Patti Smith also showed off her knowledge of European art’s different eras, from Italian murals to French sculptors. She would name Egon Schiele two times and discuss women artists such as Camille Claudel and Ruth Kligman. Iggy would also compare Nico’s stardom to Van Gogh’s posthumous fame. Because of these casual and informal interviews, people would cite buildings and people with vague, informal names. As a result of these ambiguities, this prompted me to research these people and places. For example, what exactly was the church in Knightsbridge? This is a section Gerard Malanga mentioned but did not give the church’s name. My research indicated that it may have been Saint Paul’s Church.
After the main text concludes, the book provides a list and background of the people who gave the interviews. One can imagine all the characters taking a bow after the end of a play.
Art History Ramblings 
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