Before I move on, I suggest you take the title of this post seriously: it’s uncensored. The Google ads might disappear because of F bomb appearances. Fair warning.

If you don’t know about McNeil or McCain or their work, slide on over to the Please Kill Me website.

The evening got rolling with McNeil reading from his apparently-just-completed and soon-to-be-published book about a brief, intense love affair more than ten years ago with a young woman who appeared at one of his readings.

Unbeknownst to McNeil until just before her death, she was a heroin addict — she died after injecting black tar heroin that led to an infection and a sudden amputation during which she died.

McNeil began the story this way: “When I got out of my last rehab . . .”

But this wasn’t drug or alcohol rehab — the 50-something McNeil has been sober for years. This was a rehab years after the fact to try to deal with the lasting trauma of his girlfriend’s death. After taking the audience through a little background, he read the opening of the book.

I was struck by a number of things: how much the emotional landscape of our youth stays with us as we get older, by the ways in which the older and more famous McNeil obsessed about the young woman as if she were the star. I also couldn’t help wondering if there wasn’t something about her addiction that attracted him even if he didn’t know about it.

McNeil and McCain read jointly from Please Kill Me — alternating the voices for a brief section of Please Kill Me. And yes, in case you were wondering, David Bowie is (or was) bisexual.

The authors noted that they used only a tiny percentage of their recorded interviews for the final text. So we might one day get a flood of new detail about seminal cultural figures like Iggy Pop and the Ramones.

Jim Reed of Knocked Out Loaded Concerts asked a question about Patti Smith and her refusal to participate in McNeil’s book. “Legs, I’m a wife and a mother now,” Smith apparently said, which took McNeil on an interesting tangent about Just Kids, Smith’s National Book Award-winning chronicle of her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe. McNeil was clear that Smith leaving out so many details of Mapplethorpe’s sexual exploits amounted to a kind of untruth.

I asked about anything that truly shocked the authors when they were doing the interviews.

“Everything,” McNeil said — but I’m not really convinced of that. McCain then recalled an incident that really shocked her. They were interviewing Bebe Buell — the former model and Playmate — when Buell’s teenage daughter, Liv Tyler, wandered into the room in the skimpiest of underwear. In a book filled with so much casual sex and voracious drug use, that’s a curious detail to find shocking. In any world, there are moments for propriety.

I asked about the upcoming movie CBGB and relay a couple of McNeil’s thoughts in my City Talk column tomorrow. But I didn’t quote one gem about how tough and sometimes unlikable club owner Hilly Kristal’s daughter Lisa was. “We all applauded the night that Hell’s Angel decked her,” he said.

Life at CBGB was apparently relentlessly seedy and fun — at least in the punk era. (The club closed a number of years ago and is now a John Varvatos store.) Asked about times that stood out, McNeil said that all the nights were fun in those days — and he noted the routine oral sex he got from a waitress in CBGB’s iconic phone booth (see it here).

But McNeil drew an interesting distinction between the licentiousness of that era and today’s culture of hooking up: Back then, he said, “You really liked the people you were fucking.”

The Ramones was McNeil’s favorite band of the CBGB era, he said after I asked. And why?

“Because they were so fucking good.”

McNeil said that he still listens mainly to the bands from that era — The Ramones, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, The Dead Boys.

In somehow typical punk fashion, McCain and McNeil had sold out of books at earlier stops on their reading tour. So I thought I’d at least by a Please Kill Me t-shirt, but they didn’t have any men’s sizes left that were any bigger than medium.

But the evening wasn’t about sales — it was about memory, what we value, what we don’t, what we’ve done, and what we wish we’d done.

Relics from New York City’s bygone CBGB club – including “Smithsonian-quality pieces” like its bar, the phone booth, chunks of the walls and those stained toilets, all pulled from storage – will reunite on the big screen next year in CBGB, which indie filmmakers confirmed they finished shooting in August.

Forty years after CBGB opened its doors on the city’s Lower East Side, writer Jody Savin and director Randall Miller of Unclaimed Freight Productions tell Rolling Stone they are now editing the 100-minute feature. It tells the story of how the late Hilly Kristal [Alan Rickman] offered his club’s cramped stage to bands playing original songs, which attracted groups like the Ramones, the Patti Smith Group and Talking Heads. In 1974 Television became the first act to play CBGB, and gigged there every Sunday for years before recording their album Marquee Moon. The club closed in 2006.

Much of the film was shot in Savannah this past summer, as most people reading this already know. The Rolling Stone piece contains a number of details likely to be of interest to those who have followed the project.

But will the film feature the soundtrack that it really should? That’s a question that has been nagging those of us who hope CBGB is both a critical and commercial success.

From Rolling Stone:

Produced for less than $10 million, CBGB will feature more than 40 songs of the period, though Savin admits “the music decisions are not done yet,” because “some bands are more cooperative than others.”

40 songs = good
uncertainty about which songs = bad

The Dead Boys (l-r): Justin Bartha as Stiv Bators, Rupert Grint as Cheetah Chrome, Bronson Adams as Johnny Blitz

The piece notes that the filmmakers have been consulting with both Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, so one could reasonably expect that Television songs might be in the final cut. Ditto for The Dead Boys, since Cheetah Chrome (played in the film by Rupert Grint) even had a brief role as a cab driver picking up Hilly Kristal’s mom (Estella Parsons). I’m betting songs by The Shirts will be available too — the film is a great chance to boost sales and visibility for some bands that have largely faded from public consciousness.

Given Patti Smith’s reaction to the film, I don’t expect to hear any of her music, but what about the Ramones? What about Talking Heads? What about Blondie?

Here you go:

It’s more than just about music too — there’s also a film series and a music industry conference, plus even a “spirits fest” with “artisan” liquors. (I love Bulleit, but I don’t know if I’d pin the word “artisan” to it.)

The CBGB Festival will feature both new and established bands. Among the familiar names are Craig Finn of The Hold Steady, Fishbone, Sister Sparrow & The Dirty Birds, The Dirty Pearls, The War on Drugs, and Wyclef Jean.

But they’re just part of the 300-band line-up, which sprawls across 30 venues (sounds awfully ambitious for a first-year, huh?) with passes costing only $79. As I write this, the schedule for individual venues is largely unsettled.

The venues are concentrated in the southern portion of Manhattan as one would expect, but there are a few in Brooklyn too. Not knowing NYC geography any better than I do, I can’t say if the venues are in the kind of proximity that would make hopping from one to the other easy.

On Saturday, July 7th, there’s a large free concert at Summerstage in Central Park.

Krist Novoselic of Nirvana will be the keynote speaker for the music conference.

The lineup for the CBGB Festival film series looks great, with all the following included: Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests (why not do this with Dean and Britta?), Exit Through the Gift Shop, Kurt Cobain: About a Son, New York Doll, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, Punk’s Not Dead, The Dead Boys: Live at CBGB 1977, and The Devil and Daniel Johnston.

While there’s a huge amount of information on the festival website, I find it a little hard to navigate, and literally had to stumble upon this incomplete master schedule.

The website does include History of CBGB, as written by the late Hilly Kristal (being portrayed by Alan Rickman in the film being shot in Savannah). Here’s how Kristal’s history starts:

The questions most asked of me is, “What does CBGB stand for?” I reply, “It stands for the kind of music I intended to have, but not the kind of music that we became famous for: COUNTRY BLUEGRASS BLUES.” The next question is always, “but what does OMFUG stand for?” and I say, “That’s more of what we do, it means OTHER MUSIC FOR UPLIFTING GOURMANDIZERS.” And what is a gourmandizer? It’s a voracious eater of, in this case, MUSIC.

I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve been asked those questions.

A lot of people believe that OMFUG stands for something dirty, but the truth is, I felt that CBGB sounded so pat that I wanted something to go with it that sounded a little uncouth, or crude.

The obvious follow up question is often, “is this your favorite kind of music?”

No!!! I’ve always liked all kinds but half the radio stations all over the U.S. were playing country music, cool juke boxes were playing blues and bluegrass as well as folk and country. Also, a lot of my artist/writer friends were always going off to some fiddlers convention (bluegrass concert) or blues and folk festivals. So I thought it would be a whole lot of fun to have my own club with all this kind of music playing there. Unfortunately – or perhaps FORTUNATELY – things didn’t work out quite the way I’d expected.

Click here for a list of all my posts dealing with CBGB, including the cast and some various posts about the thorny issue of “authenticity”.

But before I get to that, I should note that I love Smith’s new album Banga, which I purchased last week on iTunes. I haven’t had a chance to attempt my own review of it, and I may not get that done.

But you can judge the entire album for yourself: it’s currently streaming in its entirety through Soundcloud in the embed below.

Listen to all of Banga

The Interrobang has a great interview with Smith: Patti Smith: Still Looking Ahead, in which she touches upon CBGB:

Ron Bennington: The CBGBs movie is being done, and theyâ€ve already cast somebody to play you. Is this something youâ€re looking forward to seeing?

Patti Smith: You know what I feel about that? I feel like….Iâ€m still alive. (Laughs) Thatâ€s what I think. I donâ€t understand why anybody wants to play a living person. But, I donâ€t …you know, to me, we lived through that period. It seems ridiculous to be filming it. I think what should be done is– the new guard create their own things. You know, what I look forward isnâ€t to some rehash of what we did a couple of decades ago– when a lot of us are still here, and still working and still vibrant. You know, part open the gates and let the new guard in.

Part open the gates and let the new guard in.

But you can still click here for all my posts tagged CBGB.

Maybe if I had read more in advance about Banga, which was just released this week, I would have been better prepared for the sheer beauty of the final song: a cover of Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush”.

Here’s Smith talking about the song:

I love how she weaves in the children’s voices at the end — I could imagine some thinking it’s a little corny, but it’s quite moving at the same time.

There’s more info on Smith’s website.

From Hollywood Reporter:

The upcoming rock ‘n’ roll film CBGB has added several cast members, including Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, who will play rock icon Iggy Pop; The Big Bang Theory’s Johnny Galecki as music manager Terry Ork and The Borgias actress Mickey Sumner as Patti Smith. [. . .]

Also joining the cast are Steven Schub (Chicago 8) as Dee Dee Ramone; Evan Alex Cole (Sheâ€s Outta My League) as Richard Hell; Peter Vack (I Just Want My Pants Back) as Legs McNeil; and Kerry Bische (Red State) as Mary Harron.

Mickey Sumner

I’m also excited to report that a couple of young actors that I know have landed parts in the production.

Now, who’s Mickey Sumner and why is she playing Patti Smith (whose new album Banga will be released this week)?

She was in Last Chance Harvey with Dustin Hoffman in 2008, but I’ve never even heard of that.

She’s played Francesca in Neil Jordan’s series The Borgias with Jeremy Irons, but I’ve never seen that either.

And Mickey Sumner is Sting’s daughter, apparently. And I didn’t know that either.

For now, here are 3 videos.

First, a preview of “Fuji-San”:

Here she explains the name “Banga” — it’s a dog from Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita:

And here’s a preview of the “universal love song” “Mosaic”:

And here’s the previously released track “April Fool”: