by Neal Pollack
Peter Yarrow took the stage.
“Aw shit!” Pollack said.
“He’s coming,” Yarrow said. “Bobby’s going to get an acoustic guitar….”
“Boo!” Pollack said.
“Hey, Neal,” the girl said. “Pay attention to me.”
Dylan returned, tears streaming down. He played “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” all the time glancing backstage, as if for approval.
“Anyone have an E harmonica?” he asked. “An E harmonica, anyone? Just throw ’em on up!”
Pollack pulled a harmonica out of his underwear and tossed it on stage. He knew Dylan had a plan. He knew that this was the moment he would kick folk music out of the world forever.
Dylan blew into the harp.
“Ew,” said the girl.
Dylan began to sing “Mr. Tambourine Man.”
No, Pollack thought. Not “Mr. Tambourine Man.” That was what they wanted to hear, wanted him to sound like. What they wanted him to play. It was wrong, wrong, wrong, and he suddenly knew exactly why. Neal Pollack’s dominant aesthetic formed that moment. As he later wrote in Crawdaddy:
Rock has to be bad. What’s the point of playing rock if it’s good? You have to push people to the brink. You have to make them want to kill you. Good musicians have no place playing rock ’n’ roll.
Dylan played, and sang, and gazed tearily over his multitudes of fans. We are a generation of obnoxious, self-absorbed bourgeois sheep, Pollack thought. We will be immolated in the fires of history.
The rain came. Pollack opened his mouth, filling it with acidic water. He spat a broad stream of it onto the stage. It caught Dylan between the eyes.
“Judas!” Pollack cried. “Judas!”
PART THREE
GYPSY TIGER IN MY SOUP
1965–1970
In 1965, I graduated from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, with a minor in American history, and moved to New York City. I immediately began to wield a “generational” cultural authority. The editors of the New York Times, Esquire, the Village Voice, Life, Reader’s Digest, and other publications for which I wrote and still write didn’t know what to do with me, a longhaired weirdo in his torn jeans and hooded Mexican sweatshirt who had much to say about a “new” kind of “music” that was “going on” in the “streets.” But though I lived on the Lower East Side, within easy walking distance of Max’s Kansas City, CBGB, and, much later, the Mudd Club, I never felt entirely at home there. I was a reporter, not a homesteader.
Soon after arriving in New York, I met my first wife, who wore a leopard-print eye patch and referred to herself, in her East Village Other column, as “Commie Girl.” It was a dark two-month marriage, marred by deadlines on my end and tranquilizer addiction on hers. But in our brief time together, she transformed my aesthetic.
One day, Commie Girl shot heroin on our fire escape, which overlooked a bleak lot where, every day, Chinese butchers slaughtered anemic hogs.
“You look like a hobo, Paul,” she said. “Get yourself some black leather. We live downtown, for Christ’s sake.”
On that particular day, I had to finish a profile of Ricky Nelson for Time. But the next, I went out and bought two leather jackets, which I continue to wear casually today. I was no longer from the suburb of Chicago in which I was raised, but of the real city. That night I listened to my Chuck Berry records with a fresh mind, while drinking a beer. I’d become a true rock critic.
Now, as I appear on various symposia, speak on my book tours, or lecture at one of the three major American universities where I hold tenure, I think of those wild days that were also rife with responsibility. Do I miss it? Does a dead bird miss the wind? But I also think about my then-naïve and still-developing “revolutionary” aesthetics. Today, I’m glad to have the maturity and perspective truly necessary to understand cultural crosscurrents, which are always current, and crossing.
“I’m sorry, what were you talking about?” Ruth asked.
We were at a present-day party in a Chelsea loft, thrown by a dear friend of mine who’s in charge of artist development marketing for a major record label.
“My intellectual evolution,” I said. “How I’m glad it happened.”
“Oh yes,” she said.
“I’ve really come a long way.”
“Mmm.”
Ruth and I met in 1974. She was a junior at New York University, taking my class on the Rolling Stones and the Birth of the New Hedonism. I barely noticed her among the five hundred other students, until the day she flashed a tantalizing leg from under her long jeans skirt while presenting her brilliant paper “Mick Jagger: Dionysus in Spangles.”
We were married four years later, on Cape Cod.
“Remember our wedding day?” I said.
“Not really,” she said.
“Oh,” said I.
To the left of the catering table, I spotted an enigmatic figure in black T-shirt, black jeans, and wire-rim glasses. He was jotting notes into a well-loved copy of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.
“Hey,” I said. “Is that Lou Reed?”
“Yes,” said Ruth.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Lou, Lou!”
“Oh, shit,” he said.
Lou Reed dropped his book and his chicken satay and ran for the door.
“Wait,” I said. “I need to talk to you!”
He fled the party and burst into the hall. I gained on him quickly. The elevator wasn’t coming. He got to the exit door and started running down the stairs. I pride myself on my aerobic fitness. But Lou Reed was fast and sleek.
Lou Reed! Poet of my heart! Intemperate fickle lecher of my loins! Are you a god, or dappled tragic figure from mythos? Do you dare fly too close to the sun, or do you gaze at yourself in the pond? Or are you Hippocrates, oathless, the sickness or the cure? From whence you came you shall never return. Because what is a little S&M and cross-dressing to a glam god with shiny boots of leather? Nothing, as we are to you, even though you birthed us all; ultimately, we are powerless children of Zeus. We sprang from your head. The Velvet Underground, the greatest band that no one ever heard, lives on in dorm rooms up and down the eastern seaboard, but especially in New England, and your attitude has inspired a thousand aborted road trips. Banal? Yes! You don’t care about us, and that’s why we love you, Lou Reed. You are the bard of no bullshit, which in itself is the ultimate bullshit! See how we run. See how we run toward you, alongside you, Lou Reed, as you break the mold that made us all.
Lou! Reed! Lou Reed!
You are running from me now, through the streets of lost New York, and I feel you in my heart, you are panting in the streets, knocking over falafel carts, and I want to talk to you, my Lou, I am waiting for your words, have research that needs to be done, and I’m getting very old, and you’re working on an opera with Peter Sellars about the Armenian genocide, another step in your evolution as an artist, and you are the god of cool, and you think that I’m a fool, and we’re in a weed-strewn lot, former tenement that’s now home to a former dot-com head who is starting his own magazine about how to start a magazine. We’ve forgotten how to breathe. You are wheezing and afraid. Oh, Lou Reed.
“What do you want?” he said.
“I’m writing a book.”
“Another one?”
“Yes, but this one is different.”
“Why?”
“It’s about Pollack.”
Lou Reed grabbed my shirt and singed my mind with hot poet’s fire. He said:
“Don’t ever mention that name in my presence again.”
A dew-eyed curly haired kid walked into the offices of Pickwick Records on Staten Island.
“I’m looking for a job,” he said. “I’m a songwriter.”
The receptionist directed him to a back office. He opened the door to find a guy maybe three years older than him sitting behind a desk, talking on the phone. The floor was spilling over with stacks of newspapers, magazines, coffee cups, paperback
pulp novels, album covers, half-eaten doughnuts and hamburgers, windup toys, bad cheesecake photocopies of Betty Page doing unspeakable things to pommel horses and bearskin rugs, and many other things.
The guy swung around. His shirt was covered in grease and bits of moldy meat. He simultaneously shouted into the phone and a tape recorder.
“Screw you, Grossman!” he said. “Who needs your goddamn touring schedule anyway?”
He hung up.
“Who are you?” he said.
“I’m Lou Reed,” the kid said. “I want to be a songwriter.”
The guy gave a long laugh. His belly buckled.
“Is that right?” he said. “Well, I’m Neal Pollack, and I want to be a goddamn astronaut.”
Reed was confused.
“Lemme play you a record,” Pollack said.
He had a turntable. He put on the Byrds’s Turn! Turn! Turn!
“You like this?” he said.
“No,” said Lou Reed. “I hate folk rock.”
“Goddamn right,” Pollack said. “It’s shit.”
He handed Reed the record.
“Break it,” he said.
“Right here?”
“Right now.”
Reed found a free corner of floor and smashed the record.
“Did that feel good?” Pollack asked.
“Yeah.”
“Good! You’re hired! Where you from?”
“I just graduated from Syracuse University.”
“Hmm.”
“I studied English with Delmore Schwartz.”
“He’s not a writer.”
“Yes he is.”
“No,” Pollack said. “I AM A WRITER! The living incarnation. There is no one else.”
“OK,” said Lou Reed.
“I need you to work on a song for me,” said Pollack. “We do surf and hot-rod music here. Nothing but crap. But all real music is crap. Remember that. Anyway. This radio station in California says the kids need a new dance. I came up with something called the Ostrich. So far, I’ve got this:
Well put your head in the sand!
Ostrich!
Shake your tail in the air!
Ostrich!
Do the BRAAAAWK BRAAAAWK BRAAAAWK!
BRAAAAWK BRAAAAWK BRAAAAWK!
Ostrich! Oh Yeah!
Can’t seem to finish it though.”
“Let me think about that for a second,” Reed said.
He thought about it for a second, and then sang, in perfect monotone:
Well put your head in the sand.
I said put your head in the sand, sand.
Yeah put your head in the sand.
You wanna be my man.
Just put your head in the sand.
I’m just waiting for my man
To put his head in the cold cold sand.
“That’s perfect!” Pollack said. “You’re hired!”
“You already hired me.”
“Right!”
Reed looked at his shoes.
“You should form a band, record this shit!” Pollack said.
“OK,” said Reed.
Pollack stood on the desk, unzipped his pants, and urinated at Reed’s feet.
“I had to do that,” he said.
“No problem.”
“Reed? You Jewish?”
“Yes.”
“Good! You a junkie?”
“No.”
“You look like a junkie. You’re a good-looking guy.”
“Thanks,” Reed said.
“Let’s go to the bathroom,” said Pollack.
Neal Pollack stuffed a towel under the door of the stall. He tied off with a rubber tube, and he showed Reed how. Their arms swelled and purpled, tensed and relaxed.
“Stole this needle from Mount Sinai,” Pollack said. “The hospital, that is.”
They both felt the cool rush of almighty heroin in their blood. Suddenly the Ostrich wasn’t much of a worry for them anymore. Pollack looked at Reed, tender, lithe, breathing softly, smiling on the bathroom floor, slender, beautiful and challenging.
“Man,” Pollack said, “I do this every day.”
“Cool,” said Reed.
“You know what else I do every day?”
“What?”
“Remove your pants,” said Pollack.
“OK,” said Lou Reed.
Neal Pollack offered his loft apartment on Clinton Street to Lou for rehearsal space. The loft was eight thousand square feet and very expensive. It had quickly become a center of neighborhood social life. Freaks, weirdos, and street hustlers stopped by at all times of the day to score, and sometimes stayed for days.
“Holy shit, Neal,” Reed said. “How can you afford this?”
“Elvis ran over my father,” Pollack said. “I got the insurance money.”
Lou laughed.
“No,” Neal said. “Seriously.”
Lou brought his friends Sterling Morrison and John Cale. Other musicians rotated in and out, including for a time the director John Cassavetes, who made a movie about those days that he refuses to screen. There was always someone having sex in front of the band while they practiced, but they didn’t care, because the space was free. They would sometimes play for forty-eight hours straight without stopping. It was minimalistic music that sounded like nothing you could hear on the radio. Cale played viola and bass and sometimes guitar. Lou did most of the singing. Neal sometimes joined in, but mostly he just smoked pot and sat in a papasan, masturbating.
One night, Pollack got up from the chair and started to moan a song. He said he’d written it with Lou, but Lou swore he’d never heard a word. Halfway through, the band put down their instruments to go drink some beer. Pollack didn’t notice. He went on for many hours, repeating the lyrics over and over again. That song was, technically, the Velvet Underground’s first. It’s been called “Never Get Emotionally Involved with Man, Woman, Beast, or Child,” or “Vein,” and it went like this:
In the mornings I get lost
Near an alley with no name
And I wish I could escape
To a place beyond the world
Where the pirates drink their tears
Where the wenches like to slap
My pathetic drooping face
And I’m so so so alone.
Can’t you see me on TV?
Oh,
My vein.
Shining mistress in the dark
Where you been since I was born?
Feel the fat and angry crush
Of your boots against my chest
When my skin begins to leak
Bearded streets begin to bleed
There is nothing on TV
And the radio is blank
And the Negroes roam the streets
Oh,
My vein.
Johnny’s parties are so dull
They don’t start ’til 2 A.M.
Want to burn Chelsea Hotel
All the hippies need to die
The black leather needs to fade
The mad monster in my shorts
Feels a hunger with no face
And there’s nothing on TV
And there’s nothing on TV
Oh,
My vein.
Feel the vein run through my arm
Feel the blood run through my vein
Silky platelets in the blood
What are platelets anyway?
And I’m jonesing for some weed
It is not a gateway drug
Gypsy tiger in my soup
With a needle in his arm.
And I’m dying every day.
When Pollack stopped singing, it was noon. His hands trembled; little pools of bloody sweat formed on his arms. He was exhausted.
“Lou?” he said. “Where are you, Lou?”
The Velvet Underground had left. After that night, they rented their own place on Ludlow.
They were the greatest band of all time.
Neal Pollack got the Vel
vet Underground a gig playing R&B covers at the Café Bizarre, a tourist trap in Greenwich Village. One night Pollack came into Café Bizarre shaking and twittering some nonsense about “dumping Allen Ginsberg in the East River.” He’d been on a five-day amphetamine binge. He was also completely hairless, both on his body and his head.
“I gave myself a wax treatment,” he said. “I’ve become a sleek warrior.”
Pollack had heard that Andy Warhol was looking for a hairless androgyne for a film he was working on called Andy Warhol Presents a Hairless Androgyne. He went to the Factory and had a screen test.
“I AM A HAIRLESS ANDROGYNE!” he shouted, while a Martha and the Vandellas record played in the background. “The police can whip my wrists!”
“Hey, Neal,” Warhol said to him, “you’re a superstar.”
Pollack popped a couple pills and trembled on the sofa.
“So can I be in your movie?” he said.
“Gee, I dunno,” Warhol said. Turning to his assistant, he said, “Paul, can Neal be in my movie?”
“No,” said Paul Morrissey.
“Sorry, Neal,” Warhol said. “You can’t be in my movie.”
“Let me take you to see this band,” Pollack said.
“Gee, I dunno,” Andy said. “Rock ’n’ roll makes me nervous.”
Wrapped only in a leather towel, a mystery entered the room, a sleek brown-eyed blonde who wore weirdness like other women wore thigh-high boots.
“Wubba wubba woo!” Pollack said.
Pollack was wearing black leather pants, a black leather shirt, and a black leather jacket, along with black leather sunglasses and leather socks. He lit a joint and offered Nico a puff.
“I’m Neal Pollack,” he said.
“Yeah, I heard about you from the Rolling Stones,” Nico said. “What are you doing in New York?”
“Nothing much,” said Pollack. “Just working on my novel and living the bisexual drug addict’s dream.”
“Andy,” Nico said, “I’m SO bored. When do I get to sing?”
January 1966. Pollack took a bottle of whiskey from the bathroom sink, slugged it, and squatted. It was 3 A.M. His house was empty. He braced himself on the toilet and saw his reflection in the shimmering water. The cold porcelain and the even colder air made him shiver. His stomach hitched and erupted, his spine arched into the air. After a few minutes, it was over. He collapsed by the bowl, his breaths coming in heavy, bearlike sighs.