Never Mind the Pollacks Read online

  “You are elegant,” she said to Bowie.

  “You are disgusting,” she said to Pollack.

  “Ah, yes,” Pollack said, “but I have the cocaine!”

  “Then I am yours for the night!” she said.

  During the days, Pollack sat in Iggy’s apartment, typing the letter “l” thousands of times on hundreds of sheets of paper, an experiment in what he called the New Literature. He drank copious quantities of Pernod, blew through kilos of cocaine. Iggy was trying to be responsible. He wrote songs that would later become commercials. Pollack would sneak up behind Iggy, put his hands over his Iggy eyes.

  “Guess who?” he’d say.

  “Neal Pollack,” Iggy would say.

  “Do you want some coke?”

  “Yes.”

  Then it was off to the recording studio, and sex with transvestites. More cocaine. Iggy got two albums done. He and Bowie planned a tour. But he was frying now, living in perpetual confusion. Pollack was like a worm burrowed in his mind, his greatest fan but also his final destroyer. Iggy had been created, in some way, by Pollack. But like all creations, he longed to free himself from his master, to become a whole man, alone.

  Pollack put on a? & the Mysterians album. He danced on Iggy’s breakfast table, naked, smoking a joint. Iggy moaned into his coffee.

  “This is the greatest band of all time!” Pollack said. “Can’t you hear it? Can’t you feel it in your soul?”

  No, Iggy wanted to scream, he didn’t.

  “Will you please get the hell out of my life?” Iggy screamed.

  Pollack looked at him strangely.

  “OK,” he said.

  He kissed Iggy on the forehead.

  “But you’ll miss me.”

  And just like that, he was out the door, disappeared into the rainy Berlin morning.

  Bowie emerged from the bedroom, yawning, resplendent in a purple silk kimono. He also kissed Iggy’s forehead.

  “Where’s Pollack?” he said.

  “Gone,” said Iggy. “Gone forever.”

  “Thank goodness,” Bowie said. “Now we can start planning our life together.”

  Iggy said nothing. Instead, he had a drink. He did miss that stinky little rock critic, despite himself.

  Tampa, Florida, sometime in 1977. Pollack was on tour with the Patti Smith Group. He’d gotten tangled in some wires backstage at the sports arena and was whining softly. A familiar tweeded figure, improbably handsome, appeared. He pulled Pollack out of the mess.

  “Hey, Paul,” Pollack said. “What’s rockin’?”

  “I’m here to do a profile of Patti,” I said. “A think piece for Rolling Stone.”

  “About what?”

  “Patti. Her significance.”

  “Right,” Pollack said. “Is Ruth here?”

  “She’s smoking in a dark corner of the parking lot all alone,” I said. “She’s completely unsupervised, which is fine, because I trust her.”

  Pollack picked up his Black Russian and staggered toward the load-in dock. He hopped down, found a Dumpster, and puked. Man, that felt good. He puked again.

  “Hello, Neal,” said a gilded voice.

  Pollack turned to see Ruth in a burgundy knee-length skirt and leather boots. She wore a single carnation in her hair. A graduate student had never looked so beautiful to him. He wiped puke on his sleeve, stumbled over to her, and began to cry.

  “Ruth, nobody understands me,” he said. “I’m a really sensitive guy, and everybody thinks I should be happy fucking all these chicks and being a rock critic. But I’m hurt and I’m lonely and I need someone stable in my life like you.”

  She stroked his hair.

  “There, there,” she said. “I understand.”

  They held each other, for minutes that felt like hours, while Pollack sobbed out whatever miseries and lost hopes had lain buried in his soul all those years.

  “If they don’t appreciate what I’ve written about them,” he said, “I’ll fucking kill them all.”

  I wandered into the parking lot and saw them together.

  “Oh,” I said. “I didn’t realize.”

  “I was just consoling him,” said Ruth.

  I picked up a two-by-four.

  “Come inside, Ruth,” he said. “Bob Seger wants to meet you.”

  The hug ended. Pollack’s face contorted with rage. He raised his arms and shouted into the humid night: “Rock doesn’t deserve me!”

  “That’s enough, Neal,” said Ruth.

  Pollack wept. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for everything.”

  Pollack was in the front row, glaring, as the Patti Smith Group began their set that night. She and her band performed their first song. The audience stood silently, no applause, no enthusiasm, not even hatred. Pollack grinned and pointed, and he knew Patti could see him. He wanted her to see him, because he hated her just like he hated all women, except for those who loved him, and Patti had never loved him. He’d been just another peg on which she’d hung her fur coat of stardom. This was the truth, this was what he knew, and this made him hurt all the more.

  He said to himself, “I was just sleeping with you, Patti, to get into shows for free.”

  They started playing their second song, “Ain’t It Strange.” Pollack had always hated that song. Midway through, Patti started twirling. “Come on, God, make a move!” she shouted. She whirled in broad swoops and the band played a wobbly beat.

  One twirl took her to the lip of the stage, and the next right off the stage. Patti fell. Two guys in the pit tried to catch her, but they missed. Her head hit the floor with a loud crack. Blood pooled at the back of her head. She started twitching. Pollack pointed and laughed.

  “Who’s the poet now?” he said. “Who’s the prophet now? Someone won’t be reading Rimbaud for a while.”

  A roadie looked annoyed.

  Pollack turned to face the crowd.

  “Come on!” he shouted. “Let’s finish her off!”

  The roadie looked at him with pity and disdain.

  “Go away, old man,” he said.

  The crowd didn’t seem to be lusting for blood. They were only concerned, and concern was not what Neal Pollack liked to see at a rock show. The wheeled stretcher came, and then the ambulance, and then it was the middle of 1977 and Pollack was tired. He loped backstage, where Ruth and I were both standing around looking as concerned as everyone else.

  “Forget about her,” Pollack said. “Punk is dead.”

  “I don’t know, Neal,” I said. “You might be wrong about this one.”

  “I’m never wrong.”

  Pollack heard the ringing. Did he have a phone? Well, he must if it was ringing. He reached above him to where the ringing was coming from. Yes. A phone.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Neal,” said the voice.

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s me, Claude.”

  “Who?”

  “Claude. Claude Bessy.”

  Oh, yes, Pollack thought. A lesser critic. From Los Angeles.

  “What do you want, Frenchy?”

  “Just thought I’d call.”

  “Where am I?” said Pollack.

  “I don’t know,” said Bessy.

  “Mmm,” said Pollack. “Listen, Claude, I’m really sick and I’m going back to bed now.”

  “No, you listen,” Claude said. “You need to move to L.A. immediately.”

  Los Angeles!!!! Pollack thought. “You have got to be kidding! I’d rather die than move to L.A.!”

  “There are bands here,” said Bessy. “Really good ones.”

  “So?”

  “Bands with chicks in them. Chicks that have their own chick groupies.”

  “See you in two weeks,” Pollack said.

  The next afternoon, Pollack held a sidewalk sale to get rid of his possessions. After a couple of hours, he had twenty-five bucks, and he was free. He shoved the cats, an ounce of weed, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, one c
lean pair of underwear, and his sainted copy of Trout Mask Replica into a backpack, and went to the East Village looking for a motorcycle to hot-wire. It didn’t take long, and soon he was on the West Side Highway, leaving the bankrupt city behind him, hopefully forever.

  New York is so dull and predictable, he thought. Out there, on the American road, there has to be a fresh approach. Somewhere, he just knew, culture was being created with no hope of making a profit. People were putting out records that corporations would never discover. He wanted to be there to chronicle those many births.

  His motorcycle neared the Bronx now.

  “No good music will ever come out of New York City again,” he said.

  He turned his head toward the city one last time. In that moment, a barely discernible interstice that seemed to last forever, he heard a break, a beat, a pop. He saw everything, somehow. There, in an asphalt park, an island of beauty in a lake of decay, an old man wearing long African robes stood behind two turntables. A stack of records sat beside him on an overturned milk crate. Around him, a bunch of kids were doing a loose dance, more like a grind. The music revved and screeched. It sounded like the future.

  “Freaky,” Pollack said.

  Behind the turntables, the man, pretty hip considering how old he was, rhymed into a microphone. The words whipped from his mouth freely. For 1979, it was an astonishing verbal display that seemed completely unrehearsed. It went like this:

  Hey, party people (are you ready to drop it?)

  Hey party people (are you ready to pop it?)

  Bop it (don’t stop it!)

  Tip-tip. Top-hop. Don’t stop till your body pops

  I wanna see your hips hop!

  Rock the block

  Do it in your socks

  Rip. Slip. Clip-clop and knock your cocks.

  Hop On Pop and a Fox in the Box

  Slip. Slop. Get down on the long mop.

  We’re gonna have a party

  And we’re gonna do the body rock.

  Just bust it, trust it, clean it up and dust it and say Ho!

  The man stepped out from behind the turntables, removed his robe and dashiki, and Pollack gasped.

  “Clambone,” he said.

  At that moment, in 1979 or so, rapping debuted on the earth. As Clambone said:

  Now I’m MC Clam and I’m twice as juicy

  As Dick Van Dyke or I Love Lucy

  Your brain is fried, your mind is blown

  I’ll beat your ass with my microphone.

  I birthed the blues, I invented the funk

  I sold Charlie Parker his first hit of junk

  If you stole my music, you best repent

  Or give up plagiarism for Lent

  Come on everybody and start to move

  ’Cause I’m the lord of eternal groove

  Come on, everybody and start to dance

  And hit me with your underpants

  So let’s party!

  And let’s party some more!

  We may be in recession

  But at least we ain’t at war!

  Here we go! Here we go now

  Here we go go go go go go go go now!

  Was Pollack dreaming? Was Clambone creating yet another form of African-American musical expression, this time one that was so unique to the black experience that white people would never be able to co-opt it? He needed to rap himself, just to test. He tried:

  Now I’m Neal Pollack, and I’m here to say

  I’m the best rock critic in the USA

  I like to write, and I take drugs

  I have three dildos and four buttplugs.

  God! He sounded like Tim Conway! This form of music was simply beyond him. Black people had done it, at last.

  The world froze. Clambone hovered over the basketball court, bathed in a golden light. He gestured toward the highway.

  “Pollack,” he said.

  “Clambone,” said Pollack

  “Rock is changing,” he said. “From now on, you must Do It Yourself.”

  “Yes,” Pollack said. “Of course.”

  “But beware She Who Shall Not Be Named for Fear of Lawsuit.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Beware,” Clambone said. “And don’t stop ’til your body pops….”

  The world unfroze. Clambone and his break beats were gone; Pollack was in the wrong lane. A truck bore down on his motorcycle. He swerved and smacked the median, then swerved the other way and smacked the other median. Shit, he thought. I should have worn a helmet. Inside his backpack, the cats howled. The bike smacked the median again and Pollack flipped over the handlebars.

  “I’m free,” he said.

  He broke an oncoming windshield with his face, and the world went dark.

  PART FIVE

  THE COPS WILL HAVE YOUR HEAD

  1980–1991

  The ’80s were fun, at least for me. With great pride, I can now claim to have been the first mainstream critic on the mailing list of SST Records, writing, of their initial Black Flag issue, “This record, a relentless wall of noise that is never less than noisy, sounds unlike anything else I’ve heard this year.” Even more impressively, I wrote in my seminal record guide Paul St. Pierre Reviews the ’80s that “Ian Mackaye may be ‘straight edge,’ but his music roars down the road like a trucker on speed. What a nice young man.”

  But then the weirdo music paradise that I’d helped publicize was first co-opted and then totally corrupted by the recording industry. Capitalism reigned triumphant. As I wrote in a 1993 Spin article that was nominated for a National Magazine Award, “They say ‘we won,’ and they think we don’t know who they are or why.” Observations like that kept me on top long after my generational peers had faded away toward Margaritaville.

  All the while, Neal Pollack vexed me. As sharp as I remained in the early ’90s, he was even sharper. Researching this manuscript, I found a prophetic quote from his late diaries that made him seem less like a critic and more like a musical seer from the future: “You can take your Misfits T-shirts and stick ’em in a drawer, and run over your Soundgarden lunchbox with a pickup truck, because the future of music will come from Beck, the Fugees, Moby, and Outkast,” he wrote. “I also predict a rise, in the Midwest, of a white hip-hop artist who stupid critics like Paul St. Pierre will compare to Elvis.”

  I don’t appreciate the personal potshot, and I stand by my assessment of The Eminem Show as the greatest album released in the last twenty years. Still, Pollack’s predictions have proven to be eerily accurate. While going through his personal effects, I found an old issue of Maximumrocknroll devoted to praise of Mudhoney. Pollack had written the entire contents. Scribbled on the back cover, in thick black marker, were the words “Blink 182 SUCKS.” Pollack was so right. But how did he know that a band, not yet even formed, sucked? How?

  To discover the truth, I now find myself interviewing people at least twenty years younger than I, or more. It makes me uncomfortable, because I want to sleep with all the women, especially Sleater-Kinney, who can make beautiful noise that seems abstracted from their mouths, fingers, bodies, and instruments. They make me want to suck in my gut and remove my chin fat with a surgical hose. Well, do you blame me? They’re hot.

  But somehow Pollack seemed to have the distance necessary to see that world as it formed around him. In 1990 he wrote, “A chick band is going to come out of Olympia, Washington, that makes Bikini Kill sound like Melissa Manchester.” Also, he said, “Beware She Who Shall Not Be Named for Fear of Lawsuit. Because she’s been sent from an evil place to destroy us all.”

  Never in my life have I found myself face-to-face with She Who Shall Not Be Named for Fear of Lawsuit, or, as my friends call her, the Widow. Now the time of our encounter is nigh. She knew Kurt better than all of us put together. Kurt knew Pollack better than anyone in both their waning days. So I’ve come, at my own expense, to Los Angeles, where the Widow lives. I’ve already been here far too long.

  It’s been a dispiriting few months.
The Widow has thwarted all my attempts to speak with her. She uses a vast army of lawyers, publicists, bodyguards, personal assistants, salon employees and bouncers to deflect attention from her daily routine. One night, at the Viper Room, I saw what looked like her ankle step out of the back of a Bentley, but one of her behemoths had me in a head-lock before I could take out my tape recorder. Another afternoon, I left a message with her messaging service’s messaging service, and a few hours later, this was on my voice mail:

  “Listen, you fucking prick. This is the Widow. I don’t know who you think you are trying to talk to me, but if you try to get anywhere near me or my family, I promise you that I will hunt you down, cut off your balls with a chainsaw, and grind you into fucking horsemeat. You sexless asshole, I will destroy you and then I will eat you and lick the blood off my fingers and laugh and I won’t go to jail because no one cares about you and I’m a fucking superstar. And you ever reprint this message in a book, I promise you that I will hunt you down again and kill you again, and this time, I won’t leave any evidence. Don’t fucking mess with me. I mean it. Good-bye.”

  I shivered when I heard the message.

  “Ruth, listen,” I said.

  But the apartment was empty. Ruth had left me months before. I wept and cursed my former wife.

  Someday, I thought, she will ache like I ache.

  Now, a year past deadline, running out of money, barely shaven, wearing the same rumpled khakis and blue oxford shirt two days running, I must speak with the Widow. There are holes in my story that need to be filled. Only the Widow can fill them.

  An occasion has arisen. I read in the Los Angeles Times that the ACLU, the Sierra Club, the NAACP, Food Not Bombs, and the Spartacists Youth Brigade are honoring the Widow for “relentless lip service to unpopular causes.” This is my opportunity. The Widow would never surround herself with goons while the left was watching.

  She appears early, in a flash of glamour. Everyone wants to touch her. She’s an honored guest among people who are normally reluctant to honor guests. Her smile is wide. Her eyes glisten. This is all she ever dreamed about in the heroin dens of Portland. She’s a star.