The authors were passionate about the project but weren't sure how it would be received by publishing houses. 'They say you forget the pain of childbirth.well, I don't forget the pain of doing that book.' 'I still remember how hard it was,' says McCain. When the interviews were done and the story was laid out-from Lou Reed's beckoning opening lines ('Come over here so I can talk to you…') to New York Dolls' Jerry Nolan dying in a hospital bed-McCain felt relieved. McCain and McNeil spoke to everyone McNeil could remember from the scene who they could reach. She developed some tricks: 'You've got to wait.because the minute they see the tape recorder, they're kind of freezing up a little.' Between her and McNeil, they built up a kind of act: 'We had a great 'good cop bad cop' thing-he'd ask someone, 'Who are you fucking?' and then I'd roll my eyes and go, 'He's so disgusting!'' 'I never thought of it as interviewing-it was just talking.' McCain went into interviews without notes, armed only with a tape recorder. 'You know what? I'd never really interviewed anyone before, come to think of it,' she says good-naturedly.

The two quickly found ways to get their subjects to open up-be they groupies, label dudes, scenesters, or massive stars like Miles Davis, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, and Andy Warhol.

Photos.With McCain on board, the book shifted from being a history of The Ramones to an account of the punk scene as it spread from Malcolm McLaren's London and the Sex Pistols to New York's CBGB, Television, and Blondie-and far beyond. McNeil and McCain (Tilt) provide a vivid look at the volatile and needy personalities who created punk, if they do not offer perceptive musical or cultural analysis.

Constructed as an oral history, the book weaves together personal accounts by the crucial players in the scene, many of whom seem to have been so drugged out most of the time that their reliability is questionable. Details of Iggy Pop's drug abuse and seedy sex with groupies receive more attention than important bands such as Television and Blondie, which had comparatively puritan lifestyles. But the book's take on punk rock as ''doing anything that's gonna offend a grown-up'' overemphasizes the self-destructive side of the movement. McNeil, one of the founding writers of the original 'zine, Punk, in 1975, is certainly qualified to tell this tale. Starting out with the electroshock therapy Lou Reed received as a teenager, working through such watersheds as the untimely deaths by overdose or mishap of Sid Vicious, Johnny Thunders and Nico, as well as the complicated sexual escapades of the likes of Dee Dee Ramone, the portrayal here of the birth of an alternative culture is intermittently entertaining and often depressing. As its sensationalist title suggests, this stresses the sex, drugs, morbidity and celebrity culture of punk at the expense of the music.

Please kill me by legs mcneil