Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (An Evergreen book) by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCainI just finished reading this and thought I would share a few comments. First, the title is very misleading. It's not so much a history of PUNK but more so the New York music scene in the days leading up to the PUNK movement. There are a few small chapters about the Sex Pistols but even those deal more with Sid and Nancy AFTER THEY MOVED TO NEW YORK!If you want to read about some of the pioneering New York bands that this is a recommended read (The New York Dolls, The Ramones and the Velvet Underground get a majority of this book but there is also a lot of information about Patty Smith, Television, The MC5, The Stooges (mainly Iggy Pop AFTER HE MOVED TO NEW YORK!).
There is really no mention of any other early punk bands short of the Pistols so if you are looking for that you should look elsewhere (ENGLAND'S DREAMING by Jon Savage or RIP IT UP AND START AGAIN by Simon Reynolds are both great places to start).
I found my copy of this book at Powell's in Portland for about ten bucks but you can get them on Amazon for six bucks or so if you go used. It is a nice first hand account of pre-punk New York history using interview from most of the primary players of the era and for that I can recommend it.
Sorry about the formatting of this post! I was trying to use Google's new draft.blogger.com. The post looked magnificent, much better than the old system, when I was editing but then when I posted it looked like poop. I had to hand correct it just to get it like this but there must have been some html code left in there somewhere because I never could get it formatted into paragraphs.
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