A postscript to Legs McNeil’s interview with Norman Mailer, first published in High Times in 1979.
When proto-punk Legs McNeil first met Norman Mailer in Martha Thomases’ apartment in 1979, Legs had no idea that he would be curating a new audience for the iconic author who had just published The Executioner’s Song. Mailer, whose norm-defying literary work has a punk attitude all its own, accepted McNeil’s invitation to see the buzzsaw guitar band Ramones along with Shrapnel, a group McNeil managed, at The Policeman’s Bullet Proof Vest Benefit, a charitable event at the raucous New York City punk venue CBGB. Mailer showed up at the club in the memorable way that Mc-Neil describes in his prefatory note, apparently drawing attention away from the regular leather jacket and safety-pin crowd and toward a middle-aged author and his stunning companion and later wife, Norris Church.
Mailer attended the after-show party, too, and as the gathering grew increasingly inebriated, Mailer asked Legs to interview him at his Brooklyn Heights apartment the next day. McNeil’s website, Please Kill Me (https://pleasekillme.com/norman-mailer-legs/), describes his interview arrangement with Mailer a bit differently, decades later, than McNeil recounts here, in his original High Times headnote. McNeil, in a moment perhaps defining the punk-rock lifestyle, woke up the next morning with a hangover and some girl but no memory of the serendipitous interview appointment. His afterparty friends remembered, though, and pestered him to reschedule. The resulting interview, a wide-ranging dialogue illuminating Mailer’s thoughts on important issues and milestones in life, was published in the September 1979 issue of High Times, a magazine intended for an audience usually expecting mind-expanding features of a different type. Mc-Neil soon became a frequent visitor to the Mailer’s household, and Rolling Stone, a countercultural magazine covering the punk scene and appealing to the High Times audience, printed snarky “Random Notes” entries about Shrapnel’s performances at Mailer parties and Mailer’s impromptu wrestling match with McNeil.
The Executioner’s Song spent 25 weeks on the bestseller list and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1980. What small amount of this success resulted from that brief exposure to the High Times pot-head audience is a matter for insoluble conjecture, but Mailer’s appreciation for punk rock music and a new base of fringe-culture friends is undeniable, lasting experiences he could draw upon while producing his later genre-bending works.