Lucking Out by James Wolcott Read Free Book Online Page A

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