Never Mind the Pollacks

by Neal Pollack

  “Widow!” I shout. “Widow!”

  “Hi!” she says.

  This is my chance to ask her all the questions I’ve ever wanted.

  “Are you glad to be here?” I say.

  “I am,” she says. “It’s all about being liberal, which is very important.”

  “How’s your new album coming along?”

  “Great!”

  “Oh, that’s really cool. Listen, I’m writing a book about Neal Pollack, and I was wondering…”

  The Widow’s eyes fill with cold, hard hate. She looks at my tape recorder.

  “Is that on?” she says. “Because I’m not talking to you anymore if it is.”

  “Buh, buh, buh,” I say.

  She grabs my recorder and throws it against the wall. Her goons appear. They toss me onto the street. My pants rip at the knee. They’re the only pair I have left.

  Because I have nothing else to do, I walk, which is easier in L.A. than you might imagine. Wandering past all the coffee shops, record stores, and empty furniture warehouses, I look into the hills at a million lights. Neal Pollack probably walked these same streets when he arrived here in 1980. He knew L.A. better than anyone, just as he subsequently knew Seattle and so many other points on the open American road. There was nothing glamorous about Neal Pollack’s L.A., Neal Pollack’s America.

  Pollack and his Do-It-Yourself message defined the ’80s, the true, noncommercial ’80s. He didn’t care how anyone felt about him, which was good, because everyone wanted him dead. As Jello Biafra said during an early Dead Kennedys show in someone’s basement in Colorado Springs, “Don’t hate the media! Become the media! Unless the media is Neal Pollack. Then you can hate the media.”

  The list of bands he influenced and subsequently alienated in L.A. alone is almost too long to believe: the Alley Cats, the Avengers, the Bags, Black Flag, Black Randy and the Metro Squad, the Controllers, and the Dickies, with whom he was once stuck in a pagoda with Tricia Toyota. Then there were the Dils, the Eyes, F-Word, and the Flesh Eaters. Every night for one memorable week at their pad in the Cambridge Apartments, the Go-Gos blew Pollack beyond an inch of his life. He also befriended and betrayed Hal Negro and the Satintones, the Mau Maus, the Nerves, the Randoms, the Screamers, the Skulls, the Last, Wall of Voodoo, the Weirdos, X, and the Zero.

  “But Darby Crash and the Germs were the greatest of them all,” he wrote in Slash. “I remember one night I was dry-humping Lita Ford in the alley behind the Masque, and Darby came up and said, ‘I need a ride to the Whisky A Go-Go.’ Then he threw up all over me.”

  At midnight, I’m still walking, lost in memory. A limousine pulls up. The Widow pops out the sunroof.

  “Neal Pollack was a liar and a thief!” she says. “And he still owes me five dollars! Put that in your book!”

  Well, at least I got one quote out of her.

  In the summer of 1982, Neal Pollack started sponsoring a monthly “Make Your Own Fanzine” workshop in the basement of the San Bernadino garage in which he was living illegally. The first two months, no one showed up. The third month, because of a promotional article in Flipside, fifty people stopped by, but Pollack told them to come back the next day because he was in the middle of a nap. When they did, he wasn’t home.

  The fourth month, he got two kids in their early twenties, one of them an enormous Native American of some stripe, the other a pimply, nondescript white guy. Pollack blearily opened the garage door and found them arguing. They were both holding guitars.

  “America is a fascist police state!” said the fat one.

  “No, it’s a bourgeois democracy,” said the other one.

  “We live under an oppressive regime. Open your mind!”

  “All of us are capitalists at the core!”

  “Your ideals have been corrupted by the network news!”

  They looked up and saw their hero. He was pondering them carefully.

  “Oh, wow,” said the fat one. “Neal Pollack!”

  “We’re huge fans,” said the other guy.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Mike Watt. This is D. Boon. We read your stuff in Creem and Punk.”

  “I’m sorry,” Pollack said.

  “We started a band,” said D. Boon, the big Indian. “I wrote a song. Wanna hear it?”

  Before Pollack could reply, the guys began to play. Pollack looked at his watch. By the time he looked up, the song was over. The guitar work was very sincere, the lyrics heartfelt:

  How can you have a girl

  When there’s war in Nicaragua?

  Is Ronald Reagan your President,

  Or is it Che Guevara?

  That’s the question I ask myself every day.

  And it hurts my feelings.

  Punk rock changed my life

  It made me what I am today.

  Three hundred years of French racism

  But I still want to see the Eiffel Tower

  Go on tour in England

  And make more SST Records

  Television fills my head with contradictory images

  I hate new wave music

  But I love you.

  The song ended.

  “French people aren’t racist!” said Mike Watt.

  “Yes, they are,” said D. Boon.

  What have I created? said Pollack to himself.

  “What’d you think of our song, Neal?” asked D. Boon.

  “Very nice, boys,” Pollack said.

  “Is it going to make us rich, like the Rolling Stones?” said Watt.

  “No,” Pollack said. “Rock shouldn’t make you rich. That’s a myth. You need to Do It Yourself. You must live econo.”

  A few weeks later, Pollack approached a basketball court next to a half-pipe, where a hardcore show was scheduled to take place. His aesthetic had changed, to suit the changing times. Now his head was shaved. He wore athletic shorts, no shirt, hi-top sneakers, and long socks pulled up to his knees. On his chest was a tattoo of a skull, with pus and worms oozing from its eyes, and the words “WEALTH IS RACISM.” This is what Elvis would have been doing if he were a kid today, Pollack thought. We are his legacy.

  In front of Black Flag, a young man prowled. He was the band’s ninth lead singer in three months. Four had quit because of “creative differences” with Greg Ginn, two had OD’ed, and one had stolen six dollars from the SST Records cash box. The latest had accidentally gotten locked in the freezer of the Pizza Hut where he worked and suffered severe frostbite. Ginn subsequently fired him because he wasn’t working for an independent pizzeria.

  Pollack could see, though, that this new kid was different. For one, he and the kid were wearing the exact same clothes. For two, the kid exuded an air of authentic menace. The crowd stamped its feet like bulls about to be released from the chute. The sound check alone could have stripped the asphalt off a convenience-store parking lot.

  Pollack took a hit of nitrous and plunged into the throng.

  The first note sounded a tsunami. The singer launched himself into the crowd. He punched someone in the nose. The crowd launched him back. He grabbed the microphone and screamed.

  THE CITY IS DEAD

  LET’S PAINT IT RED

  I NEED SOME MORE

  LIFE IS A WHORE

  YOU’VE NEVER BEEN

  THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

  THE COPS

  WILL HAVE

  YOUR HEAD

  BEER AND WEED

  BEER AND WEED

  ALL I NEED IS

  BEER AND WEED

  I’VE GOT A GUN

  I’M HAVING FUN

  I’M SO AFRAID

  THIS IS A RAID

  THIS COPS WILL BEAT YOU

  WHILE THEY GET PAID

  YOU’LL ROT

  UNDER

  THE SUN

  I NEVER READ

  I NEVER BLEED

  I NEVER NEED

  GIMME SOME WEED

  GIMME

  SOME GODDAMN

  WEED!

  BE
ER AND WEED

  BEER AND WEED

  ALL I NEED IS

  BEER AND WEED

  JACK IN THE BOX

  ASSES AND COCKS

  CALIFORNIA DREAMING

  CALIFORNINA SCREAMING

  THE COPS WILL GIVE YOU

  A CALIFORNIA REAMING

  THEY’LL STRIP

  YOU TO

  YOUR SOCKS

  Henry Rollins, who was once Henry Garfield, pointed at Pollack in the audience. He emitted a long, low, guttural moan.

  “Traitor!” he shouted. “Rock critic!”

  The crowd closed around Pollack. He was caught in a steel-booted gauntlet of pain. He felt a tooth loosen, then another, and then his liver. Never before had he seen so much hate and frustration in youthful eyes. This was more anguish than he’d bargained for. These kids were evil.

  Something sharp stuck into his upper thigh.

  “I’m going to die,” he said. “And I’ve never had a son.”

  The band kept grinding. Rollins kept screaming. A wail of sirens, and the cops charged. Some of the kids ran in one direction, some in another. Some of them ran at the police phalanx. The cops brushed them aside. It was the band they wanted. They bashed Black Flag over their heads, but Black Flag kept playing. The cops cuffed them, but Black Flag kept playing. Nothing could stop Black Flag.

  Pollack was bruised, bleeding, and confused. He stood on the edge of the playground. A van pulled up. The side door opened. Pollack smelt seven unwashed young men.

  D. Boon poked his head out.

  “Neal!” he said. “We’re the Minutemen! We’re going on tour! We’re doing it ourselves!”

  “Uhhh,” Pollack said.

  Mike Watt was driving.

  “You look terrible!” he said. “You’ve inspired us! Get in the van!”

  In an interview years later, Watt said, “Bringing Pollack on tour with us was the dumbest decision our band ever made.”

  Nothing has been written about the Minutemen’s first U.S. tour. Years later, Mike Watt was to say, “We left L.A. young and sincere with such high hopes, and returned beaten cynical old men.” They fell into a trap that so many bands had before. They gave Neal Pollack control.

  For the first twenty-four hours, everything went great. Pollack didn’t drink anything, not even water. They did a show in San Diego in the backyard of a guy D. Boon had met at a 7-Eleven, in front of almost two hundred kids, and made thirty dollars each.

  “Let me handle the money for you,” Pollack said. “Also, I’ll book all your shows.”

  In Phoenix, on the second day, Pollack arranged for the band to play in a downtown parking lot. They unpacked their gear and started playing to their audience, comprised of five men who were in line for the Salvation Army soup kitchen next door. Boon insisted on doing the full set. “These are the guys we’re trying to reach,” he said. “They’re working class.” Within minutes, they’d all been arrested, except for Pollack, who’d easily blended in with the soup kitchen clients. He spent all the San Diego profits on bail.

  That night, in his journal, Pollack wrote, “There’s never been a less rock ’n’ roll place on earth than Phoenix, Arizona, and no music will ever come from here, except for the Meat Puppets. It is a godforsaken baked asshole of ignorance and blind consumerism, a festering nightmare. If god picked the lice from his armpits and flicked them to earth to die, he could find no better resting place than Phoenix. Now I have to go rob a liquor store so we can get to Albuquerque.”

  No one showed up at the Albuquerque show. It was at a Hardee’s. The next night’s San Antonio taqueria gig went marginally better, because the band at least got free tacos. In Austin, they played at Liberty Lunch in front of 350 people, and sold albums to every one. Watt sold three guitar picks to one guy for a hundred dollars.

  “Man,” he said, “Austin rules! We should move here!”

  “No,” Pollack said. “It’s too gentrified.”

  “No, it’s not,” Watt said.

  “It will be,” said Pollack.

  Still, they’d made enough money in Austin to keep them going, and the tour really began. Pollack had them on a grueling schedule. They played sixty-five shows in thirty-two days, eating on the fly and sleeping in the van, or, occasionally, onstage. They had six pounds of pot in the van, which, in retrospect, wasn’t a very good idea. From Austin, they drove to Houston, and then to Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, Asheville, Winston-Salem, Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Charlotte, Columbia, Charleston, Jacksonville, Tampa, Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Atlanta, and Athens.

  “Stop the car,” Pollack said. “Do you hear that?”

  “Hear what?” said D. Boon.

  “It’s the sound of a music scene coming together.”

  “There’s no music scene in Athens, Georgia,” said Watt.

  “Oh,” Pollack said, “you’re wrong. In fact, I attended a house party here on Valentine’s Day, 1977. A band played a six-song set twice in a row. You may have heard of them. The B-52’s.”

  “They suck!” D. Boon said.

  “Yes,” said Pollack, “they’re authentic.”

  He grabbed the wheel.

  “Turn left!”

  “Goddamn it!” Watt said.

  “Now a sharp right! Here. Drive down that street. There’s a dirt road at the end of that cul-de-sac. Go down that.”

  “Why?”

  “House party,” Pollack said.

  Sure enough, at the end of the dirt road was a house party.

  “Who’s playing tonight?” Pollack asked the door guy.

  “Tiny Toy, Love Tractor, Pylon, and the Side Effects,” the door guy said.

  “Fuck!” said Pollack. “I love those bands!”

  The stage was outside. The keg was in the kitchen. On the couch sat a skinny, abstract guy with two women on either side of him. He was talking to them about many things.

  “We’re sitting on a couch,” he said. “Or maybe we’re not. It could also be a dream, or a waking thought. There are things that we just take for granted and things that we are very quick and very easy to dismiss and not think about or say, ‘Oh, that’s bad and I don’t want to go there’ or, ‘Oh, I don’t know what I must’ve eaten to make me dream that.’"

  “Bullshit!” Pollack sneezed.

  “Excuse me?” said Michael Stipe.

  “Nothing,” said Pollack. “Please continue.”

  He did.

  “Most people miss the point that I’m trying to make in my songs, but that’s OK. I’ll accept that it’s a beautiful song and I’ll let it be one. I’ll change MY take on it to allow it to be that. For instance, when I sing about a moral kiosk—”

  “What’s a moral kiosk?” Pollack asked.

  “It’s a phrase I thought of while listening to Patti Smith’s Horses.”

  “Get bent!” Pollack said.

  “What’s that?” asked one of the girls, who was looking at Stipe with a twinkle of love.

  “A beautiful album,” Stipe said. “I have it right here on cassette.”

  He went over to the stereo and put Horses on. Patti Smith screeched from the speakers. Pollack dropped to the ground and twitched.

  “No! No! No!” he said.

  From his back jeans pocket he produced a copy of Van Halen II.

  “Now this is music!” he said.

  He ripped the Patti Smith cassette from the player. A spool of magnetic tape spilled onto the floor. Within seconds, Van Halen was ripping through the party.

  Michael Stipe stood up. Pollack looked at him. Jesus, he was tall. What was with that stupid cap?

  “That music promotes rape,” he said.

  “Well, I hope so!” Pollack said.

  “I know who you are, Pollack,” Stipe said. “And you’re not welcome at this party.”

  Neal Pollack punched Michael Stipe in the face. It was an action, Stipe later said, that prompted him to take Pollack’s name out of “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And
I Feel Fine).” Stipe staggered backward, but he didn’t fall. The band outside stopped playing. A whole mess of country folk with a somewhat hippie aesthetic moved toward the patio door. Pollack glanced over his shoulder. The Minutemen were backing up toward the front of the house.

  “Run!” he said.

  They played Richmond, Annapolis, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Trenton, Jersey City, and Newark, skipping New York City because Pollack didn’t feel like seeing anybody he knew there. That was when the band realized something was awry. But they kept going because they had no other way of getting home. Pollack had taken all their driver’s licenses and put them in a locked box, he said, “for your protection.”

  So they hit Boston, Burlington, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, Toledo, Lexington, Bloomington, Indianapolis, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison, Minneapolis, Iowa City, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Lawrence, where the show was attended solely by William S. Burroughs, followed by Omaha, Denver, Boulder, Colorado Springs, Fort Collins, Laramie, Salt Lake City, Boise, Eugene, and Portland.

  In Seattle, they played at a construction site at midnight.

  “There aren’t any clubs in this town that book unsigned bands,” Pollack said. “Believe me, I looked.”

  After the show, the band held a meeting. It was decided to slip two Valiums into Pollack’s whiskey. About an hour later, the van moved slowly down a small-town Washington state highway. The side door opened and Pollack tumbled out.

  The van screeched away. Pollack rolled down a hill, but still he slept. A few hours later, it was dawn. He woke to the sound of timber mills shutting down because of the recession.

  He stirred, barely, and knew what had happened. Like always, once a band got big, they dropped him. It was OK. He’d see the Minutemen in the afterlife for sure, and then he’d get them, those ungrateful bitches.

  He looked up. A sign read “Aberdeen, Washington. Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.”

  “ABERDEEN?” he said.

  Man, he thought. I could really use a doughnut.

  The front page of the Aberdeen Desperate Shopper drifted by him in the wind. He could make out the headline: LAST DOUGHNUT

  SHOP IN TOWN CLOSES.

  “Shit,” he said.

  Thin raindrops fell, followed by thick ones. Pollack sat by the side of the road, waiting for the rain to stop. It didn’t. An hour later, he decided he’d wait another hour. It still didn’t stop. He didn’t care, until about four hours after that, when it was still raining. Max and Kansas City were soaked to the bone, their wet fur pasted against his chest.