Resident Punk: How I Smoked, Drank, and Stumbled My Way Through the '70s Punk Scene

by Legs McNeil, Crispin Kott (Other)

Time-travel to the punk scene of 1970s New York and beyond—as seen through the eyes of its chief reporter known as “the original punk” who gave the movement its name.

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.

Genres: Music, History, Punk, Nonfiction

304 pages, Kindle Edition

Expected publication September 15, 2026

About the author

Roderick Edward "Legs" McNeil (b. 1956 in Cheshire, Connecticut), is the co-founder and a writer for Punk Magazine. He is also a former senior editor at Spin Magazine, and the founder and editor of Nerve magazine (print only; 1992).

At the age of 18, disgusted with the hippie movement that seemed to be going nowhere, McNeil gathered with two high school friends, John Holmstrom and Ged Dunn, and decided to create "some sort of media thing" for a living. They settled upon a magazine, assuming that people would "think [they were] cool and hang out with [them]" as well as "give [them] free drinks". The name "Punk" was decided upon because "it seemed to sum up...everything...obnoxious, smart but not pretentious, absurd, ironic, and things that appealed to the darker side". In Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, McNeil said that the magazine was inspired by two chief influences: Harvey Kurtzman and The Dictators' debut album The Dictators Go Girl Crazy!, indicating that the magazine was started strictly so that its creators could "hang out with the Dictators".

Nicknamed "Resident Punk" in the magazine, he claims (to much dispute) that he was the first person (along with co-founder John Holmstrom) to have coined the term "punk" to describe a certain type of music, fashion, and attitude. He says he came up with the name punk because Telly Savalas used the line "You lousy punk!" on the show "Kojak." According to McNeil: "After four years of doing Punk magazine, and basically getting laughed at, suddenly everything was "punk," so I quit the magazine."

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My thanks to NetGalley and BenBella Books for an advance copy of this biography about a man, music, writing, fighting, finding oneself, more music, and being a chronicler, being present, and a scene that seems more of a dream than reality.

Unlike the writer of this book I was born in the Bronx. Legs McNeil was born in Cheshire, Connecticut. I grew up in Connecticut, and McNeil took the first chance he could to get out of his small, confining, town and flee to the Big Apple, a city that at the time had been given up by the federal government, and many others, including my own parents. Except for needing oxygen, that is where our similarities end. Though considering all the cigarettes that McNeil has smoked over the years, maybe he doesn't even need oxygen anymore. McNeil is a teller of tales, a chronicler of an age where music was going through a delayed adolescence, trying to shake off the commercial stink, the easy peaceful feeling, the ABBA of it all, and be what it was when rock first hit. Scary, dangerous and full of fun. This is his story, and what a story it is, full of myth breaking, myth making, smoke, drugs, failure, success and whole lot more. Resident Punk: How I Smoked, Drank, and Stumbled My Way Through the '70s Punk Scene (and Beyond) by Legs McNeil with Crispin Kott, is a biography, a confession, a search for family, and love, with lots about music, entertainment, people famous, infamous, and lots of bad behavior.

Roderick Edward McNeil was born in Cheshire Connecticut, a boy without a father, and with a mother who didn't want to be there. McNeil was the baby of the family, and he spent days crawling through swamps, looking for snapping turtles, and watching bad television, two things that would help him later in life. McNeil's life wasn't quiet. Trouble was always around, from pranks in school, to selling drugs in Mexico while on vacation at age 13. McNeil escaped to New York, supposedly for school, but as that wasn't going to work out anyway, he never bothered. Instead he worked in film where he could, both straight and slightly illegal movies, an interest that later lead to a book. McNeil was making a bit of money helping to write a comic strip for Scholastic when he found a band that literally changed his life. The Dictators. This band made his friends want to create a magazine that covered this kind of music, angry, different, defiant, odd, and life changing. PUNK magazine was born. A magazine that soon gave a name to a nascent form of music. Legs, as he nicknamed himself, soon began to rove the venues CBGB and others, making friends, making enemies, in Lou Reed, and more, covering the music, writing about the scene, and soon made a name for himself in music criticism. Culminating in the first real book about the punk scene, a book that still holds up even many years later, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk along with other books.

The book tells of McNeil's life in details that are almost Dickens-like with a mix of Rimbaud. A real punk one would say, with a sad backstory, but an attitude and a desire to survive. And thrive. One one think there is a lot of fables being written here, but there isn't. Stories that sound like come on man, end with results that seem true. Dreams ending covered in syrup one could say. The writing is funny, and honest. McNeil is as quick to make fun of himself as he is of Lou Reed. There are a lot of jokes, a lot of comic references, and though McNeil wrote about music, there is not that much about the music, more the musicians, like Joey Ramone, Debbie Harry and others.

A Bildungsroman with a bit of a soundtrack. A look at a vanished age where the hope that music would save the world fell apart. A look at writing, journailms following your dreams and mouths filled with cigarette smoke, and sadness. I enjoyed this quite a bit, both for the social history, the music history, and the fact the McNeil lived a really fascinating life. A book for people who like all that, as well as well-written biographies.