Never Mind the Pollacks
Page 8
There, on a stump, sat Clambone.
“Ah’ve been waiting for you, Neal,” he said.
“You!”
“Yes, you done found me.”
“What…”
“Hush,” Clambone said. “My time is limited. Now listen. This folk that you’ve been listening to is a false music. It is not the answer. It does not represent the true spirit.”
“But the songs!”
“No. I was there when the songs were written. They weren’t like that. These white folks have changed the music.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’ve made it boring, but it won’t always be this way. You must find the ones who do not sing well, and do not care about their bodies. They are coming soon, and they are many.”
“But Dylan can’t sing!”
Clambone sighed, and began to shimmer in the dawn.
“Damn it, Dylan is not the one,” he said.
“Yes, he is,” said Pollack.
“OK, OK,” Clambone said. “I’ll give you Dylan. Follow him if you must, for he will become well connected very soon. But you must seek the other prophets of rock ’n’ roll.”
“Where?” Pollack said. “Where?”
“Start in England…” Clambone said, vanishing. “But beware Asbury Park. It is a distraction and a curse….”
“Clambone!” Pollack shouted into the dawn. “Clambone!”
At that moment, Pollack’s heart calcified. There were no more women, only receptacles on the way to his final destiny. Only the quest, the truth, and rock criticism remained.
He emerged from the woods a madman. Dylan was packing his duffel as Pollack banged on the back door of the house. Pollack was slathered in mud, skin ravaged, a crown of brambles in his hair.
“Man,” Dylan said. “What happened to you?”
Pollack grabbed Dylan’s shirt and spat in his face.
“I need a shower!” he said.
“You sure do.”
“Where’s Joan?”
“She went to the store. She wants you out by sundown.”
“Good! She’s a goddamn phony anyway!”
He sat on Dylan’s duffel.
“Where you going?”
“Gotta get to London,” Dylan said. “Be on a TV show, playing myself. Maybe record an album.”
London, eh?
Neal Pollack walked into a bar.
Two guys with guitars, one bassist, and a big-lipped lead singer were onstage. The singer was writhing around like a monkey, doing his best to murder “Sweet Little Sixteen.”
Maybe fifteen people sat in the audience, guys in white shirts and zoot suits and their well-dressed dates.
“You’re a tosser!” one of them shouted. “Get off the stage!”
“Cool,” Pollack said.
Pollack looked at the band, in their black work shirts and ruined jeans with Scotch tape across the rips, their hair as mangled and dirty as their sound.
“Rock ’n’ roll,” he said. “I’ve found you again.”
After the show, Pollack hung around.
“We don’t want you,” the manager told the lead singer.
“Why not?”
“No room for your kind of music.”
One guy, one of the guitar players, was scruffier than the rest, much scruffier. He looked like a rat that had been tumbling in his own filth for weeks.
“Need a gig,” he said. “It’s winter and I gotta buy myself a coat, man.”
“Not my problem,” said the manager.
Pollack got in the manager’s face.
“Give these guys a job!” he said. “They’re the best band I’ve heard since I got to England!”
“Sod off, Yank,” said the manager.
Pollack reached around for a bar stool. Fluidly, almost professionally, he swung it around and smacked the manager in the face. The manager buckled.
“Christ!” said the scruffy guy.
The manager moaned, on his knees. Blood pooled into his cupped hands.
“Police!” he shouted. “They bloody broke my bloody nose.”
The band and Pollack scrambled into the street. The sky was bright and cold. They sprinted and squinted. It started to snow.
The whistles erupted. Pollack tried to keep up with the Rolling Stones as they ran.
“I’m Neal Pollack, and I’m a rock critic,” he said, in an alley, as they panted.
“So?” said the lead singer.
“I came here with Bob Dylan, but he’s boring. If I have to hear ‘Poor Miner’s Lament’ one more time, I’m gonna plotz.”
“You know Bob Dylan?” said the scruffiest and handsomest one of all.
“Yep. And I’m rich, too.”
“My name’s Brian,” he said. “Buy me a coat. Also, I need a new guitar.”
The next day, Pollack and his knapsack moved into the second floor of a three-story house in Ealing. With him were Brian, Mick, and Keith from the band, a couple of students from the London School of Economics, and a mysterious Norwegian who refused to tell anyone his name. The Norwegian sat in a corner of the living room and read the same three pages of Kierkegaard day and night, his lips shaking with each repeated sentence.
It was the dead of winter. No one had any money but Neal.
“Give us some for the gas bill, wouldja?” Mick said.
Neal did, without complaining, because this was the greatest band he’d ever seen.
“Right, then,” said Keith. “Let’s go get some hamburgers.”
The burger place was a few blocks away.
“I’m cold,” said Keith. “Give me your sweater.”
“Sure,” Neal said.
“And give Mick your boots.”
“Sure.”
“Now give us ten quid.”
“OK.”
They went in the hamburger place.
“Wait outside for us,” Keith said.
“Can’t I come in? I’m hungry!”
“You want to see us play in West London or what?”
The show that night was unreal. Nearly a hundred people, many of them women, rubbed deep grooves into the floor. Under the hot dingy lights, Mick emanated menace. Pollack saw and felt the living power. The band, he knew, was a cut of prime beef that the public would devour whole. They played:
Where you going
Where you going
My little gasoline girl?
In your upstairs two-room flat
Petting your mangy orange cat
Blowing your gas-streaked hair
Letting it grow and curl?
All right.
Where you going
’cause I’m coming
My little gasoline girl
On a private gassed-up jet
In the ocean, getting wet
Gas me up
My little gasoline girl.
All right.
Are you coming
Are you coming
My little gasoline girl
In the fancy foreign car
In the honky-tonky bar
In New Orleans
At King’s Cross
Or in Queens
I means what I says
And I says what I means!
All right
My sweet
Little gasoline girl.
One night, in February 1963, they were lazing around the apartment on moldy pillows, drinking expensive booze that Pollack had bought, and listening to Big Bill Broonzy records. Keith wailed along on the harmonica.
“Hey,” Neal said, “I got an idea. Let’s go to Liverpool. Check it out.”
“Eh?” said Keith. “There’s nothing going on in Liverpool.”
“Oh. OK.”
From the kitchen came moaning. Brian was shagging a girl. This should have been disgusting; the kitchen stank of months of unwashed dishes and rotting trash. They had placed it under quarantine. But the women just loved it when Brian treated them bad. Pollack watched, listened, and learned.
Mick turned up the record.
“This is the real stuff,” he said.
“I met Big Bill Broonzy once,” Neal said.
“Sod off.”
“No, I really did. And I know Clambone Jefferson, too!”
“Who’s Clambone Jefferson?”
“Who’s Clambone Jefferson? Oh, man! Someone give me that guitar. He wrote this song. You must have heard it, because it’s the most important…Woke up this morning, and my boots were full of blood…”
“Nope,” Mick said.
“Yeah, I woke up this morning, all my boots were full of blood…”
“Quit the racket!” Brian said. “I’m shagging over here!”
“Shouldn’t have stayed up all night…”
Brian burst from the kitchen, leaving his girl in the ruins.
“You can’t bloody sing, Pollack!” he said.
Brian pounced on him. Pollack dropped the guitar.
“What’re you doing?” Pollack said.
Brian pushed him down, cackling madly. Mick and Keith unbuttoned and unzipped his jeans, then pulled them off. They started going through the pockets.
“Oh,” Mick said, “a credit card!”
“Stop it!”
Keith held down Pollack’s arms, and Mick his legs. Pollack squirmed, in his underwear, but he couldn’t cut loose. The girl, out of the kitchen, rubbed her breasts in his face, for torment’s sake. Pollack began to weep.
Brian produced a wire cable, which was connected to an amplifier. It gave off sharp electric sparks. He waved the wire in Pollack’s face.
“You must confess,” he said.
Mick and Keith cackled madly.
“Confess to what?” Pollack said.
“Confess!”
The wire sizzled. Pollack’s eyebrows singed.
“But I was just playing the blues!” Neal said.
“Stick the blues!” Mick said.
Brian touched the wire to Pollack’s testicles.
An unholy scream filled the Ealing night.
Pollack kicked loose, shot up, and limped toward the door.
“You bastards!” he said, sobbing. “You goddamn bastards!”
He ran out into the street, in his underwear.
Two days later, Pollack showed up again. He was covered in all kinds of filth. Ungodly. He was naked, except for his dung-crusted underpants, which he wore on his head. Somewhere along the line, he’d taken the plunge into deep madness.
Brian smacked him in the face with a tambourine.
Pollack broke the tambourine’s skin with his fist.
“You won’t hurt me anymore, Brian,” said Pollack.
“I need a hundred quid,” Brian said.
Pollack pushed him against the wall.
“I mean it. You touch me again and I’ll break your hands.”
The future Sir Mick appeared.
“Right then,” he said. “Who’s up for bridge?”
DON’T LOOK BACK: THE BASEMENT REEL
Hotel suite, London, England. Present are Neal Pollack, Bob Dylan, Albert Grossman (Bob Dylan’s manager), Twiggy, and an interviewer from Life magazine.
DYLAN: Did you see my concert last night?
INTERVIEWER: Yes.
DYLAN: Did you like it?
INTERVIEWER: Oh, yes. Very much.
DYLAN: Phew! That’s a relief. I was worried that you weren’t going to like it and write something bad about me.
INTERVIEWER: No, I’d never do that.
POLLACK, sits down next to Dylan, addresses interviewer: Why not? Are you afraid to say what you think? Are you afraid, man? Because I know your magazine, and how your magazine works. I’ve read your magazine, I’ve seen what you do, with your words and your pictures. You’re just gonna say what your readers want you to say. Because your readers are sheep and so are you. You’re just a sheep. You can’t understand Bob Dylan and his genius. No way!
DYLAN: Hey, Neal. Relax.
POLLACK: How can I relax? This guy doesn’t care about you! You think the people who listen to your records read Life magazine?
INTERVIEWER: I just wanted to ask Mr. Dylan about what kinds of messages he’s trying to impart through his lyrics. DYLAN: Well, gosh, there’s not one specific message, but if young people come away with anything from my music, I’d like it to be—
POLLACK: Why does music have to have a message, huh? Why does it have to mean anything? You journalists are very interested in meaning, but not very interested in just being. You know? Just people being people. You only care about rich people anyway, not poor people who are vomiting in the gutter. You think they’re gonna read your article? Or care about a message?
INTERVIEWER: What kind of people do you want me to write about, then?
POLLACK: I don’t know, man. Just people. Like some bum wiping his ass with a newspaper or Mr. Thompson wanting to kill himself on the 5:13 train back to his soulless house in the suburbs. Why don’t you ever write about them?
DYLAN: Listen, I think I have something to say…
POLLACK: Sure you do. But you don’t have to tell this guy! This guy represents Lyndon Johnson and Rockefeller and all the billionaires who are sending kids off to fight in Vietnam! He writes for a magazine, man, but all magazines are shit!
DYLAN: Yeah. I’d never thought about it that way before. I hate you, Mr. Life magazine!
In a trailer behind the stage, Pollack and Dylan drained the last puffs from a roach.
“I’m gonna do it tonight,” Dylan said. “I’m gonna go electric.”
“Seriously?” Pollack said.
“Yep. This is it.”
“Oh, man!”
Folk music was about to die, and Pollack was going to be there.
They sauntered backstage, wearing identical black leather jackets and motorcycle boots, each packing a Fender Stratocaster.
“Bloomfield!” Dylan said.
“What?” said Mike Bloomfield.
“I want you, and Arnold, and Lay. Get me that Goldberg guy on piano.”
“Bob, they don’t know the songs.”
“Who cares if they don’t know the songs?” he said. “I ain’t Dizzy Gillespie! This is goddamn rock ’n’ roll!”
“What am I gonna play?” Pollack said.
“You’re not in the band,” Dylan said.
“Whaddya mean?”
“I mean I don’t want you onstage.”
“Fuck you!”
“No, fuck you!”
While Pollack sulked on the sidelines, Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary, introduced the band: “Coming up now is a person who in a sense has changed the face of folk music to the large American public, because he has brought to it a point of view of a poet. Ladies and gentlemen, the person that’s gonna come up now has a limited amount of time. His name is Bob Dylan!”
Yarrow came backstage.
Pollack punched him in the face.
“Puff this, pansy,” he said.
The band broke into “Maggie’s Farm.” It was terrible, a discordant buzzsaw of noise. Pollack saw the future.
“Fuckin’ rock ’n’ roll!” he shouted.
Next to him, Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger were not happy.
“Augh!” Seeger said. “That song has a socialist message, but you can’t hear it! The instruments are too loud!”
From somewhere, Seeger produced an ax, and charged the power cord. He swung the ax over his head. Pollack tackled Seeger from behind.
“My generation grew up with the rock, old man,” he said. “You can’t stop the rock!”
“Heresy!” said Lomax.
Lomax threw his bloated self on the dog pile. Pollack scratched and spat. Seeger had a fat lip. Pollack kicked Lomax in the nuts.
From the audience, he heard booing. They were booing Bob Dylan. Or were they cheering, or maybe hooting? He couldn’t tell. The guitars produced a horrib
le screeching noise, a cacophony of chaos. It was horrible. It was heaven. The young crowd outnumbered these old men with their sour egalitarian breath. Dylan merely needed to summon revolt from the stage, and they would be history.
Pollack whipped off his leather jacket, tore his collared shirt, and squirted out of his jeans. He burst onto the stage while the band played “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” and began to dance in rhythm to the music. But there wasn’t much rhythm, so he jumped madly, there, in his underwear, twitching, stinky, borne on the wings of rock madness.
“Get lost, Neal,” Dylan hissed.
“WAHHHHHHHHHHGH!” Pollack said, and he launched himself into the crowd.
He landed among ten friends from Cambridge, Massachusetts. In their early twenties, like him, they were looking for something new. They didn’t know exactly what to do when a mostly-naked man in motorcycle boots fell on them from the sky like a stoned dervish. But Pollack had ideas.
Dylan finished his set and went backstage. Seeger, Lomax, Yarrow, and Bikel were waiting for him.
“Bob,” Seeger said, “people are very upset with you.”
“I am one of those upset people,” said Lomax.
“There’s no place for rock music in a folk festival. You have to go out there and play something to calm the crowd down.”
“I only have my electric guitar,” Dylan said.
He began to cry.
“I didn’t mean to upset anyone,” he said.
“I know, Bob,” Seeger said, “I know. Be a good boy. Someone will get you an acoustic guitar.”
Theodore Bikel, to Dylan’s surprise, said, “Pete, you can’t stop the future.”
“Yes, I can,” Seeger said. “Now get out there, Bob, and play some folk music.”
In the crowd, Pollack was leading a stomping chant: “Dylan! Dylan! Dylan! Dylan!”
Pollack grabbed the girl next to him and kissed her, sliding his hand beneath her gingham dress. She melted to his sweaty touch.
“Dylan! Dylan! Dylan!”
In garages across America, the motor was starting to rev. Boys were plugging in their guitars and pounding on their drum sets. Factory loft spaces were getting ready to host parties centered around blotters and monster joints. The sound barrier was about to be broken, and Neal Pollack was getting a hand job from a drunken stranger in front of the stage at the Newport Folk Festival, where it all began. His eyes bugged, his hair slicked back in ecstasy, as the rain soaked him in almighty transformation.