Lucking Out (5 page)

What Felker perceived with pirate zeal was that the
Voice
was a brand and the brand was being left to fend for itself, unexploited, unemblazoned. He compared the current operation of the
Voice
to a college paper, a country store. Following the model of
Rolling Stone
, he intended to platform the paper into a national weekly less immersed in the parochial joustings below Fourteenth Street and packing more throw weight as a political and cultural resonator. To accomplish this, the national edition had to pipe up and pump out trend pieces that translated into every urban zip code. Such trend spotting and trumpeting were antithetical to the
Voice
ethos, where eyewitness testimony was prized over billboard statements plastered over every passing craze. And the wider spectrum Felker sought involved a different, alien set of metrics; he commissioned a profile piece of the impressionist Rich Little—whose personality was considered bland even by Canadian standards and whose takeoffs had none of the fanged bite of David Frye’s (his tongue-darting, eye-popping William F. Buckley suggested an iguana on mescaline)—based mostly on Little’s high Q ratings, which were considered a gauge of likability. Likability! This from a paper dedicated to chafing and championing the difficult underdog. He brought in designers and illustrators and introduced a blue band to the
Voice
’s front-page logo, a minor twirl-up that was considered a trashy violation of the paper’s monochromatic aesthetic. It didn’t take long for the verdict to be rendered on Felker’s tenure at the
Village Voice:
guilty—guilty of journalistic manslaughter and reckless malpractice. In the histories and memoirs of the
Voice
that soon followed, Felker was cast as both usurper and undertaker. The front cover of Ellen Frankfort’s unauthorized account
The Voice: Life at the “Village Voice,”
published in 1976, featured a mock front page of the
Voice
pasted over a tombstone. “Here Lies Independent Journalism” was the graveyard message. Kevin Michael McAuliffe’s less emotionally shredded, wider-lensed view of the ongoing psychodrama,
The Great American Newspaper: The Rise and Fall of the “Village Voice,”
published in 1978, offered a more detailed damage assessment that also consigned the
Voice
to the junk pile of broken dreams. To McAuliffe, and in this he was far from alone, Clay Felker’s conquistadorial reign had ushered in a dry-hump orgy of debauchery, profligacy, and groupie adulation of power and celebrity:

All that may be true, but I have to admit it worked out swell for me. Up blew the whale spout and on a spume of foam I flew. Those may sound like the words of an ingrate, but denying is lying, and I can’t deny that the Felker takeover turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me at the
Voice
, and not just me. That rude injection of vulgarity invigorated a vein of new blood that revitalized the paper and cocked it forward, despite the masthead carnage and the premature burials of the
Voice
’s relevance. Due to Felker’s meddling and despite Felker’s meddling, the paper was poised for a lightning streak that would make the
Voice
the definitive seventies paper, a bucking bronco reborn. Punk, disco, the emergence of gay culture, the morphing of political feminism into personal memoir (as exemplified by Karen Durbin’s ardent, reflective, influential essay “On Being a Woman Alone”), the triumphant swell of the Hollywood blockbuster, the celebrity portraiture that would displace street photojournalism—the
Voice
was primed for these phenomena by the new observation deck Felker installed in nearly everyone’s thinking. New editors boarded the vessel, and the old system of unassigned reviews filling the in-box each week like church flyers was junked in favor of a bullpen rotation. One day I was slicing open envelopes like a Victorian clerk when the new music editor, Robert Christgau, boistered in, holding loose manuscript pages in his hands and flapping them with authority. In future years it would be hard to picture Bob empty-handed, so familiar was he for reading copy on the flat-footed fly, doing his own version of bumper cars years later when a new device known as the Sony Walkman came on the market, enabling him to avoid seeing
and
hearing where he was going. (Empowered by the music pumping into his head, he assumed he had the right-of-way.) Bobbing was what Bob did, the top half of his body—clad in record-company T-shirts that had shrunk considerably in the wash while retaining their impudent panache—rocking back and forth as he thought, expostulated, paced like a prosecutor in front of the jury, laid down the editorial law, or let loose with a laugh that seemed to explode with a timing device, two or three beats after something struck him as funny and he had rolled it around in his head awhile.

The introductions over in a flash, Bob got down to business, letting me know with a minimum of gift wrapping that of the two most recent rock reviews I did for the
Voice
, one was smart and funny (a review of a solo effort by the Doors keyboardist, Ray Manzarek) and the other (here memory draws a blank) pitifully inadequate. (He would later describe most of the music reviews published by the previous regime as “a waste … slack, corny, and anonymous.”) In miniature preview, this was Bob’s method in boosting and subduing contributors: the praise-up and the slap-down, the latter an ego check up against the hockey glass to let you know who was boss, king, keeper of the keys, samurai master of the red edit pen. Although Greil Marcus would come to command more intellectual throw weight with
Mystery Train
and similar expeditions into the mythic depths and marshy fringes of the American Gothic, Lester Bangs would survive in legend as the Neal Cassady of Romilar and epic rhapsodies at the typewriter, and Jon Landau and Dave Marsh would eventually earn joint custody of Bruce Springsteen, it was Bob who was the self-proclaimed, scepter-wielding Dean of American Rock Critics, an honorific that sounds as esoteric today as some ecclesiastical title. With the decline of the album as message statement and the rise of the iPod, rock critics no longer exist as a recognizable category of cultural journalist with its own career ladder, schlubby mystique, battle stripes of cultural rebellion, and backstage lore. Like jazz, pop analysis has become academicized, with Christgau himself practicing his deanhood at the Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music at New York University and carting his buckshot-packed capsule Consumer Guide review column from one set of temporary digs to another, retiring and restarting it in 2010. But back then Christgau commanded the pulse center, enveloping himself in an energy cone of charisma that made writers want to be admitted into the big chief’s teepee while worrying that, once in, they might find themselves cast out again through the flap door for some flub or faux pas against the canons of rock-crit orthodoxy. Under his editorship, the pop music pages of the
Voice
exerted a force field that made the review section of
Rolling Stone
look like minor-league box scores.

As an editor, Christgau practiced the opposite of Zen. Indirection wasn’t in his playbook; pro or con, he gave it to you straight, with extra mustard. The upside was that Christgau made you want to please him, impress him, fuse two circuits together for an electric insight no one had made before, use the performance anxiety all writers have as the impetus to dig deeper and be on the receiving end of one of his triumphant war whoops. He would share his enthusiasms with the other editors, the congratulations multiplying until your swelled head barely fit into the elevator. The flip side fell when you failed to execute your mission, letting down Bob, the fellow Bobsters, and your membership in the fertility cult. Once, hazily hovering over the opening paragraph of a review I did of the Hollies performing at the Bottom Line, Bob said, as if reprimanding himself for overruling his better judgment, “I knew I should have assigned this to ——,” since I had made such a hash of it, revealing myself as Hollies-inadequate. Another time, looking over a revise I had done, he said, “Well, I’m glad you incorporated my suggestions, but I didn’t think you’d do it so
faithfully
,” making me feel like a retriever bearing the master’s slippers in its mouth. Bob didn’t always edit at the office, burning eyeholes in your copy and sounding the sentences in his head as if doing ballistics tests. Sometimes he edited at home, which was a trip, in both senses of the word. Once I made explorer tracks over to the apartment that Bob and his future wife, Carola Dibbell, shared in the alphabet side of the East Village, where a mound of garbage burned in the middle of the street like an anarchist’s bonfire as taxis slowed to navigate around it. Inside Bob and Carola’s apartment it was a Dickensian cove, as if their decorator had been a chimney sweep with a load of cinders to spread around. The focal point in this Stygian picture of domesticity was the spectacle of Bob, wearing nothing but red sheer bikini underwear, attending to something at the kitchen stove and pensively scratching his ass. Bob wasn’t one to stand upon formalities, adopting a more Tarzan stance. After he and Carola moved to a sunnier place on Twelfth Street (a street I too later shared, where the crunch of crack vials met the hoarse cries of hookers having an intimate conversation at the top of their charred lungs from ten or twelve feet apart), Lester Bangs told me that Bob once edited him in the nude, lying on the carpet with his butt-crack smiling northward as in a baby picture. The buzzer rang and it was Bob’s apartment neighbor, Vince Aletti, announcing himself. Bob got up and went into the other room to slip on a pair of underwear. Lester wondered, he told me, why Vince’s presence necessitated underwear from Bob while his didn’t, and then he remembered that Vince was gay—“And, you know, Bob probably didn’t
want to tempt him
,” Lester said, laughing.

In his return to the
Voice
, Bob brought with him an air of embattlement that had a soap-opera backstory. He and fellow rock critic/politico-cultural journalist Ellen Willis had been the reigning rock critic couple on the counterculture scene, the John and Yoko of the downtown set, the future Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter of the Ministry of Pop Sensibility. If as a couple they functioned as a dual-processor dynamo, their intellectual status was separate but unequal. While Christgau had enjoyed a trapeze platform as a columnist at
Esquire
, which was a “hot book” in the magazine world under the ringmaster editorship of Harold Hayes, Willis haunted even higher, holier rafters as the rock critic of
The New Yorker
and a contributor to the
New York Review of Books
and Theodore Solotaroff’s
New American Review
(where her somber epitaph on the riots at the 1968 Democratic convention, “Lessons of Chicago,” appeared). Given his intellectual carriage and male pride, this uneven ranking must have been a cactus prick to Christgau, who was denied entrée into the more exclusive cloisters of prestige. Bob told me of the phone ringing when he and Ellen lived together and hearing the quavery, eggshell-walking voice of William Shawn at the other end and his handing the phone to Ellen with a mock-annoyed “It’s for you.” Their breakup—discreetly memoirized by Willis in a journal for the short-lived paperback magazine
US
, edited by Richard Goldstein, a wunderkind who would also rejoin the
Voice
in its radical Felkerization and not win any popularity contests—had been unamicable in the extreme. The betrayal of Ellen’s briefly taking up with some hippie dude (“The last time I got my hair cut, Ellen dumped me for somebody else,” was how I remember Bob explaining his subsequent aversion to barbershop scissors) incurred a wrath almost Sicilian from Bob, who refused to share the same public confines with his former comrade-lover. It was a logistical headache for record-company and concert publicists, who had to ensure that the rock critic of
Newsday
and
Esquire
didn’t find himself under the same roof enjoying freebies (there were freebies then—buffets even) as the rock critic of
The New Yorker.
Urban legend had it that Bob once spotted Ellen at a record-label event and was so incensed that he threw a pie at her, an incident that became as inscribed in rock-crit myth as R. Meltzer (
The Aesthetics of Rock
)’s peeing into the punch bowl at some press event, a stunt I was cautioned not to emulate, lest I develop the wrong kind of reputation—an invaluable piece of advice for any promising youngster. Bob assumed everyone knew the saga of his breakup with Ellen, as if it ranked with Grendel on the Richter scale, and its unfinished business dragged through the office like an anchor.

Bob’s wounded pride and obstinacy prevented Ellen from being given a full editorial role at the
Voice
, Bob deploying a her-or-me ultimatum that was eventually lifted after mutual friends and colleagues, tired of being tugged in the middle, impressed upon Bob that his gruff resolve made it appear that he still hadn’t gotten over the breakup despite the intervening years, which wasn’t very flattering to Carola, who was by then his wife. I had no great opinion to drop one way or the other on the scale of justice because I never quite “got” the Ellen Willis cult of genius, the whole Rosa Luxemburg mystique aureoled around her curly Ed Koren cartoonish head and goggled squint. Written as if her words represented the patter of rain, Willis’s pop music reports for
The New Yorker
had none of the toreador flash and headlong plunge of the best rock writing being done in the sixties and seventies; they lacked the authority she stamped into her political essays, as if she were doing a series of liner notes, keeping the grown-ups informed about what the kids were up to. Not that I liked her political writing any better. I liked it less. It ground forward like an earthmover along with the worst liabilities of left-wing pamphleteering, her Marxist-feminist-Reichian calls for erotic freedom and social liberation laid down with the iron clang of railroad spikes hammered to the heavy metronome of jargon. It was evident from the worship and emulation Willis inspired that she possessed a personal charisma that transcended the page, but that charisma and I never cloud-mingled, so all I had to go by were pieces that seemed weighed down by their pedagogical intent, bottom-heavy correctives to liberal orthodoxy, and radical cant that made the pages you were holding in your hands turn to lead. But I was in the minority when it came to Willis’s acuity and importance and would remain so, not that it mattered then or now. What was important then was this sense, this supposition, that sixties scenes-bursters such as Christgau, Willis, and Goldstein were destined to inherit or hijack in slow motion the intellectual-journalistic establishment of
The New Yorker
, the
New York Review of Books, Commentary, Partisan Review
, and
Dissent
and become the presiding grown-ups of this generational power bloc. They had the brains, the ambition, the range and grasp, and the lengthening track record of a countercultural commissariat set to inherit the big desks in the editorial offices and give culture its marching orders. Yet it didn’t happen, they never assumed command; their schemas never got off the drawing board. Ice formed on the ceiling, the elevators got stuck between floors, they were no match for Harvard—choose your own metaphor, but the upward push that seemed inevitable was somehow arrested and the books never completed that might have planted their flags on the surveying heights. That’s one of the advantages of sticking around in life long enough: you get to see how other people’s stories turn out, though it doesn’t do your own story any good, the future having laid its own special snow-covered wolf traps just for you.