I returned home from Memphis early one stale evening in July. The loft was silent save the hum of the central air. In her office space, Ruth worked on an essay for Cultural Studies Today in which she wittily deployed found quotations from the scenarios of Ashley Judd movies to comment on cable-television coverage of the Robert Blake trial.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hey,” she said.
I had a bag full of Elvis presents from Graceland, barbecue from B. B. King’s restaurant, and a plush Robert Johnson doll from the Clarksdale, Mississippi, historical society. I couldn’t wait to give them to the children. After all, I hadn’t seen my kids in six months, and I had to make good.
Their rooms were pristine, untouched. The beds were made and the GameCube had been put away. Looking in the refrigerator, I saw only vegetables, yogurt, and Italian soda.
“My god, Ruth!” I said. “The children! Where are the children! What have you done with the children?”
I sat on the sofa, turned on MSNBC, and started to sob. I’d been away so long, and now the children were gone!
“My babies!”
“Paul,” Ruth said, “it’s summer. They’re at camp.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thank god. Music appreciation camp, right?”
“No. Zoe is at horse camp, and Paul Jr. is at Derek Jeter camp.”
“Then let’s go get some dinner.”
Over a delicious bowl of basil-infused miso corn soup, I said, “So are you teaching next year?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“How’s your book going?”
“Pretty well. And yours?”
“Not bad.”
We didn’t speak for the next two courses. When we got home, we turned on the TV and sat on opposite ends of the couch.
“Do you wanna have sex?” I said.
“OK.”
Ten minutes later, Ruth was asleep, but I was restless. I took a long bath, because the slate tub and massage jets usually relax me. Not this time. My book wasn’t really going that well, I admitted to myself. After all those hours in Memphis, I felt that I barely knew Neal Pollack. If the story ended here, Pollack would be a sweet, sad, but incomplete kid, a footnote to a footnote to a parenthetical citation. There was little connection between the Pollack I’d researched thus far and the grizzled monster he became at the end of his life. What about the world could wear a man down so? What in his own time had drawn Pollack away from himself, made him seek veracity in a country—a country, if you were honest, both old and new, barely a country in name alone, more like an Übermensch skulking out of the Bible—when before him lay nothing but the future? Why was rock ’n’ roll destined to destroy us all?
Neal Pollack’s ghost lingered above me. This was not what I needed to see in the tub. I got out and blow-dried my hair, which was still full and handsome, and slapped some Lotrimin on my loins.
Only one man had the answers I needed, and he was more legend than man. It was nearly midnight. If I started driving now, I figured, I’d be in Woodstock by dawn.
I knelt next to Ruth. She was still attractive to me, but barely. I whispered, “Honey, I’m going away for a while.”
“Mmm-hmm,” she said.
“I have to talk to Dylan,” I said. “It’s been too long.”
There’s an old man who lives in your neighborhood, or maybe the next neighborhood over, who spends his days smoking cheroots as if they were cigarettes, then tosses them in the bushes, which catch on fire, so he has to put out the fires with big pitchers of homemade iced tea, spiked with whiskey, but the booze makes the flame burn ever higher, so you have to call the fire department, and the neighborhood gets noisy and the trucks wake everyone up and you’re pissed off at the man, who doesn’t seem to care.
A strange character, this man, and if he asks you into his house, you’re not sure if you should accept, because he passes his time singing you songs or playing you old records, and sometimes you’re not sure if it’s him singing, or if it’s the record. He’s that kind of man. There are hundreds of CDs in his parlor, an actual parlor by most standards except there are posters of the man everywhere. Many of those CDs are bootlegs of a fellow named Lyman Mathis, who was a prison preacher in Alabama in the 1920s, the man will tell you. The strange man, who has a weird, wispy mustache, plays a song, either on his guitar, a piano, the CD player, or all three at once. Jesus murdered my wife, you think the lyrics go, but they sound vague, indistinct, apocryphal, lost words from a lost era. There is menace in the words, and myth in the woods, but you can imagine the lyrics being sung on a street corner or in a swamp-bound tar shack. Jesus murdered my wife, and I’m gonna take his life, come on down to the church, ’cause the flood is rising higher…
I arrived in Woodstock around 7:30 A.M., with an offering bag of Krispy Kreme. There was no answer at the main house, so I went around back, to the barn. An old hound dog lay tethered to a post. Chickens pecked freely around the rusty remains of a vintage tractor. A raccoon, stuffed, leered at me, perched on a vintage anvil. There were poplars in bloom and plump tomatoes on high vines that crawled up a wooden fence. The air brimmed with fecundity and low-lying summer dew; the ground was festooned with auto parts and rusted tools. It was like I had stepped onto the set of a movie based on a murder ballad.
The barn doors were bolted. I knocked. The bolt came undone, automatically, and the doors swung open without my touching them. Bob Dylan sat inside, atop a purple velvet cushion, which itself nestled in a broad-framed oak chair, big enough for a king, all perched on stilts eight feet off the ground. Dylan’s head rested contemplatively in his right hand, and his guitar lay beside him. He wore a black suit, white shirt, black tie with yellow spots, and bowler hat. He always chose interesting headgear. You could say that about him.
I bowed.
“Hey,” he said, cryptically. “How’ve you been, Paul?”
“You remembered me!” I said.
“Of course. Man doesn’t forget a guy who’s written three books about him, now, does he?”
“Do you like me?” I said. “I mean my books? Do you like my books?”
“Yeah,” he said. “They’re pretty good. I see what you’re getting at when you talk about me. Hey. Wanna hear a song I just wrote five minutes ago?”
“Oh, yes. Please,” I said.
I thought to myself, Bob Dylan wants to be my friend!
He played his guitar, focused intensely on the chords, and from his mouth came words infused with tradition and historical allusion. Yet they were also stamped with his unique poetry. As always with Dylan, meaning was subordinate to art, making it somehow stranger and more meaningful, and also more artful. Listen, now:
People say I’m old, but are you old, Mrs. Watkins?
My sugar baby’s lonely by the side of the road
Love is an animal, a humpbacked spiny monster,
Somewhere down the line you’re gonna lick the toad.
The Serpent king is livin’ on the wrong side of the tracks,
Followin’ the ward boss for a cup of powdered soup
We were carryin’ the mayor on the workin’ people’s backs,
There we went, here we go loop de loop de loop.
All down the line.
All down the line
Down the line,
Mrs. Watkins.
My dear sweet lonely spinster girl
Lookin’ out the window
Give this ugly man a whirl.
All down the line
Down the line,
Mrs. Watkins.
Dancin’ by the side of the ditch.
Come on over and rest a while ’Cause loving is injustice
And living is a sonofabitch.
People say I’m young, but are you young, Mrs. Watkins?
My lovelorn lovely’s near the back of the plane.
Passion is illusion, abrasion, and contusion,
Somewhere down the line, you’re gonna feel my pain.
Pancho Villa ridin’ ponies to traverse the dusty land
Followin’ the border for a money train to rob
Carryin’ our freedom to El Paso across the Rio Grande
There we went, here we go, lookin’ for a job.
All down the line.
All down the line
Down the line,
Mrs. Watkins.
My dear sweet lonely spinster girl
Lookin’ out the window
Give this ugly man a whirl.
All down the line
Down the line,
Mrs. Watkins.
Dancin’ by the side of the ditch.
Come on over and rest a while
’Cause loving is injustice
and living is a sonofabitch.
People say I’m dying. Are you dying, Mrs. Watkins?
My darlin’ darlin’s at the edge of the field.
The dawn is yellow, the corn is ripe and mellow
Somewhere down the line, get a dollar on the yield.
Cesar Chavez was always boycottin’ the vines
Lookin’ for his followers and lookin’ for a home
All the handsome people must drink their handsome wines
So they can pay their tithes to the Emperor of Rome
All down the line.
All down the line
Down the line,
Mrs. Watkins.
My dear sweet lonely spinster girl
Lookin’ out the window
Give this ugly man a whirl.
All down the line
Down the line,
Mrs. Watkins.
Dancin’ by the side of the ditch.
Come on over and rest a while
’Cause loving is injustice
and living is a sonofabitch.
“My god,” I said. “That is beautiful. It emerges from the lost murk of Americana like a clear diamond.”
“I didn’t choose the song,” he said. “It chose me. I’m just channeling something in the air. But who cares about me anyway?”
“I do,” I said.
“I know,” said Bob Dylan.
“I’m working on a project.”
“Hmm.”
“It’s about music, but also not about music.”
“Hmm.”
“It’s about a man.”
“Neal Pollack,” said Bob Dylan.
“Yes,” I said. “How did you know?”
“I know,” he said. “Because I knew Neal Pollack. Oh yes, I did.”
“I thought so,” I said. “But I wasn’t sure. There aren’t any pictures of you two together.”
“I had them destroyed,” Dylan said, “to protect my reputation.”
I was overcome, and I genuflected.
“Now, then,” Bob Dylan said. “If you’re willing, I’ll tell you about Pollack.”
One morning in January 1961, a bus pulled up in front of the Greystone Park Psychiatric Facility, an ordinary building in an ordinary northeast New Jersey suburb. A young man, handsome in a hairy, unwashed way, got off the bus, which he’d ridden all the way from Salt Lake City. He wore a royal-blue cowboy shirt with a light blue fringe, decorative flowers adorning the collar and sleeve, as well as fading work dungarees, a fisherman’s cap jaunted to the side, and a bloodstained pea coat. When asked about it later by a female reporter who was in love with him because she thought he was someone else, the young man said he’d retrieved the coat off a dead sailor during “the siege of Cyprus.”
He’d slung a banjo over one shoulder and a guitar over the other. In his knapsack he carried a washboard, a fiddle, some powdered eggs, a fraying copy of Gregory Corso’s poetry collection The Happy Birthday of Death, and several harmonicas that he’d stolen from dying hobos in and around Bakersfield, California. The temperature outside was twelve degrees Fahrenheit, which froze the lice that had burrowed into the young man’s clothes. He hummed a coolie work song that he’d learned from a ninety-five-year-old Chinese tailor in San Francisco. Opening the doors to the hospital, he went inside.
“Mornin’, sweetheart,” he said to the desk nurse.
“What do you want?” she said.
“I’m here to see Woody Guthrie,” he said.
The nurse sighed, and picked up the phone.
“Betty,” she said, “another one for Woody.”
Another one? the young man thought. Why, he’d found a copy of Woody Guthrie’s 1943 autobiography, Bound for Glory, at City Lights Bookstore. Reading it, he was sure he’d stumbled onto a forgotten American treasure. He’d memorized vast passages of the book, though he’d forgotten most of them during an unfortunate cough syrup binge with some merchant marines in El Cajon, and then even more of them in that Tijuana jail cell. Nonetheless, the image of Woody Guthrie, hobo, poet, patriot, two-fisted troubadour fighting fascists across America, stuck like an old work shirt to the young man’s skin after a day’s hard labor.
The nurse broke his sublime waking Woody Guthrie dream.
“Go on up,” she said. “Can I have your name?”
“I’m Neal Pollack,” he said. “But they call me the Fishin’ Cowboy. They used to call me the Singin’ Fishin’ Cowboy, but that was hard to fit on a record jacket.”
“You have a record?”
“Not yet. But my day is coming. I know a lot of songs. Learned ’em out there, on the open road. Also, I write really good music criticism.”
Pollack took the elevator to the third floor, to his hero’s room.
Bob Dylan, just as young, was already in there. He had one hand on Woody Guthrie’s throat, another on his sternum, and he was slamming Guthrie down on the bed, hard.
“Stop it!” Pollack said. “Stop trying to kill Woody Guthrie!”
He leapt for Dylan, grabbed Dylan’s arms, and kicked at his shins. Dylan wrenched away, both hands plunging for Guthrie’s midsection. Guthrie was turning blue.
“Goddamn it!” Pollack said. “Nurse! Nurse!”
“You fucking idiot!” Dylan said.
Woody Guthrie spit up a chicken bone.
“Urrrrgh!” he said. “That’s one tough chicken.”
“Holy god,” Pollack said.
“You almost killed him,” said Dylan.
“He didn’t mean it, Bob,” Guthrie said.
This Bob, Pollack noticed, was also wearing a fisherman’s cap, and denim clothes filthier than his own. Still, compared to Pollack, whose skin had been leathered by months of scorching Southern California dock work, and whose arms were covered in cigarette burn scars from rumbles in train yards half across Texas, the kid was a pallid, sour glass of milk.
“I came all this way to see Woody, you damn rubbernecker,” Pollack said.
Woody Guthrie rubbed his sore sternum.
“They all come to see me,” he said.
They did, indeed. Guthrie was pretty sick of them, in truth. He just wanted to watch a Yankees game on TV, or to read a novel, or go down to the pond and watch the ducks. A hot bath in a claw-foot tub would be nice, he thought. Or maybe a blow job.
“I’m a songwriter,” Pollack said.
“Of course you are,” Guthrie said.
Bob Dylan had turned to the window. He stared out, almost sulked, silently. Pollack thought, Is he ignoring me? Suddenly, Pollack really wanted Bob Dylan to like him.
He unslung the guitar and sang, improvising his own words to an old miner’s melody he’d picked up at a rest stop in West Virginia.
Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, chokin’ on a chicken bone
Dyin’ in the hospital while the nurse is on the phone
I came a ways out east, a hobo all alone
To see this Jersey loony bin or wherever you call home.
“I can’t remember the rest of the tune,” Pollack said.
“Oh, thank god,” Guthrie said.
“Hey, man,” said Bob Dylan to Pollack, “I like your song.”
“The music is old,” said Pollack. “Older than I am. I write lyrics. I’m a writer.”
Dylan studied Pollack, his eyes steady and considerate.
“Mind if I play that song tonight at the Café Wha?” he said.
“Hell, no,” Pollack said. “It’s a folk song.”
Guthrie, pretending to sleep, rolled his eyes under his lids.
“It’s the singer, not the song,” he mumbled. “Folk, my ass.”
Neal Pollack had arrived in New York. From then on, a Friday, or a Monday, or a Sunday, or any day at all, really, you could find him in Washington Square Park in his blue cowboy shirt, playing one of his instruments, impressing Columbia sophomores with his rope tricks, talking up women, passing around packets of brownish-white seeds that he said he’d smuggled from Mexico. He told people to grow them in damp soil, under good light, and to never smoke the stems. Bob Dylan joined Pollack from time to time, and they passed Pollack’s hat, which he called Old Cecil, for money. Pollack had a patter that went like this, “I’m the Fishin’ Cowboy. They used to call me the Singin’ Fishin’ Cowboy. Now this here is the music of the people, coming up the mighty Mississip to the mouth of the Columbia River Gorge. Lots of blood and sweat went into these songs, many of which are about murder. Donations would be appreciated….”
One afternoon Pollack walked over to Washington Square Park. There was Bob Dylan, sitting on a bench, a woman on either side of him.
The women listened as though Dylan’s words meant something to them, and his words did, because they were the essence of meaning distilled into words. It was the dawn of the morning of a new afternoon in America. From the suburban earth came these men and women in their work pants and thick-black-framed glasses and serious gazes. Soon they would sing and march and transform the social and political consciousness of the entire world.
I’m gonna get laid tonight, Pollack thought, and these broads are gonna make me dinner, and I’ll probably have a place to crash.
“Hey, Bob,” he said. “Introduce me to your friends.”
“This is Susan,” he said, “and this is Evelyn. They’re from New Jersey, and they love folk music.”
“Well,” Pollack said. “We can’t deny them.”
They sang together, and the women listened:
Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, chokin’ on a chicken bone…
The magazine Sing Out! sent Pollack to cover an April 9, 1961, protest against restrictions on folksinging in Washington Square. Pollack got drunk at the Cedar Tavern, passed out, and missed the whole event, but he filed the article anyway, calling it a “real righteous hootenanny.” The next night, April 10, everyone got together at Gerde’s Folk City to celebrate a successful protest. A rested Pollack brought his guitar and his notebook.
The mainstays of the folk scene each sang a couple of songs—Dave Van Ronk (“subpar,” Pollack wrote in his notebook), Doc Watson (“half a man, no staying power”), Gil Turner (“sucks big ass”), Bob Dylan (“superhuman prodigy”), and, at the white-hot center of the evening, Ms. Joan Baez herself (“the luminescent paragon of perfect, a beauty unmatched on this continent, a voice like that of Circe, but with good intentions”).
Pollack gazed upon Baez as she sang “Silver Dagger” and “El Preso Numero Nueve,” songs that, when sung by others, he later dismissed as the work of “pre-Cambrian Eurofags.” But on that night, as he later wrote on a bar napkin, “My heart thundered like the hooves of a thousand rhinos. I was Zorba the Greek drunk on ouzo afire, hovering over a moonlit bog of unrequited desperate love. Joan was the shimmering luz de mi corazon.”
Afterward, Pollack and Dylan sat together at Gerde’s, eating peanuts and grinding the shells under their authentic work boots.
“Hey, man,” Dylan said. “I want Joanie to hear our Woody Guthrie song.”
“Naw,” said Pollack, his stomach boiling with love. “She wouldn’t have time for us.”
It was nearly 2 A.M., and a friend was hustling Baez out the door, along with her sister Mimi. Dylan made for the exit, but Pollack, unusually shy, could barely stand to follow him.
“Joan, hey, Joan!” Dylan said. “I’m Bob Dylan! Mind if I play you a song?”
He sang for her.
“That was very nice, thank you,” she said.
Behind Dylan, Pollack wept softly into his fisherman’s cap. Joan Baez noticed him for the first time.
“Who’s your sad and sensitive friend?” she said.
“My name is Neal Pollack,” he said. “My life for you!”
Pollack covered his mouth.
What’s the matter with me? he thought.
“Are you a folksinger, Neal?” Joan asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“Can I hear something?”
Pollack sighed, his belly full of hungry love rodents that gnawed at his soul.
“Yes,” he said. “This here’s a song that I wrote after I saw something terrible in Kentucky, something so terrible that I had to write a song about it.”
What he sang next had been lost until the lyrics and music were recently found in the basement of a Long Island lighthouse. No one knows how the document got there, but it bears Pollack’s authentic scrawl. In a voice from the past, yet very much in the present, he played…
THE BALLAD OF EMMETT O’DONNELL
Poor Emmett O’Donnell shot the Boone County sheriff
With an old Remlinger that he perched on his shoulder
At his family’s farmhouse way out in the country.
And the cops were called in and they shot up his barn
And they brought the dogs in to nuzzle his corpse
And they hacked up his body all riddled with bullets.
But you who don’t understand the story of Emmett O’Donnell,
We do not need your attention.
Your sympathies are quite worthless in
This state House of detention.
Emmett O’Donnell, who at twenty-four years
Farmed six hundred acres of corn and of carrots
With no one around but his simpleton sister
And a hulking manservant, left over from slavery,
Could not tolerate the banks’ sternest warning
All the notes of foreclosure went straight into the garbage
With the leftover fruit and the cheese and the wrappings.
But you who don’t understand the story of Emmett O’Donnell,
We do not need your attention.
Your sympathies are quite worthless in
This state House of detention.
Marcellus Kincaid was the Boone County sheriff
He was fifty-five years and had fathered twelve children
By six different women who he never married
Who he never looked at while he was impregnating.
He planned and completed more than sixty-two lynchings
He laughed and he laughed at the drunks in the gutter
And burned down the taverns when they didn’t make payments
To his election fund, which he used to throw parties
In a brothel with guests like the mayor and governor
Who passed bill after bill to hurt the cursed farmers
Like Emmett O’Donnell, who was dead on his birthday.
But you who don’t understand the story of Emmett O’Donnell,
We do not need your attention.
Your sympathies are quite worthless in
This state House of detention.
In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel
To let the people know that dead Emmett O’Donnell
Would hang for the murder of the Boone County sheriff.
And that Emmett’s corpse, it would twist from the galleys
For one hundred long weeks before heading to prison
Where an outfitted cell would be specially curated,
For the remains of the man who’d shot up the sheriff.
For a most dire warning for the other poor prisoners
That until their death, the state owned all their bodies
And would hold them in jail until eternal heaven
For their baseless desire to smoke marijuana.
Oh, but you who don’t understand the story of Emmett O’Donnell,
We do not need your attention.
Your sympathies are quite worthless in
This state House of detention.
As Baez later recalled in her memoir Fly, Tender Butterfly, “his singing was abysmal and his playing was worse, but something about Neal made me fall like I’d never fallen before. I melted.”
“Come home with me tonight,” she said.
“Yes,” Pollack said. “I must.”
“Can I come, too?” Dylan said.
“No,” said Joan Baez.
“Can I go home with your sister, then?”
“No,” she said.
Joan extended her hand to Pollack, and he took it in an exulted trance. Their flesh seemed to ripple at the touch. They laughed together instantly; no one could understand their love, borne on wings to heaven by the tragedies of folk and the triumph of future hope.
A cab took them into the night. Neal Pollack eased his head onto Joan Baez’s lap and began to cry.
“It’s been so hard,” he said. “I miss my mommy.”
“I know, sweetie,” she said. “I know.”
Back in front of Gerde’s, Bob Dylan picked the nits out of his hair and stared at the bills. Pollack was a big fucking phony. He wasn’t no hobo, no fishin’ cowboy. And he’d stolen Joan Baez.
“Jesus Christ,” he said to himself. “This just won’t do.”
In the summer of 1961, Pollack and Baez moved into a one-room pine saltbox house in the Carmel Highlands of California. Joan did all the cleaning and made all the meals on a wood-burning stove. She also tended to the lawn and the gravel driveway and cleared away the pine needles to make a path leading to a stone chapel in the woods, which she built herself. Sometimes she stole an hour to practice her guitar, but she also had to feed the ten chickens that Neal, on a whim, had purchased at the farmer’s market in Monterey. Twice a day, at Neal’s command, they made love, and then, also at his command, she wrote song lyrics about him, which he promptly made her discard.
“Now that I think about it,” she said later, “it wasn’t an entirely equal relationship.”
They lived this way for months. Pollack spent the day working on a novel, which he said was about “an abandoned child in America,” as well as occasional folk songs, and various other untitled projects. At night, they would eat dinner and drink wine. Joan would sing for a while, she would draw his bath, and then they would tumble about. In bed, they shared as lovers do.
“We must have a civil rights bill in this country,” she said. “It’s a moral imperative.”
“Yes,” he said. “I know a black man.”
“Josh White?”
“No. There is another.”
Pollack began to weep.
“What is it?” Joan said.
“Every time I think of this man, it reminds me of something true, yet also false. He’s the source of everything, but also nothing. All my life, I search for him, find him, and then lose him again. To me, he’s nothing but a loosely disconnected series of glimpses, yet also the raw hard truth of the primeval.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Joan,” said Neal, “I’ve kept this from you all these months, because I didn’t want to hurt you. But I’m not who you think I am.”
“Who are you?”
Pollack seemed to grow in size, and stature. He also seemed to radiate glory. Like Persephone returning to the underworld after an overripe summer, Baez absorbed his words, feeling her soul grow darker.
“I’m a rock critic,” Pollack said. “Since I was eight, I’ve known that I bear a critical mind so shrewd that it may someday tragically lead me to damnation. And it’s all because of this man. When I first heard his music in a Chicago alley, I knew that I had to find the source. But that was fifteen years ago, and I’m no closer now than I was then. Everything I’ve done, whether I’ve known it or not, has been a search for this man. They call him Clambone Jefferson. He is the horrible essence of American music. He is my god.”
“Tell me about him.”
“I’m scared.”
She stroked his hair, soft from months of her careful conditioning. He cried softly.
“There, there, little bird,” she said. “Let it all out. Tell your Joan about your Clambone.”
And so he did:
William Arugula Clambone Jefferson was born in South Carolina to a recently immigrated Afro-Cuban Jew named Carmela Goldfarb. When Clambone was four, his mother accidentally mailed herself to Omaha, Nebraska. A judge sent Clambone to live with his only known relative, a vicious bootlegger and killer by the name of Pee Wee Wilson, in a three-room outhouse in the very depths of Louisiana Bayou country. Clambone spent his days locked in a four-by-six cedar crate, listening to his uncle play the accordion, plotting murder. In 1917, the judge sent Clambone to the Louisiana Boys’ State Reformatory Home for the crime of disemboweling his uncle with a tuning fork. Clambone quickly amazed his fellow inmates with his easy mastery of a number of instruments, including the saxophone, drums, slide trombone, and hurdy-gurdy.
One of Jefferson’s fellow inmates was a young man named Louis Armstrong. He heard Jefferson playing in the prison courtyard one day and never forgot that sound. “It sounded like a clam,” Satchmo said, “only with a bone in it.”
At the age of seventeen, Clambone Jefferson broke out of prison. He began a journey deep into the heart of the South, descending into a seamy world of clinging vines and thick, viscous swamps and broken-down old juke shacks populated by bighipped rough-skinned women, down, down, down into the depths, into the dirty stanky hungry maw.
Rather than making a deal with the devil, which was popular in those days, he moved in with a white farmer and hillbilly guitarist named Doc Thompson, who lived just outside Natchez, Mississippi. All day, they would beat each other senseless with hoes and then play out on Thompson’s front porch, a keg of moonshine between their legs, songs like “Shrimps in My Shoe,” “If I Had One More Minute I’d Pass This Stone,” “The Devil Bit My Ass In Two,” and “Won’t Stop Drinkin’ Till I Start Drinkin’ at Dawn,” which went like this:
Won’t stop drinkin’
Till I start drinkin’ at dawn.
Yeah, I won’t stop drinkin’
Still I start drinkin’ at dawn
Well, the devil bit my ass in two
And now my baby
Is long gone.
Musicologist Alan Lomax ran out of gas in front of Thompson’s farm one night. He heard the music and got out his gear. The next day, Jefferson beat Lomax up and took his recordings. He and Thompson sold their collected songs to a company in New York for more than one thousand dollars.
In 1930 Jefferson shot Thompson dead, stole his car and his prize sheep, Tootie, and lighted out for Chicago, where jazz was hot and jazz was cool. For a time Clambone owned a nightclub called the Wet Grotto, which was closed by the health and revenue departments simultaneously, and he played piano with Cab Calloway, but, unfortunately, it wasn’t that Cab Calloway. The 1940s came along soon enough. Clambone spent much of the decade in a coma. On December 6, 1941, after attending a meeting of the American Nazi Party, he injected a quart of sugar water into his left leg.
He awoke in 1949, staggered down to Maxwell Street, played a full set, kissed a mysterious woman who he only knew as “sexy bitch,” and collapsed again.
Then it was 1951, and a beautiful nurse was hovering over him.
“Where am I?” he said.
“Why, Memphis, Tennessee,” she said.
She held his hand.
“You’re going to be OK,” she said. “I’m going to take care of you. Forever.”
Clambone ripped out his IV. He slugged the nurse in the face, pinched her wallet, and fled the hospital into the street. For blocks and blocks, he ran like he had nowhere to go. Then he realized that he really did have nowhere to go, and he collapsed on a park bench, panting to himself, “That’s all right, Mama, that’s all right.”
He started saying it louder and louder, and then singing it, until his voice became a quivering, plaintive wail that fused together the blues and country yodeling, with a distinct, rhythmic backbeat.
The legend goes that Clambone’s voice was heard all throughout Memphis that spring morning. As he moaned away on the park bench, a tall, handsome man wearing a cowboy hat approached him.
“Hello,” the man said. “My name is Sam Phillips.”
Clambone never saw the man again.
The story ended, incomplete. Dawn shivered over the trees, and bathed an exhausted Neal Pollack and Joan Baez in redemptive light. The ocean heaved a half mile in the distance, and he slept. Joan looked at the strange, hairy man lying next to her, and her eyes trembled with tendrils of love. What an authentic person he was!
The doorbell rang. Neal didn’t stir. Joan put on a flowered housedress.
Lo and behold! It was Bob Dylan. He kissed Joan’s hand.
“Hey hey,” he said. “Come to stay a while. And I brought very cheap wine.”
During the day, while Pollack wrote, Dylan and Baez took long walks by the sea and in the woods. Dylan told her things that, at first, she didn’t believe.
“Neal says that he’s just with you because he wants to become famous.”
“Neal believes that we should resegregate the schools, and he voted for Nixon in 1960.”
“He doesn’t like your singing or your cooking.”
“He had syphilis.”
The effects accumulated. At night, Pollack and Dylan worked on songs and smoked cigarettes while Joan cooked them dinner. When Dylan was around, Pollack tended to ignore Joan, only taking her into his lap after the second bottle of wine.
“I love this woman!” he said.
Meanwhile, Dylan filled Joan’s head with sinister whispers.
“Pollack has other girlfriends.”
“He told me you’re a lesbian.”
“His family sent money to McCarthy in 1953.”
Baez began sleeping outside, because she said it was good for her skin. Pollack joined her in the sleeping bag often, but she no longer stroked his hair or talked to him after sex. Her eyes gazed at the moon, but not at him.
Late one night, a wolf moaned, causing the elk to flee. A vague frost formed on the ground, and Pollack felt his body chill. Next to him in the sleeping bag, Joan was stirring.
“Neal,” she said, “we can’t do this anymore.”
“You’re right,” he said. “It’s almost winter. We should sleep inside.”
“No. I’m leaving you.”
“You are not.”
“I am. We can’t see each other anymore.”
“But I love you!”
“You may think it’s love,” she said, “but it’s not. It’s become something sick and terrible.”
“Come on, baby,” Pollack said. “Don’t be such a drag.”
“I don’t need you, Neal,” she said.
“I am your deflowerer!”
“Neal,” she said, “I wasn’t a virgin when I met you. Not even close.”
Neal Pollack yowled into the darkness. He scrambled from the sleeping bag, mad with heartbreak and shattered ego. Plunging naked into the woods, he tore at his cheek flesh with long nails.
“ARRRRRRRRGH!” he said.
It was unimaginable out there.
The moon threw off shards of glinty light. Pollack’s bare feet touched a patch of stone slathered with slimy moss. He spilled to the pine-needle floor, his head slamming to the rocky earth. His chin cracked and bled. He crawled toward wood’s end, where the ocean slammed the cliff with tidal inevitability.
There, on a stump, sat Clambone.
“Ah’ve been waiting for you, Neal,” he said.
“You!”
“Yes, you done found me.”
“What…”
“Hush,” Clambone said. “My time is limited. Now listen. This folk that you’ve been listening to is a false music. It is not the answer. It does not represent the true spirit.”
“But the songs!”
“No. I was there when the songs were written. They weren’t like that. These white folks have changed the music.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’ve made it boring, but it won’t always be this way. You must find the ones who do not sing well, and do not care about their bodies. They are coming soon, and they are many.”
“But Dylan can’t sing!”
Clambone sighed, and began to shimmer in the dawn.
“Damn it, Dylan is not the one,” he said.
“Yes, he is,” said Pollack.
“OK, OK,” Clambone said. “I’ll give you Dylan. Follow him if you must, for he will become well connected very soon. But you must seek the other prophets of rock ’n’ roll.”
“Where?” Pollack said. “Where?”
“Start in England…” Clambone said, vanishing. “But beware Asbury Park. It is a distraction and a curse….”
“Clambone!” Pollack shouted into the dawn. “Clambone!”
At that moment, Pollack’s heart calcified. There were no more women, only receptacles on the way to his final destiny. Only the quest, the truth, and rock criticism remained.
He emerged from the woods a madman. Dylan was packing his duffel as Pollack banged on the back door of the house. Pollack was slathered in mud, skin ravaged, a crown of brambles in his hair.
“Man,” Dylan said. “What happened to you?”
Pollack grabbed Dylan’s shirt and spat in his face.
“I need a shower!” he said.
“You sure do.”
“Where’s Joan?”
“She went to the store. She wants you out by sundown.”
“Good! She’s a goddamn phony anyway!”
He sat on Dylan’s duffel.
“Where you going?”
“Gotta get to London,” Dylan said. “Be on a TV show, playing myself. Maybe record an album.”
London, eh?
Neal Pollack walked into a bar.
Two guys with guitars, one bassist, and a big-lipped lead singer were onstage. The singer was writhing around like a monkey, doing his best to murder “Sweet Little Sixteen.”
Maybe fifteen people sat in the audience, guys in white shirts and zoot suits and their well-dressed dates.
“You’re a tosser!” one of them shouted. “Get off the stage!”
“Cool,” Pollack said.
Pollack looked at the band, in their black work shirts and ruined jeans with Scotch tape across the rips, their hair as mangled and dirty as their sound.
“Rock ’n’ roll,” he said. “I’ve found you again.”
After the show, Pollack hung around.
“We don’t want you,” the manager told the lead singer.
“Why not?”
“No room for your kind of music.”
One guy, one of the guitar players, was scruffier than the rest, much scruffier. He looked like a rat that had been tumbling in his own filth for weeks.
“Need a gig,” he said. “It’s winter and I gotta buy myself a coat, man.”
“Not my problem,” said the manager.
Pollack got in the manager’s face.
“Give these guys a job!” he said. “They’re the best band I’ve heard since I got to England!”
“Sod off, Yank,” said the manager.
Pollack reached around for a bar stool. Fluidly, almost professionally, he swung it around and smacked the manager in the face. The manager buckled.
“Christ!” said the scruffy guy.
The manager moaned, on his knees. Blood pooled into his cupped hands.
“Police!” he shouted. “They bloody broke my bloody nose.”
The band and Pollack scrambled into the street. The sky was bright and cold. They sprinted and squinted. It started to snow.
The whistles erupted. Pollack tried to keep up with the Rolling Stones as they ran.
“I’m Neal Pollack, and I’m a rock critic,” he said, in an alley, as they panted.
“So?” said the lead singer.
“I came here with Bob Dylan, but he’s boring. If I have to hear ‘Poor Miner’s Lament’ one more time, I’m gonna plotz.”
“You know Bob Dylan?” said the scruffiest and handsomest one of all.
“Yep. And I’m rich, too.”
“My name’s Brian,” he said. “Buy me a coat. Also, I need a new guitar.”
The next day, Pollack and his knapsack moved into the second floor of a three-story house in Ealing. With him were Brian, Mick, and Keith from the band, a couple of students from the London School of Economics, and a mysterious Norwegian who refused to tell anyone his name. The Norwegian sat in a corner of the living room and read the same three pages of Kierkegaard day and night, his lips shaking with each repeated sentence.
It was the dead of winter. No one had any money but Neal.
“Give us some for the gas bill, wouldja?” Mick said.
Neal did, without complaining, because this was the greatest band he’d ever seen.
“Right, then,” said Keith. “Let’s go get some hamburgers.”
The burger place was a few blocks away.
“I’m cold,” said Keith. “Give me your sweater.”
“Sure,” Neal said.
“And give Mick your boots.”
“Sure.”
“Now give us ten quid.”
“OK.”
They went in the hamburger place.
“Wait outside for us,” Keith said.
“Can’t I come in? I’m hungry!”
“You want to see us play in West London or what?”
The show that night was unreal. Nearly a hundred people, many of them women, rubbed deep grooves into the floor. Under the hot dingy lights, Mick emanated menace. Pollack saw and felt the living power. The band, he knew, was a cut of prime beef that the public would devour whole. They played:
Where you going
Where you going
My little gasoline girl?
In your upstairs two-room flat
Petting your mangy orange cat
Blowing your gas-streaked hair
Letting it grow and curl?
All right.
Where you going
’cause I’m coming
My little gasoline girl
On a private gassed-up jet
In the ocean, getting wet
Gas me up
My little gasoline girl.
All right.
Are you coming
Are you coming
My little gasoline girl
In the fancy foreign car
In the honky-tonky bar
In New Orleans
At King’s Cross
Or in Queens
I means what I says
And I says what I means!
All right
My sweet
Little gasoline girl.
One night, in February 1963, they were lazing around the apartment on moldy pillows, drinking expensive booze that Pollack had bought, and listening to Big Bill Broonzy records. Keith wailed along on the harmonica.
“Hey,” Neal said, “I got an idea. Let’s go to Liverpool. Check it out.”
“Eh?” said Keith. “There’s nothing going on in Liverpool.”
“Oh. OK.”
From the kitchen came moaning. Brian was shagging a girl. This should have been disgusting; the kitchen stank of months of unwashed dishes and rotting trash. They had placed it under quarantine. But the women just loved it when Brian treated them bad. Pollack watched, listened, and learned.
“If you can play a guitar,” he wrote in his journal, “girls will let you do whatever you want.”
Mick turned up the record.
“This is the real stuff,” he said.
“I met Big Bill Broonzy once,” Neal said.
“Sod off.”
“No, I really did. And I know Clambone Jefferson, too!”
“Who’s Clambone Jefferson?”
“Who’s Clambone Jefferson? Oh, man! Someone give me that guitar. He wrote this song. You must have heard it, because it’s the most important…Woke up this morning, and my boots were full of blood…”
“Nope,” Mick said.
“Yeah, I woke up this morning, all my boots were full of blood…”
“Quit the racket!” Brian said. “I’m shagging over here!”
“Shouldn’t have stayed up all night…”
Brian burst from the kitchen, leaving his girl in the ruins.
“You can’t bloody sing, Pollack!” he said.
Brian pounced on him. Pollack dropped the guitar.
“What’re you doing?” Pollack said.
Brian pushed him down, cackling madly. Mick and Keith unbuttoned and unzipped his jeans, then pulled them off. They started going through the pockets.
“Oh,” Mick said, “a credit card!”
“Stop it!”
Keith held down Pollack’s arms, and Mick his legs. Pollack squirmed, in his underwear, but he couldn’t cut loose. The girl, out of the kitchen, rubbed her breasts in his face, for torment’s sake. Pollack began to weep.
Brian produced a wire cable, which was connected to an amplifier. It gave off sharp electric sparks. He waved the wire in Pollack’s face.
“You must confess,” he said.
Mick and Keith cackled madly.
“Confess to what?” Pollack said.
“Confess!”
The wire sizzled. Pollack’s eyebrows singed.
“But I was just playing the blues!” Neal said.
“Stick the blues!” Mick said.
Brian touched the wire to Pollack’s testicles.
An unholy scream filled the Ealing night.
Pollack kicked loose, shot up, and limped toward the door.
“You bastards!” he said, sobbing. “You goddamn bastards!”
He ran out into the street, in his underwear.
Two days later, Pollack showed up again. He was covered in all kinds of filth. Ungodly. He was naked, except for his dung-crusted underpants, which he wore on his head. Somewhere along the line, he’d taken the plunge into deep madness.
Brian smacked him in the face with a tambourine.
Pollack broke the tambourine’s skin with his fist.
“You won’t hurt me anymore, Brian,” said Pollack.
“I need a hundred quid,” Brian said.
Pollack pushed him against the wall.
“I mean it. You touch me again and I’ll break your hands.”
The future Sir Mick appeared.
“Right then,” he said. “Who’s up for bridge?”
DON’T LOOK BACK: THE BASEMENT REEL
Hotel suite, London, England. Present are Neal Pollack, Bob Dylan, Albert Grossman (Bob Dylan’s manager), Twiggy, and an interviewer from Life magazine.
DYLAN: Did you see my concert last night?
INTERVIEWER: Yes.
DYLAN: Did you like it?
INTERVIEWER: Oh, yes. Very much.
DYLAN: Phew! That’s a relief. I was worried that you weren’t going to like it and write something bad about me.
INTERVIEWER: No, I’d never do that.
POLLACK, sits down next to Dylan, addresses interviewer: Why not? Are you afraid to say what you think? Are you afraid, man? Because I know your magazine, and how your magazine works. I’ve read your magazine, I’ve seen what you do, with your words and your pictures. You’re just gonna say what your readers want you to say. Because your readers are sheep and so are you. You’re just a sheep. You can’t understand Bob Dylan and his genius. No way!
DYLAN: Hey, Neal. Relax.
POLLACK: How can I relax? This guy doesn’t care about you! You think the people who listen to your records read Life magazine?
INTERVIEWER: I just wanted to ask Mr. Dylan about what kinds of messages he’s trying to impart through his lyrics. DYLAN: Well, gosh, there’s not one specific message, but if young people come away with anything from my music, I’d like it to be—
POLLACK: Why does music have to have a message, huh? Why does it have to mean anything? You journalists are very interested in meaning, but not very interested in just being. You know? Just people being people. You only care about rich people anyway, not poor people who are vomiting in the gutter. You think they’re gonna read your article? Or care about a message?
INTERVIEWER: What kind of people do you want me to write about, then?
POLLACK: I don’t know, man. Just people. Like some bum wiping his ass with a newspaper or Mr. Thompson wanting to kill himself on the 5:13 train back to his soulless house in the suburbs. Why don’t you ever write about them?
DYLAN: Listen, I think I have something to say…
POLLACK: Sure you do. But you don’t have to tell this guy! This guy represents Lyndon Johnson and Rockefeller and all the billionaires who are sending kids off to fight in Vietnam! He writes for a magazine, man, but all magazines are shit!
DYLAN: Yeah. I’d never thought about it that way before. I hate you, Mr. Life magazine!
In a trailer behind the stage, Pollack and Dylan drained the last puffs from a roach.
“I’m gonna do it tonight,” Dylan said. “I’m gonna go electric.”
“Seriously?” Pollack said.
“Yep. This is it.”
“Oh, man!”
Folk music was about to die, and Pollack was going to be there.
They sauntered backstage, wearing identical black leather jackets and motorcycle boots, each packing a Fender Stratocaster.
“Bloomfield!” Dylan said.
“What?” said Mike Bloomfield.
“I want you, and Arnold, and Lay. Get me that Goldberg guy on piano.”
“Bob, they don’t know the songs.”
“Who cares if they don’t know the songs?” he said. “I ain’t Dizzy Gillespie! This is goddamn rock ’n’ roll!”
“What am I gonna play?” Pollack said.
“You’re not in the band,” Dylan said.
“Whaddya mean?”
“I mean I don’t want you onstage.”
“Fuck you!”
“No, fuck you!”
While Pollack sulked on the sidelines, Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary, introduced the band: “Coming up now is a person who in a sense has changed the face of folk music to the large American public, because he has brought to it a point of view of a poet. Ladies and gentlemen, the person that’s gonna come up now has a limited amount of time. His name is Bob Dylan!”
Yarrow came backstage.
Pollack punched him in the face.
“Puff this, pansy,” he said.
The band broke into “Maggie’s Farm.” It was terrible, a discordant buzzsaw of noise. Pollack saw the future.
“Fuckin’ rock ’n’ roll!” he shouted.
Next to him, Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger were not happy.
“Augh!” Seeger said. “That song has a socialist message, but you can’t hear it! The instruments are too loud!”
From somewhere, Seeger produced an ax, and charged the power cord. He swung the ax over his head. Pollack tackled Seeger from behind.
“My generation grew up with the rock, old man,” he said. “You can’t stop the rock!”
“Heresy!” said Lomax.
Lomax threw his bloated self on the dog pile. Pollack scratched and spat. Seeger had a fat lip. Pollack kicked Lomax in the nuts.
From the audience, he heard booing. They were booing Bob Dylan. Or were they cheering, or maybe hooting? He couldn’t tell. The guitars produced a horrible screeching noise, a cacophony of chaos. It was horrible. It was heaven. The young crowd outnumbered these old men with their sour egalitarian breath. Dylan merely needed to summon revolt from the stage, and they would be history.
Pollack whipped off his leather jacket, tore his collared shirt, and squirted out of his jeans. He burst onto the stage while the band played “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” and began to dance in rhythm to the music. But there wasn’t much rhythm, so he jumped madly, there, in his underwear, twitching, stinky, borne on the wings of rock madness.
“Get lost, Neal,” Dylan hissed.
“WAHHHHHHHHHHGH!” Pollack said, and he launched himself into the crowd.
He landed among ten friends from Cambridge, Massachusetts. In their early twenties, like him, they were looking for something new. They didn’t know exactly what to do when a mostly-naked man in motorcycle boots fell on them from the sky like a stoned dervish. But Pollack had ideas.
Dylan finished his set and went backstage. Seeger, Lomax, Yarrow, and Bikel were waiting for him.
“Bob,” Seeger said, “people are very upset with you.”
“I am one of those upset people,” said Lomax.
“There’s no place for rock music in a folk festival. You have to go out there and play something to calm the crowd down.”
“I only have my electric guitar,” Dylan said.
He began to cry.
“I didn’t mean to upset anyone,” he said.
“I know, Bob,” Seeger said, “I know. Be a good boy. Someone will get you an acoustic guitar.”
Theodore Bikel, to Dylan’s surprise, said, “Pete, you can’t stop the future.”
“Yes, I can,” Seeger said. “Now get out there, Bob, and play some folk music.”
In the crowd, Pollack was leading a stomping chant: “Dylan! Dylan! Dylan! Dylan!”
Pollack grabbed the girl next to him and kissed her, sliding his hand beneath her gingham dress. She melted to his sweaty touch.
“Dylan! Dylan! Dylan!”
In garages across America, the motor was starting to rev. Boys were plugging in their guitars and pounding on their drum sets. Factory loft spaces were getting ready to host parties centered around blotters and monster joints. The sound barrier was about to be broken, and Neal Pollack was getting a hand job from a drunken stranger in front of the stage at the Newport Folk Festival, where it all began. His eyes bugged, his hair slicked back in ecstasy, as the rain soaked him in almighty transformation.
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!”