Never Mind the Pollacks Read online

  NEVER MIND THE POLLACKS

  A ROCK AND ROLL NOVEL

  NEAL POLLACK

  FOR JACK AND MEG

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  The phone rang in the post-noon dusk, and I answered…

  PART ONE

  COME ON OVER TONIGHT

  PART TWO

  THIS STATE HOUSE OF DETENTION

  PART THREE

  GYPSY TIGER IN MY SOUP

  INTERLUDE

  MIDNIGHT DRIVE ON A HIGHWAY STREET

  PART FOUR

  NEVER MIND THE POLLACKS

  PART FIVE

  THE COPS WILL HAVE YOUR HEAD

  Epilogue

  This brings the narrative to 1992, but Pollack’s life still…

  Selected Discography

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Neal Pollack

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  I want a job

  I want a job

  I want a real job

  I want a job

  I want a job that pays.

  I want a job

  I want a job

  I want a real job

  One that satisfies

  My artistic needs.

  —SID AND NANCY, 1986

  PROLOGUE

  1994

  APRIL 7

  PLAYA DEL CARMEN

  MEXICO

  The phone rang in the post-noon dusk, and I answered it, because I’d told them not to call me unless somebody famous died. Sure enough, two days into my vacation, someone had, and I knew him. In the rock world, which I chronicle, our friends and heroes are always dying, and we’re always eulogizing. But at deadline time, I’ve learned, mere grief is never enough.

  It was Wenner on the line.

  “St. Pierre,” he said. “We’ve lost Pollack. I want you to write a piece about him. A short piece, for the back of the book.”

  My mouth was full of fish taco.

  “How,” I said, “did he die?”

  The answer wasn’t as simple as might be indicated by my brilliantly researched prologue to this book, which you are about to read. As I constructed my story through press accounts, on-site witness interviews, and pure historical conjecture, I realized that Neal Pollack’s death, in retrospect, had been inevitable since his birth. What is death, after all, but the absence of life? In Pollack’s case, as in so many others, not much.

  Pollack mattered to me, like he did to most other cool people in their late forties, early to mid-fifties. He was thrilling, but he was also weird, the only true rock critic this country will ever produce. He was, in many ways, the living, breathing essence of America’s music, its dark Baudelaire Rimbaud genius, its Céline, its Brecht, the long crawl from the swamps of Louisiana to the halls of Dadaism and back again, writing with prejudice, but without mercy.

  At least I hadn’t heard it first from Kurt Loder. But I still wasn’t prepared for the news. I’d just seen Pollack at Lollapalooza in Seattle eight months before. He’d been gnawing on a piece of fry bread.

  “Neal,” I’d said, “you look terrible.”

  “Grumph,” he’d said. “Look who it is. Paul St. Pierre, the world’s most pretentious fuck.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Shilling for Alice in Chains,” he said. “Those ass-eating phonies.”

  Pollack was standing in front of a yellow tent. A banner over his head read “Anal Piercings. $10.”

  “This isn’t like you,” I said.

  His eyes teared.

  “Whaddya want from me, Paul?” he said. “I needed the money. You don’t return my calls anymore. No one does. It’s over, don’t you know that? They’re charging for bottled water, and the kids are paying for it! They like Dinosaur Jr., for god’s sake! Back when music was good, Dinosaur Jr. couldn’t have wiped me with their set list! I’m done!”

  The multiplicity of the market’s desire to consume subcultural cornucopia overshadows the integrity of independent scholarship. As a lapsed but hopeful leftist and professor of American culture at three major universities, I understood that. But Pollack did not.

  “THEY SHOVED SOUNDGARDEN DOWN OUR THROATS!” he said. “THOSE FUCKING CORPORATE BASTARDS!”

  A guy about one-third Pollack’s age slapped him across the mouth with a tattooed hand.

  “Just collect the money, Grandpa,” he said.

  I said to Pollack, “I’ll call you, Neal. I swear.”

  Neal Pollack looked at me, his eyes verging on the insane, but also on the wise.

  “You never believed in me,” he said. “You never understood me. And you don’t know shit about rock and roll.”

  I filed my piece for Mother Jones, “Alterna-Capitalism and the New World Disorder,” and then I got busy with a feminist monograph for a rock-critic retrospective show at the L.A. County Museum. I cleverly called it Shirley Manson: American Medusa, and it was well reviewed in the local weeklies and glossy art quarterlies. But I never called Pollack, never even tried to find his number.

  Still, his words had stung me. I’d spent my entire professional life studying the vicissitudes of popular music, and had written about it intelligently, to the point where I never, before this sentence, had used the phrase “vicissitudes of popular music.”

  So what had Pollack meant? I knew everything about rock and roll. Who was he kidding?

  In the hours after Wenner called, I sat at the bar of my expensive yet authentically decorated Mexican beachfront hotel, drinking mojitos, each one more vicious than the next. My brain stewed in sugarcoated rum, and my thoughts drifted to Austin, Texas, 1987, where Pollack and I had appeared on a panel at the first South by Southwest music conference. Pollack was living in Washington State at the time, and I’d just purchased my loft home in SoHo. Record producer and Big Black guitarist Steve Albini and the lesser critic Robert Christgau joined us. The topic was “Whither Punk?” My memory picked up the conversation mid-panel:

  CHRISTGAU: There are all kinds of hopeful signs. I love R.E.M., and they are straight out of the punk tradition.

  POLLACK (belches) : Pfft. College boys whining about how their mommies didn’t love them.

  CHRISTGAU: No. I just think they produce some good songs. I don’t know anything about them personally.

  POLLACK: They can blow me. And I know, because I’m a goddamn rock critic!

  ST. PIERRE: Think about it, though. When Chuck Berry was recording “Johnny B. Goode” in 1957, was he making rock music, or was he just practicing enlightenment as mass deception? A group like R.E.M. is just decoding certain innate truths in our culture, whether they’re punk or not.

  CHRISTGAU: Well, I wouldn’t say it quite like that….

  POLLACK: But I would say, Paul, that you suck, and your writing sucks, and rock and roll sucks.

  ALBINI: Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine the band at one end of this trench. I imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end holding a fountain pen and a contract. Nobody can see what’s printed on the contract. It’s too far away, and besides, the stench is making everybody’s eyes water.

  POLLACK: Tell us something we don’t know, Steve. Is the moon round, too? Do you have a tiny little indie weenie? This festival is for yuppies, like you, with your one-piece mechanic’s jump-suit and elitist noise. Celebration of music, my ass. Sixth Street is completely gentrified. This ain’t the Willie Nelson picnic at Dripping Springs, pal. They’re gonna tear down Liberty Lunch and the Arma
dillo World Headquarters someday. Then The Hole In the Wall won’t be able to make its rent, and Austin will be ruined!

  The headline in the next issue of the Austin Chronicle read: POLLACK RIPS ST. PIERRE, ALBINI NEW ONES.

  “Fucking Pollack,” I said, remembering.

  My wife, Ruth, came into the bar. The kids wanted me to tell them a story, she said.

  “Only if I can read to them from Hammer of the Gods,” I said. “It’s all I’m in the mood for tonight.”

  Soon after, the little ones were snug in their bungalow, rocked to electric dreamland by the sounds of the ocean, their heads dancing with visions of Robert Plant sodomizing groupies with moldy tubes of deli meat. Ruth, who is also a professor of cultural studies, slept at peace, her two vacation volumes of Lacan resting quietly, unread, on the rattan nightstand. I cursed her lack of intellectual rigor. Then I rolled and lit a joint and prepared for the calming of my mind. But as is my dark destiny, I just kept thinking.

  Someone was going to have to distill Pollack’s millions of unpublished words, his vast armada of experiences, into a digestible volume of approximately three hundred pages. Every genius needs a filter, and more than anyone else, I felt qualified. Historians who know the history makers, after all, are the ones who write true history, and by making Pollack’s life my own, I figured that maybe I’d get to keep some of his album collection.

  In my backpack, I found some pages of Pollack’s prose, which I always kept with me in case I ever had to anthologize his work. It was a largely unedited piece he wrote for Testicle, a one-issue magazine he published himself in 1976. In those whip-and-chain days of sad ahistorical rock nihilism, no one could have written this but him:

  There is no rock-and-roll! Where did you ever really see anyone claiming that there was? On the back of a bus? In some hipster hotel lobby? NO! BECAUSE IT DOES NOT EXIST! A bunch of half-formed pubescent acne-riddled fools thwacking away at their twenty-dollar guitars is not art! You find art uptown, at Lincoln Center, in George Balanchine’s pneumatic tube of a brain! Art is not Dee Dee Ramone shooting speed in the Chelsea Hotel, or some cum-bag wannabe poet twirling around at St. Mark’s Church in her long skirts! You can’t live like that. Art is slavery, and rock is not redemption. It seems to me that growing up is war and vice versa and you have to react to it like that, and if you have to eat a dog, then eat a dog, and goddamn it, I don’t feel like a man anymore, and Frank Zappa sold us out to the Russians, and I am shrieking now, shrieking, can you hear me? AHHHHH! AHH HHH! My arms are growing horns!

  I fell asleep, and dreamt that Neal Pollack visited my SoHo loft while I was on deadline. Downstairs, Ernesto made him sign the sheet. He took the elevator up and there I was at my desk, trying to find traces of Bill Monroe lyrics in the photographs of Walker Evans.

  Pollack, unshaven, hair firing in multiple directions like rogue missiles, in his Boy Howdy T-shirt, defecated in my foyer. He said:

  “I’ve been seeing your pieces in the Times.”

  “What about my column in the Voice?”

  “I don’t read the Voice!” he said. “What is this, 1962?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Your stuff’s all right, man,” he said. “But it’s missing something.”

  “What could it possibly be missing?”

  “Oh ho. You poor sucker.”

  Pollack raised his arms, and was abruptly framed by lightning. Behind him, a simple street sign, flashing above a sea of human color, read BEALE. A storefront window prophesied the Memphis Recording Service. A twang from the hills grew louder and louder until it was heard by the mass and subsequently rendered unrecognizable among a polyglot din. Jerry Lee Lewis threw a piano at my head. I tried to scream, but was drowned out by Dylan gone electric. The lights of Andy Warhol’s Factory blinked out into the piss-stained 1966 Manhattan night, and then the world exploded into angry light and noise. I saw guitars flying through windows, angry mounds of barebacked teens grinding in a man-made pit. Streams of blood and puke flowed past my feet like lava.

  Pollack threw back his head and coughed. Then he laughed.

  “You’ll never know, Paul,” he said. “You’ll never know….”

  The phone rang.

  I woke in a freezing sweat.

  It was Wenner again.

  “Kurt Cobain is dead,” he said, “and so is rock.”

  Later, as I composed Cobain’s obituary and established phone hookups with local NPR outlets across the country, Pollack’s story still vexed me. I was to write two Kurt books and serve as consulting editor for several documentaries, but no one, it seemed, wanted to know about the man who claimed to have made Cobain and then had the misfortune to die three days before him.

  No one wanted to know about Neal Pollack anymore.

  But something unusual, and perhaps evil, has compelled me to tell you about Pollack. Like all good stories, this one begins at the end. As these words drip from my fingers onto the keyboard like blood from a fresh wound, Neal Pollack’s voice cackles at me still.

  “You’ll never know,” he says in my waking nightmare. “You’ll never know….”

  APRIL 4

  WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN

  On the morning of the day he died, Neal Pollack woke with a burning pain in his ass unlike any he’d experienced in weeks. He remembered what his father had told him back in Memphis, Tennessee, so many decades before. It was strong advice from a strong man that Pollack, on those days when he still had linear memory, was willing to follow.

  “If your ass hurts when you wake up, son,” his father said, “sit on some ice.”

  Pollack felt beside him. No chick. It’d been weeks since he’d met someone in a bar who’d known his name, and months since he’d met someone who’d go to bed with him because she’d known his name, and even then it had only been Patti Smith. She’d lain on her meat-cart bed, swathed in muslin. That pop priestess of Pollack’s soul had crossed her arms and said, “We can fuck. But don’t you dare touch me.”

  “How,” Pollack said, between slugs, “will that be possible?”

  “Figure it out,” she said. “Make me come. Then leave.”

  No, Pollack was alone as usual, lying on something lumpy but also kind of soft. Definitely a futon. An open can of Pringles and a half-drunk bottle of Maker’s Mark nestled in the billowing folds. A Richard Hell action figure curled into an alienated ball beside him. He was home.

  I own nothing, he thought. His room was all records and needles and crummy furniture, most of which he’d picked up for performing a song at the Johnny Thunders estate sale in 1990. A cat, large enough to be frightening, snored between his feet. Another cat lay to the left of his head, also snoring.

  “Max!” Pollack said. “Kansas City! You bitches! Get me some ice!”

  The cats didn’t move.

  “Fat old queens,” he said. “Useless dykes.”

  His ass was on fire and his brain hurt. The previous night was coming back to him. He’d been up until near-dawn, eating beef jerky, listening to Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica backward, drinking orange juice laced with nutmeg, working on his novel The True Story of How Rock and Roll Smacked Me in the Mouth Until I Bled Real Tears. Had he made progress? A notebook lay nearby, and he picked it up.

  “Gang of Four Jimi Hendrix ham salad MIDI Rolling Thunder Viet Cong sonofabitch,” he had written. “I’m gonna make you a star!”

  Pretty good. A few more years, and the first chapter would be done.

  The bile rose, quick and ugly, in his throat. Pollack was used to vomiting on himself; it was often the only way he could begin the day. When it was done, Pollack found himself able to sit up and drink some whiskey.

  He stood. Fresh shards of pain streamed toward every sensitive corner of his body.

  God! What devil was in his stomach?

  He crumpled to the concrete floor.

  A few minutes later, he rose again, with agonizing effort, and lurched toward the sink in the corner.

  He
stared at a hideous goblin, its face a mottled mess of hair patches and dried puke, its worn, emaciated bones poking at skin hanging off joints in loose folds, its belly bloated, legs bowed and arthritic, the last visage of a defeated wretch at the end of a long and lonely ride.

  Wait. He was looking at a poster of Iggy Pop.

  He vowed to cut out the hard drugs, splashed some water on his face, popped a couple of Xanax, and washed them down with a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

  Oh! The ass! Ice!

  The refrigerator was in another corner of the room. Fifteen minutes passed before Pollack could get there, and then only with the aid of a glass pipe full of White Widow. His cats looked at him with scorn, disdain, and pity, but they always did, because they despised him. When he reached the refrigerator, Pollack found it empty, and also off. Christ! Ever since Giuliani had taken office, it was almost impossible to get electricity in your squat. You couldn’t even afford to live in the city for free anymore, Pollack thought bitterly. Bring back the days when you could jaywalk and legally murder a street poet, that’s when this place was really good. He was ready to declare the day over, to go back to bed and writhe until sundown. He’d done it before.

  “Stinking fascists,” he said.

  But he had a thought.

  “Tussin,” he said.

  Only Tussin DM could save him. Nothing made Neal Pollack hallucinate and clutch the curtains like a quick shot of dextromethorphan, and it only cost four dollars a bottle with the senior prescription card he’d filched off an elderly Chassid on the outbound L train. But where had he left that bottle? The last time he’d shot up Tussin, either two months previous or the other day, he’d been on the toilet. No. On the couch.

  No. There was a stash under his pillow. Bingo, and needles everywhere, some of them from Jim Carroll’s personal stash. Now to find a vein. Arms had been out of the question since 1982, and good luck locating something uncollapsed in the thigh. The ass hurt too much, but the middle toe on Pollack’s right foot shone out like an emerald in a Brazilian coalfield. It bore a fat juicy vein, never penetrated, much less by the quart-sized needle that Pollack filled with the syrup of syrups, that sweet Tussin DM. He plunged it deep, and felt his tongue grow heavy.