Another Little Piece of My Heart (9 page)

It's embarrassing to admit that I met so many famous people in 1966 and didn't connect with them. This is the fate of a journalist, as I learned that year—you know everyone and no one. But it also happened because I was stiff and girded, the posture of someone in a chronic panic attack. Nothing had prepared me for life in the media zone. I felt sealed within my image, like a mummy. It would take a trip to California, where the rock scene was very different, for me to finally let myself show. Until then I wasn't really aware of the people I wrote about. They were figments of fame, and I saw them as I saw Dylan—through a glass, dorkly.

By 1967, I had an agent. He wasn’t exactly in the William Morris league, but I wasn’t looking to break the bank. All I wanted was a way to avoid dealing with negotiations, contracts, or anything that fueled the fear that I was nothing but a hustler. My agent, however, had big plans for me. He was a packager, and he had an idea that would have made my interview with John Wayne unremarkable: a TV show hosted by a boxer named Rocky Graziano—and me.
Move over, Merv Griffin
, I thought, but fortunately I didn’t have to turn the deal down, because no one would buy it. I should have known then that this agent was wrong for me, but I stayed with him, partly because he was willing to finance a story far outside the kind of thing that was expected. I wanted to see what rock meant to young people behind the Iron Curtain.

I had come up with the idea after reading about Allen Ginsberg’s visit to Prague, where students elected him king of the May Day Parade, a serious breach of Communist protocol. He was expelled from the country after the government seized his journal, which included descriptions of his amorous encounters with young Czech musicians. I was no stranger to fooling around with straight boys—remember, I grew up in an Italian neighborhood—but I wasn’t out for sex tourism. Pop music represented a certain idea of America to kids in other countries. In Britain it meant funkiness and freedom from the propriety that confined them. But what did it signify in a place like Czechoslovakia? In order to find out, I had to convince Ginsberg to share his contacts with me.

He was eager to get together. He’d found evidence that the CIA was transporting heroin through Indochina, using the revenue to finance covert military operations. The drugs, of course, ended up in U.S. ghettos. These allegations have never been conclusively proven—though they are likely true—and in 1967 they seemed too bizarre to be credible. Ginsberg had a frenzied look on his face that I’d seen in many radicals. As a journalist I was suspicious of their obsession with American evil, and I hadn’t yet come to share their rage. I told Ginsberg that I wasn’t equipped to verify his information. He said it was my duty to do the story, and he was visibly disappointed when I demurred. I had the feeling that he would have been more indulgent if he’d found me fuckable. Still, he gave me what I wanted—the names of musicians in Prague.

I decided to broaden my sources by reaching out to the National Student Association, an organization that turned out to be yet another CIA front. If I’d known that at the time I wouldn’t have followed up on their leads, but I would never have met the tottering old man whose job was to license Czech rockers. Yes, there was a bureaucrat in charge of pop music in that country. The government, which ran the only record label, had set out to prove that it was
modni
enough to rock, and this ancient satrap got to decide who could play the music professionally. In an office that looked like a set from
The Third Man
, he grilled me about all things Top 40. “Tell me,” he said in the earnest, faintly melancholy tone I came to love in the Czechs. “What is Surfing Bird? What means ‘Bird is the word’?”

The state assigned me a guide, a loyal Communist who turned out to be fairly flexible about my itinerary. But when I asked her to show me Franz Kafka’s house she replied drily, “Maybe in your society you have need of such writers, but we do not.” I realized that I needed to shake her, and I managed to do it by promising to send her cosmetics from the States. Soon I was hanging out with Ginsberg’s pals, a contingent of musicians and their fans that gathered in the city’s main square. More than once I watched the police round up these kids. They’d be back the next day, shorn of their long hair. They were criminals because they didn’t have jobs and they weren’t licensed to play rock. But they certainly knew the music, and they had a withering opinion of the group I was scheduled to meet, the most popular rock band in the country—pretty much the only official one.

I knew them as the Olympiks, though I’ve since seen them referred to as Olympic. These four guys were definitely cute enough to steal the
heart of Allen Ginsberg, as they did mine, though I kept my feelings to myself. (I didn’t want to be deported before I had my story.) They’d done everything in their power to look like George Harrison, down to a carefully coiffed version of his hair, and they sang gentle folk rock, mostly in English. I recall hearing them play “Sealed with a Kiss,” a classic summer-romance ballad, which sounded even more wistful with a Czech accent. The group may have been a tool of the state, but they were pretty up-front about disdaining Communism. They didn’t like capitalism either; they wanted a Swedish-style socialism in which the state provides for its people but leaves them alone. This was the most prevalent attitude among young people I interviewed in Prague. They always asked when America would end the war in Vietnam—and what did Coca-Cola taste like? Before I left the country I severed the leather labels on my Levi’s so the Olympiks could sew them onto their locally made jeans.

The trip to Prague was the most important political experience of my life. It demolished my faith in Marxism as a system, and it made freedom seem much more concrete. Things that I took for granted were hard-won and risky here. I suppose this was the impression that the CIA and its student front hoped I’d come away with. But I also developed an attitude that would make me anathema to the U.S. intelligence community. (I love it when spies and bankers call themselves “communities.”) In Prague I saw, for the first time, young people fighting a culture war against the empire that ran their lives. Within a year, Soviet tanks would move on Czechoslovakia to crush their experiment, and American students would confront troops and police in the streets. It was easy for me to see the connection between both struggles. We were all facing the military power of irrational governments convinced that they were rational. This was my first inkling of generational solidarity. Something bigger than systems and borders tied young people across the West together, and rock had a lot to do with it.

Politics was the last thing on my mind when I got back to New York. I’d come home just in time for the biggest story of 1967, at least on my beat. It was an album called
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
, produced at a then-staggering cost of one hundred thousand dollars after four months in the studio. The result would redefine not just the Beatles but my generation. It’s hard to imagine the impact of this record unless you
understand the central role rock played for us. Its messages were rubrics for life, but without clear instructions; it was up to each person to put it all together, to assemble meaning and take action. So it was fitting to have, as one of the major guides, a collection of songs that broke every rule of Top 40 music, except for the sacred beat. Each number on this album was different from the next, scored with everything from animal sounds to horns, harps, and electronic rushes. Yet all of it, quite mysteriously, cohered.

Sgt. Pepper
marked the moment when intellectuals fully realized that rock was an art form. So astonishing was the response that even the
New York Times
, which had never taken this stuff seriously, felt compelled to notice—and they also noticed me. I was cribbed from the underground by the Sunday Arts & Leisure section as it struggled to be hip. There was a dress code for
Times
reporters, but they exempted me because I was a freelancer. I would appear at the office in my most velveteen gear, to contemptuous (possibly envious) stares. My first assignment was to review
Sgt. Pepper
, and I’m sure they anticipated a rave. Instead I panned it. “Reeking of special effects,” I wrote. “Dazzling, but ultimately fraudulent.” My editor, the unflappable Sy Peck, quipped that he hadn’t gotten so many letters “since we bashed the Bible.” He shoved several large crates of mail my way.

I wasn’t trying to pull off a contrarian stunt. I fully expected to adore
Sgt. Pepper
, since I’d loved the Beatles’ two previous attempts to break out of the yeah-yeah mold. But
Rubber Soul
and
Revolver
were basically rock records; this was something else. There was no genre to describe it; the term “concept album” hadn’t been invented yet. All I knew was that it didn’t belong to the categories of either pop or progressive. The feeling of wonder before a truly new work is the hardest thing for a critic to express. I don’t think I’ve ever read a review that says, “I don’t know how to judge this,” and I certainly never wrote such a piece, even when I should have. Instead I rejected what didn’t fit my schema, so I missed what mattered most about this album, which wasn’t any of its songs, but their total effect. For all its diversity,
Sgt. Pepper
is a philosophical whole, presenting a certain attitude toward identity and style. Both are mutable and self-generated—the essence of the hippie worldview.

A number of critics now think I was right to slam that record. There’s a feeling that it isn’t really great because it doesn’t come from the
gut, and I thought so too. But I changed my mind about
Sgt. Pepper
in the late seventies as I began to question the values of masculinity. It forced me to think about the relationship between macho attitudes and rigid ideas about what rock should be. As I learned to love the Beatles in their Lonely Hearts Club Band incarnation, I was really learning to love myself.

And now a confession, never before told in print. In those days before earbuds, the ideal way to listen to a record was to plant your head between the speakers and turn the volume up as high as you could bear. I did that with
Sgt. Pepper
, but one of my speakers had blown out. As a result I lost the stereo effect, which is pretty fucking important. I also missed the full force of the bass line, so it seemed even less like rock than it actually was. But I can’t claim this technical lapse as an excuse. The fact is, I was an excellent skeptic, but an uneven critic. I could be right and wrong in the same piece. For example, I was an early champion of the Doors, and I praised their debut album lavishly—except for one weak cut, “Light My Fire.” What can I say? Sometimes the monkey does not write
Hamlet
.

My major strength as a writer was my passion, and the rocker who aroused that feeling in me more than any other was John Lennon. Everyone had a favorite Beatle; John was mine. He had the perfect voice, with its flat accent and rough edges. I know, it’s precisely the tension between rough John and smooth Paul that made the Beatles what they were. But even if he’d lived, I can’t imagine Lennon going the McCartney route, writing well-tethered love songs, irresistibly melodic. John was the hungry one, aware of his personal pain but also attuned to what the sociologist Richard Sennett called “the hidden injuries of class.” No one wrote as acutely as Lennon did about the battering that poverty inflicts upon young men like those I grew up with. “
They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
…” No one smacked us in math class, but I knew just what John Lennon meant by the bitter refrain of that song: A working-class hero was, indeed, “something to be.”

It wouldn’t have been hard to meet John during his New York years. We moved in concentric circles, and he mentioned the name of my column in the long list of references that make up “Give Peace a Chance.” (“Rabbis and Pop Eyes …”) After I wrote something nice about one of his records he sent me a telegram that read, “Yoko and I say thanks.”
Unfortunately it was slipped under the door, and my dog chewed it up except for that line. Given my timidity, you can imagine how I felt about approaching John. That was why I never tried. But one day I got a call from a friend, a perpetual sideman who frequented music clubs where he sometimes hung out. My friend said that John wanted to meet me. I couldn’t turn the invitation down.

I don’t remember the precise date—my best guess is that it happened in the late seventies. It was a brisk spring afternoon. John was sitting in a van parked on Lafayette Street. All my awestruck lights flashed as I climbed inside. I felt my whole body stiffen, not a novel experience for him, I’m sure. But he was remarkably skillful at getting me to forget who he was. The look of engagement on his face was too genuine to fake. My friend had told him that I’d grown up in the Bronx, and John wanted to hear all about the place. I couldn’t imagine why, since it was mainly known for its vast stretches of rubble. But those derelict streets popped with energy. Artists were working there, and my colleagues at the
Voice
were aware of the street parties that would soon give birth to hip-hop. Lennon may have heard about this nascent scene, or perhaps he was curious about the part of the city that was furthest from the grasp of visitors like him. At any rate, he was fascinated by the Bronx, and that was why he wanted to meet me. I wanted, above all, to be useful to him.

I prattled on about the history of the borough, including its development in the 1920s as a destination for the ethnic middle class. I told him about the Grand Concourse, which had been built to evoke the boulevards of Paris. I mentioned the Loew’s Paradise, a movie palace with an over-the-top lobby and a marble fountain containing goldfish so fattened by popcorn that their backs stuck up above the water. All of it had been inherited by Latinos and blacks with the same dreams as I had, and access to the same route upward for the dispossessed of New York: style. John listened intently, but he didn’t say a lot—or maybe his words don’t seem as vivid in my memory as the feeling that I was boring him. It wouldn’t have been right to whip out a tape recorder or take notes, so I have no insight into the issues that were tormenting and inspiring him. What I remember most about that meeting is how good he was at relaxing me.