Never Mind the Pollacks Read online

  His shoulders drooping, Pollack loped to his building, went down a flight of stairs to the basement, smashed a windowpane, stuck his arm through, and undid the lock. He opened the door.

  “Kitties…” he said. “Where are you?”

  The apartment was dark and quiet. Too quiet. Pollack turned around.

  Something was on his head, screaming, and clawing at his eyes. It made a hissing sound, like vapors escaping from hell. It gripped tight.

  “Mmmmworrrrw!” it said.

  “GODDAMN IT, GET OFF ME!” Pollack said.

  He grappled with the thing, which tore at his cheeks and continued its terrible noises.

  Another thing, equally vile, attached itself to his right leg and ripped at his pants.

  “ARRRRGH! ARRRGH! ARRRGH!” Pollack said. “CATS!”

  He kicked his leg up, and shot Max across the room. The extra pain of removing the upper cat would mean little. Enough of his flesh had already been shredded. Shards of skin ripped from Pollack’s temples. He threw Kansas City against the door.

  They stood on either end of him, hissing, ready to strike again.

  “Dinnertime, you fat whores,” he said.

  The cats rubbed against him. Dinner was the best time of their day. No matter how badly Neal Pollack treated himself, his cats always got dry lamb and rice, and wet salmon with couscous. Ungrateful sluts they may have been, but they were the only family he had left.

  Pollack wasn’t hungry himself. He popped a couple of Darvon, washed them down with vodka, and collapsed onto the beanbag chair he’d stolen from Allen Ginsberg’s apartment.

  “I’m so tired,” he said to himself. “So very tired. Enough already.”

  The CD player was nearby. He put on Follow the Leader and sparked the bong. The cats, sated, curled on either side of him. The beats began to flow, and the words:

  What could ya say as the Earth gets further and further away

  Planets are small as balls of clay

  Astray into the Milky Way—world’s outasight

  Far as the eye can see—not even a satellite

  Typical pretentious hip-hop bullshit, Pollack thought. All these guys think they’re the damn Messiah. Still, after the day he’d had, it felt so good to be relaxing, to be listening. That was all he’d ever really wanted, to kick back with the music he loved. Where had he steered from the truth, the Message? He closed his eyes, for the second-to-last time.

  In this journey you’re the journal I’m the journalist

  Am I Eternal? Or an eternalist…

  There was something in those words, but what? He’d been somewhere, but where? He’d done something, but how? Why? Where was he going, going, going?

  What was this, Yom Kippur?

  Then he heard, in the music, a distant echo of the past. Were Eric B. and Rakim really sampling Clambone?

  Woke up this morning, and my boots were full of blood…

  Pollack closed his eyes and saw Memphis.

  Woke up this morning, all my boots were full of blood…

  He saw the University of Michigan student center, its floor covered with broken glass. Man, that was a great show!

  I shouldn’t have stayed up all night…

  He saw the sweet filthy Bowery in 1974.

  Getting nasty in the mud…

  Forty-five years had passed, and the music was still there. Neal Pollack saw his father, Vernon Pollackovitz, waving the finger of disapproval, but the music had finally drowned his voice. Pollack was following the leader now, back into the recesses of rock-and-roll time, and he remembered. Remembered. Remembered.

  PART ONE

  COME ON OVER TONIGHT

  1952–1959

  What a wonderful morning. I’d just finished reviewing the galleys of my book The Threepenny Hip-Hopera, which compares the sociopolitical roots of Chuck D’s work with those of Kurt Weill’s. It serves as an excellent companion piece to my oft-studied book From Bauhaus to Compton: Sixty Years of Revolution in Western Popular Music.

  Then my editor from the Times arts section e-mailed.

  “We haven’t interviewed Sam Phillips in nearly two years,” he wrote. “Our readers demand roots-music coverage.”

  It was the perfect research opportunity. I needed to seek verification for my still-nascent Pollack biography, to summon my remarkable powers of research, drive into that Delta dawn, and never blink at the truth. I knew that Pollack had spent part of his youth in Memphis, because I possessed this protean gem from the secret diaries he’d kept at age twelve. It was dated July 3, 1953:

  I think Rocket 88 is neat/It really makes me tap my feet/They’ll be dancing in the street/When Ike Turner brings the heat.

  Brilliant. But I needed more.

  My wife was home because her New School seminar, Rapacious Global Corporations: Imperialist Mind Control in the So-Called Third World, didn’t meet on Thursdays.

  “Honey,” I said, “I’m gonna get an apartment in Memphis for a few months. It’s for work.”

  “OK,” she said.

  “Are you gonna miss me, baby sugar?”

  “Eh,” Ruth said. “Not really.”

  “Oh,” said I.

  I’ve often written, at Harper’s folio length, about Sam Phillips, spoken about him on panels, composed tribute songs to him in my mind, but I’d never had the opportunity to meet him in person. While I felt this was the insulting equivalent of Boswell never meeting Johnson, or David McCullough not meeting John Adams, I was still grateful for the assignment and the resulting paycheck.

  When I encountered Phillips on a balmy Memphis night a few days later, the father of Sun Records, the grandfather of all records, really, the original benefactor of Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash, stood on the front lawn of his Memphis home in his bathrobe, his longish hair and reddish beard appearing just as they had on that recent CBS Sunday Morning feature.

  “Who the hell are you?” he said.

  “Paul St. Pierre,” I said. “I’m here for the interview.”

  He looked confused.

  “Someone interviews me every day,” he said. “I can’t keep you damn people straight.”

  Every room of the house was full of memorabilia from a life in rock. There were gold records, and platinum ones, and records with no color at all but black, the presence of all musical color. Lyric sheets, both framed and unframed, adorned the walls. A life-size copper statue of Roy Orbison stood in one corner, across from a wax model of Howlin’ Wolf. And everywhere, photos, of men fresh from the cotton fields, hillbillies hitchhiking into town, people recording, picking, playing, laughing, self-promoting, shouting into microphones and sitting on the laps of pretty girls. It was a house to be envied indeed, filled with haunting music from the dawn and twilight of the real America.

  Without any prompting from me, Phillips began to talk, in a relaxed, folksy, intelligent drawl, about the birth of rock ’n’ roll. As he spoke, I realized that he’d channeled, in his life, an American ethos about which I’d only dreamed, or occasionally seen in movies made in the 1970s. I realized my rock archivist’s fantasy. Phillips had stood at the center of popular history. Fifty years later, he sat beside me, recounting:

  “You see, the motto of my Memphis Recording Service was ‘We Record Anything, Anytime, Anywhere.’ Well, actually, the original motto was ‘Don’t Be Afraid To Record With Me Just Because I’m White,’ but nobody came in off that one, so I changed it. In any case, I opened my shop at 706 Union Avenue in 1949. I wanted to bring together what I saw going on in Memphis at the time, these black and white music scenes that had more in common than even the musicians knew. All along, my mission was to bring out of a person what was in him, to recognize that individual’s unique quality and then to find the key to unlock it. And one person, to me, embodied all the hopes and dreams I’d ever had for American music.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “I’m talking,” said Sam Phillips, “about Neal Pollack.”

  Pollack had come barging ou
t of the shadows yet again, and my imagination veered into places at once horrible and hopeful.

  “Pollack?” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” Phillips said. “I knew him from very early on. Why, I remember—”

  “Damn Neal Pollack,” I said aloud. “Damn him!”

  “Neal Pollack,” Phillips said, “Neal Pollack. Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in many years.”

  “But you just mentioned him.”

  He slapped his forehead.

  “Why, that’s right!” he said. “I did. Well, let me tell you the story about how Neal Pollack and I met.”

  My notebook and tape recorder snapped to attention. He began:

  “It was early fall, 1951. I’d driven up to Chicago with my dear friend Kemmons Wilson, who was getting ready to open the first Holiday Inn. I’d made the trip to squeeze some money out of Leonard Chess, that parsimonious bastard, and Kemmons was looking for investors in his enterprise. One evening, after retiring our respective alms cups, we met at a bar on Roosevelt, just west of State. It was your typical Chicago bar, tin ceiling, autographed photos of Hack Wilson and Jack Dempsey, bitter anarchists mumbling over their pamphlets at a corner table, fat-fingered city employees ogling the working girls. We sat down. I ordered a draft beer with the density of sausage. Kemmons had sour mash straight.

  “Next to us was a thick-shouldered fellow who smelled like beets. I noticed him right away because he was wearing a very nice coat, and I always said you could trust a man in a nice coat. He was with a skinny little boy, maybe ten years old, with a bad haircut. That boy’s eyes radiated a clear intelligence. It’s rare that you notice that kind of perspicacity in a man of fifty, much less a child before puberty. I had to look down into my beer, the kid’s eyes were so bright. Kemmons, always the friendliest sort, started talking to this fellow about this and that and the weather. The man said his name was Vernon Pollackovitz, and the boy was his son, Norbert. The boy just gazed shyly into his ginger ale.

  "‘Say, Pollackovitz sure is a funny name!’ Kemmons said.

  "‘It’s German.’

  "‘Hey! An immigrant! Well, I’ve always said, if an American works hard, an immigrant works twice as hard!’

  "‘That is true.’

  "‘What line of work are you in, anyway, Vernon?’

  "‘I am employed in an executive position at a prominent rug company.’

  "‘Rugs! Well, I’ve always said that rugs are a good business, because people will always need rugs. But at the same time, rugs aren’t really growing. I mean, you can’t go wrong with rugs, but they’re not moving forward, if you know what I’m saying. Now the hotel business, on the other hand…’

  “At this point, I had to tune out the conversation. I’d heard Kemmons make that pitch a thousand times.

  “I talked to the boy instead.

  "‘Hello, Norbert,’ I said. ‘My name is Sam Phillips.’

  "‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m in the fifth grade.’

  "‘Well, I’m in the music business. Do you like music?’

  "‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘It’s my favorite thing in the whole world. But my dad won’t let me listen to it. He says it gives people too many ideas, especially jazz.’

  "‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s not very enlightened, is it?’

  "‘No sir,’ said the boy, ‘especially because if you listen to black music, in my opinion, you can hear, like Walt Whitman kind of said, the real America singing.’

  “Well, you could have hit me on the head with a Studebaker when that boy uttered those words. It was the most extraordinary piece of criticism I’d ever heard come out of anyone’s mouth.

  "‘Where’d you get an idea like that, boy?’ I said.

  "‘I dunno,’ he said, sipping his soda, ‘I just made it up, I guess.’

  "‘That’s not the kind of idea a boy just makes up.’

  “He looked at me, his eyes confessional.

  "‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘after my parents go to sleep, I drink cough syrup and then I write secret stories.’

  "‘You do?’

  "‘Yes. They’re about musicians. Last night, I wrote a story about how Billie Holliday took me to an ice cream shop.’

  "‘Say!’

  "‘Then she overdosed on pills, so I got to have all the ice cream I wanted.’

  “I sat there, near-stunned, and then I said, ‘Well, son, how’d you like to meet the real Billie Holliday, in person? I think I could make some phone calls…”

  "‘Oh my goodness gee!’ said the boy.

  “The thrill in his voice reminded me of myself as a cotton-picking boy with imagination.

  "‘Let me tell you a story, young fellow,’ I said. ‘It takes place back in northeast Alabama, a long time ago, in the 1930s.’

  "‘All the way back then?’ he said.

  "‘Yes. Many, many years ago. See, we were poor, very poor, but not too poor that we didn’t have a Negro manservant. We called him Cousin Brutus. Now, Cousin Brutus was blind. He was missing one leg and one arm. Also, he was seventy-five years old, really too old to be much good around the house, but he was fine company, and a fine musician. He would rock on the porch, hold his harmonica with his one hand, tap his one foot, and sing us sad, strange songs that none of us had ever heard before. One day, Cousin Brutus sat me down on his only knee and said, “Sammy, ah’m not gone live a very long time now. I hear the Lord callin’ mah name, and I don’t see fit wah I shouldn’t answer him. But ah’m not afraid of dyin’. ’Cause I know that when I get to heaven, there are gonna be these wonderful trees, and ah’m gonna climb them. But you know what? Instead of leaves and flowers, those trees are gonna have fried eggs, and delicious Virginia ham, and big heaping bowls of biscuits and sausage gravy. And one day, Sammy, you’re gonna meet me there, and we’re gonna climb those breakfast trees together, and it’s gonna be delicious and we’re gonna be happy until the end of time.”

  "‘That’s what I’m saying to you, young Norbert. One day, we’re going to climb those breakfast trees, with Cousin Brutus, and the music we love is gonna be there, and we’ll be happy. That’s what life is all about.’

  "‘Gee!’ said the boy.

  “Vernon turned to me and said, ‘Mr. Phillips, my son is not allowed to talk to black people.’

  "‘Well, why the hell not?’

  "‘They carry disease.’

  "‘No, they don’t!’

  "‘Please, Daddy…’ the boy begged.

  "‘Son,’ said Vernon. ‘be quiet or I will lock you in the pantry when we get home.’

  “I’d never heard such cruelty expressed, and you could just see the tears well up in that poor boy’s eyes. Spotting brilliance was, and always has been, my specialty. Somehow, I thought, I have to give that boy a chance to express himself through popular-music criticism.

  "‘Don’t worry, son,’ I said softly. ‘We’ll figure something out. I promise.’

  “Meanwhile, Kemmons had finished his pitch to Vernon, and Vernon had bit hard.

  "‘Sam,’ he said, ‘I’d like you to meet my new assistant vice-president in charge of something or other.’

  “Vernon put his change on the bar.

  "‘Come, Norbert,’ he said. ‘We have news for your mother. We are going to move to Memphis, Tennessee.’

  “I winked at the boy.

  "‘Hasta luego,’ I said. ‘That’s Mexican for see you later…’”

  Near 9 P.M. one night in February 1952, the Pollackovitz family first appeared inside the Memphis city limits. Vernon drove a car whose make and model have been lost in the junkyard of time, but accounts indicate that it was large and sensible enough to hold a family of three and all their vital possessions.

  Young Norbert was in the backseat, fidgeting.

  “I’m bored,” he said.

  “Be quiet,” said Vernon.

  “Darling,” said Gladys, “why don’t you read your David Copperfield?”

  “I finished that before we got to Indianapolis,” he said.
“And I read Dombey and Son, too.”

  “A smart guy, eh?” Vernon said.

  “He is my little genius,” said Gladys.

  “Can we listen to the radio?” Norbert asked.

  “No,” said Vernon.

  “Please?”

  “No.”

  Norbert started to cry.

  Gladys turned on the radio.

  “Now, Vernie. It’s been a long drive,” she said. “And he’s been such a good boy. Let him listen to the radio for just a little while.”

  “Dee-gaw!” the radio shrieked.

  “Ach!” Vernon said.

  “Dee-gaw! Broadcasting from right downtown Memphis from the magazine—I mean mezzanine—floor of the Chisca Hotel, this is the Dew with Red Hot and Blue. Dee-gaw-a-roonie! Wuzzat? Wuzzat? I hear a Martian talking into my ear. You better talk louder, Martian, because old Dewey’s gone deaf! Hello, Mr. Dewey Phillips, the people of Mars would like to tell you that this broadcast is being brought to you by Falstaff Beer. If you can’t drink beer, eat it with a fork or put it in your stew. Pour it right through the hole in your neck, just like they do on Mars!”

  “What the hell is this?” Vernon said.

  In the backseat, Norbert was giggling like he’d never giggled.

  “Now here’s one from Coogie Mitchell, for all those people down at Lansky’s Department Store. A little bitty number called ‘Big Pair of Jugs.’ Dee-gaw!”

  From the radio came a raw and dirty song. Norbert Pollackovitz listened, gape-mouthed, as the horns, guitar, piano, and call-and-response double entendre chorus swept across his brain like a street-cleaning machine at dawn.

  Now, I love my little baby

  Love to give her special hugs

  But nothin’ says I love you

  Like a whopping pair of jugs.

  My mama always said to me,

  Son you can buy them drugs

  But nothing makes a lady scream

  Like the special gift of jugs

  So if you’re buying poodles

  Or if you’re buying pugs

  Remember you can trade them in

  And give your woman jugs.