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By Root 883 0

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