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.
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.
There was plenty to write about. The Stones were dressed for the press, Mick in a bright, striped blazer, Keith Richards in red suede boots. Brian Jones, their rhythm guitarist at the time, wore a button on his fly that read SEX IS HERE TO STAY. Only the quietest member of the band, Charlie Watts, noticed me. “Don’t let the photographers make you nervous,” he said. “Ask your questions.” I whipped out my Kodak and snapped a few shots of Brian as he put on his best sneer, and then I sidled toward Jagger. He was surrounded by women and chatting with no great enthusiasm. I had the feeling that he was standing in a suit of shining armor. I’m not surprised that he’s still a brilliantly preserved version of himself, whose only giveaway is the portrait of Dorian Gray that is his face. Brian Jones might have aged into a similar creature, but in 1969, he drowned in a swimming pool. Accidentally or willingly—who can say?
I didn’t get much face time with Mick that day, but when the reception ended, Charlie motioned for me to follow him. We slipped into an underground garage where a limo was waiting. A mob of fans rushed us from nowhere, shrieking, tearing at the guys. Everyone made it into the car except Brian. He was engulfed in lips and fingernails. Five girls clutched at his jacket and pants. Others flung themselves over the hood, pounding on the windows, kissing the glass. Finally Brian was rescued by the police and he climbed into the limo, impassive. So were the others. They’d seen this before, but I hadn’t. I was deeply moved. These girls were expressing my own response to rock, but they were able to act on it in a way I couldn’t. It was like watching a mystery cult. Suddenly I knew what my piece should be about, not just a description of the hype surrounding the Stones but a speculation on how it must feel to be a rock god. I conjured up the African deity Shango, god of thunder, and I transferred his attributes to Mick. What was it like to regard divinity as a day job? What did it feel like to stand on a stage and make thunder? I didn’t have the answers, but I had the spectacle and the devotion down cold.
In the months that followed, my Voice column rode the wave that rock created. Only one thing was missing: money. The Voice paid so little that I survived mostly on cans of tuna from my parents. (“Don’t give it to the goy,” they said of my roommate, John.) But the paper allowed its meagerly paid writers to publish elsewhere, and I’d begun to find other venues for my work. One day I got a call from a legend of New Journalism, Clay Felker. He was the editor of New York, then the Sunday magazine of the city’s hippest daily (by far), the Herald Tribune. Style was one of its major selling points, and it featured writing by the likes of Jimmy Breslin, Nora Ephron, and Tom Wolfe. Soon I was part of the magazine’s stable, finally earning the uptown credentials that would give me access to major rock stars. I also gained entry to the fabled back room at Max’s Kansas City, where Warhol’s minions frolicked. I felt like a total snob for going there, but I couldn’t resist the self-importance. Only a year earlier, I’d been a student begging to be noticed; now I was an underground media celebrity. At some point the inevitable happened: I was caricatured in an ad for pickled herring. It was part of an upscale campaign for the briny fish, featuring a character who flitted among trendy milieus. One ad was called “The Herring Maiven Goes to the Discotheque.” At the edge of the sketch, amid the renderings of famous people twisting the night away, was me.
Clay Felker was a man of monumental enthusiasms, and he came up with some very unlikely assignments for his new pop expert. One of them took me to Mexico City, where John Wayne was making a movie about the Alamo. I was nervous about meeting an American icon whose face was its own John Ford landscape, craggy and monumental. But Wayne was infinitely more cosmopolitan than the characters he played. I thought he would let me have it for my long hair; instead he was consoling. He may have sensed the queerness under my look, because he told me that he knew what it was like to be different. His real first name was Marion, and he’d grown up being teased mercilessly about it. Was there a relationship between that childhood vulnerability and the male icon he’d become? I wondered, but I didn’t pursue the point. I hadn’t yet learned to ask leading questions, and I was too uncomfortable to stray from my prepared notes. He tried his best to deal with my rather cerebral topics, and I wrote an undistinguished piece about his myth, which had already been amply commented on. It missed the most interesting thing I had detected in him: his empathy. A photographer took a classic odd-couple shot of us, him in cowboy regalia and me in rock-critic drag. He was a foot taller than me, large and rugged. I was pudgy and pubescent. “We’d look funny walking down Fifth Avenue together,” he quipped.
That picture ran in Newsweek, along with an article claiming that I’d created something new in journalism: the “pop beat.” This was the kind of thing that made me feel simultaneously like a genius and a fraud. I veered between both perceptions, with no way to gauge the praise. My precocity provided an unassailable mystique, which I took full advantage of, in a benumbed state. There’s another, equally absurd photograph of me. I’m on a panel at the Yale Club with several movie-industry honchos, including Jack Valenti and Darryl F. Zanuck, sitting at my side. Zanuck is puffing a cigar, trying his best to hide his contempt for this bizarre creature in a costume that made no sense to him, because he needed the kid, needed the insight that was nothing more than supposition, since who the fuck knew what it all meant? Not me. I shudder when I look at that picture, because I know how I felt. Time was moving on two tracks—professionally at breakneck speed, but emotionally not at all. I was frozen, yet careening.
Clay Felker didn’t regard me as a caricature. He was the first editor I’d met who treated me like a peer. That might mean hitting on a woman I was seeing (if he was more her speed), but it also produced a comforting informality. Sometimes we met in his apartment, a large, messy duplex on the tony end of 57th Street. He was married to Pamela Tiffin, an actress so beautiful in a classic Hollywood way that, when she came down the staircase, wearing a pale blue robe trimmed in fur, my eyes went out of focus. At such moments, all doubt about my sexuality vanished. I couldn’t be queer if Pamela Tiffin left me breathless. What did it matter if Mick Jagger did, too?
One day, Felker called to tell me that I didn’t have to file my latest piece. The Trib had folded. There wasn’t room in the city for a hip daily alternative to the Times. It would take him several years to raise the money to publish New York as a stand-alone weekly, and when he finally succeeded I became a contributor, migrating between that magazine and the Voice. I used New York’s expense budget to travel to places where the Voice would never send me. Once there, I would write about a well-known rock band for my uptown outlet and report on the scene for my downtown column. In the Voice I could be as polemical as I liked, and I began to develop a sense of pop as a unique aesthetic experience. It was clownish and trashy, inherently political, since it could subvert the past with lightning speed, and able to bite the hands of the industries that fed it—so I argued. This theory allowed me to tie rock to the emerging idea that mass culture could be a source of radical change. “A pop critic,” I wrote, “needs his eyes, his ears … and an impressive German vocabulary.” (I’d just discovered the Frankfurt School.)
The Voice was doing well enough to have its own ad campaign. “Expect the unexpected,” the tagline read. But its office was oddly formal—a hip hush prevailed. New York had a more casual vibe. If I dropped by to bat around ideas, I was likely to run into a writer I’d imitated in j-school. The peak experience came when a man in a white suit introduced himself. This wasn’t just any white schmatta. It was a package as distinctive as my rock-critic drag, and inside it was Tom Wolfe.
The first thing I noticed was his face. It was a shade of pink that didn’t exist in the Bronx, except on a new Spalding. But the most fascinating thing, to a boy journalist like me, was his demeanor. He was engaged but remote, curious yet impenetrable—the perfect stance for a reporter, I decided right away. I was already copying so much from Wolfe—the voice that operated as a personal signature, the rhetoric meant to suit the story, the focus on those rituals of dress and jargon he called “status details.” One look at him and I realized that I could never crib his look. I was far too grubby. Thank God for paisley shirts—they didn’t show stains.
Tom Wolfe was very solicitous of me. He included one of my Voice pieces in his anthology of New Journalism, and he even agreed to give me a letter of recommendation to the American Studies program at Yale, where he’d earned a Ph.D. (“So you want to get closer to God,” he snickered. I took his drift and never applied to the school.) I think his attitude toward me was part of a larger affection for men who had invented their own roles—pop-music millionaires, custom-car Michelangelos, psychedelic prophets. Eventually this fascination with the exceptional man pushed Wolfe to the right. He was a gifted picador of the liberal cultural elite, but he had no feeling for social oppression, and this prevented him from understanding the movements springing up around him. As my politics veered leftward over the course of the sixties, we drifted apart. Felker, however, remained in my life for many years. At one point I actually punched him in the stomach when he killed a story that was sympathetic to the Vietcong. But, being Clay, he reacted by inviting me to breakfast at his apartment.
Moving among famous writers didn’t faze me, maybe because I didn’t think of them as charismatic. I saw writing as a shelter from self-exposure. It went well with masturbation, and I was sure every author did that as a reward for producing a great paragraph. But there were some literary lions so fearsome that they might as well have been gods of the guitar to me. Norman Mailer was one. I’d sharpened my knives on his grindstone. He was my model of what a critic should be: a political thinker with a persona that challenged every orthodoxy. In college I’d devoured his collection of early essays, Advertisements for Myself. His style combined the swagger of a working-class bruiser with the intellectual reach of an Ivy League grad and the acuity of a radical—everything I wanted my own style to be. What I didn’t want was to meet him. Mailer was renowned for his fistfights, and he’d stabbed his wife. But meet him I did, when he stopped by the paper.
As a founder of the Voice, Mailer was welcome there, and he would sometimes show up to poke around. He wandered through the office, chatting with writers. As he approached my desk I flashed the grin that meant I was terrified. His eyes widened and he raised his fists. This was his way of greeting a comer in the game. It was a well-known shtick, and I probably should have realized that. But all I saw was a bruiser who wanted to fight me. I was seized by confusion and panic. I fled from the office.
Yes, I was a wuss when it came to meeting my heroes. That was why I’d always shrunk away from Bob Dylan, though there were several opportunities to be introduced. I had a recurring waking nightmare in which any Dylan song about how phony most people are was really about me. At moments when I was sure my inner fraud would burst out, I heard him singing: “Something is happening, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Disco?” This wasn’t just a fantasy about humiliation. Dylan’s lyrics posed a major challenge to my competence as a rock critic. Their meaning kept slipping out of my grasp. I should have understood that this is precisely the Dylanesque experience. The song flees from whatever it represents; it eludes definition. His great achievement in the sixties was not wisdom but dexterity. Yet I felt compelled to crack the code.
I was never tempted to search the Great Man’s garbage, as one notorious fanatic did, but in my need to dredge for meaning I made one of my worst errors (and there were several doozies). I analyzed the song “All Along the Watchtower” without a lyric sheet. The words were usually printed on the back cover of albums, but I had an advance copy without a jacket. A certain line intrigued me: “Two riders were approaching and the wind began to howl.” I heard it as “Two writers were approaching …” and I concluded that it was a reference to Dylan and his fellow prophet Allen Ginsberg. After the paper came out I was told by one of his associates that Dylan got a good laugh out of that.
Like many of my heroes, Dylan eventually moved rightward in his sexual politics, toward a nostalgia for patriarchal values that, I think, has rigidified his work. Ask yourself how many women artists cover his songs and you’ll see what I mean. Get me stoned and, like many people my age, I will chatter on about what Dylan was and is. But the conversation usually gets around to, Did I finally meet him? Yes and no. Sometime during the late sixties I was invited to his dressing room before an arena concert. He sat on the edge of a table, looking like a boxer about to have his hands taped up. I, of course, had lost the ability to speak.
“I’ve been hearing a lot about you,” Dylan drawled.
“Me too,” I peeped.
I don’t remember anything else about that brief conversation—the awkwardness is what sticks in my mind. I had blown it. Failed to make an impression. And, unlike Charlie Watts, he was not about to say, “Don’t be nervous, ask your questions.” Afterward I realized that this had been a very charged encounter. I was looking at someone with a mask of perfect insulation. At this point in his career, he was a man whose survival, creative and otherwise, depended on hiding, and he was very good at it. I was in hiding, too, for different reasons. I felt closest to myself when I got to be a fan, and that’s what I became in Dylan’s presence. But sympathy wasn’t his strong suit. I was relieved that he didn’t insult me.
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.