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 coedited 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.
