Another Little Piece of My Heart (6 page)

Unlike his minions, Andy was always welcoming to me. We'd walk around the Factory, and he'd show me the stuff he was working on. I had the impression that, under the posturing and promo, he loved making things. I came to believe it was the same kind of relief for him that writing was for me. I didn't try to do a formal Q&A—I'd seen him reduce reporters to idiots with a calculated set of put-ons. But he never ran his vacant-stare routine on me. He made me feel that I was talking to another introverted working-class guy. This was a side of him that the media knew nothing about, and it's probably why, in years to come, he would forge a bond with the young Haitian-American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, back when this boy genius was writing graffiti on the streets. He was another ambitious outsider, like Andy and me.

I wrote up the evening at the Exploding Plastic Inevitable for my cultural criticism class. The professor was a veteran film critic named Judith Crist, as crusty as a woman who had risen in the male world of newspapering could be. I must have seemed to her like a long-haired twerp with no future in print. But she was kind enough to offer me advice: “Cut your hair and learn to spell if you want to get a job in journalism.”

The faculty had every reason to worry about me. Though they inveighed against the New Journalism, even they had to admit that there was a market for it. But none of the writers in those hip magazines was under thirty. They were still rebelling against the strictures of the 1950s. To a kid like me, these conflicts were beside the point. But there was no way I could break into their ranks. I would have to find a beat that reflected my own expertise, and a venue willing to let me work it. By the time I graduated from Columbia in 1966, I had stumbled upon both. “You're bringing the whole earning curve of the class down,” the career counselor at Columbia groaned when I mentioned that I would be earning twenty dollars a week. But I would have paid the editors for a chance to appear in the
Village Voice
.

In the years since I'd crossed the Bronx to find the only newsstand that would carry it, the
Voice
had doubled in circulation. By 1965, it was the hometown paper of every New Yorker who felt too hip for the
Times
—and they were legion. Hip was the new black, and the
Voice
served as a kind of social register, admitting some to the hot center and banishing others. It was a bizarre system, eminently corruptible, since no
one really knew what hip meant. To me this was another way to fill a vacant self. I was determined to be part of it.

Though I would soon become the
Voice
's first full-time rock critic, it wasn't music that got me an interview with the editor. It was a book I'd written about the new drug culture on college campuses. I'd sold an article on the subject to a national magazine aimed at students, and a publisher offered me a contract with a $750 advance. I took time off from j-school to travel around the country, interviewing young users of marijuana and their dealers, who were also their friends. This struck me as a novel arrangement, one that belied the image of demonic pushers and drug fiends. And then there was acid. In San Francisco I saw something that, as I would soon learn to say, “blew my mind.” It was called the Trips Festival, and it featured loud music, a blobby extravaganza called a light show, and free-flowing LSD. In early 1966, the drug was still legal, and its advocates called these events “acid tests.” I wrote about the culture they were creating, but my editor was not amused. He added a chapter called “A Guide for Worried Parents,” and he changed the title I'd chosen for the book. So it wasn't called
Mr. Tambourine Man
as I'd intended (in tribute to the Dylan song), but
One in Seven: Drugs on Campus
. This was the first—but hardly the last—time an editor would stick me with a humiliating title. Whenever it happened, I felt like a pawn in a rigged game.

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.

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 art 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.