Lucking Out - James Wolcott [82]
Punk fashion itself began to feast on its own lean meat as the “look” at CBGB’s and similar clubs mutated into mutant Clockwork Orange aggro-wear baroque in its puncture-mark motorcycle-vampire detailing—a scavenger mix of Goth and garbage heap still venereally visible in what remains of the ungentrified East Village today (the punk equivalent to the historical restoration of the bonnets and shoe buckles in Colonial Williamsburg). This look reflected the transatlantic influence of English punk, which was far more radically tooled, piratical, politicized, defiantly, cawingly larynx’d, and media-provocateurish, and small wonder—London had all those “red top” scandal-crazed tabloids like the Sun and the Daily Mirror primed to have a sizzle-shit of indignation over the latest outrage from the obliging Sex Pistols. (THE FILTH AND THE FURY, barked the now-famous front-page headline of the Daily Mirror after the Pistols swore like parrots on live TV.) Meanwhile, here in our fair parish, the New York tabloids, the Daily News and the Post, had so many other five-alarm melodramas to cover (from the “Son of Sam” serial-murder rampage to the New York Yankees’ Billy Martin–Reggie Jackson–George Steinbrenner axis of ego in the burning Bronx) that they weren’t going to squander valuable outrage space on fish bait. Dominating the underground-rock-scene coverage in the daily press was John Rockwell, the chief rock critic of the New York Times and a friendly nodder to avant-garde aspirations, who accepted whatever sonic detritus might come jet-engining his way as if it were cousin to Stockhausen or La Monte Young banging on a treated piano. He wasn’t going to fry bacon on his forehead over some skin-and-bones character spitting out curses onstage or off. Short of human sacrifice, offending Rockwell would take some doing.
(I once attended a party hosted by Rockwell in his loft to welcome Greil Marcus on a visit to Manhattan. Marcus, the author of Mystery Train and the future annotator of all things Dylanesque and Elvisiana, was based in California and considered the super-cerebral prince regent of the West to Christgau’s East Coast suzerainty. He had the gritted zeal of a Marxist rhetorician with a deep-sea diver’s quest for buried cosmology and gnostic scraps of “the old, weird America,” wielding a different set of academic/analytical equipment from the majority of us ditchdiggers. In retrospect, the fact that I was invited to such a soiree marked an unofficial induction into the ranks of the fraternal order of rock critics, a sign that I wasn’t considered just another freelancer dressing up the set. It wasn’t only rock writers invited either. A Village Voice editor was engaged in such intense nebbishy flirtation with a New York Times writer, a petite, vibrant blonde who looked as if she were always up for a game of volleyball, that he came over to us and nervously said, “I mean, suppose something happens tonight, suppose we go back to my place, or her place—I don’t know, I mean, she writes for the Times,” italicizing the last word aloud. He was reassured that he would be able to acquit himself—“It’s not as if you’re going to bed with the building.” He nodded, though you could see he was still mentally nibbling on the daunting task ahead like a squirrel working a nut. It was the age of Annie Hall and everyone played his or her part.)
But at some point the shock of the new wore off until bigger shocks