Lucking Out - James Wolcott [17]
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