Never Mind the Pollacks Read online

  The band was silent.

  “Your critical acumen is remarkable,” Springsteen said.

  “You understand us so well,” said Clemons. “But how?”

  The amnesiac shook his head.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know.”

  On May 2, 1972, Bruce Springsteen played an early-evening acoustic set at the Gaslight, a club in Greenwich Village. He walked into the club with his manager, Mike Appel. Spread about three tables, a dozen people sat. The amnesiac stumbled in, carrying all of Bruce’s bags, and also his guitar.

  “Man,” the amnesiac said, “this place is fucking DEAD!”

  At one of the tables sat the legendary John Hammond, of Columbia Records, the man who had given Bob Dylan his first professional break.

  “Oh, dear God,” he said.

  The amnesiac porter dropped all his bags on the stage in a thud, which cracked the guitar frame. He sat down next to Hammond and scratched himself.

  “Neal Pollack,” Hammond said. “I would rather have died ten years ago than ever seen you again.”

  “What’d you call me?” said the porter.

  “What’d you call him?” Springsteen said.

  Also in the room was Peter Knobler, the editor of Crawdaddy.

  “I thought you were dead, Pollack,” he said. “You owe us a profile of Syd Barrett.”

  In his mind, the amnesiac porter heard a vague call from down a dark road. He gripped his skull with both hands. “Ohhh,” he said. “It hurts!”

  Pollack stood up from the table, knocked over some drinks, and lurched toward the door. With a howl, he threw it open, bursting into the late-day Greenwich Village sun. Inside the club, they could hear his sad banshee wail.

  “Pollack,” Hammond said. “The singin’ fishin’ cowboy.”

  “The greatest rock critic alive,” said Peter Knobler.

  “Can I sing now?” said Springsteen.

  That day, in his blue jeans and white sleeveless T-shirt, unwashed and bearded, Neal Pollack looked like much of lower Manhattan. But the whole borough veered out of his way as he lurched uptown, magnetically drawn like mercury toward Times Square. Four decades of guitar ripped at his brain as the memories of a life that may or may not have been his flashed like thunder in his mind.

  “Urgh,” he said.

  Down the street, oozing from the basement of a seedy hotel, he heard a guitar screech, or was that in his mind? No, this was definitely external, with drums. Something that sounded suspiciously like rock ’n’ roll was crawling out of that basement, slithering down the sidewalk, and into Pollack’s pants.

  He had an erection.

  “Hello, old friend,” he said.

  His boner led him into the hotel and down the stairs. In front of an audience of a few fourteen-year-old girls, a couple of A&R guys, and several dozen rock critics, five men dressed like women yet somehow also like men were thrashing about in their platform shoes and white pancake makeup and bouffant-manqué hairdos and aluminum pants and tight striped shirts open to the navel. There were also garbage bags involved. The music sounded elementary, even impoverished, but to a rock critic’s ear, it was sweet nectar.

  Jesus, Pollack said to himself. That’s “Showdown,” by Archie Bell and the Drells. Wait. How could he possibly have made that connection? Why were these fairy queens playing this song? Why were they drinking Schlitz? Goddamn, they sounded good! They sounded better than anything he’d heard in a long time. He threw himself into the show, raised his arms, sweat and stench and all, and rocked out.

  “I KNOW WHO I AM,” he said. “AND I AM ROCK ’N’ ROLL!”

  The lead singer spat in his face. Pollack spat back. Prodded by the New York Dolls, he was seized by raw sexual desire, and he groped through the crowd.

  “Get your hand off my ass, dickwad!” said a girl.

  She kneed him in the nuts, and he fell.

  He was whole again.

  PART FOUR

  NEVER MIND THE POLLACKS

  1973–1979

  One floor below me, my mother putters across brown-and-ivory shag, gossips into her lime-green rotary phone, watches Wheel of Fortune, mixes almonds with the green beans. In the evenings, we walk around the artificial pond and feed the ducks. On weekends, we go to Costco. I eat a hot dog. She buys detergent, toilet paper, tuna packed in water, garbage bags. Then home, always home, where the private airplanes flying into Palwaukee regional buzz overhead from 5 A.M. until sundown. On earth, there are few places less rock ’n’ roll than Wheeling, Illinois. Yet here I am, drying out with mother, seeing my book contract through.

  Ruth doesn’t call. She doesn’t e-mail. No one does, anymore. My project is simultaneously losing steam and focus. Pollack’s been dead eight years now, but it seems like eighty. Writing about the 1970s feels like writing about the 1870s. It’s a vast, absurd gulf of time.

  Still, the manuscript and memory summon me back.

  It was Memorial Day weekend, 1973, and we’d all been invited to Memphis for the First Annual Association of Rock Writers Convention. One hundred and forty tickets paid by Ardent and Stax records to promote Black Oak Arkansas and Big Star. Neither of the bands had any commercial viability. I’d said so in the Voice. Still, I took the trip to support my old friend Greg Shaw, who was trying, against all hope, to unionize America’s rock critics. When he told me on the phone, I laughed.

  “That’s like trying to lasso the wind,” I said.

  “What a crummy metaphor,” he said.

  The air in Memphis was thick and viscous. A mosquito flew up my nose. My linen shirt instantly soaked through with sweat.

  Shaw met me at the gate and was nice enough to carry my typewriter.

  “They’re all here,” he said. “Meltzer showed up, and Lenny Kaye.”

  “What about Lester?” I said.

  “Lester doesn’t miss a party,” Shaw said. “The whole staff of Creem drove down, in a stolen van.”

  Then he was silent.

  “What?” I said.

  “I don’t know how to tell you this.”

  “What?”

  “Pollack got in this morning.”

  My first reaction was shock, followed by surprise. It couldn’t be. Pollack was dead. I’d had him killed, by goons, two years earlier. Yet he wasn’t dead, or so Greg was telling me.

  “Are you sure it’s Pollack,” I said, “and not an impostor?”

  “Unmistakable,” Greg said.

  Somehow I wasn’t angry. Barbara had been relentlessly unfaithful to me, according to the detective agency I’d hired. Her cineaste persona was a front; she’d slept with every half-baked Lothario in rock, including James Taylor, who gave her free cocaine. Over the course of two weeks, through relentless therapy, I’d come to blame Barbara for the incident, not Pollack. After all, I realized, he was driven by a relentless priapism beyond that of normal men. My second divorce hadn’t been his fault.

  We got to the Holiday Inn. Pollack was atop a coffee table, slugging Jack Daniel’s, while the other rock critics gazed at him in awed rapture.

  “A toast to Memphis, the city of my youth!” he said.

  He belted the bottle.

  Lester Bangs hopped onto the table next to him.

  “Fuck you, Pollack!” Bangs said.

  He took a great chug of cough syrup.

  “I’m the King of Rock Critics!” Bangs said.

  “No,” Pollack said. “It is I!”

  “Me!” said Bangs.

  “Me!”

  “Me!”

  “Me!”

  Bangs saw me at the check-in desk and bounded over.

  “Paul St. Pierre!” he said. “Oh, Paul! How I’ve longed to see you again, you sweaty bastard!”

  He wriggled like a puppy and wrapped me in an obnoxious hug. His right hand slipped a joint into my breast pocket. His left hand patted my butt.

  “Put in a good word for me at Fusion,” he said.

  Behind us, Pollack hovered, like a one-he
aded Cerberus.

  “Hey, Paul,” Pollack said.

  “Hey.”

  “I’m sorry I nailed your wife.”

  “That’s OK,” I said. “I’m sorry I pushed you out a fourth-story window.”

  “You gave me amnesia.”

  “Sorry.”

  We hugged. Pollack smelled worse than ever. He sobbed in my ear. But that moment passed, as all moments must, and I had the porter carry my bag upstairs.

  Later, buses waited outside to take us to a show where Black Oak Arkansas was going to play nude by the Mississippi. The buses were appointed with buckets of free booze and fried chicken. They were monuments of payola on wheels.

  In the front of the bus, Furry Lewis played acoustic.

  “This is a song by an old friend of mine, Willie Jefferson,” he said.

  Lester threw an empty plastic bottle of Romilar at him.

  “Shut up, old man!” he said. “I hate the blues! Jim Dandy to the rescue!”

  Furry Lewis looked genuinely sad, almost frightened.

  “Naw,” Lester said. “I love the blues!”

  Pollack stood in the aisle, bottle in each hand, and told stories.

  “So Johnny Thunders and I were in the back room at Max’s, and I said to Bebe Buell, you can blow me, but only if we figure out a way to take heroin anally. Todd Rundgren was really pissed, and he threw his fur coat on the floor….”

  I sat in the back, ignored and unrespected. Here I was, an increasingly wealthy and respected academic and a lover of some of the world’s best, most original music. I’d lived a life full of adventure, or at least in proximity to it. Of all the people who’d ever breathed, I counted myself among the top one percent in terms of income and comfortable circumstance. And there was Neal Pollack, a disgusting, poverty-drenched slob, a professional loser. This pretentious bloated nightmare of a man was despised by all but his small coterie of pasty disciples.

  I was jealous of him.

  The attempts to organize the critics went nowhere. Seventy-five of us showed up for a Saturday meeting, seeking air-conditioned shelter from a sticky wind, which was the first sign of an apocalyptic tornado bearing down on Memphis. Seventy-three of us, including me, were drunk. Meltzer stood on his chair and demanded that the liquor companies pay rock writers from now on. “We’re their best customers!” he said. You could never tell if he was joking or not.

  In the end, we concluded that writers didn’t get paid enough.

  “No shit,” Pollack said. “I’ve made ten dollars since 1970, and I’m the best writer in the room.”

  But Pollack joined the union anyway. It immediately disbanded over an argument about David Bowie. An hour later, we re-formed, and he joined it again. Later, at a Big Star show, he leapt onstage, kicked over an amp, grabbed the microphone from Alex Chilton, and said, “This is useless! They’re taking advantage of us! We’re all a bunch of industry whores! But the music is pretty good!”

  Next to me, a nineteen-year-old sophomore from Oberlin University gasped.

  “My god,” the kid said. “I never thought of it that way before. Rock is an industry.”

  “Didn’t you read my piece in Rolling Stone?” I said. “I figured that out two years ago.”

  “Neal Pollack is brilliant,” said the kid.

  Lester Bangs came up behind me, shirtless.

  “Fuck this,” he said. “Let’s take some acid.”

  Later, Lester, Meltzer, Stanley Booth and I got into a brand-new Cadillac the color of pea soup. Neal Pollack was in the driver’s seat.

  “You can’t drive, Pollack!” said Lester.

  We roared out of the parking lot.

  “Where’d you get this thing?” Booth asked.

  “My friend Sam Phillips lent it to me,” Pollack said.

  “You don’t know Sam Phillips,” I said.

  “Oh, yes, I do.”

  About then, my acid kicked in. Pollack’s head grew to three times its normal size. His jaw unhinged, revealing cragged valleys of bug-strewn teeth and a flabby leechlike tongue. His words drew out long and deep.

  “SAM PHILLIPS IS MY FRIEND,” he said.

  Through the night, I imagined shiny gold records whipping toward the car, smashing into the windshield but not breaking it. Above us, on a flying motorcycle, a cackling figure, guitar strapped to his back, waved a six-foot scythe.

  “Shit,” I said. “I’m trippin’.”

  It was dawn. The car had stopped. No one else was inside. I wondered how long I’d been curled on the floor, behind the front seat, shivering, naked. I looked up.

  Graceland.

  Meltzer and Bangs, one hand on the gates, one hand each at their respective flies, were pissing through the bars onto the driveway. Stanley Booth was running around in circles. He had a Confederate flag wrapped around him like a cape. Pollack leaned against a tree, bottle of whiskey in one hand, bottle of gin in the other. At least he seemed to be in control.

  “Mornin’, sleepy,” he said to me.

  The ground rose up, my knees sank toward it. My mouth was desiccated.

  “Need…clothes,” I said.

  “You need a drink,” said Pollack.

  I felt like someone had driven a steel spike into my back. But the whiskey was strong and the spike softened a bit. Pollack produced a joint, and that also helped a lot.

  From down the road, we heard the clomping of hooves. Meltzer and Lester, who were still pissing, zipped their pants. Stanley dropped his flag. I picked it up because I was cold, and wrapped it around my shoulders. Pollack squatted by the tree, waiting.

  Over the hill came a horse the color of cream. Its coat had a shine that could only have been created by a groom from Austria, or maybe Kentucky. The air was thick as butter, and full of flies. It was goddamn hot already.

  Atop the horse sat a man, or what had once been a man, or, as I described him in my second book of Elvis criticism, The Man Who Was Once a Man, “once he was a man, but to us, he was now a god, or meat, to us, that is. He had multiple meanings, this Elvis, but no meaning to us meant as much as the meaninglessness of no meaning. He was decay and mystery, and because of that, he contained clues about our death. The Elvis we saw then is the Elvis we hear now.”

  The King approached, on his white horse. Lester fell to the ground. Meltzer crossed his arms, skeptical. Stanley fainted. Pollack stayed against the tree. I took mental notes.

  “Oh, my King!” Lester said.

  “Rise, Lester Bangs,” said Elvis.

  “You know my name!” said Lester.

  “Of course,” Elvis said. “I read Creem.”

  He clapped his hands. From the bushes came two stable boys. They helped him dismount. I rubbed my eyes.

  “You aren’t hallucinating,” said Elvis. “The acid has left your system.”

  Elvis knew everything, and it frightened me.

  The sun began to cut through the haze. Neal Pollack stepped into the light.

  “Hello, Elvis,” he said.

  “Hello, Neal,” said Elvis. “It’s been a while.”

  “Wha-wha-wha?” Bangs said.

  “Yeah,” said Pollack. “Jesus, you look terrible.”

  “So do you,” Elvis said.

  Elvis put an arm around Pollack’s shoulders.

  “Come in,” he said. “I’ll make you breakfast. You can bring one friend.”

  Pollack turned around to see Lester’s pleading face. Meltzer had started walking down the road. He was already putting rock behind him. Under a maple, Booth babbled like an idiot about his deadlines.

  Pollack pointed at me.

  “St. Pierre,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  The cape only covered my shoulders. Elvis looked down at my crotch. I felt stirring against my will.

  “The South shall rise again,” he said.

  The gates opened. Thanks to Pollack, I set foot on the sacred grounds. Behind us, Bangs held the bars, whimpering.

  “Fucking Pollack,” he said.

  L
ester Bangs tried to urinate again. But he was all tapped. He would soil Graceland no more.

  We sat in Elvis’s breakfast nook, eating eggs, slabs of Kentucky ham, and stacks of pancakes as big as my head.

  “Damn, I was starving,” said Pollack. “Elvis, man. You can cook!”

  “It’s all I have left,” Elvis said. “For what am I to America anymore? Just a celebrity slab onto which people can paint their own grief, fury, and desire.”

  I took a heaping mouthful of okra.

  “Don’t sell yourself short, Elvis,” I said. “You can still come back.”

  “No,” he said.

  He stuck a Quaalude into a bran muffin.

  “My useful hours have ended.”

  Elvis pressed a button on the wall. Next to the refrigerator, a panel opened into a secret room.

  “My atelier,” he said.

  I never really thought I’d have access to Elvis Presley’s work space. In my febrile imaginings, I figured it would contain some recording equipment, a few guitars, a keyboard, maybe evidence of songs attempted but abandoned in despair. Instead, it was nothing but records, thousands of them, alphabetized, and also categorized by genre.

  “The only good thing about being Elvis Presley is that people send you their records,” he said.

  The discography in that room was almost beyond imagining. Elvis had every record ever put out by Ernest Tubb, Rufus Thomas, Hank Snow, and Bobby Blue Bland. There were a thousand Okeh disc recordings alone. I spotted a Capitol album that I’d never seen before: Merle Haggard Sings the Songs of Other People Singing Merle Haggard Songs. And the soul music: the Orioles, the Flamingos, Ivory Joe Hunter, Little Willie John, and a rare copy of The Underappreciated Sam Cooke. Singles of Jackie Moore’s “Personally” and Eddie Floyd singing “Never Get Enough of Your Love.”

  “My word,” I said. “Black people certainly make a lot of music! Why doesn’t this stuff get played on the radio?”

  “It does down here,” Elvis said, sadly.

  Pollack wasn’t paying attention. Hungrily, he flipped through a different stack of records.