 |
| Please Kill Me author Legs McNeil recounts his exploits in NYC during the first wave of punk in the 70s for his new memoir. |
RESIDENT PUNK
How I Smoked, Drank, and Stumbled My Way Through the '70s Punk Scene (and Beyond)
by Legs McNeil with Crispin Kott, foreword by Chris Stein of Blondie
Available everywhere from BenBella Books / Simon & Schuster on September 15, 2026
Part memoir and part cultural history, Resident Punk offers a no-holds-barred expose chronicling the iconic and unforgettable music scene that would become defined by bands like the Ramones, Blondie, Television, the Heartbreakers, and Talking Heads.
In 1975 at just 19 years old, Legs McNeil—alongside John Holmstrom and Ged Dunn—cofounded PUNK magazine. In doing so, they inadvertently chronicled the start of a movement. McNeil’s role in the whole thing? To be their resident punk, embodying the zeitgeist the magazine was looking to capture, often by getting f*cked up with musicians, artists, writers, and hangers-on . . . and sleeping with a different girl every day of the week.
Now, just in time for the 50th anniversary of PUNK magazine, Legs tells the stories behind the stories in a sleazy, star-studded adventure. The coauthor of Please Kill Me, Legs invites readers along for the ride as he tussles with musicians and artists, groupies and writers, Golden Age Hollywood film stars and legendary figures of ‘70s New York. Featuring untold stories about Joey Ramone, William S. Burroughs, Patti Smith, Alan Vega, Martin Rev, the Dictators, the Dead Boys, Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, and Poly Styrene, this book is an immersive look at the punk music scene as only a true insider can tell it.
What’s more, Legs shares the raw meat of his life, starting with his gritty suburban childhood, and the teenage wasteland years that put him on a path to punk. Join him as he steals David Bowie’s hubcaps, wrestles with Norman Mailer, and lives life on the edge, and wrestles his own demons—eventually setting in a small Pennsylvania town, where he’s very much still the Resident Punk.
About Legs McNeil...
Legs McNeil, the original punk, is the coauthor of the 2.5-million-copy global bestseller Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (Grove Press, 1996), a book widely hailed as the Punk Bible. One of the cofounders of the seminal Punk magazine, which gave the movement its name and where he was known as the “resident punk,” Legs is a former editor at Spin and editor-in-chief of Nerve. He is also the coauthor of The Other Hollywood (Regan Books, 2005), cowrote I Slept With Joey Ramone with Mickey Leigh (Touchstone, 2010), and co-edited Dear Nobody (Sourcebooks, 2014).
Legs is a filmmaker, directing and narrating Pusherman: Frank Lucas & the True Story of American Gangster (MVD Entertainment, 2025), a documentary that examines the life and influence of a notorious drug kingpin. His next film, Johnny in Wonderland (MVD Entertainment, 2026) tells the true story of porn star John Holmes’s involvement in the 1981 Wonderland Murders.
One of the foremost chroniclers of the punk movement, Legs’s writing has long been the go-to for on-the-ground accounts of those heady years of New York and London in the late ’70s and early ’80s. He has appeared in innumerable documentaries exploring the punk years, on networks as diverse as the History Channel, Epix, and VH1. His journalism has appeared in the likes of Rolling Stone, Spin, New York Magazine, VICE, Details, High Times, AirMail, The Atavist, Cultured Mag, The Daily Beast, and many, many more.
For more info and a link to pre-order, visit the Simon & Schuster site right here. Watch a two-part Zoom interview with Legs McNeil conducted by Jeff Frumess below.
Check out the impressive blurbage...
“Legs McNeil revisits his hard-knock adolescence and run-ins with Lou Reed, the Ramones, and Talking Heads with a finely honed sense of mischief. Essential reading for anyone who came along too late for CBGB—or arrived on time but can’t quite recall what happened.”
—Graydon Carter, former editor of Vanity Fair and cofounder of Air Mail and Spy
“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
“Legs is a true original and he was THERE, baby. Personally, I can never get enough of this . . .”
—John Taylor, Duran Duran
“Legs McNeil has made a profession out of inviting mockery. Few have been able to resist accepting, but among his admirers have been Sinead O’Connor, Norman Mailer, and a sexually disadvantaged elderly rich woman in the vicinity of Cheshire, Connecticut. I did love finding out about his childhood. Eddie Haskell (look him up) was a kindred soul. Obsequious ineptitude, with a suburban-swamp dash of surly, as survival tactic and comedy engine. The Legs is still standing. You have to salute him. Viva Legs!”
—Richard Hell, punk rock legend and poet
“Legs tells a story I remember well; through a haze of heroin and coke-soaked lenses told in utterances that stink of puke and stale beer, when Times Square was a real red-light district temple to vice and depravity and the Bowery had real ‘dive-bars.’ The music was as raw, violent, and dangerous as the streets. Literature came out of pulp paperbacks. Politics came out of Screw Magazine. And art came out of underground comix and fanzines. It was a time when we were all innocent before our fall from paradise.”
—Joe Coleman, artist
“Legs McNeil has always been the coolest guy in the room. He’s also a brilliant writer. Resident Punk is a heartfelt, hilarious, hell-bent journey through a downtown NYC that’s been lost forever. A fantastic memoir.”
—Elizabeth Hand, award-winning author of A Haunting on the Hill
“I’ve been way too busy making a living, but I finally finished Legs McNeil's stupid book. Now I know way more about him than I would ever care to, so thanks for that! Despite the trauma, I really enjoyed it. I still can’t believe Legs can form whole sentences, never mind put enough of them together to make a paragraph."
—Elaine Aaronson, comedy writer for The Larry Sanders Show
“Before there was punk, Legs McNeil was the prototype. When punk was a scene, he was the living embodiment. When punk was a genre, he was the chronicler. Now that punk is an American subculture, Legs is the Godfather, a pop culture superhero who tells his origin story so intimately that you can smell the warm beer. This punk Pilgrim’s Progress speeds by like a song by the Ramones, as stark as William S. Burrough’s Junky and more hilarious than Will by G. Gordon Liddy.”
—Burt Kearns, author of Marlon Brando: Hollywood Rebel and SHEMP!
“McNeil is an unstintingly entertaining guide who cultivates an improbably endearing sad-sack persona...Reliably diverting. Casually obscene. Frequently hilarious.”
—Kirkus Reviews
"Here, with co-author Crispin Kott, (McNeil) reminisces about punk’s early days when he was hanging out with the Ramones, Richard Hell, and Blondie, and frequenting Max’s Kansas City, the Mudd Club, and Andy Warhol’s The Factory. Compelling anecdotes are scattered throughout, including eyebrow-raising tales about David Bowie and Sinéad O’Connor. With a foreword by Blondie co-founder and guitarist Chris Stein, this is sad, profane, and funny."
—Booklist
