BIRTH OF PUNK, IN ALL ITS INFAMY : NOSTALGIA MEETS LURID GOSSIP IN TALE OF MUSICAL REVOLUTION.

Byline: Jon Pareles The New York Times

Title: ``Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk''

Author: Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain

Data: Illustrated, 424 pages, Grove Press; $25

Our rating: Four Stars

In the 1990s, suddenly everybody wants a piece of punk rock. Nirvana and Green Day have sold millions of records, showing that an urban underground movement has turned into suburban party music.

At the same time, the 20-year nostalgia gap between pop culture events and their fond revival has rolled around to the mid-1970s, when punk reached critical mass as a concept, style and self-conscious sect.

The punk poets who made New York the movement's core have re-emerged: Patti Smith with an album, book and tour, Richard Hell with a book. The Ramones are gathering encomiums on a farewell tour. And 18 years after their quick flameout, the original Sex Pistols are on the road again, playing to far more listeners than ever heard them in the 1970s.

So it's an opportune moment for ``Please Kill Me,'' assembled by two people who were at the center of New York's mid-1970s punk scene. Legs McNeil has been credited with naming it in 1975, when he came up with Punk as the name of a new magazine; Gillian McCain was a program coordinator of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, where Smith emerged.

Their book, in which McNeil speaks but McCain does not, assembles reminiscences from a good share of the musicians, photographers, artists, roadies and groupies who were present at the birth of punk.

``Please Kill Me,'' named after a T-shirt once worn by a member of Television, doesn't have much to say about the music itself. It's a book of gossip, usually from the participants themselves, about couplings, petty crime, hustles, pratfalls, snubs, traffic mishaps, fistfights, knife fights and overdoses. In it, sex and drugs are inextricably linked to rock 'n' roll; so are dissension, ambition and death.

And true to its subject, ``Please Kill Me'' is lurid, insolent, disorderly, funny, sometimes gross, sometimes mean and occasionally touching. Its alternate subtitles might be ``The Romance of Self-Destruction,'' or perhaps, ``Body Fluids of the Poor and Infamous.''

Yet ``Please Kill Me'' also has an agenda beyond titillation: to re-establish a true believer's account of punk, saving it from two decades of posers and exploiters. To the authors, punk traces one clear path through popular music.

Its origins are the cacophony, drone and taboo-breaking lyrics of the Velvet Underground in New York, the kamikaze nihilism of Iggy Pop and the Stooges and the righteous fury of the MC5 in Detroit, the theatrical androgyny of the New York Dolls and the humor of the Dictators. British hipsters, first David Bowie, then the future manager of the Sex Pistols, Malcolm McLaren, try to swipe some ideas and energy.

Then, in New York in the mid-1970s, along come Smith, possessed by poetry; early Television, playing the series of shows that establish CBGB & OMFUG as punk's crucible; Richard Hell, who leaves Television with a ripped T-shirt and the song that should have been an anthem, ``Blank Generation''; and the Ramones, whose fast, catchy, deadpan songs cut through all the accumulated pretensions of 1970s rock.

To the surprise of all concerned, a New York in-joke catches on overseas. The Sex Pistols take the semi-ironic stances of New York punk seriously, borrowing style and some substance from Richard Hell; they galvanize class rage in England but burn out on tour in the United States. And the Dead Boys, drawing on Iggy Pop's wildness, the Dolls' sloppy exuberance and the Ramones' terse songwriting, arrive just a little too late.

Once the Sex Pistols made their headlines, McNeil declares, ``Overnight, punk had become as stupid as everything else.'' But he goes on to articulate what had made him care about it in the first place.

``This wonderful vital force that was articulated by the music was really about corrupting every form,'' he writes. ``It was not about being perfect, it was about saying that it was OK to be amateurish and funny, that real creativity came out of making a mess, it was about working with what you got in front of you and turning everything embarrassing, awful and stupid in your life to your advantage.''

The book has a parochial view that isolates the New York punks from their hard-rock and new wave contemporaries, utterly ignores any African-American music more recent than the blues and pretends not to notice most English punk and all West Coast punk.

Between the lines, axes are being ground and 20-year-old scores are being settled. Yet with its scene-maker arrogance and factional bickering, ``Please Kill Me'' resounds with authenticity, even as it concentrates on everything embarrassing, awful and stupid.

Except for the drug-free Smith, nearly every important musician and most of the hangers-on turn out to be hustlers and junkies. The latter part of the book follows declines and deaths. It memorializes Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols (claiming he didn't murder his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, because he had passed out on Tuinals - the dealer must have done it); Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan of the New York Dolls and the Heartbreakers; and Stiv Bators of the Dead Boys.

From the '60s through the late '70s, the book follows the same grim cycle of success followed by drug abuse followed by serious trouble. Wayne Kramer of the MC5, just released after a jail sentence for dealing cocaine, watches the Heartbreakers ``dope-fiending'' backstage, and thinks: ``I do not want to get into this. I've starred in this movie a couple of times already.''

``Please Kill Me'' recapitulates without comment all the ugly details of punk's backstage behavior. But it doesn't, and perhaps it can't, explain the punks' lasting impact. They may have been lowlifes, but they changed rock history.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1) Under the tutelage of manager Malcolm McLaren , the Sex Pistols cultivated their image from the New York punk movement, mixing the style and substance of Television's Richard Hell with England's class angst.

(2) Patti Smith added poetry to the energy of early punk rock.