Another Little Piece of My Heart (7 page)

But I was still little Richie from the Bronx. When I entered a room of tall and trendy people, every muscle in my body twitched. I was sure the murmuring I heard was barely suppressed laughter. Fortunately, I'd learned from Andy Warhol how to croon “Oh, wow!” to any comment. I adopted a version of rock-critic drag that was even more distancing—a velvet cape, satin pants, and silver boots. It was how I thought a member of my profession should dress, and I was desperate to look like the real thing. Oddly enough, it worked. Before long, I was on my way to an encounter with that whirling sixties gyre of new money and brittle fame that could touch down and scoop up a schmuck like me.

A growing pack of sycophants pursued me. I had never experienced such grasping behavior, and it made me feel like I was standing on sand that could liquefy at any moment. But I couldn't resist the attention, or the novel power to put people down. You were expected to do that if you were hip. Since status was so intangible, insults were a major instrument of ranking. Dylan was a master of this craft—check out his tirade to a hapless journalist in the film
Don't Look Back
. I took my cue from him, writing that Judy Collins, a highly competent singer of artfully folky songs, could “put Jesus to sleep on the cross.” I told myself that nastiness was necessary to preserve the rough-edged integrity of the music, but it had more to do with feeling like a dork in disguise. I mocked so no one would dare mock me.

In person, I was anything but aggressive, especially with the rockers I interviewed. I would sit there with an adoring expression, too shy in their presence to ask more than a few questions in a soft voice. I had no choice but to let them run the conversation, and that usually worked well. They had interesting stories to tell, tales of brutal fathers or rejection by their peers, and how music had been a way to escape from their pain. Rock was for them what writing was for me: a free, safe space. I, too, was a misfit transformed, so I could describe their feelings from inside.

Watching rockers perform left me with a longing so deep that I could only make sense of the emotion by putting it into words. It was the way I'd felt about my neighbors in the project, with their outsize sexiness. Now, that same erotic vitality was prancing and preening before me, guitars pressing on crotches so that the song went right from the groin into the audience. The music insisted on the kind of body-and-soul orgasm I had never experienced (not yet). I wanted to capture that rush. I yearned for an ecstasy so great that it would shatter my doubts about myself forever.

Dan Wolfe didn't edit
Voice
writers; he counseled them. It was a therapeutic experience to meet with him. He said little but it always seemed momentous, even when it was bullshit. And he offered this diagnosis of me: “Most people escape from reality. You escape
into
it.” In my case, he was right. I fled from myself by plunging into spectacles, the more extreme the better. I was hungry for any sensation that could suspend my self-consciousness. This need to lose myself was what made me a good reporter of the scene, and it turned out to be a major asset in 1966. At a time when no one knew how to judge anything new, when nothing was defined by its past or definite in its future, when the culture seemed to be floating in a boundless fluidity, journalists were the most credible authorities. I was that kind of guide to rock, though I knew hardly anything about music. All I knew was what it felt like to be in awe.

There was a small group of young reporters who understood rock the way fans did, and we quickly connected. My best friend in that crew was an Australian named Lillian Roxon. She's best known for her rock encyclopedia, but when we met in 1966, she was just a New York
correspondent for the
Sydney Morning Herald
. Lillian was a major music devotee and an unlikely groupie.

I'll digress briefly to explain that term as it was understood in the sixties. A groupie was a woman who fucked the band. It was an enviable role in those days—the best groupies were legendary. I remember several of them joining forces to make casts of their favorite rock-star penises in an erect state. They called themselves the Plaster Casters, and they actually exhibited their trophies. These were fans as courtesans.

Life was hard for a woman in music journalism, especially a sometime freelancer and sometime novelist who was asthmatic and overweight, as Lillian was. She died of an asthma attack at the age of forty-one.

Because we were both earning a pittance, we shared our assets, and one of them was a talented photographer named Linda Eastman—later known as Linda McCartney. Linda and I had something in common, a love of rockers, though hers was more, let's say, corporeal. To call Linda a groupie would be to understate her allure. She was a major New York attraction for visiting musicians, and thanks to her I got to interview rock stars who had never heard of the
Village Voice
. Linda would bring me along on a shoot, and while she was setting up I would do the interview, trying to distract Prince Charming from preening for her. Then I would leave the two of them alone. That was how I met Donovan, the British folksinger turned proto-hippie. When I arrived at his hotel room, he was sitting yoga style on an ottoman between two Afghan hounds. I didn't have to fish for a lead; the author of an anti-American song with the line “As you fill your glasses with the wine of murdered Negroes” was ready for his close-up, dressed in a kaftan.

Soon I didn't need Linda Eastman to enter the hip rock hotels of New York: They knew me at the Albert and the Gramercy. I saw a lot of messy rooms, stepped around piles of half-eaten debris, learned to avoid tripping on liquor bottles. Little by little I became a fixture on the local music scene, consisting of a few clubs and, in the wee hours, when everything else was closed, the Brasserie up on Park Avenue. Our ringmaster was Danny Fields, the wry editor of a fan sheet called
Tiger Beat
. (So many pictures of David Cassidy; so little time!) We were writers without a genre. The music industry didn't know what to
make of us, and the literary world didn't notice. But because the
Voice
reached a cultivated audience, I got to cross over. I mingled with John Lindsay, New York's upper-crust mayor, who always came to the paper's Christmas party, but I also prowled the lowbrow corridors of the Brill Building.

All that remained of Tin Pan Alley by the sixties was a plaque on West 28th Street. But the Brill Building, just north of Times Square, housed more than 160 music businesses and hordes of songwriters. Carole King and Neil Diamond churned out hits there before they got to sing their own lyrics. The place was haunted by the ghosts of shysters who had bought the rights to doo-wop hits from black kids for (as it were) a song. Legend had it that one group hung the middle-aged owner of their tune out of the window until he agreed to sign over the rights. But this building was also home to publicists—a plague of them, it seemed. Many were holdouts from the days when promoting pop stars meant making them seem clean-cut. They were baffled by the new crop of bad boys with college degrees. I still remember the unfortunate woman who issued press releases under the heading “Gnus for Youze.” I hated having to rely on flacks like her for story leads, probably because they reminded me of the hapless inner salesman I was trying to suppress. Even worse, they often called me “Rich, baby.”

The only person I allowed to get away with that was Murray the K. The best radio DJs, and he was one, had a sheer love of hustle, and they hustled what they loved. Murray (who legally changed his birth name, Kaufman, to “the K”) had an uncanny ability to insert himself into any scene. Only he would have dared to call himself the Fifth Beatle, but the Fab Four let him get away with it. To judge from the smiles in the photos they took with Murray, the Beatles loved his shtick as much as I did. “You're what's happening, baby,” he would say to the latest sensation, whoever that was. He had me on his show several times, and he let me program records. I played songs that would have never gotten airtime, including “Heroin” by the Velvet Underground. This was not exactly a drug-prevention jingle. As Lou Reed droned, “It's my wife and it's my life,” Murray blanched. He must have thought I would get him thrown off the radio, and after that he didn't call me baby.

Into this den of venality and vitality stepped the Brits. I was well prepared for them. I'd been to London and come home with Beatle bangs and a Victorian fireman's coat from Carnaby Street. I figured that
I'd bond with British rockers by dressing in the right gear, but I could never master the art of androgyny like a young Englishman. To them I must have looked like a Hasid in an Aubrey Beardsley print. And never mind my attempts to trade on our shared working-class roots. I was just another necessary hustler to them, and they suffered me, which is hardly the same thing as confiding. Even if they'd wanted to open up, many of them couldn't, since they were stoned, and not just on grass. It was terrible to see rockers nod on heroin, but I didn't blow their cover in print. The drug laws were so severe that the only moral response was to never rat on a junkie.

I was always relieved to find musicians who were merely manic. That's what I hoped it would be like to interview the Who. Several years before the release of
Tommy
, they were already my favorite British band (not counting the Beatles). Their songs were unlike anything in rock—acerbic, anthemic, influential in unexpected ways. I've always regarded them as the creators of the oratorical pop style that shaped groups like Pink Floyd and Queen. And their unsparing affect was a real antidote to the joviality of the Beatles. They were roughnecks as aesthetes. I was psyched to meet them.

The Who were performing at a theater in Manhattan when I got my chance. Their dressing room was backstage, at the top of a narrow open staircase that twisted around a column. As I climbed the rickety rungs I heard a familiar shriek. A cluster of girls rushed by, makeup running. One of them screamed ecstatically, “Keith sat on me!” This was Keith Moon, the most demonic of all the demon drummers in rock. Onstage he was a djinn, his arms in constant motion over his kit, slamming and crashing in what seemed like triple time. The girl he had deigned to sit upon would probably not change her clothes for days. I was ready for anything.

When I opened the door, all was quiet. The band looked sated, as if they'd just devoured a haunch of game. Only Keith seemed truly alive, but he was far beyond talking. He sat in a hyper daze as the group's leader, Pete Townshend, took my questions. The gist of his response was that he wanted his music to speak for him. I tried to egg him into discussing my favorite Who song at the time, “Substitute.” This was a nasty exercise in romantic resentment, but it posed a problem for American radio for another reason: the line “I look all white, but my dad was black.” That part of the lyric was missing in the U.S. version. It was the
first of many times I would witness the censorship of a rock song, but this had nothing to do with sex or drugs. It was pure racial prudery—and the band had apparently colluded. When I asked Townshend about it, he sized me up, unfavorably. “Listen, mate,” he said. (I'm not actually sure he said
mate
.) “Just make up my quotes.”

To these musicians I was part of the machinery of fame, and they were caught between their need and their contempt for it. I had an easier time with British pop stars who performed in mod suits. They were much more willing to schmooze. I remember lunching with a Howdy Doody look-alike named Peter Noone, whose band, Herman's Hermits, did popped-up versions of music-hall ditties. I met Noone at a deli in midtown Manhattan. He stared anxiously at a mile-high sandwich and a huge bowl of pickles as we chatted. I was sure his agent had told him that he would have to suffer such delicacies in New York. I had the feeling that, to him, Jews were another unholy part of the record industry. He assured me that he loved kosher food—“So healthy,” he said. I flashed him a peace sign.

I shouldn't complain about the way British rockers treated me. I had my own ambivalence. The closer they got to blues, the more they made me miss the wildness of American R&B, the showmanship and the excess. These Brits were too earnest. They had frilly shirts and hair cascading over the collar, but they were practically motionless onstage, hunched over their guitars, rarely making eye contact with the audience. This struck me as an anti-pop attitude, not so different from what I'd experienced in the folk scene, and it had something to do with masculinity. Pop is basically the domain of teenage girls—they discovered Elvis and the Beatles—but British blues was serious guy rock, meant to be played with tight, closed lips. It sounded stringent to me, reverent toward its sources (the way male culture often is) but also distant from them in a sometimes eerie way. It was strange to hear someone who sang like a sharecropper from the Delta lapse into a Midlands accent for an interview.

There was only one British performer who could sing blues without seeming suspect to me. Mick Jagger understood that rock wasn't just music; it was a gender show. He was all flounce and finery, as magnetic an androgyne as I'd ever seen, with lips and hips that made Little Richard seem butch. For about a year, I kept a picture of Mick, in full pucker, over my desk. I have a vivid memory of a concert at which he dropped
from the sky in a helicopter. It was the closest I've ever come to having a Pentecostal experience. Meeting him was a whole other thing.

I had missed the famous Beatles concert at Shea Stadium in 1965, but a year later the Rolling Stones were coming to New York. I was there when they arrived at JFK airport to howls from the girly mob confined behind police lines. The Stones had been unable to find a hotel willing to risk the rabble sure to invade its lobby, so they rented a boat docked in the Hudson River, and they summoned the press on board. I was surprised to see women who were much too classy for fan mags. These were editors from the leading fashion monthlies, their perfect figures draped in tasteful versions of the mini-wear Twiggy had made hip. That was when I realized that rock had gone high-end. These ladies were fishing, desperately, for a word with a Rolling Stone. And the lads were total pros, able to satisfy any bearer of a byline the way a male escort might please a customer. I was much too shy to approach them, and I pressed myself against the wall, planning to do what I always did when I couldn't bring myself to chat up a celebrity—describe the scene.