The story behind the John Lennon & Chris Montez brawl of 1963! Burt Kearns delivers another exclusive on PleaseKillMe.com

Our man Burt Kearns has gotten to the bottom of a fifty-five year-old rock ’n’ roll urban legend with an eyewitness account of the brawl between John Lennon and  Chris Montez in March 1963.

That story is Burt's latest exclusive on the literary rock website PleaseKillMe.com.  The story focuses on an incident tduring a British concert tour on which Chris and Tommy Roe headlined with the Beatles as their opening act! It includes testimony from Chris and Tommy, and a cameo from Andrew Loog Oldham, who was a publicist on the tour and went on to produce The Rolling Stones.

The story is culled from Burt's long-in-the-works documentary project, El Viaje Musical de Ezekiel Montanez: the Chris Montez Stoy, and includes exclusive video!

Click here to read it  (and learn the secret to the opening of The Beatles’ I Saw Her Standing There!)

And click here to buy the 20th anniversary edition of Please Kill Me, the definitive oral history of punk by Legs McNeil and Gilliam McCain, and the inspiration for the website.

Chris Montez & Brian Wilson’s 50-year reunion: A clip from Burt Kearns’ Montez documentary is his latest exclusive on PleaseKillMe.com

A piece of rock ’n' roll history has been revealed this week, as music legends Brian Wilson and Chris Montez talk about their days at Hawthorne High in their first meeting in fifty years!

The story and video come from Burt Kearns, who's been better known for his documentary and television work the past two decades, but who recently has been exhibiting his writing chops on PleaseKillMe.com, his old pal Legs McNeil’s literary and pop culture website (in March, Burt and Jeff Abraham cooked up a much-lauded piece on sixties comedy album star and sexual revolutionary Rusty Warren).

The reunion took place during the filming of El Viaje Musicial de Ezekiel Montanez: The Chris Montez Story, the documentary that has shown up in a “preview form” at film festivals around the country.  The story on PleaseKillMe.com tells the story of the still-in-progress film work, what led to the reunion -- and even includes a cameo from Gary Busey.

Most impressive however, is the reunion film clip.

You can click here to see it on the Please Kill Me site.

(By the way,  'Please Kill Me’ is the name of the punk oral history written by Legs and Gillian McCain, which was recently released in a 20th anniversary edition and has been recognized and awarded as a modern literary classic.

Brian Wilson (second from left) onstage at Hawthorne High

Chris Montez returns to Hawthorne High with a film crew