Legs McNeil Releases Memoir at 70, Recounting Punk Magazine's 1975 CBGB Origins
Updated
Updated · The Guardian · Sep 12
Legs McNeil Releases Memoir at 70, Recounting Punk Magazine's 1975 CBGB Origins
2 articles · Updated · The Guardian · Sep 12
Summary
Resident Punk, out September 15, traces how Legs McNeil helped define New York punk through Punk magazine and the CBGB scene before the label was widely embraced.
1975 sits at the book’s center: McNeil says even the Ramones resisted being called punk at first, before the term hardened into a genre and later became a badge bands claimed.
McNeil, now 70, pairs that origin story with a rough personal history — a childhood marked by poverty, illness and a leg operation — and presents punk as the outlet that gave his life direction.
The memoir also revisits his later career, including Please Kill Me, the 1996 oral history of punk that has sold more than 2.5 million copies worldwide and helped finance his move from New York to rural Pennsylvania.
Beyond the anecdotes, the book renews McNeil’s long-running argument that punk began in New York, not London, and casts him as a still-combative witness to that history.