Never Mind the Pollacks Read online

  “You have Alice Cooper’s first album!” he said.

  “Derivative,” said Elvis.

  “And the Velvet Underground’s Murder Mystery bootleg, recorded live in Cleveland in January 1969!”

  “True.”

  “And the complete Jonathan Richman sessions recorded at Fowley! How’d you get those?”

  “I’m a huge Modern Lovers fan,” Elvis said.

  In one corner of the room sat a desk, with typewriter, and sheet of paper, with words. I read them aloud: “Do you think White Light/White Heat is a revelation? Are you going to turn to salt if you look over your shoulder at Lou Reed? Have you ever stood knee-deep in the Delta at midnight, the devil’s green mud licking at your thighs?”

  Elvis looked ashamed.

  “Why,” Pollack said, “that’s rock criticism!”

  We gazed upon the King. His eyes gained a life that they hadn’t seen in years, and never saw again. He said:

  “Yes, I want to be a rock critic. I’ve often read the music press with awe and wonder. No matter what I’ve achieved in my life, I don’t feel that I’ve gained true artistic perfection. Alone above all the arts, rock criticism stands. At its best, criticism topples music, because, at its best, it’s music combined with literature. How I long to make people read, to make them understand. Would that I could discard my fame for a humble, yet consistent, byline!”

  “It’s not too late,” said Pollack.

  “For me, it is,” said Elvis. “My fate’s been written. But yours hasn’t. I beseech you, Neal Pollack, take care, for the music industry has become something voracious and codified. The true critic must stand above and seek the unknown bands that do not care about fame. He must go beyond. And he can make music himself, but it has to be godawful.”

  “I understand,” Pollack said.

  “What about me?” I asked.

  “You don’t matter, Paul,” Elvis said. “Let’s get you some pants.”

  We sat there for a while, listening to bootlegs, taking notes like true professionals. Inside the main house, a bell rang. Elvis looked at his watch.

  “My doctor’s here,” he said. “It’s time for my injections.”

  He walked us to the gate. Lester was still there, face pressed against the bars. We all took a good-bye ’lude. Elvis gave Pollack a hug. Lester rolled his eyes. The King drifted back toward his mansion shrine, a ghost ahead of his time.

  “Stay the course,” Elvis said. “Don’t debase your noble calling.”

  It was Sunday, and we had planes to catch. Halfway to the airport, Pollack stopped the car. A Dream Carnival was underway in W.C. Handy Park. Geeks wrestled in the street, half watched by their trainers, almost totally ignored by the indifferent, stoned crowd. Black transvestites pistol-whipped one another behind the Porta-Johns. Everywhere, you saw guns and whiskey waved with cavalier glee and total lack of regard for human dignity. The tornado lurked just miles away; the air swayed and whipped frenetically. Music screamed from every corner of the debased grounds, terrible and wonderful, rock and soul and blues and the last decay of folk. None of the other critics were there. We were the only ones who stood on the true hallowed lost plain of American music, and it was all because of Neal Pollack.

  “Memphis, Tennessee,” he said, “is the greatest city in the world.”

  Those were Neal Pollack’s golden years. They were the times when times were good. Punk had descended onto New York like a vampire bat on a possum, and Pollack felt a thrilling rush in his veins. The skies seemed to rearrange themselves nightly. Pollack published magazines no one read, and wrote poems no one published. And for once he made dimes off his criticism. He wrote for Creem and Punk and Melody Maker and Hit Parader, Rolling Stone, Fusion, and once, only once, for New York Rocker. They were stories, many of them made up, about his new friends with whom he often posed, sullenly, for group pictures. For three years, no one smiled, but they took a lot of drugs and fell down stairs. And they were all so happy. “We are everyone’s rejects and everyone’s nightmare,” he wrote. “We have no talent, but lots of ambition. We may have read a book or two. We’re gonna be stars, and you can’t stop us.”

  He and Patti Smith fell in love after meeting at a poetry reading at the Mercer Arts Center. He was dressed like a woman, and she like a man. “You’re so transgressive,” she said. Like Baudelaire had in his time, Neal and Patti and Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine broke open the dress codes of genre, sometimes by wearing floppy hats, or by ripping their T-shirts in two separate places. “It got to the point,” Pollack wrote in his diaries, “where everyone wanted to hang out with us. And by everyone, I mean no one.”

  He lived in a windowless room in a residential hotel on the Bowery, with wire mesh for a ceiling and no potable water. “All I ever wanted, needed, or cared for,” he wrote, “were a typewriter and three solid walls. It’s all a true man requires for happiness. That and drugs, of course.” There were definitely drugs. At night or by day, Pollack and Jim Carroll and sometimes Iggy if he was in town would stumble through the streets looking to score. Pollack called Lou Reed from time to time, looking to reconcile or mooch, but Lou was never home. The streetlamp across the street from Lou’s apartment reflected a thoughtful silhouette. Pollack stood for hours, shouting his name, but he knew that there was no home in Lou Reed’s mind or heart for him.

  “Why, Lou, why?” he said.

  By day, he would walk through a bankrupt, wasted city, among the contraband vendors selling their trinkets on reclaimed cardboard, past the sticky-fingered gold-chain-wearing con men, the bat-and-knife-wielding hooligans, the depressed and confused and insane. By night, he hung out at Max’s and Mother’s and a hundred other bars that didn’t get the same amount of press. His head nodded; his arms opened to the world. Boys made out with boys and girls with girls, and the in-betweens with whomever they wanted. The air scorched with pills and fellatio and poetry and music and the knowledge that it was all going to burn, burn, burn. Pollack, at the center of it all, would stand up on a table, any table, and shout, “Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

  It was the battle cry of a generation without a name.

  A great party was under way at Gerard Malanga’s apartment, largely involving beautiful young men making out in groups. Pollack burst through the door, clutching his beloved kittens, Max and Kansas City, who he’d recently rescued from a fire at the Mercer. He needed a fix.

  “What’s rockin’, you sick fucks?” he said.

  “Oh, no,” said Malanga.

  The music stopped. So did the kissing. Lou Reed sprinted for the back door.

  Pollack looked around: Lots of glitter, lots of platform shoes. Men were wearing lipstick and hair spray.

  “GLAM IS DEAD!” he said.

  Patti was there. She kissed him on the lips.

  “Where’ve you been, baby?” she said.

  “I was on deadline,” said Pollack.

  “For two months?”

  “It was a long piece.”

  In a corner of the room, a slivery individual tied off alone. He was done up in full glam: ripped T-shirt, platform shoes, leather pants, sailor hat and all.

  Pollack instantly wanted to be this guy’s friend. He leapt upon him. They cuddled all night, sometimes with Patti, sometimes without, while all about them New York in the ’70s swirled, a skanky paradise of strung-out negative possibility. At two A.M., Iggy appeared, and asked Malanga if he could take a bath. Pollack and the guy, who said his name was Dee Dee, got into the tub as well.

  “Man, I’m sick of glam,” Pollack said. “All the good bands are in the Midwest, anyway. Fuck New York. Everyone’s trying to be Mick Jagger all the time. Just fun, fun, fun. Look around you. Are these people having fun?”

  “I’m having fun,” Iggy said.

  “You don’t count,” said Pollack.

  Patti had curled into a ball by the toilet. She was writing poetry.

  “I’m not having fun,” she said.

  Dee Dee’s makeup leaked into the wa
ter. He was tired of the hustler’s life, he said, sick of going back to Queens Boulevard and throwing things at the old ladies. Where was the rock ’n’ roll he used to listen to on the radio?

  “That’s a good question,” Pollack said.

  Pollack launched from the tub and grabbed Patti’s notebook. He took a bottle off the sink, swallowed whatever was in it, and began writing an essay called “Where Is the Rock ’n’ Roll We Used to Listen to on the Radio?”

  After a few minutes, he had ten or so usable pages, and he got back in the bath.

  “I agree with you completely,” he said. “We need a raw, stripped-down music that takes rock out of the hands of the artists and brings it back to its amateur, working-class roots.”

  Iggy belched.

  “All you need are jeans, a T-shirt, and a guitar,” Pollack said. “Why didn’t I see it before?”

  He later described that event as “the most important bath in the history of rock ’n’ roll.”

  “Let’s go to Manny’s Guitar Shop,” said Dee Dee Ramone.

  If you knew Joey Ramone, you were lucky. If you knew Dee Dee Ramone, you were a little less lucky, but still somewhat luckier than the average person. The other Ramones, as of this writing, are still alive. There’s still time to know them, but who has that kind of time, really? Neal Pollack, however, knew them all at the time we wish we’d known them. He knew them in the beginning, when the world was young.

  Dee Dee had invited Pollack to a recording studio. Pollack didn’t want to go, but Dee Dee slipped some Tuinals into his gin-and-tonic, so Pollack would follow him anywhere. Dee Dee couldn’t play his guitar. The drummer, some skinny longhaired freak, was worse. He really didn’t know how to play at all. The bassist wasn’t much better.

  “Stop this noise!” Pollack said.

  And they stopped.

  “You can do better,” he said. “Let’s hear you play together.”

  They started doing a Bay City Rollers cover. It sounded like Max and Kansas City getting fed to a meat grinder. Pollack stopped them again.

  “You’re not gonna get anywhere as a band unless you let me play bass,” he said.

  “Who are you?” said the longhaired guy.

  “I’m Neal Pollack.”

  The longhaired guy kneeled and bowed his head.

  “I’m sorry to have insulted you, great one,” said Joey Ramone.

  “Ah, you’re all right,” said Pollack.

  “You can be in the band, but you’ve gotta give us drugs,” Joey said.

  “No problem.”

  “And you have to have a Ramone name.”

  It was just another stupid band gimmick, like a thousand others Pollack had seen. But they went through a list anyway, dumping Ritchie Ramone right away, even though it sounded cool and alliterative. There were lots of other possible Ramones: Archie, Spanky, Slinky, Go-Go, Mikey, Ziggy, Crunchy, Georgy, Frodo, Tinky, Winky, Petey, Kitschy, Henry. None of them seemed to suit Pollack.

  They broke open a bottle of Boone’s Farm and tried some more.

  Kinky, Willy, Dicky, Lachlan, Rupert, Junkie, Alkie, Nicky, Talky, Lumpy, Hedwig, Chalky, Horny, Wally, Kobe.

  Nah.

  “Grumpy?”

  “That’s pretty good,” Pollack said, “but no. None of the Seven Dwarfs.”

  “I kinda like Dopey Ramone.”

  “Then take it yourself.”

  They smoked and popped pills and drank until the sun came up. Joey nodded behind the drum set. Dee Dee and the other guy collapsed into heaps on the floor. It was 7 A.M. when Pollack’s brain sparked on.

  “I’ve got it!” he said. “I know what my name should be!”

  The other Ramones barely stirred. Pollack started kicking them. If they were going to make it in rock, they’d better start having some discipline.

  “And my name shall be…” Pollack said.

  “Mmmmm. Whuh?” said Joey.

  “Smokey Ramone!”

  Pollack went downstairs and got coffee. The Ramones had written a bunch of songs, with titles like “I Don’t Wanna Clean My Room This Weekend,” “I Don’t Wanna Go for a Ride in the Country, Stupid,” and “I Don’t Wanna Eat a Bag of Cheese.” Pollack tried to play them. He wasn’t sure if the other guys were trying or not. The songs got faster and faster, sludgier and sludgier. Joey fell off his stool, and they kept going. He just flailed stupidly at the drum set. They needed a real drummer, bad. But it was still the best band of all time.

  Joey groaned. “I don’t wanna play the drums anymore,” he said. “Please let me sing, please.”

  He threw a snare out the window. They started playing a song that they later named “I Don’t Wanna Play the Drums Anymore.” An amp blew up. The room filled with smoke but they all choked through it and kept on playing. It was a goddamn mess of dirt and noise.

  “God, this is horrible!” Pollack said. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

  The original Ramones—Joey, Marky, Dee Dee, Tommy, and Smokey, the elusive fifth Ramone—took the stage at CBGB for the first time on August 16, 1974.

  “I figured that club had no chance,” Pollack later wrote for the newly formed Punk magazine, after it was newly formed. “No chance at all.”

  They played the first note of the first song. A string broke on Pollack’s guitar. They played the second note. Another string broke.

  “Fuck!” Pollack said.

  “Man,” Joey said, “you’re messing up our gig.”

  “Screw you!” said Pollack. “I quit.”

  He stormed off the stage, and the music started again. Five seconds in, Dee Dee broke a string.

  “I’ll kick your ass,” Joey said.

  “Fuck you,” said Dee Dee.

  They started swinging at each other. Pollack came running back to the stage, with fresh guitar strings. He handed them out and rejoined the band. They started again. An amp blew up. A drumstick flew out of Tommy’s hand.

  They played a lost Ramones song, which Pollack later claimed that he’d written. No one argued with him, because it wasn’t very good.

  Dee Dee said, “Onetwothreefour!”

  Riding on the Cyclone

  Seeing lots of Mermaids

  Eating all the corndogs

  Whack-A-Mole

  Riding on the Carousel

  Blow jobs on the boardwalk

  Nearly reaching third base

  By the pier

  Coney Island is the place to be

  Coney Island whitefish

  Swimming up from the sea

  Coney Island is the place to go

  I’d rather visit Coney

  Than spend a weekend at the Jersey Shore.

  I will be with you

  Whoa-oh-oh

  On Coney Island!

  Getting in a bar fight

  Beating up the Irish

  Drinking with the Russians

  All night long.

  Whistling at the hookers

  Buying stolen furniture

  Never ever wanting

  To go home.

  Coney Island is the place to be

  Coney Island whitefish

  Swimming up from the sea

  Coney Island is the place to go

  I’d rather visit Coney

  Than spend a weekend at the Jersey Shore.

  I will be with you

  Whoa-oh-oh

  On Coney Island!

  One Two Three Four!

  Going to the freakshow

  Gazing at the Lizard Man

  Heckling contortionists

  For five bucks

  Kiss the bearded lady

  Kiss the tattooed lady

  Kiss the lovely lady

  Who breathes fire!

  Coney Island is the place to be

  Coney Island whitefish

  Swimming up from the sea

  Coney Island is the place to go

  I’d rather visit Coney

  Than spend a weekend at the Jersey Shore.

  I will be with you


  Whoa-oh-oh

  On Coney Island!

  After the show, as the Ramones packed up their gear, a bearded guy loped toward them. He was walking two dogs.

  “I’m Hilly Kristal,” said the guy. “I own this bar.”

  “Oh yeah?” Joey said.

  “I thought you were good. But no one else is ever gonna like you. If you want, you can play here again.”

  “Great!” Pollack said.

  “On one condition,” said Kristal. “You’ve got to lose Smokey.”

  Pollack raised his guitar over his head and said, “Fuck you, you shit-brained country-music-loving Jew-ass motherfucker….”

  A bouncer flung Pollack onto the Bowery. His career in the Ramones was over. He pounded on the door.

  “Let me in, goddamn it!” he shouted. “I made this band what it is today!”

  A hand was on his shoulder. Pollack turned around to face me. There was a lovely young woman on my arm. I immediately saw that this wasn’t a good time for him. The Ramones incident had brought on another one of his long, slow declines. Two years of very hard living had suddenly taken effect.

  “Hello, Neal,” I said.

  “What do you want, Paul?” Pollack said.

  “Just to say hello. That band was great!”

  “Thanks!”

  “Except for you.”

  “Oh.”

  Pollack stood there in the summer heat, shivering.

  “This is my third wife, Ruth,” I said.

  “So?” Pollack said.

  “Ruth, this is the legendary rock critic Neal Pollack.”

  “I’ve read your work,” said Ruth.

  Pollack stopped twitching momentarily.

  He kissed Ruth’s hand.

  “My dear,” he said. “How do you do?”

  For weeks, Pollack and Patti Smith had been living in the artist Arturo Vega’s loft on Bowery with the Ramones. Nights meant an endless wandering from avant-garde theater to poetry venue to rock club to bar and back home for something up the nose. Then they were back on the town until dawn and pancakes. Noon passed, and 2 P.M. When they woke, Patti would read Rimbaud aloud. Pollack pet his cats. He was getting bored.

  Patti twirled about the room in her long skirts, stopping only to cross her arms. She gazed at Pollack dramatically.