Legs McNeil's RESIDENT PUNK to Score Critical Acclaim Ahead of Release
Actor Patton Oswalt calls the memoir a knockout look back at a vital chapter in rock history.
With just two weeks remaining until publication, Resident Punk has landed a resounding critical success, drawing praise from Publishers Weekly, which called Legs McNeil's memoir an 'intimate and fascinating' account of the punk scene's formative years. The trade review joins early acclaim from actor and comedian Patton Oswalt, Kirkus, Graydon Carter, and Richard Hell as anticipation builds toward the book's September 15 release.
'Having read this propulsive, gasp-inducing mosh pit of memories, I'm not 100% sure that 100% of Legs lived to tell this tale. But what's left of him has written a knockout book.' — Patton Oswalt, actor and comedian
Part memoir and part cultural history, Resident Punk: How I Smoked, Drank, and Stumbled My Way Through the '70s Punk Scene (and Beyond) takes readers deep into the gritty downtown New York world that Legs McNeil helped name, chronicle, and immortalize. As cofounder of PUNK magazine in 1975, alongside John Holmstrom and Ged Dunn, McNeil was there at the birth of a movement—documenting the chaos, humor, style, and attitude that would come to define punk for generations.
Timed to the 50th anniversary of PUNK magazine, the memoir revisits the stories behind the stories in a raw, funny, star-studded account of McNeil's life in and around the scene. This year also marks the 30th anniversary of Please Kill Me, the landmark oral history of punk coauthored by Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain, which has sold more than 2.5 million copies worldwide.
From suburban adolescence to CBGB, and from encounters with Joey Ramone, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Tom Waits, Alan Vega, Sid Vicious, and William S. Burroughs to the personal wreckage and absurdity that fueled the era, Resident Punk offers an insider's history in a voice that could only belong to Legs.
Resident Punk (BenBella Books, distributed by Simon & Schuster), written by Legs McNeil with Crispin Kott, features a foreword by Chris Stein of Blondie, and includes photographs by Stein, Tom Hearn, Bob Gruen, Roberta Bayley, Victor Bockris, and Jim Tynan.
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