In those lax days that were soon to end sooner than anyone anticipated, the Voice had an idiosyncratic system for stocking the shelves of its review departments. Freelance reviews were left in a vertical folder for the arts editor, Diane Fisher. Because these reviews were unassigned, there might be three unsolicited reviews of the same rock concert or some new album trying to squeeze through the same tunnel, reviews of events and items that might have already been assigned to a regular. It was like playing darts in the dark, hoping to hit the board. It may not have been the most efficient system, but it was ego sparing. When something turned in on spec didn’t make the cut, I didn’t know if it had flunked because it wasn’t good enough, if it was a victim of column-space shrinkage, if one of the regulars had already called dibs, and so on. The pieces were never actually rejected, handed back with a skull and crossbones slashed in ink across the top, they just weren’t accepted, which enabled you to avoid discouragement but also left you dangling, until the next elimination dance. So I kept trying, trying to figure out the combination to the lock, find the elusive sweet spot.
Having intercepted a publicist’s phone call one day at the front desk, I zipped uptown to interview Groucho Marx, who was in town to promote a Marx Brothers festival. It was the last interview of a long day, and he was flagging but cordial (if a little puzzled), a cheery tam-o’-shanter perched on his head as he humored this obvious novice, his sharpest retort coming when I asked what he remembered most about working with Marilyn Monroe on Love Happy, and he said: “She had square tits.” His minder was Erin Fleming, who had played the NYU graduate with pretentious airs (“For me, Norman Mailer has exactly that same sort of relevance—that affirmative, negative duality that only Proust or Flaubert could achieve”) whose portal Woody Allen’s anxious sperm prepared to ford in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex. Fleming was later sued and removed as Groucho’s legal guardian by his family, who accused her of pushing him into public appearances past the limits of elderly fatigue, resulting in numerous minor strokes. Falling by the wayside, Fleming eventually died of a self-inflicted gunshot, but nothing was foreshadowed on that late afternoon; she was charming and helpful, papering over awkward pauses with diplomatic interjections and bringing the interview in for a gentle fade so that Groucho could have a nap before the carousel restarted in the evening. The Groucho article didn’t run, but brief reviews I did of rock albums, downtown plays, and TV programs began to be published. Upon appearing in print, I realized that I possessed an asset that I had never reckoned on, something given to me at birth.
My name.
My byline, James Wolcott, it sounded so mature, so English, so litty-critty and stamped with authority. It was a byline that sounded as if it knew what it was talking about and had an extensive library for backup. That the impression my byline gave bore little resemblance to its owner didn’t matter, because no one could see me eating lunch at my desk. It would be years before people realized I was nowhere near as lineaged, assured, and stately as my byline suggested, one well-known editor from Knopf exclaiming upon meeting me, “And here I always thought you were a member of the fucking gentry.”
These small incursions not only bolstered my confidence but gave me something to clip from the paper as proof to my parents and other interested parties that I wasn’t just gazing out the window in the circulation department wishing the phone wouldn’t ring.
Then the everyday drift of events picked up speed and went over the falls into the thundering foam. In 1974, the founding fathers of the Voice were dethroned in a coup that sent Dan Wolf and the publisher, Ed Fancher, packing into exile, or as far as “exile” could take you while still maintaining an abode in Greenwich Village. In a buccaneer move that none of us underlings saw coming (and caught nearly all the overlings off guard), the paper was sold by its principal owner, the patrician pretty boy and former New York City councilman Carter Burden, to Clay Felker, who had made New York magazine the flagship station of the New Journalism, the only weekly worthy of the racing silks and the dusty roar of career jockeys working the far turn. The sale was a culture clash fused with a shotgun wedding. Where the Voice was a downtown scrappy collage, a bulletin board that shot back, New York was a midtown, Madison Avenue, starfucky, glossy display window where the contributors shone with the reflected glow of their glamorous subjects, achieving their own celebrity shellac—Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, Jimmy Breslin, John Simon, Albert Goldman, Gail Sheehy, Nick Pileggi, Nik Cohn, Judith Crist. If the Voice still fancied itself as something of a rogue enterprise, punching above its weight with wicked uppercuts, New York aspired to the cocktail party in the penthouse suite where every name was boldfaced and the tinkling of ice was musical delight. In this, my first experience with an editorial coup, I had the psychic cushion of being a bit player not worth waging a custody battle over. I had little stake pro or con in an editorial changeover because I was still down in the circulation department, hiding incriminating mistakes in my desk and fielding phone calls from the highly frustrated. It was far more emotionally whipsawing for most of those around me, whose histories with the paper went back a decade or more and had become integrated into their cellular structure. For those of such braided loyalty, the Voice was the only journalistic home they had ever known, the only hut on the island willing to accept the idiosyncratic and unclassifiable and provide refuge. Dan and Ed, Ed and Dan (their names went up and down together like a teeter-totter), were soft-spoken patriarchs whose presences were taken for granted as enduring. The sense of dismay and betrayal at the paper being sold cut deep and cross-angled, serrated with the knowledge of how much Dan and Ed had profited from the original sale to Carter Burden while writers were subsisting on financial scraps. As would later happen at The New Yorker when William Shawn was deposed, some would never recover from Wolf’s departure, banking their bitterness for long-term capital losses and never quite finding themselves again.
What Felker perceived with pirate zeal was that the Voice was a brand and the brand was being left to fend for itself, unexploited, unemblazoned. He compared the current operation of the Voice to a college paper, a country store. Following the model of Rolling Stone, he intended to platform the paper into a national weekly less immersed in the parochial joustings below Fourteenth Street and packing more throw weight as a political and cultural resonator. To accomplish this, the national edition had to pipe up and pump out trend pieces that translated into every urban zip code. Such trend spotting and trumpeting were antithetical to the Voice ethos, where eyewitness testimony was prized over billboard statements plastered over every passing craze. And the wider spectrum Felker sought involved a different, alien set of metrics; he commissioned a profile piece of the impressionist Rich Little—whose personality was considered bland even by Canadian standards and whose takeoffs had none of the fanged bite of David Frye’s (his tongue-darting, eye-popping William F. Buckley suggested an iguana on mescaline)—based mostly on Little’s high Q ratings, which were considered a gauge of likability. Likability! This from a paper dedicated to chafing and championing the difficult underdog. He brought in designers and illustrators and introduced a blue band to the Voice’s front-page logo, a minor twirl-up that was considered a trashy violation of the paper’s monochromatic aesthetic. It didn’t take long for the verdict to be rendered on Felker’s tenure at the Village Voice: guilty—guilty of journalistic manslaughter and reckless malpractice. In the histories and memoirs of the Voice that soon followed, Felker was cast as both usurper and undertaker. The front cover of Ellen Frankfort’s unauthorized account The Voice: Life at the “Village Voice,” published in 1976, featured a mock front page of the Voice pasted over a tombstone. “Here Lies Independent Journalism” was the graveyard message. Kevin Michael McAuliffe’s less emotionally shredded, wider-lensed view of the ongoing psychodrama, The Great American Newspaper: The Rise and Fall of the “Village Voice,” published in 1978, offered a more detailed damage assessment that also consigned the Voice to the junk pile of
broken dreams. To McAuliffe, and in this he was far from alone, Clay Felker’s conquistadorial reign had ushered in a dry-hump orgy of debauchery, profligacy, and groupie adulation of power and celebrity:
Clay Felker had taken over a paper in 1974 that was unique, populated by a community of writers who constantly agreed to disagree and who were edited, if that is the word, by a man who simply loved good writing for its own sake. By the end of 1976, Felker, whatever his own politics might be, had discovered that New Left rhetoric was a commodity that could be bought and peddled just like any other, and that was what he had done. For the first time in its history, it was possible to predict, in advance, what position the Village Voice might take on anything. The paper that had never had an editorial line now had one, a smug, institutionalized hippie leftism. The paper that had always been open to every point of view was now cravenly jingoistic. Clay Felker had taken the most ambitious, the most experimental, the most exciting American newspaper of its generation, and he had built a monument to vulgarity with it.
All that may be true, but I have to admit it worked out swell for me. Up blew the whale spout and on a spume of foam I flew. Those may sound like the words of an ingrate, but denying is lying, and I can’t deny that the Felker takeover turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me at the Voice, and not just me. That rude injection of vulgarity invigorated a vein of new blood that revitalized the paper and cocked it forward, despite the masthead carnage and the premature burials of the Voice’s relevance. Due to Felker’s meddling and despite Felker’s meddling, the paper was poised for a lightning streak that would make the Voice the definitive seventies paper, a bucking bronco reborn. Punk, disco, the emergence of gay culture, the morphing of political feminism into personal memoir (as exemplified by Karen Durbin’s ardent, reflective, influential essay “On Being a Woman Alone”), the triumphant swell of the Hollywood blockbuster, the celebrity portraiture that would displace street photojournalism—the Voice was primed for these phenomena by the new observation deck Felker installed in nearly everyone’s thinking. New editors boarded the vessel, and the old system of unassigned reviews filling the in-box each week like church flyers was junked in favor of a bullpen rotation. One day I was slicing open envelopes like a Victorian clerk when the new music editor, Robert Christgau, boistered in, holding loose manuscript pages in his hands and flapping them with authority. In future years it would be hard to picture Bob empty-handed, so familiar was he for reading copy on the flat-footed fly, doing his own version of bumper cars years later when a new device known as the Sony Walkman came on the market, enabling him to avoid seeing and hearing where he was going. (Empowered by the music pumping into his head, he assumed he had the right-of-way.) Bobbing was what Bob did, the top half of his body—clad in record-company T-shirts that had shrunk considerably in the wash while retaining their impudent panache—rocking back and forth as he thought, expostulated, paced like a prosecutor in front of the jury, laid down the editorial law, or let loose with a laugh that seemed to explode with a timing device, two or three beats after something struck him as funny and he had rolled it around in his head awhile.
The introductions over in a flash, Bob got down to business, letting me know with a minimum of gift wrapping that of the two most recent rock reviews I did for the Voice, one was smart and funny (a review of a solo effort by the Doors keyboardist, Ray Manzarek) and the other (here memory draws a blank) pitifully inadequate. (He would later describe most of the music reviews published by the previous regime as “a waste … slack, corny, and anonymous.”) In miniature preview, this was Bob’s method in boosting and subduing contributors: the praise-up and the slap-down, the latter an ego check up against the hockey glass to let you know who was boss, king, keeper of the keys, samurai master of the red edit pen. Although Greil Marcus would come to command more intellectual throw weight with Mystery Train and similar expeditions into the mythic depths and marshy fringes of the American Gothic, Lester Bangs would survive in legend as the Neal Cassady of Romilar and epic rhapsodies at the typewriter, and Jon Landau and Dave Marsh would eventually earn joint custody of Bruce Springsteen, it was Bob who was the self-proclaimed, scepter-wielding Dean of American Rock Critics, an honorific that sounds as esoteric today as some ecclesiastical title. With the decline of the album as message statement and the rise of the iPod, rock critics no longer exist as a recognizable category of cultural journalist with its own career ladder, schlubby mystique, battle stripes of cultural rebellion, and backstage lore. Like jazz, pop analysis has become academicized, with Christgau himself practicing his deanhood at the Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music at New York University and carting his buckshot-packed capsule Consumer Guide review column from one set of temporary digs to another, retiring and restarting it in 2010. But back then Christgau commanded the pulse center, enveloping himself in an energy cone of charisma that made writers want to be admitted into the big chief’s teepee while worrying that, once in, they might find themselves cast out again through the flap door for some flub or faux pas against the canons of rock-crit orthodoxy. Under his editorship, the pop music pages of the Voice exerted a force field that made the review section of Rolling Stone look like minor-league box scores.
As an editor, Christgau practiced the opposite of Zen. Indirection wasn’t in his playbook; pro or con, he gave it to you straight, with extra mustard. The upside was that Christgau made you want to please him, impress him, fuse two circuits together for an electric insight no one had made before, use the performance anxiety all writers have as the impetus to dig deeper and be on the receiving end of one of his triumphant war whoops. He would share his enthusiasms with the other editors, the congratulations multiplying until your swelled head barely fit into the elevator. The flip side fell when you failed to execute your mission, letting down Bob, the fellow Bobsters, and your membership in the fertility cult. Once, hazily hovering over the opening paragraph of a review I did of the Hollies performing at the Bottom Line, Bob said, as if reprimanding himself for overruling his better judgment, “I knew I should have assigned this to ——,” since I had made such a hash of it, revealing myself as Hollies-inadequate. Another time, looking over a revise I had done, he said, “Well, I’m glad you incorporated my suggestions, but I didn’t think you’d do it so faithfully,” making me feel like a retriever bearing the master’s slippers in its mouth. Bob didn’t always edit at the office, burning eyeholes in your copy and sounding the sentences in his head as if doing ballistics tests. Sometimes he edited at home, which was a trip, in both senses of the word. Once I made explorer tracks over to the apartment that Bob and his future wife, Carola Dibbell, shared in the alphabet side of the East Village, where a mound of garbage burned in the middle of the street like an anarchist’s bonfire as taxis slowed to navigate around it. Inside Bob and Carola’s apartment it was a Dickensian cove, as if their decorator had been a chimney sweep with a load of cinders to spread around. The focal point in this Stygian picture of domesticity was the spectacle of Bob, wearing nothing but red sheer bikini underwear, attending to something at the kitchen stove and pensively scratching his ass. Bob wasn’t one to stand upon formalities, adopting a more Tarzan stance. After he and Carola moved to a sunnier place on Twelfth Street (a street I too later shared, where the crunch of crack vials met the hoarse cries of hookers having an intimate conversation at the top of their charred lungs from ten or twelve feet apart), Lester Bangs told me that Bob once edited him in the nude, lying on the carpet with his butt-crack smiling northward as in a baby picture. The buzzer rang and it was Bob’s apartment neighbor, Vince Aletti, announcing himself. Bob got up and went into the other room to slip on a pair of underwear. Lester wondered, he told me, why Vince’s presence necessitated underwear from Bob while his didn’t, and then he remembered that Vince was gay—“And, you know, Bob probably didn’t want to tempt him,” Lester said, laughing.
In his return to the Voice, Bob brought with him an air of embattlement that had a soap-ope
ra backstory. He and fellow rock critic/politico-cultural journalist Ellen Willis had been the reigning rock critic couple on the counterculture scene, the John and Yoko of the downtown set, the future Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter of the Ministry of Pop Sensibility. If as a couple they functioned as a dual-processor dynamo, their intellectual status was separate but unequal. While Christgau had enjoyed a trapeze platform as a columnist at Esquire, which was a “hot book” in the magazine world under the ringmaster editorship of Harold Hayes, Willis haunted even higher, holier rafters as the rock critic of The New Yorker and a contributor to the New York Review of Books and Theodore Solotaroff’s New American Review (where her somber epitaph on the riots at the 1968 Democratic convention, “Lessons of Chicago,” appeared). Given his intellectual carriage and male pride, this uneven ranking must have been a cactus prick to Christgau, who was denied entrée into the more exclusive cloisters of prestige. Bob told me of the phone ringing when he and Ellen lived together and hearing the quavery, eggshell-walking voice of William Shawn at the other end and his handing the phone to Ellen with a mock-annoyed “It’s for you.” Their breakup—discreetly memoirized by Willis in a journal for the short-lived paperback magazine US, edited by Richard Goldstein, a wunderkind who would also rejoin the Voice in its radical Felkerization and not win any popularity contests—had been unamicable in the extreme. The betrayal of Ellen’s briefly taking up with some hippie dude (“The last time I got my hair cut, Ellen dumped me for somebody else,” was how I remember Bob explaining his subsequent aversion to barbershop scissors) incurred a wrath almost Sicilian from Bob, who refused to share the same public confines with his former comrade-lover. It was a logistical headache for record-company and concert publicists, who had to ensure that the rock critic of Newsday and Esquire didn’t find himself under the same roof enjoying freebies (there were freebies then—buffets even) as the rock critic of The New Yorker. Urban legend had it that Bob once spotted Ellen at a record-label event and was so incensed that he threw a pie at her, an incident that became as inscribed in rock-crit myth as R. Meltzer (The Aesthetics of Rock)’s peeing into the punch bowl at some press event, a stunt I was cautioned not to emulate, lest I develop the wrong kind of reputation—an invaluable piece of advice for any promising youngster. Bob assumed everyone knew the saga of his breakup with Ellen, as if it ranked with Grendel on the Richter scale, and its unfinished business dragged through the office like an anchor.
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