Richard Meltzer, part 3

By Scott Woods

Scott:   What do you think is the biggest misconception about your writing?
Richard:    Well, in the early days it was that I was illiterate gutter trash. And I just saw on the web today, somebody pointed me at something that seems to be a parody of me -- it has "the ghost of Richard Meltzer" talking to God, just some stupid stuff. It's somebody trying to do a parody of what they think I wrote like in 1972. When Spinal Tap put out a coffee table book that contained -- they were on the Joe Franklin Show, which is like this silly New York talk show, where they actually went on straight pretending to be the band, and they had the entire text of their appearance, and it was sort of a nice little book, and they had a fake review of Spinal Tap by somebody named 'R. Seltzer' that was like a mock Meltzer review. And whenever these parodies would occur they were basically, like, "Anybody can write like him, he's not saying very much; just fill the page." As if ALL I did in those days was fill pages. And then from a certain point on, the assumption about my writing is that, y'know, that I hate the MUSIC. I mean, it's like they're confusing aesthetics with commerce. If I hate the crap that's being released -- I mean, to say like today, I really don't know, I'm not gonna say anything about bands I don't know about. But I can even say I like anything Mike Watt does, I like this band called Cat Power. I mean, there are things I hear that're fine. But as far as the general HEALTH of the whole thing? I think it's a joke!

Scott:   But hasn't the commerce been tied into the music from day one?
Richard:    Yeah, but the relationship -- the formula -- was very different. There was once a, what you might call a, DIALECTIC of success/failure. The SCORE was the pipe dream of -- the score was NOT -- what's the word? -- it wasn't an aspect of the pursuit from square one. And then you get to where, slowly but surely, the hype becomes the reality. It isn't even that, yes, Elvis got hyped, there was no means… in the '50s you listened to Alan Freed, who had a show in New York after leaving Cleveland, and he was really very, very good, and he was somebody who you would TRUST. Obviously, he was being paid to play things -- who wasn't? But there was something about -- there was a reason to trust him. I mean, a lot of these things are ad hominem, that was always part of rock 'n' roll, you know, you trust Act A by somebody, so let's go for Act B, and all of that. But somewhere down the line it became a formula for treachery, being so, like, like DOGshit. And by somewhere -- the downfall of AM radio was somewhat tragic, when it went to FM and became album-oriented and all that. AM radio was once a wonderful thing, and it was 90% commercials, but it was still basically the real animal, it was the marketplace NAKED. And then everything found a way to hide, and found a way to participate in the RUSE, and then you get to MTV, where the commercial IS the product, where bands stopped making records and they were making advertisements for themselves. Where sound becomes secondary, and audio-visual becomes primary.

Scott:   I don't know if I agree with that, though.
Richard:    Really?

Scott:   I think that video is an afterthought, at least from the band's perspective.
Richard:    Not the bands that I've talked to. Blue Oyster Cult would literally think, when I was still writing lyrics for them, "Could you give us some songs that we could make videos out of?"

Scott:   Yeah, Blue Oyster Cult, though, I mean…
Richard:    They were shit (laughs), but whose isn't?

Scott:   Not only that, but by the time of the video age I don't know if Blue Oyster Cult really meant anything to anyone, so...
Richard:    They had an enormous hit with "Burnin' For You," and with a video.

Scott:   Did you write the lyrics for that one?
Richard:    Yeah.

Scott:   And no royalty cheques?
Richard:    I got some, but certainly not all.

Scott:   You were talking earlier about how you'd meet some of these bands backstage, and how creepy they were and that sort of thing, but I still don't see -- maybe the Beatles were creeps, too.
Richard:    Well, I mean, I'm saying -- how do I put it? -- once upon a time these people -- you don't want them to be civil, that's too much to ask -- but in 1967, I talk about this early in the book, how Jimi Hendrix and Marty Balin and this guy Peter Albin, who was the bass player from Big Brother and the Holding Company, I got FRIENDLY with these people, and they regarded me, and everybody else writing about the stuff -- not just the better writers but the whole damn crew -- as being CO-conspirators. Imagine! Writing about rock 'n' roll! In 1968, Jim Capaldi, the drummer from Traffic -- somebody introduces me to him, "Oh, here's one of the great rock writers." "Oh, you're a writer? Get me a cup of tea." And that's really -- there was no turning back from that point on. You were in the service trade.

Scott:   So it follows that a Traffic album would…
Richard:    The first Traffic album was incredibly great, but there's no way that I'm going to listen to everything that they do. Why SHOULD I? It's like Maria Callas is a bitch, but I love her music, so, blah, blah, blah. Writers are human, too, and participants in the dance -- why SHOULDN'T they hold grudges?

Scott:   I guess it's kind of like saying Picasso's misogynist, so if you're a woman, you shouldn't like Picasso.
Richard:    Or Dave Marsh saying Johnny Ramone voted for Reagan, let's boycott the Ramones -- he actually said that.

Scott:   Are you kind of saying the same thing?
Richard:    No! I'm not pulling for the WORLD to share my take on these people. I never ever meant for my own KICKS to be world religion, which even Lester was very much involved in; it was like, his twitch had to be the world's twitch. If anything, I was simply saying don't let these people OWN you.

Scott:   Did Aesthetics of Rock get reviewed much at the time?
Richard:    It actually got two reviews -- in the same way that there were two reviews of this new one in the Voice, Rolling Stone gave two reviews to Aesthetics of Rock.

Scott:   And what was the gist of the reviews?
Richard:    They had one pro and one con, or one pro and the other was sort of, I don't know -- "what's going on here?" And that led directly to me writing for Rolling Stone. I had tried to write for them before, I offered them a roller derby piece, I offered them a boxing piece -- no, no, no. But as soon as -- I mean, Aesthetics of Rock was a five-year-old book when it came out, basically. And I would say that by the time it came out I'd just about forgotten about it, it was at a publisher for over two years because it took that long to get permission to quote lyrics. Bob Dylan wanted $1000 a quote, and he was almost entirely cut out of the book. But the book came out, and it was very anti-climactic for me in my own sense of things, but it was my ENTRY to a lot of these mags. Dave fuckin' Marsh, who was editor of Creem at time time, kissed my ass, and then ten years later, in the Rolling Stone Book of Rock Lists, he calls Aesthetics of Rock the "worst rock book of all-time."

Scott:   I don't know if you'll have anything to say about this. You've made two references to McLuhan in your writing. One from Aesthetics of Rock itself, where you call him a "hack" in parentheses, and then as a footnote, you say, "His only move is the pop status he has inadvertently attained, and his jargon is nice as misused plagiarism." Then in the introduction to the reprint of Aesthetics you tell the story about getting kicked out of Yale, and you write, "No way I'll ever be the McLuhan of rock." So I'm not sure what to ask first -- was he something at all that you aspired to?
Richard:    I never wanted to be McLuhan, but it seemed like there was a kind of celebrity status for philosophers for a moment, and so I thought maybe that's what I could aim for.

Scott:   Do you think there's any similarities between what you were doing and what he was doing?
Richard:    It's funny, I think of him as being a very, very CANADIAN thinker, and when I finally read -- I liked the book he did called Mechanical Bride, which was sort of like pictures of, uh, it was re-printed by Da Capo a long time ago, and it was...

Scott:   The ads…
Richard:    You ever see that one?

Scott:   Yeah.
Richard:    It's a nice book, but Understanding Media, I tried to read that, I wanted to write a piece about him maybe ten years ago, and so I read a few things, and the ONLY examples he gives about TV, about how great TV can be, are things like, "Oh, great CBC special on Glenn Gould!" "Here in the Global Village we get to see the making of a Glenn Gould concert!" Like, he's giving examples of once-in-a-lifetime events that TV could give a shit about doing anymore. He was not talking about any TV that existed in the world. And yet, he wrote an inCREDIBLE review -- he reviewed Naked Lunch for The Nation when it came out, and it's an incredibly insightful review, where he basically talks about heroin addiction. It's almost PRO-heroin addiction.

Scott:   I've never seen that review -- does he write about it as a metaphor for the electronic age?
Richard:    Well, not really, he has Burroughs talk about control and nature. It's in a book -- there's a collection of writings about Burroughs, I forget what it's called, it has a pink cover, but he says, he credits Burroughs as saying now that nature -- I mean, maybe he is saying electronic age, blah, blah, blah -- but he's saying now that nature doesn't EXIST, the only way to deal with nature is to become one with nature by becoming a heroin addict.

Scott:   The interesting thing about McLuhan is that he actually despised television, and I think he's really misunderstood in that way. But when you said you think of him as a real "Canadian" type of writer, what did you mean by that?
Richard:    Well, I mean that he would give examples of CBC specials. He wasn't writing about I Love Lucy.

Scott:   You had mentioned something about...
Richard:    He went to mass every day I heard.

Scott:   Yeah, I think he had a heart condition in the early '70s, and from that point on he was a pretty devout Catholic.
Richard:    He's also one of these guys who -- John Cage is another, and Joseph Campbell -- they're all crazy about Finnegan's Wake. And as I said, I never really read much of anything until I was almost 40, and then I read everything, and so I read Joyce and all that, and I think Finnegan's Wake is almost the least of his major works; it's like one joke on too many pages.

Scott:   I guess my initial reason for asking you about McLuhan is I can kind of see maybe some similarities between what you and him were doing in the whole drawing provocative connections with everything.
Richard:    Well, sure. And dealing with what you might call "contemporary media." I had this teacher, Allan Kaprow at Stony Brook, who was another great thinker, he did environments and happenings, he wrote lots and lots and lots of theses about blurring the distinctions between art and non-art. And I just think there was a lot of wacked-out analysis being done in the '60s independent of rock, independent of drugs, independent of Tim Leary, and Albert [? - ed] at Harvard, and so forth. There was just a lot of shit going on. And you can talk about the political side of it -- Vietnam. I mean, that was ANOTHER aspect of the '60s. Basically, you had a draft-eligible American youth who had a fear of DEATH as a motivation. Which certainly turned up the heat under everything.

Scott:   How have your girlfriends or ex-girlfriends responded to being written about in such a frank manner?
Richard:    They hate it. Nobody's ever thanked me.

Scott:   I don't want to phrase it this way, but -- although you don't like rock and roll anymore, is there anybody still writing about it who you like?
Richard:    I don't read it, so I don't know. I have this friend Byron Coley, who as of today claims that he's not writing about it anymore either, but he used to do Forced Exposure magazine, and when I was just on the road, they sent me on a very small promotional tour, I did Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, L.A., and in every town that I did a book signing there were these 25-year-old kids there who knew me from reading Forced Exposure magazine. Which I wrote for basically as a favour to Byron, who I knew in L.A. Basically, he's a guy who I DID used to like the writing of, but he claims he's not doing it anymore.

Scott:   In regards to the whole idea of having contempt for the music and its criticism, is that true of the culture at large?
Richard:    That the culture at large has contempt for music criticism?

Scott:   No, no, that YOU have contempt for the culture at large.
Richard:    I think the world has gone to HELL, forever -- it's terminal. I can (laughs) get specific, but this whole cyber bullshit is the end of the world. In the very LEAST it's just turned everything shabby.

Scott:   Well I was going to say I was really surprised to discover that you were online and you had e-mail.
Richard:    It's COMPULSORY. First it was okay, I never wanted to have a computer, and about eight years ago I was told by every place I worked that it had to be on disk so they could fire every typesetter, you know, you wouldn't need a typesetter, and they would NOT pass the profits along to you. And then a year ago I was told, uh-uh, I used to send them a disk in the mail, I didn't have a modem, and then it was like, NO, we have to have it immediately. And so I HATE it. I mean, the only thing I use the internet for is six times a year there's a Sumo tournament in Japan that lasts 15 days; there's one going on now, and every day I check in to see who won the matches. That's the ONLY thing that I found to use the internet. Every time I've used it for research purposes, I find things that are WRONG. There's a boxing website where, I go there, and rather than walk down to the basement where I have some boxing record books, I go to this website and I see things that are just WRONG -- they're absolutely wrong. Rolling Stone has their own rock 'n' roll database, rock history database, where every time I've gone there it's been wrong, they've had the names of ALBUMS wrong. They had Satanic Majesties as "Y-apostrophe-s" instead of "ies," you know, and so if that stuff is wrong, what ISN'T? You know, there IS no history anymore, it's all just a bunch of, you know, uh, what's the word, acceptable data. But I have my own sonic LIFE, I listen to the blues now. I've always listened to jazz, but in the last two or three years I started listening to a lot of blues. I listen to -- I get these CD reissues of old scratchy 78s from the '20s.

Scott:   Like Yazoo stuff?
Richard:    Yeah, the stuff is great. Robert Wilkins -- there's an album called The Original Rolling Stone, it's on Yazoo, it has something he did in 1930, the original thing that later became "Prodigal Son," because the Stones heard "Prodigal Son" on a Newport recording from the '60s, but he did this version called "That's No Way to Get Along" from 1927 or 1930. It's just FANTASTIC, it's like wacked-out-genius-meets-Edward D. Wood, it's like complete over-reach. It's absolutely perfect and right on and yet it bites off more than it can chew. My feeling is that, having listened to the blues from the '20s, '30s, '40s, '50s, and so forth, it seems to me that this stuff is not the PRE-cursor of rock 'n' roll, it IS rock 'n' roll, and rock 'n' roll as such happened three or four or five times before the '50s, and each time it had reason either to burn out or to suddenly be ignored by the industry or whatever, or people moved and regions got wiped out. But whatever it is, my feeling is there's enough sound, there are enough recordings of this stuff to last anybody a lifetime. And I just find it essentially silly that so many kids today -- I mean, when I was in high school, if you met ONE person who was in a band, your own age, that was amazing. I lived in New York with a billion people, and maybe I ran into -- there was a band in my local high school, the Rocking Chairs. Oh boy! But I mean, now EVERYbody's in a band, it's a rite of passage, and I just find that absurd, I mean, there has to be other things to do with your time, and to get your jollies. Kicks is very important, and I'm not knocking rock 'n' roll as an incentive to burn out the night, but I just think that rock 'n' roll has become as much of an OBSTACLE to getting your kicks as a it ever was a means.

Part 4 of Richard Meltzer interview