I’ve spun this yarn (pardon the pun) before, but in the summer, fall and early winter of 1989, I interned at SPIN Magazine, then on West 18th Street just off Fifth Avenue. For a broader telling of that tale, check out this post, but one notable aspect of that experience was being in the company of then “editor-at-large,” Legs McNeil. For those who may not know the name, Legs McNeil is a somewhat notorious character who was one of the founders of Punk Magazine (alongside John Holmstrom, who I discussed earlier this week). He was, technically, Punk Magazine’s “resident punk,” and, y’know, conducted himself accordingly, insouciantly establishing the tone, attitude and spirt of what would become “Punk Rock,” and championing then-unknown bands like The Ramones, Patti Smith, Television, The Dictators, The Dead Boys, etc. I suppose it would be fair to brand Legs McNeil a tastemaker, but he’d probably sneer at you for it.
In the wake of the dissolution of the original run of Punk in 1979, I’m not entirely sure what Legs got up to — invariably nothing good -- but via the foresight of founding SPIN publisher, Bob Guccione Jr., he was plucked back out of obscurity in 1985 and put to work in the nascent auspices of SPIN, a then-genuinely cutting-edge periodical that offered a bona fide alternative — before that descriptor was appropriated — to jurassic contemporaries like Rolling Stone.
Given his origins, Legs leant both credibility and a palpably sharp edge to SPIN’s editorial efforts, even if frequently clashing (figuratively and literally) with the magazine’s top brass. It was not at all uncommon to see Legs stomp into the office and actually kick a desk over and/or hear him shout out a stream of hilariously profane invective at one hapless staffer or another. While incredibly cool, uproariously inappropriate and always very funny, Legs was also quite capable of being kind of … difficult. It just went with the territory, I guess.
One of my best friends at the magazine was my fellow intern Sam, and Sam and I pretty much idolized Legs. As representatives of the very bottom rung of the magazine’s hierarchy, it really didn’t bother us to watch Legs storm around the office, throwing tantrums and cursing people out. I mean, we were interns. We got no respect. Everyone hated us or, at the very least, went out of their way to ignore us. In my experience, though, that’s pretty much true everywhere. At SPIN, however, it seemed especially pronounced. We did shitty tasks no one would ever want to do, had to frequently fetch fucking lunch for editorial staffers (don’t ever do this to your interns) and didn’t get paid. Sam and I made up for the last part by liberally helping ourselves to stacks of disregarded promo albums, SPIN coffee mugs and piles upon piles of SPIN t-shirts and sweatshirts. As I type this, I’m wearing one of two SPIN sweatshirts I brazenly purloined. I’ve been wearing it for 32 years. It even still fits … kinda.
In any case, when not alphabetizing promo photos, putting stamps on mailers, manning the front desk phone when Claire the punky receptionist went to lunch (much less fun than you’d imagine, although it did afford me the opportunity to fleetingly chat with Ted Nugent, of all people), Sam and I would occasionally be assigned something actually interesting. While Legs was normally loathe to acknowledge us (again, … we were interns), he reeled in a big fish, one day, and needed some support.
Legs had somehow cajoled Dee Dee Ramone into giving him an exhaustive, tell-all interview. While the band’s primary songwriter, responsible for such classics as “Blitzkrieg Bop,” “Teenage Lobotomy,” “53rd & Third,” “Pinhead,” “I Wanna Be Sedated" and countless others, Dee Dee had grown fatigued by the rigid, militaristic uniformity of The Ramones and unthinkably jumped ship. At this stage, I believe he was holed up in the Chelsea Hotel, plotting his next move — one that would manifest in a spectacularly misdirected reinvention as a rapper named Dee Dee King, although that was yet to come.
In any case, Legs landed this big scoop — a sprawling, ten-hour conversation with Dee Dee — and needed it to be transcribed. A laborious chore at the best of times, interview transcription can be a time-consuming, mind-numbing affair. While usually best tackled by the person writing the resultant interview (so they’d know which quotes to keep and which to dump), Legs didn’t want to bother with that, so grabbed Sam and I to handle the whole work. I mean, why not, right? What else are interns good for?
Given Sam’s rich, Southern drawl (hailing, as he did, from Boone, North Carolina), Sam had already made an impression on Legs, who — shortly after hearing Sam speak for the first time— re-christened him “Deputy Dawg.” Sam also cut a distinctive figure with his penchant for loud patterned shirts. As far as Legs was concerned, I was just yet another ancillary, insufferable college-boy intern. I mean, I can’t really blame him for that. I looked like this, at the time.
But for this onerous function of transcribing Dee Dee Ramone, I’d suffice. We were bestowed handfuls of cassettes and yellow, legal note pads covered with Legs’ jagged approximation of shorthand, and told to get to work.
As insalubrious as that sounds, both Sam and I considered this a plumb assignment. Both of us being lifelong Ramones fans didn’t hurt, and we dove headlong into the job, giddily abandoning our otherwise corrosively banal daily tasks to wade into what we considered “real music journalism!"
But as invested as we were in the project, it was genuinely hard work. Between Legs’ indecipherable notes and Dee Dee’s practically Joycean tangents (nobody speaks in clear, fluid, perfectly crafted paragraphs, least of all the lyricist of the Ramones), making any semblance of sense of the narrative was no small feat. For several days, Sam and I came in early, skipped lunch breaks and stayed long after our allotted shifts to help bring Legs’ interview to fruition. I remember one editor being taken aback by our dedication. “What are you guys still doing here?” she asked, one early November evening as Sam and I were still beavering away at the Dee Dee saga. We were committed to getting it done.
Towards the end of the task, Thanksgiving was looming. Sam and I were putting the final touches on the full transcription (which, in hindsight, the magazine could probably have farmed out to a professional agency to take care of in a fraction of the time, but whatever), and committed to finishing before the break. We hadn’t really interacted with Legs in days. We heard him around the office (he was hard to miss), but it was almost like he was deliberately avoiding us, which seemed entirely likely. Towards the end of the day, he came trucking by the intern/copyeditor area and made a cameo on his way out the door (I took the picture of him above at that moment). He seemed in a not-atypical foul mood. As he passed by us, we eagerly told him we’d finished the transcription and to have a happy Thanksgiving. As he turned away from us and walked down the corridor, we heard him grumble a “yeah, yeah, whatever” on his way to the elevator.
Sam and I looked at each other with a sort of “we tried” shrug. A beat later, Legs re-appeared with the sort of wobbly smile Charlie Brown sports at the end of each holiday special. “Hey, guys,” he finally said, “Happy Thanksgiving to you guys, too! GOBBLE GOBBLE GOBBLE!”
Some time after that, Sam left SPIN to go back to his college in North Carolina. I left at the end of December after the managing editor who alluded to hiring me full-time got fired. Legs quit SPIN for one reason or another, possibly even before I did. Here in 2022, Sam, like myself, is married and has teenagers of his own. He lives in Portland now and we are still great friends.
I want to say I remember at least part of Legs’ interview with Dee Dee Ramone appearing in an ensuing issue of SPIN, but can’t find any record of it now.
In later years, I ran into Legs in the East Village and accosted him. He kindly said he remembered me, but that struck me, then as now, as heroically unlikely. His cantankerous edges had clearly softened a bit, and he was happy to chat. In 1996, “Please Kill Me,” his authoritative tome with Gillian McCain about the rise and fall of Punk Rock, was released and practically became a standard by which all new oral histories are executed, exalting Legs to a new level of respectability he’d probably never experienced. Personally speaking, hyperbole aside, “Please Kill Me” is unquestionably my favorite book of all time. He also went onto publish acclaimed books about the pornography industry, Joey Ramone, teenage diarist Mary Rose and, last I heard, was working on an oral history about the Manson Family.
Along the way, he helped launch the similarly inclined Please Kill Me website, which featured some great posts over the years (including an eye-opening interview with John Oates, of all people). For whatever reason, however, in arguably typical fashion, Legs must have had a falling-out with his partners at the website and has since abandoned the venture, branching out on his own with a new website called — wait for it — Legsville. Three decades after first meeting and working alongside (kinda) Legs, I’m still a big fan of his work, so I went over to Legsville recently to check it out.
Imagine my surprise, then, to find that interview with Dee Dee Ramone there at long last. Check it out here ...tell'em Flaming Pablum & "Deputy Dawg" sent ya.
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