In this case, the game really was rigged. The magazine where my article had appeared and the publisher of my book were both CIA fronts. I didn’t know that at the time, of course. I made the discovery in 1967 from a Ramparts magazine exposé of CIA funding in the U.S., and it came as a horrible shock. Other public figures had similarly unaware encounters with the secret government. I would discover that certain connections with sources were not due to my reportorial skills; they’d been arranged by the agency. I should have suspected that my abrupt rise wasn’t entirely kosher, but at the time, I regarded it as evidence of my enormous talent. The CIA exploited gullibility nearly as avidly as they killed people.
I don’t include that tainted book in my résumé, but it launched my career. Armed with it, I felt ready to land a job in journalism. I wasn’t about to approach a legitimate paper, not with my sensibility. There was only one place that might let me cover pop music in a style of my own. And so, one June day, fresh out of Columbia, I ventured into the Voice’s cramped office on Sheridan Square. I think I was the first person to show up there with a journalism degree, and I didn’t brag about it to the editor or the publisher, who shared a book-strewn room. They were classic Greenwich Village gentry—tweedy without tweed. The publisher rarely spoke, and the editor, a small man with very bright eyes, listened as I gushed on about wanting to be a rock ’n’ roll critic. Finally he said, “What’s that?”
“I don’t know,” I replied.
“Well,” Dan Wolfe said, “try something.” And I did.
I covered a concert at Yankee Stadium called Soundblast 66. It featured a bill any rock critic would have died for: Ray Charles, the Beach Boys, the Byrds, and Stevie Wonder (back then he was Little Stevie Wonder). But my piece wasn’t just a review; it focused on the interaction between the musicians and the fans, whose every nuance I knew well. I described fistfights in the audience, autograph hunters roaming the outfield, the bell-bottomed seventeen-year-old girl who leapt onto the field and got tackled by a flying wedge of police, the go-go dancer who complained that she’d had to bring her own costume. Everything was cast in the oh-wow style that would become my signature.
I submitted my piece and waited. When the Voice appeared, I approached a newsstand, trembling. There was my story, billed on the front page. Inside was a photo—captioned “the author”—that showed me as I was, a kid with the astonished innocence of someone who had no idea what it meant to pose for the press. This was the first time I’d seen my picture in a paper, and I winced. But I was being published in the weekly of my dreams. It was better than even sex with the Shirelles.
A Dork’s Progress
Nineteen sixty-six was the year when I entered the media zone of Manhattan for real. I met rockers and writers whose work I cherished. I can’t say that I knew them—these were relationships grounded in the intersecting worlds of culture and journalism, not to be confused with friendship—but I got close enough to form vivid impressions. It could only have happened because rock suddenly mattered, and I was the rock critic of the Village Voice.
I called my column “Pop Eye”—pun intended. Though music was my major beat, I covered everything from the counterculture to the revolution it spawned. But at first I didn’t have that kind of access. No one knew there was such thing as a rock critic, never mind a beatnik newspaper that could generate publicity for a band. So I wrote about the scene I knew, the boys who smeared soot on their faces to look like they had mustaches, and the girl groups … yeah.
My first subject was the Shangri-Las, four white chicks from Queens who could work their hips while rat-combing their hair. They sang of dirtbag rebels and bikers doomed to die, in lyrics so over the top that the sound effects around their whiny voices seemed inevitable. (Of course there’s a motorcycle crash in “The Leader of the Pack.”) Their best numbers were like dialogue you might hear in a high school bathroom, the air thick with cigarette smoke.
A girl is being grilled about her new steady. “What culluh are his eyes?” her friend asks.
The girl doesn’t know, because “he’s always wearin’ shades.”
The friend has heard that he’s a bad guy.
Not so, the girl insists. “He’s good-bad, but he’s not eee-vil.”
I wrote this piece and others like it with no great expectations, so I was surprised by the reaction. There were letters praising the paper for hiring a fourteen-year-old rock critic (I did look cherubic in a messy way), and I got mash notes from boy lovers. I had no idea that I was being read by thousands of people. All I knew was that the Voice offered freedom, which was much more important than money to me. There was no layout to speak of, and an article could appear at pretty much any length. My copy wound around tiny ads, jumping from page to page, forward and backward, several times. Every week I’d show up on deadline night and take one of the desks that belonged to the ad takers by day. I worked until morning, when the editor arrived, grabbed my story, and proofread it on the way to the printer. The absence of interference was unheard of in journalism unless you were a writing star, but it was how the Voice worked in those days. This was the best way to learn style, because when the paper appeared there was no one to blame for your errors but yourself. Every awkward phrase felt like I’d dribbled piss on my jeans.
On nights when we put the paper to bed, the office was full of writers, and the gay bar below it, a lively place called the Stonewall Inn (yes, that Stonewall), sent peals of laughter through the windows. Every now and then I would hop across the street for a pastry at an all-night grocery called Smilers. I remember the counterman, an African immigrant with scarification on his face. He wore a paper hat and a name tag that read, HI, MY NAME IS … PARDEEP. In the greenish fluorescent light, he looked like Queequeg. Back in the office, struggling to find a lead, I would picture myself hurling a harpoon at the great white whale of reality.
There’s some dispute about whether I was the first rock critic. It’s not an issue for me, since I didn’t set out to start a profession, but as far as I know, I was the first writer to cover the music regularly in a major paper. A small magazine called Crawdaddy, which featured serious essays on rock, appeared a few months before my column began. If any of its writers want to claim that they got there first, I say, Go for it, dude! (And I’m sure you’re a dude.) Being a founder was beside the point. I was in it for the openness—there were no rules or standards to meet. To me, a critic didn’t have to get it right; he just had to notice things. My job was to write what I saw, heard, and felt about something I loved. That became a lot easier as my column caught on.
I don’t know when rock ’n’ roll became rock. I started using the term in 1966, though it seemed arbitrary to make a distinction between the trash of my youth and the “serious” stuff. I thought it had more to do with class than with music. Rock went to college; rock ’n’ roll was a high school dropout. But there had to be a new word for songs that blasted through the traditional formula of pop, which consisted of repeated stanzas broken by a bridge—in under three minutes. I was an early proponent of the idea that rock lyrics were poetry. At the height of my influence, in 1969, I edited and annotated a collection of lyrics under the title The Poetry of Rock. But I took pains to argue that this aesthetic quality had been present in early rock ’n’ roll as well. Buddy Holly didn’t know from metaphysical verse, but he channeled its spirit when he sang, “My love is bigger than a Cadillac.” R&B had its own mysterious poetry, with roots in the richness of blues. Rock was merely more overt about its pedigree. Bob Dylan had seen to that.
No songwriter has ever been so glorified by academics. They’ve plucked Dylan out of the sixties and repurposed him as Keats in buckskin. But at his best, he’s a typical artist of his time. His most important songs are a mash-up of high and low influences; one can say the same about the work of Andy Warhol or Jean-Luc Godard. There’s a reason why this hybrid vitality arose when it did. It was the mark of a generation better educated than ever before, but without the taste for fine ar
t that could only be acquired in elite universities. As the son of a hardware-store owner, Dylan had precisely that background. He was a young man with the stomach of an adolescent, capable of digesting anything tasty. So were we all, and rock was the music of our voracious appetite.
As its prestige grew, rock appealed to the same erudite adults who sponsored other hybrid forms, such as Pop Art and the New Journalism. These people had come of age with progressive jazz, and they didn’t know the first thing about Chuck Berry or doo-wop. Jazz is a music of development, but rock, at its core, is about repetition: hooks and riffs. The incessant beat, so grating to sophisticated ears, was what allowed rock to venture into exotic modes without losing its coherence. Not that I could have explained this at the time. I only knew how rock worked as a scene, but that was expertise enough. In a short time—maybe six months—my column became a must-read for seekers of the Now, which is to say, the hip.
Record ads, much bigger than the ones from local bangle shops, soon began to arrive at the paper. The editor, Dan Wolfe, was pleased with my work, though he gingerly suggested that I drop the four-letter words. That was a shock—no bad language at the Village Voice! I should have read his remark as a sign that the paper looked at culture from a perspective more refined than mine. But I calmly replied that obscenities were part of the scene, and he never mentioned it again. I didn’t think much about the contradiction between my background and the Voice’s readers; if I had, I would have been intimidated. But the best thing about writing is that you can hide behind it. It puzzled me when people were surprised by my (let’s say modest) height. My style made me seem much taller than I was. I guess it was my version of standing on a box.
But I was still little Richie from the Bronx. When I entered a room of tall and trendy people, every muscle in my body twitched. I was sure the murmuring I heard was barely suppressed laughter. Fortunately, I’d learned from Andy Warhol how to croon “Oh, wow!” to any comment. I adopted a version of rock-critic drag that was even more distancing—a velvet cape, satin pants, and silver boots. It was how I thought a member of my profession should dress, and I was desperate to look like the real thing. Oddly enough, it worked. Before long, I was on my way to an encounter with that whirling sixties gyre of new money and brittle fame that could touch down and scoop up a schmuck like me.
A growing pack of sycophants pursued me. I had never experienced such grasping behavior, and it made me feel like I was standing on sand that could liquefy at any moment. But I couldn’t resist the attention, or the novel power to put people down. You were expected to do that if you were hip. Since status was so intangible, insults were a major instrument of ranking. Dylan was a master of this craft—check out his tirade to a hapless journalist in the film Don’t Look Back. I took my cue from him, writing that Judy Collins, a highly competent singer of artfully folky songs, could “put Jesus to sleep on the cross.” I told myself that nastiness was necessary to preserve the rough-edged integrity of the music, but it had more to do with feeling like a dork in disguise. I mocked so no one would dare mock me.
In person, I was anything but aggressive, especially with the rockers I interviewed. I would sit there with an adoring expression, too shy in their presence to ask more than a few questions in a soft voice. I had no choice but to let them run the conversation, and that usually worked well. They had interesting stories to tell, tales of brutal fathers or rejection by their peers, and how music had been a way to escape from their pain. Rock was for them what writing was for me: a free, safe space. I, too, was a misfit transformed, so I could describe their feelings from inside.
Watching rockers perform left me with a longing so deep that I could only make sense of the emotion by putting it into words. It was the way I’d felt about my neighbors in the project, with their outsize sexiness. Now, that same erotic vitality was prancing and preening before me, guitars pressing on crotches so that the song went right from the groin into the audience. The music insisted on the kind of body-and-soul orgasm I had never experienced (not yet). I wanted to capture that rush. I yearned for an ecstasy so great that it would shatter my doubts about myself forever.
Dan Wolfe didn’t edit Voice writers; he counseled them. It was a therapeutic experience to meet with him. He said little but it always seemed momentous, even when it was bullshit. And he offered this diagnosis of me: “Most people escape from reality. You escape into it.” In my case, he was right. I fled from myself by plunging into spectacles, the more extreme the better. I was hungry for any sensation that could suspend my self-consciousness. This need to lose myself was what made me a good reporter of the scene, and it turned out to be a major asset in 1966. At a time when no one knew how to judge anything new, when nothing was defined by its past or definite in its future, when the culture seemed to be floating in a boundless fluidity, journalists were the most credible authorities. I was that kind of guide to rock, though I knew hardly anything about music. All I knew was what it felt like to be in awe.
There was a small group of young reporters who understood rock the way fans did, and we quickly connected. My best friend in that crew was an Australian named Lillian Roxon. She’s best known for her rock encyclopedia, but when we met in 1966, she was just a New York correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald. Lillian was a major music devotee and an unlikely groupie.
I’ll digress briefly to explain that term as it was understood in the sixties. A groupie was a woman who fucked the band. It was an enviable role in those days—the best groupies were legendary. I remember several of them joining forces to make casts of their favorite rock-star penises in an erect state. They called themselves the Plaster Casters, and they actually exhibited their trophies. These were fans as courtesans.
Life was hard for a woman in music journalism, especially a sometime freelancer and sometime novelist who was asthmatic and overweight, as Lillian was. She died of an asthma attack at the age of forty-one.
Because we were both earning a pittance, we shared our assets, and one of them was a talented photographer named Linda Eastman—later known as Linda McCartney. Linda and I had something in common, a love of rockers, though hers was more, let’s say, corporeal. To call Linda a groupie would be to understate her allure. She was a major New York attraction for visiting musicians, and thanks to her I got to interview rock stars who had never heard of the Village Voice. Linda would bring me along on a shoot, and while she was setting up I would do the interview, trying to distract Prince Charming from preening for her. Then I would leave the two of them alone. That was how I met Donovan, the British folksinger turned proto-hippie. When I arrived at his hotel room, he was sitting yoga style on an ottoman between two Afghan hounds. I didn’t have to fish for a lead; the author of an anti-American song with the line “As you fill your glasses with the wine of murdered Negroes” was ready for his close-up, dressed in a kaftan.
Soon I didn’t need Linda Eastman to enter the hip rock hotels of New York: They knew me at the Albert and the Gramercy. I saw a lot of messy rooms, stepped around piles of half-eaten debris, learned to avoid tripping on liquor bottles. Little by little I became a fixture on the local music scene, consisting of a few clubs and, in the wee hours, when everything else was closed, the Brasserie up on Park Avenue. Our ringmaster was Danny Fields, the wry editor of a fan sheet called Tiger Beat. (So many pictures of David Cassidy; so little time!) We were writers without a genre. The music industry didn’t know what to make of us, and the literary world didn’t notice. But because the Voice reached a cultivated audience, I got to cross over. I mingled with John Lindsay, New York’s upper-crust mayor, who always came to the paper’s Christmas party, but I also prowled the lowbrow corridors of the Brill Building.
All that remained of Tin Pan Alley by the sixties was a plaque on West 28th Street. But the Brill Building, just north of Times Square, housed more than 160 music businesses and hordes of songwriters. Carole King and Neil Diamond churned out hits there before they got to sing their own lyrics. The place was ha
unted by the ghosts of shysters who had bought the rights to doo-wop hits from black kids for (as it were) a song. Legend had it that one group hung the middle-aged owner of their tune out of the window until he agreed to sign over the rights. But this building was also home to publicists—a plague of them, it seemed. Many were holdouts from the days when promoting pop stars meant making them seem clean-cut. They were baffled by the new crop of bad boys with college degrees. I still remember the unfortunate woman who issued press releases under the heading “Gnus for Youze.” I hated having to rely on flacks like her for story leads, probably because they reminded me of the hapless inner salesman I was trying to suppress. Even worse, they often called me “Rich, baby.”
The only person I allowed to get away with that was Murray the K. The best radio DJs, and he was one, had a sheer love of hustle, and they hustled what they loved. Murray (who legally changed his birth name, Kaufman, to “the K”) had an uncanny ability to insert himself into any scene. Only he would have dared to call himself the Fifth Beatle, but the Fab Four let him get away with it. To judge from the smiles in the photos they took with Murray, the Beatles loved his shtick as much as I did. “You’re what’s happening, baby,” he would say to the latest sensation, whoever that was. He had me on his show several times, and he let me program records. I played songs that would have never gotten airtime, including “Heroin” by the Velvet Underground. This was not exactly a drug-prevention jingle. As Lou Reed droned, “It’s my wife and it’s my life,” Murray blanched. He must have thought I would get him thrown off the radio, and after that he didn’t call me baby.
Another Little Piece of My Heart Page 5