Back home in Cheshire, Connecticut the following winter, McNeil slipped a just-published paperback copy of Susan Atkin’s testimony called The Killing of Sharon Tate under his jacket at the local Morton’s Pharmacy. It was one of those summers where you start playing with matchbox cars and by the end you’re smoking cigarettes and you’re a little thug,” says McNeil.
(Said brother had watched the 1966 surf doc classic The Endless Summer, and it inspired him enough to temporarily relocate the family.) “It was just wonderful. McNeil was 13 that summer, keeping busy selling weed to Canadian tourists in Mazatlán, Mexico while his surf bum older brother sought out the perfect wave.
He and his writing partner, Gillian McCain, are now working on their second major oral history collaboration, a chronicle of the 1969 Manson Family murders. These days, McNeil functions as a journalist, classic punk’s unofficial archivist, and one-half of the creative team that produced the indispensable oral history Please Kill Me in 1996, which singlehandedly spearheaded a genre in music journalism. McNeil was the publication’s “resident punk”-a role that involved embodying the zeitgeist as he saw fit, often by “getting drunk every night and fucking a different girl.” Together with John Holmstrom and Ged Dunn, McNeil ran the magazine out of the Punk Dump, a former auto parts store spitting distance from the Lincoln Tunnel. McNeil occupies the oxymoronic status as an underground icon, thanks in part to his role as co-founder of PUNK, the irreverent ‘70s magazine that chronicled the New York punk scene and popularized the term ‘punk.’ (The title was McNeil’s idea). Cigarettes are, after all, his last remaining vice, or at least they were. McNeil doesn’t live in Los Angeles he’s only passing through, staying in a smoking room in the Standard Hotel. McNeil knows the joint he and Dee Dee Ramone lunched in the hotel restaurant the day of The Ramones’s final show in 1996. Scott Fitzgerald allegedly suffered a heart attack decades earlier. Add to that list the Chateau Marmont, the spot where we’ve chosen to meet and the only hotel with a claim to fame that involves John Bonham riding a Harley through the lobby where F.
Here is a slightly longer list of things Legs McNeil likes: Eggs Benedict, Cream (the band), Gary Oldman, and Chloe Webb’s performances in Sid & Nancy, The Dictators, noir, lavish if now-extinct press parties funded by record companies, Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn (originally recommended to him by Roberta Bayley, who informed him that anyone who hadn’t read it was an asshole), and the history of the 101st Airborne. Here is a brief list of things Legs McNeil hates: needles, The Grateful Dead, the Hardy Boys series, heroin, Robert Christgau (who he claims never truly understood punk), and reality TV.
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