"They say you forget the pain of childbirth.well, I don't forget the pain of doing that book." "I still remember how hard it was," says McCain. When the interviews were done and the story was laid out-from Lou Reed's beckoning opening lines ("Come over here so I can talk to you…") to New York Dolls' Jerry Nolan dying in a hospital bed-McCain felt relieved. McCain and McNeil spoke to everyone McNeil could remember from the scene who they could reach. She developed some tricks: "You've got to wait.because the minute they see the tape recorder, they're kind of freezing up a little." Between her and McNeil, they built up a kind of act: "We had a great 'good cop bad cop' thing-he'd ask someone, 'Who are you fucking?' and then I'd roll my eyes and go, 'He's so disgusting!'" "I never thought of it as interviewing-it was just talking." McCain went into interviews without notes, armed only with a tape recorder. "You know what? I'd never really interviewed anyone before, come to think of it," she says good-naturedly. The two quickly found ways to get their subjects to open up-be they groupies, label dudes, scenesters, or massive stars like Miles Davis, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, and Andy Warhol. With McCain on board, the book shifted from being a history of The Ramones to an account of the punk scene as it spread from Malcolm McLaren's London and the Sex Pistols to New York's CBGB, Television, and Blondie-and far beyond.
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