Obtained and finished McCain/McNeil's Please Kill Me. Only six years behind schedule.
The following represents all or part of my favorite individual sentences in the book, mixed together. In other words, the following theoretically would have been my favorite page in the book, had it actually existed. In other words, the following is my favorite non-existent page in the book. At the same time, it reads uncannily like many of the pages that did exist.
I was fired from Elektra Records on the day Richard Nixon was inaugurated president, January 20, 1969. When they first make you Caesar, you always had to say, "No, no, no, I couldn’t possibly." Which was a brotherly kind of revolutionary thing to do. In fact, that’s the sad part: hippies survived Nixon, but punk caved in to Ronald Reagan, know what I’m saying? It’s not even a political clash, it’s cultural clash.
Turning everything embarrassing, awful, and stupid in your life to your advantage. The device of every guy named Ramone. He’d say, "I met her in the bin." Joey was painting then. He would chop up carrots and lettuce and turnips and strawberries and mix it all together and paint with them. I’m okay, I"m wipable. Sometimes he’d have me come over and bounce the basketball for a half hour and he’d tape it. We knew these numbers to dial where you could get these weird sounds. We’d call the numbers and it would go "Beep- beep - beep - beep - beep." We’d listen to that for hours. We had a blender with a little bit of water in it and put a mike right down in it, and just turned it on. We played that for like fifteen minutes before we went on stage. People would just come in and then be assigned to drone. What a party, you couldn’t get your head outta that bag. I still have dreams about that car.
And it was a real dancing bear phenomenon: "We’re going to go see Burroughs." Iggy did the reading. . . . Lou had that New York thing – he could make out like he’d read it even though he hadn’t. Hell, who had both feet in the ooze. . . . The Stooges, who were like an oven that burned money. Hell was a boulevard surrealist. So I’d say to Lester, "Do what I do – just buy these old f*cking blues records." I mean, Billy Graham is a great performer, even though he is a hunk of sh*t. Jackie wrote the play using the names from horse-racing forms. She kind of went "Oh," and space-cadetted away from me. Whereas Johnny was writing songs because he was broken hearted over Sable. She won’t get out of herself, right? God made that then threw away the skin formula. It was something so out of character to see him enjoy a moment of life. The way you got to dream but direct your dreams like a movie director. You couldn’t compete with those images. No, you got a lot of style, but you got no class. Lester gave a sh*t about music and that’s partly what killed him, because music in the eighties was total sh*t. I remember saying that on the Tom Snyder show.
Did they get sleep? Naah, I don’t think that was really on the agenda.
People came to get bitten. They didn’t really come to get petted. What’s in store for them, realistically, is a lot of spoilage, denting and banging around. You’re up for nine days, your peripheral vision is raining. All these triangles. These arrogant freaks. They’d come home and pound on the table like cavemen. Was that fun? Yeah, right. I’ve starred in this movie a couple of times already. It was a very boring, poetic, silent thing. And it was all sexy-sexy and dudey-dudey. You could have sex with all the busboys. I mean, not right there, but later. But on a basic level, would they share their peanut butter with me? I was always watching "Dragnet" – and I knew that if you smoked a stick of marijuana you’d be robbing banks in two to three weeks. You look away from me again, I’ll smash you in the face. I’d never been treated in such a way in grocery stores in my life.
