I Slept with Joey Ramone: A Family Memoir Mickey Leigh with Legs McNeil. Touchstone, $26 (384p) ISBN 978-0-7432-5216-4
Singer-songwriter Joey Ramone, who cofounded the rock group the Ramones in 1974, died of lymphatic cancer at age 49 in 2001. Born Jeff Hyman in Manhattan, he grew up in Forest Hills, Queens, with low self-esteem and what is described as an obsessive compulsive disorder, but he soon escaped to Greenwich Village, where he became a punk pioneer. Commercial success was elusive. While the Ramones remained an underground band, they are regarded today as a huge influence on the entire punk rock movement. Joey's brother, Mickey Leigh (who formed his own band), recreates that electric era, striking all the right chords in this dynamic biography. With skillful writing, he finds Joey's musical roots in their dysfunctional family life. As they attempted to deal with their mother's divorce and remarriage, the accidental death of their stepfather, financial worries and neighborhood bullies, their interest in rock, drugs and far-out fashions escalated. With angst-ridden anecdotes, the book traces the trajectory of the Ramones over two decades, from early gigs and recording sessions through sibling rivalry, feuds, fights, eccentric escapades and 2,000-plus performances before they disbanded in 1996. Leigh and Legs's mashup of memories with solid research makes for revelatory reading in this compelling portrait of a musical misfit who evolved into a countercultural icon. (Dec. 1)
音樂
A lot of music, especially Broadcast and the Ike Riley Assassination
電影
ABC News is reporting that 20th Century Fox division Fox Searchlght is in negotiations to adapt the upcoming memoir I Slept With Joey Ramone, written by Joey's brother Mickey Leigh and longtime Ramones historian Legs McNeil.
I Slept With Joey Ramone, the book, is scheduled to be published by Simon & Schuster imprint Fireside in December.a
電視
Everything.
書籍
This Month's Top Eleven:
1. Dispatches -- Michael Herr
2. In Cold Blood -- Truman Capote
3. Constantine's Sword -- James Carrol
4. The Hot Zone -- Richard Preston
5. King Leopold's Ghost -- Adam Hochschild
6. The Johnstown Flood -- David McCulluogh
7. In The Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex -- Nathaniel Philbrick
8. Stanley: The Making of an African Explorer -- Frank McLynn
9.Remembering America -- Richard N. Goodwin
10. Executioner's Song -- Norman Mailer
11. Edie: An American Biography -- Jean Stein and George Plimpton
Fiction: 1. CITY OF REFUGE -- TOM PIAZZA
2. OWEN NOONE AND THE MARAUDER -- by Douglas Cowie
偶像
Norman Mailer and Doris Kearns Goodwin. And of course, David Vincent, Architect,
Legs McNeil Barnes and Noble Booksellers hosts the launch of I Slept with Joey Ramone: A Family Memoir by Mickey Leigh with Legs McNeil at their Tribeca, NYC store. There 於 星期四。 檢視更多
我想認識： Saturday, April 12, 2008
Punk Rock Bookshself #2: Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain (1996)
Is Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk the best book ever written on punk rock? Sometimes it seems so, as it has the same vibrant energy, adolescent street-smart/smart-ass poses and grit of all those great 1970s American punk (and not-so-punk) albums like Marquee Moon, Fun House, Rocket to Russia, Blank Generation, or Plastic Letters. You won't find this approach in England's Dreaming. The book's basically a how-to for living fast and dying young and leaving behind that beautiful corpse.
Detailing the rise of (mainly) New York’s underground rock scene in the early and mid 1970s, author Legs McNeil knows whereof which he speaks. As a co-founder of Punk magazine in 1976, he was there for everything, and saw it all. Years later he interviewed the wasted and wounded, the survivors and the just barely-still-there, about their recollections of those dangerous days, and collated them all into this burning tome. One’s shelf of music books is incomplete without it; I would even say if one is not a fan of the artists involved. (I mean, I’ve never listened to a Led Zeppelin album on purpose in my life, but even I have a copy of Hammer of the Gods).
And yet virtually none of the artists Please Kill Me celebrates have been within spitting distance of a Billboard Hot 100 chart, or had paparazzi chase them down at an LA or NYC nightclub, or become a national icon. The two that did achieve such heights—Blondie and the Talking Heads—cleaned up the spit and the spray paint of CBGB for mass consumption. Of course now you can get your Ramones with your cell phone commercials, but once upon a time, the single “Sheena is a Punk Rocker” sent radio DJs and record company execs into paroxysms of fear and disgust.
But the fact that these musicians never achieved mass acceptance doesn't mean they didn't live rock'n'roll to its limits. They did it all. And I mean all: these people, almost to a one, are seriously fucked-up misfits who could do nothing but make a singular and passionate music that created an entirely new teenage subculture. It satisfies more than adequately the reader’s desire for impolite behavior like vast drug abuse, inappropriate sexual hijinks, and tiny t-shirts; it has a myriad of folks giving the finger to society, flaunting its rules and codes by being drunk, high, both, or neither but writing lyrics like “I’m a Nazi schatze/I fight for the Fatherland/I’m a Nazi, baby, I’m a Nazi, yes I am” or “I need a fix and a kiss.” You get a cast of characters sleazier and more desperate, and with probably similar hairstyles and clothes, as found in a Dickensian stable of scoundrels and pickpockets.
In the form of an oral history—a style that can be annoying, and isn’t really “written” so much as it is edited—Kill Me is leaps and bounds more exciting than a previous CBGB history, This Ain’t No Disco, from the late 1980s. That book has many of the same stories but here, you can actually feel the grit and the grime. But don't forget, it wasn't all Bowery beasts. Can you imagine the collective shiver that went up and down everyone's spines when Debbie Harry walked into the place?
The famous nightclub Max’s Kansas City (which has its own version of Please Kill Me, 1998’s High on Rebellion) had the New York Dolls, the Velvet Underground, the Stooges and other raucous luminaries grace its stage before the soon-to-be-famous CBGB stole a bit of its thunder. The book starts off detailing the darkness at the heart of the Velvets and their arty, atonal, S&M-besotted approach that virtually single-handed created a new kind of musical attitude. Sometimes I forget that Velvet Underground & Nico was released the same year as Sgt. Pepper and the Doors' first album (Lou Reed might've hated Morrison, but we all know where Iggy worshiped).
More stories come thick and fast, told in the voices of the participants and the guilty. Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee Ramone; Johnny Thunders and David Johansen; Richard Hell and Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Wayne Kramer and Lou Reed. Then there is the Warhol contingent, the artistes, transvestites and glamour queens; various band managers like Malcolm McLaren, Linda Stein and Danny Fields (when is that guy writing his book?); photographers and filmmakers; and countless hangers-on and groupies and girlfriends and wanna-bes. Stories criss-cross, get tangled, get contradicted. Perhaps the most harrowing tale in a book filled with close calls is the one in which Dead Boys drummer Johnny Blitz ends up nearly stabbed to death by a street gang. The guy he was trying to protect, Blondie roadie Michael Sticca, ends up in Riker's Island for a night or two. Yikes.
One might want to read this in small doses. The obnoxiousness factor is high, as is the exaggerated sense of self-importance. One can only listen to some sideliner talk about how fabulous it all was, how fabulous and decadent, before you want to say: Okay, now *who* did you fuck again, Iggy Pop or Dee Dee Ramone? Stories about Stiv Bators’ drunkenness or Johnny Thunders’ desperate junkie manipulations begin to get exhausting. Upon my first reading of this I realized that I really wouldn't want to hang out with my heroes. That's a bitter realization. I did, however, like how Steven Tyler turns up at Thunders’ funeral, wailing, "It could have been ME!" Dammit, I thought, why wasn't it?
When this book came out in hardcover from Grove Press (home to punk sympathizers like William Burroughs) in 1996, it was one of the very few widely-published works on punk rock. Bold move. 1996 was years before any of the Ramones had died, before you could hear Blondie in every other TV commercial, before Iggy sold you sea cruises, long before the New York Dolls reformed, before Hot Topic invaded shopping malls, and of course a decade before legendary rock club CBGB made front page news by closing down. Today Ramones t-shirts are de rigueur for stylin' like you're downtown, when you're really from Canada.
What signaled the end? Well, Sid Vicious’s death in Greenwich Village for one. Various characters ripping each other off so they have to leave for Europe. The Ramones in LA filming Rock’n’Roll High School and recording End of the Century with Phil Spector. Dissolution of various "super groups" conceived of while in impossibly altered states of consciousness. Patti Smith marries MC5's Fred “Sonic” Smith to be a housewife. Number-one hits and enormous worldwide success for Blondie.
Please Kill Me, despite, and because of, its excesses is a pleasure pure and simple: hearing about these people talk about the youthful thrill of throwing off the shackles of normal life and embracing the not-yet-clichéd lifestyle of the punk demimonde is charming and inspiring. The freedom to create something almost entirely new is a rare event in pop culture, and Please Kill Me is a celebration of that. Despite the dark shadows of commercial indifference, heroin addiction, sexual perversions, band break-ups, and even death, the spark shines on through, 30 years on.
Si tu as aimé mes musiques de film trip-hop/electro-acoustiques, en voici 2 illustrées en vidéo par mes soins... Tu pourras trouver les codes de ces vidéos sur mon myspace... N'hésites pas à me dire ce que tu en penses,
Hey! Listen in to Arboles on KSUN this Sunday at 4pm! I'll be playing some new songs off the upcoming EP. Just go to ksunradio.com and click at the top of the page!
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