The Boy Who Cried Freebird

by Mitch Myers

  Without hesitation, Curt said, “Excuse me, sir, but do you know what year it is?” The hippie stopped and stared at them. “What year? C’mon, I know it’s harvest season but the grass going around isn’t THAT good. It’s 1973, of course.”

  Bundy and his friends became hysterical and started arguing among themselves. The hippie (whose name was Fred) watched them squabble for several minutes before interrupting their heated debate: “Hey, I don’t know what’s wrong, but if you guys need to crash at my pad and sort things out, you’re more than welcome.”

  “Gee, thanks,” said Bundy. “Maybe we can figure this out if we get off the street for a while.”

  When they entered Fred’s apartment, the dazed time travelers let out a collective gasp. For there, strewn all about the room, were a dozen vintage guitars. A beautiful Guild 12-string guitar was sitting by the couch and a Martin was propped up against the wall. There was a dobro, a mandolin, and even a stand-up bass. “Yeaaah,” Fred drawled. “These are my babies. Any of you guys play?” The four laughed nervously and settled down in the cluttered living room.

  Almost immediately, Chris spied something familiar on the floor near Fred’s stereo. “Hey, check it out, a brand-new copy of Leo Kottke’s Takoma album, 6- and 12-String Guitar. I’d recognize that armadillo anywhere.”

  Before they knew it, Bundy, Chris, Doug, and Curt were lost in discussion with Fred. They spoke for hours about the history of steel-string guitar music. Fred really knew his stuff and was a pretty tasty player, too. He was a walking encyclopedia when it came to John Fahey’s Takoma label and he had all of the albums by Fahey and Kottke (up to 1973). He also knew about other, more obscure acoustic guitarists, like the mysterious Robbie Basho.

  “Yeaaah,” said Fred. “Kottke is an incredible technician while Fahey is the ultimate stylist/composer. I’ve got a permanent cramp in my left hand from trying to play ‘Vaseline Machine Gun’ like Leo.” The five men drank coffee and continued discussing requiems, Fahey’s classic, Blind Joe Death, and other solo guitar innovations.

  They talked deep into the night about the American folk form phenomena: big wooden guitars, all loosely strung with open, dropped tunings and fingerpicking styles from the 1930s played by southern blacks and poor white folks.

  “Yeaaah, it was an American interpretation of Renaissance music with some Delta blues thrown in for good measure,” Fred chuckled. “Now let me show you my version of Kottke’s ‘Cripple Creek.’”

  It was two in the morning when Curt, Doug, and Chris began to get hungry. “We gotta go out for something to eat, Bundy,” said Doug. “You want to come?”

  Bundy looked up from the guitar in his hands and said, “Nah, Fred and I want to try the Allman Brothers’ tune ‘Little Martha.’ I’ll catch up with you later.”

  As the trio left Fred’s apartment and walked out onto Damen Avenue, another blinding flash of light appeared before them. When their eyes finally readjusted, they realized something had changed once again.

  “Oh no,” Curt moaned. “We’re back in the present, but Bundy is still stuck in 1973 playing guitars with that guy Fred. What are we going to do now?”

  “Let’s head back to the loft,” Chris said. “There has to be some resolution to all this.”

  As they approached the door of Bundy’s loft, the three heard a ringing acoustic guitar inside. They knocked, and a spry old man answered the door.

  “Bundy?” they screamed.

  “Yeaaah, it’s me,” answered Bundy. “What took you guys so long? Come on in and close the door. I think I’ve finally got this solo steel-string guitar stuff down pat—I’ve been doing a whole lot of practicing.”

  ROUNDABOUT

  Adam Coil strolled down the hall toward his dorm room. As he reached the door, he heard some peculiar sounds coming from the other side. The burbling noise was not like anything he had ever heard before—then it stopped.

  Adam entered to see his roommate Bill stripped to his underwear, bong in hand, clumsily pressing the play button on Adam’s $4,000 stereo. The same strange sounds began once again.

  “What the hell is this?” Adam demanded.

  “Hey, dude, sit down and check this out,” Bill replied. “It’s these Germans who claim to be radical poststructuralists. They digitally process environmental recordings and electroacoustic sound files. Listen! It messes around with an auditory aspect of the spatial scope. Heavy dimensionality and no beats!”

  Adam eyed his roommate carefully. He knew Bill was having trouble in several of his classes and had been down in the dumps. Now the kid was sitting around nearly naked, listening to this arrhythmic, electronic mishmash.

  A few moments passed and just as he was about to speak—Adam got it. The liquid noise did seem to move around the room. Without an actual meter, the software-based innovations somehow suspended human time, and deepened his personal reaction to the ambient milieu. Lost in the sound, he didn’t even hear his roommate dress and leave the room.

  Suddenly there was a knock on the door. It was Tim, the R.A. from down the hall.

  Adam put down the bong, clumsily pressed play on his $4,000 stereo, and said, “Hey, dude, sit down and check this out…”

  WAR ALL THE TIME

  According to common legend, rock criticism first raised its pointed little head somewhere around 1966. As if on cue, young volunteers sprang up across the country to join the original rockcrit army. Among the idealistic soldiers to hit the front line was one Richard Meltzer. Perhaps Meltzer didn’t know that his writing was going to turn into journalistic warfare, but he fought long and hard and took no prisoners.

  Of course, the music industry’s scorched-earth policy eventually caught up with Richard as he wrote, drank, screwed, and battled his way through the fire. Long a self-described geezer, this militant soul ultimately survived to see his explosive musings compiled in the greatest hits collection A Whore Just Like the Rest: The Music Writings of Richard Meltzer.

  It’s all there in Richard’s battered journal, including fond remembrances of colorful comrades in arms and requiems for sad casualties like the late Lester Bangs. Meltzer also goes out of his way to identify some traitors from the battlefield as well as unloading both barrels on old adversaries like Village Voice mainstay Robert Christgau and rock-academic Greil Marcus.

  Not surprisingly, Meltzer has taken his share of abuse over the decades, and some say he’s still asking for more. A bitter anti-journalist who literally wrote himself in and out of several jobs, he offended record company honchos and humble music fans alike with his irreverent diatribes on rock culture. Eventually banished to the outskirts of the rockwrite community, Richard was denied the soft comforts of corporate journalism (you know, free stuff ) and by the mid-’70s he was on the outside looking in.

  The funny thing is, nobody told Richard that the war was over and he kept dropping bombs and naming names with a vengeance. But let’s go back to the beginning and access the bloodshed, the victories, and the personal price of Richard Meltzer’s literary combat.

  “R.” Meltzer first hit the scene with a blazing labyrinth of a term paper he’d written while attending the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Excerpted in 1967 by a young editor named Paul Williams, Meltzer’s rousing article (originally called “A Sequel: Tomorrow’s Not Today”) was featured in the eighth issue of Williams’s now-fabled fanzine, Crawdaddy!, under the auspicious title, “The Aesthetics of Rock.”

  Around the same time, Richard was drummed out of the graduate program in philosophy at Yale University. His academic offense? Writing essays about rock ’n’ roll for class courses, like Laws of Nature, and Being and Becoming in Greek Philosophy.

  Meltzer’s unwieldy assertions on music were unlike anything his generation had ever seen in print. Spewing a booze-and-dope-fueled rant wedding traditional dialectics of art criticism and philosophy with the context and content of ’60s pop counterculture, “The Aesthetics of Rock” provided abstract (and concrete) connections in wh
olesale and hallucinatory fashion.

  Free-associating in tangential hyperdrive, Richard examined the influences and sonic antecedents of the Doors, the Beatles, Moby Grape, Jefferson Airplane, and countless others. His comical treatise gained theatrical momentum by weaving the Sisyphus myth into rock culture and using the concepts of worldly philosophers like Nietzsche, Plato, and Immanuel Kant.

  Obtuse, passionate, sublime, ridiculous, and all but unreadable, the excerpted essay (and the 1970 book version) of “The Aesthetics of Rock” garnered both high praise and damning criticism. In any case, Meltzer wrote the damned thing.

  This all happened a few months before Jann Wenner began publishing the world’s most famous music magazine, Rolling Stone. Besides Meltzer and Paul Williams, other writers who began making rock ’n’ roll a priority included East Coast upstarts like Meltzer’s former schoolmate and future Blue Oyster Cult producer Sandy Pearlman, Richard Goldstein, and Patti Smith’s soon-to-be-perennial guitarist, Lenny Kaye.

  And the beat went on; LA writer Greg Shaw had a fanzine called Mojo Navigator while Robert Christgau wrote for Esquire and the short-lived Cheetah. Lured by the ambitious Jann Wenner, future Springsteen manager Jon Landau contributed to Rolling Stone’s very first issue and Bay Area writer/editor Greil Marcus soon followed.

  Despite his enthusiasm and originality as a young rock scribe, Meltzer’s professional sojourn was not an easy one. While he was observant enough to become the first American writer to profile Jimi Hendrix, his mocking diatribes and combative persona challenged readers and editors alike.

  Crawdaddy!’s Paul Williams remembered Meltzer’s provocative impact on the then-innocent rock world, “When Richard handed me his manuscript I loved it and excerpted it as ‘The Aesthetics of Rock.’ We had some personality conflicts but I kept publishing him and I’m certainly very proud of it. Of course, some of the magazine’s readers totally freaked out and hated Meltzer. For example, with his piece, ‘What a Goddam Great Second Cream Album,’ Richard was already (implicitly and explicitly) criticizing the fan attitude and taking it right to the readers. Naturally, a lot of them hated it. At the same time, Richard would have demands that I couldn’t meet. I just thought he was brilliant and he thought I didn’t appreciate him.”

  Predictably, Meltzer and Williams parted ways, and the ’70s found Richard hustling his singular brand of review-speak to a slew of new rock magazines. A primary influence on the bleeding-heart-gonzo-rock-journo-savant Lester Bangs, Meltzer found shelt(z)er for his stream of consciousness/deconstructionist rock ravings in periodicals like Fusion, Rolling Stone, Zoo World, and Detroit’s very own music magazine, Creem.

  Bolstered by the drunken camaraderie of equally brazen writers like Nick Tosches and rising star Bangs, Meltzer entered into a prolific period of extemporaneous rock writing. Ironically, while he was improving as a writer through the rigors of nonstop work, Richard was losing his enthusiasm for the music itself. More precisely, he became disillusioned with the commerce-driven marketplace called rock ’n’ roll.

  Speaking to me from his home in Portland, Oregon, Meltzer recalled the long and winding road involved in his being and becoming a writer, “I don’t think I’ve ever made a middle-class income per se, but I have survived by writing,” he said. “I feel in some ways it was good that I had these options early on to write for crummy mags that paid ten dollars a review. When I wrote for enough of them I was able to get by—it forced me to be prolific and get my chops. I also got on all these mailing lists and suddenly I was being force-fed the whole gamut of [rock] releases.”

  Receiving and immediately selling off his promotional albums, Meltzer survived the early ’70s by eating and drinking (gratis) at the countless press functions held in Manhattan. Constantly drunk and a relentless lecher, he devolved into a rogue critic who would engage in food fights, piss anywhere anytime, and even feel up somebody’s mother. Basically, Richard seemed eager to go that extra mile in order to embarrass and/or outrage everybody.

  Above and beyond the stresses of maintaining his bad-boy persona, Meltzer became dependent on the music industry for his daily fix of promotional records. He also developed serious artistic conflicts when it came to writing about music.

  “[Getting free albums] is a worse addiction than crack,” Richard admitted. “Those people who I have known that have had that habit—some of them are lifers. You have to ask yourself, ‘Will my enthusiasm be enough if I’m not getting these perks?’ I don’t think anybody that I’ve known has been capable of doing that and maintaining enthusiasm. It’s very difficult to be objective and you turn into a shill. I was kicked off every mailing list and I’m glad. I just don’t know how glad I was at the time.”

  Nonetheless, Meltzer had his fun while living and working in New York. He was the life of the party in the early ’70s, at least in his own mind. Strutting a punk philosopher guise in Creem and scribing under pseudonyms like Borneo Jimmy and (Not the) Audie Murphy, Meltzer’s street life became fodder for his art. Besides writing song lyrics for Blue Oyster Cult, he was bosom buddies with Patti Smith and schmoozed with an outrageous cast of characters.

  Marty Balin, a former lead singer of Jefferson Airplane, recounted his association with Meltzer, “Richard wrote about me in some book in which he had me hanging around New York with Joe Namath, smoking cigars and picking up women. I never ever met Joe Namath. That never happened. Richard’s stuff was a little radical, even more out there than most guys because he would go to the farthest limits about stuff. I guess he made up a lot of his own stories. He had a sense of humor about all of it—it made you laugh anyway. I haven’t seen him since 1967.”

  Sadly, many of the relationships Meltzer prized during the ’70s have soured. He no longer speaks to Sandy Pearlman, citing a cruel withholding of songwriting royalties from Blue Oyster Cult as the final straw. Resentment also runs deep toward failed friends like Patti Smith. “There was a moment where the public Patti was it, and the private Patti didn’t need friends,” Meltzer said wearily. “She was the most non-ironic, shoot-from-the-hip anti-Semite I’d ever met. Patti wanted to be all things to all people. Little by little it seemed so absolutely phony.”

  In addition to personal quarrels, Richard’s enmity toward professional rock journalism manifested itself in feuds that have endured for decades. Booted from the record review section at Rolling Stone in 1971 for penning a Commander Cody review credited to Nick Tosches (and co-conspirator Nick returning the favor by writing Richard’s review of the same album for Fusion), Meltzer was locked in a dance with his most despised foes: editors.

  Clearly, the journalistic demands of magazine editors went against the grain of Meltzer’s artistic sensibilities. “Journalists are chumps,” Meltzer exclaimed. “I mean, to do any form of coverage of things in the real world for papers and mags is a real chore. I feel like it has to come close to tearing your heart out.”

  Richard’s controversial response to his dilemma was to review certain albums without actually listening to them. To his credit, history has borne out his decision to actively ignore industry-hyped (and now-forgotten) artists of the time like Ned, Barbara Mauritz, and Black Grass.

  Alienated, intimidated, and generally objecting to established music editors like Robert Christgau, who presided over Richard at the Village Voice, Meltzer left New York in the mid-’70s and moved to Los Angeles. Sick of rock writing and listening almost exclusively to jazz, Meltzer applied his dense, self-referential joke-prose toward essential topics like boxing, wrestling, and a guidebook to L.A.’s ugliest buildings. He found an authentic voice writing visceral poetry and applied the tough-vision/nocturnal emissions of his true-to-his-life fiction in a dark comic novel, The Night (Alone). He even sang his outrageous prose as the front man for a punk group called Vom.

  While living and (dying) writing in Los Angeles, Meltzer’s muse was revitalized by the city’s fledgling punk scene. In the early ’80s he wrote vividly about groups like the Germs, X, The Blasters, and the
Minutemen. Meltzer considered the musicians he wrote about to be his friends, and some of them are still devout fans.

  Bassist Mike Watt voiced his resounding support for Meltzer’s outsider perspective, “Me and D. Boon [late guitarist/singer of the Minutemen] used to learn all of the lyrics for the Blue Oyster Cult, which was our primo band thirty years ago. Then we got to actually meet Richard Meltzer. He told you a lot with his work. It was different than reading the LA Times; it was another way of writing. He wrote like somebody who you’d really want to know. These other cats, they seemed like the lamest teachers you had at school. I guess in the grand scheme of things those other guys won. But I don’t know if the world was really richer for it.”

  Roots-rock musician Dave Alvin (once of the Blasters) echoed Watt’s devotion to Meltzer’s work, “Richard writes in a way that’s very musical; there’s a rhythm to it that’s like listening to Jerry Lee Lewis at the Star Club. There’s real intensity to his writing, a sort of fuck-the-consequences edge that’s in all the best rock ’n’ roll records. It’s also challenging to read Richard, and most music writing isn’t challenging. He makes you think, and uncomfortably so sometimes. Back in the ’80s we did several poetry readings together. Richard used to write a column for the LA Reader and he pissed off so many people that there would be bomb threats phoned into the readings. It’s amazing to think, ‘What you’re doing is nothing, man, Meltzer’s getting bomb threats.’ Of course there were times when I was reading his book and I thought, ‘Why didn’t you just play the game, just a little bit?’ But then Richard wouldn’t be who he is, so what are you going to do?”

  What Meltzer did was to grow into a masterful writer who demanded to be dealt with on his own terms. His best works come fully loaded with powerful insights, and are fueled by a cold, brilliant solipsism. In the essay “As I Lay Dead,” he wrote his own postmortem testimonial, “I was generous then (i.e. now *my* now) always gave the whole wad away, squandered my fluids on writerly whims with but the most esoteric payoffs, spent 5-6-7 years on books that didn’t get me laid, didn’t earn me a can of clams, and the bounty of that generosity lingers on.”